Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Determined to maintain a connection to France, Gillian visited the Labour Exchange after she and John moved to London in the New Year. ‘I said I wanted to work for the Free French. The woman said in the bossy way of civil servants, “Mrs Sutro, you can’t pick and choose. You’ll be put where you’re most use.”’ Somehow Gillian landed up in censorship and was given an exciting ‘black list’ of people to report on. The outgoing French mail was dumped on her desk, any mention of bomb damage to be censored in case the enemy gained possession of the mailbags. The letters were mainly from the wives and sweethearts of soldiers and sailors posted abroad. ‘They all reflected sadness, fear, loneliness.’

  Their sentiments reinforced Gillian’s sense of isolation. ‘As well as missing my friends, I longed to speak and hear French.’ In her lunch breaks, she tore back on the number 25 bus to the two-room, first-floor flat which John had rented in Avery Row. ‘I yearned to sit again at the Dôme, Deux Magots, Café de la Paix.’ She made herself a Nescafé and put an old French record on her portable gramophone, which had to be wound up like a clock. Chewing a biscuit and sipping her instant coffee on the sofa, she listened to Josephine Baker in her childish voice sing ‘J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris’; or Maurice Chevalier, ‘Paris, reine du monde’. Turning back the hours.

  And in the evenings haunted the bars and lower ground floor restaurants of the expatriate French: Le Petit Club Français, Prunier’s, the York Minster, Le Coq d’Or, Les Ambassadeurs in Hanover Square. ‘I was avid for news of Paris. At the Petit Club Français one heard snippets of information.’ The worst problem was said to be the heating. People wore wood-soled shoes. The black market flourished. Everyone bicycled, except the Germans; and the ‘collabos’ who had cars.

  The owner of the French pub in Soho, hearing Gillian speak French, once passed her a slice of contraband beef hidden under pommes frites (Graham Greene told her it must have been horse-meat: ‘Didn’t it taste a bit sweet?’). With butter and margarine rationed, oranges and bananas never seen, and her weekends spent picking nettles in the ditches near Denham (‘thickened with powdered milk they made quite a good soup’), Gillian chewed the steak in silence, savouring the images that it released, of tournedos in the Café de Paris, hot chocolate and warm brioches at the Café Weber. ‘They brought back recollections of Priscilla and Vertès.’

  Still with no news of Priscilla, Gillian resigned from the censorship department in October 1941 and went to work for the Free French secret service, or BCRA. She was employed as a bilingual steno-typist for £17 a month. The first premises were at no. 10 Duke Street. She had to be there at 9 a.m. to take down words phonetically on a small machine. She never learned shorthand and had trouble deciphering what she had written. ‘A man hearing I could draw said I would be far more useful in their cartographic section.’

  At her art school in Paris, Gillian had learned the elementary rules of poster-drawing – invaluable for stencilling names – and was an old pro with tire-ligne, ruler and compasses. ‘The BCRA work required exactitude and preciseness.’ Day after day, she stood over a map of the country the Germans had compelled her to leave, selecting and marking up targets for the RAF to bomb.

  ‘Bombing expeditions were based on exact locations of German munitions, hideouts, trains carrying food to Germany or loaded with stolen works of art, hangars where Stukas lay camouflaged, ready to tackle their next bombing of England. I would have cold sweats wondering if I had located the right target.’

  Her target was at times no more than a rough plan originally drawn on lavatory paper or a ripped-off corner of restaurant table-paper. One night, from a crumpled sketch ‘brought back from France by a Free French parachutist who had found German munitions stocked there’, Gillian had to stencil in ‘Aubagne’ as a bombing target. The name was new to her. She perused the maps in the map-room, where the gloomy Madame Passy was in charge, and calculated the kilometres. There was a sense of fear and secrecy about these bits of paper.

  Through her work for BCRA, Gillian came to know agents who parachuted into France, like Vertès’s friend, the novelist Joseph Kessel. ‘In London,’ Kessel wrote, ‘all the surviving leaders of the Resistance turn up sooner or later. Framed by the great bay windows of a Chelsea drawing-room, I talked with three men who had been sentenced to death, who smiled as they looked out on the trees in the garden, and who were going back to France to resume command of their group and turn into shadows once more.’ In addition to Kessel, there was Gillian’s boss, Colonel ‘Passy’ (‘a tall, balding top-booted man’); Wing-Commander Edward Yeo-Thomas (‘The White Rabbit’); Pierre Brossolette (‘Brumaire’); the actor Claude Dauphin; the aviator Edouard Corniglion-Molinier; the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler (who worked at the Ministry of Information and whom Gillian met through Vincent Korda). Chief of operations was Colonel Roulier, who became ‘Rémy’. ‘Kessel m’a beaucoup parlé de vous,’ he told her.

  Gillian took advantage of her position. She was attractive, a Francophile, available. ‘While John was working on a film in Denham, I was carousing at night.’ Several agents became lovers. ‘Corniglion loved me, so did Kessel; for the others, I was a beautiful girl of whom they were determined to obtain the favours. Some lovers overlapped when we moved from Avery Row to Lees Place. The prospect of death at any moment increased the sexual urge. One lived in a state of fatigue mingled with a sense of urgency.’

  It was natural that Gillian should ask her lovers, when on their missions to France, to find out what had happened to Priscilla.

  Of the French agents whom she charged with this task, none amused Gillian more than a pre-war friend of her husband’s, Edouard Corniglion-Molinier. ‘He was a colonel serving in the Free French Airforce. Later, he became a general. A skilled pilot, a friend of de Gaulle and a shameless womaniser.’ Gillian had met him at Wood Cottage, a weekend retreat near Denham which John rented after giving up the lease on Nonsense House. ‘My colonel was living in the next cottage with a French woman, Madame Roquemaire, who had been torpedoed and had her buttocks bitten by a shark.’ A Rabelaisian character who considered himself irresistible, Corniglion-Molinier possessed what Gillian called ‘l’oeil rigolard’ – the grinning eye. Witty, with a humorous face, he knew how to make a woman laugh, and how to seduce. ‘I don’t think he failed when he set himself a goal.’ He succeeded with Gillian.

  He invited her to Claridge’s. The hotel – a convenient short walk back to Avery Row – offered quite a cheap three-course meal. The head waiter was a sturdy Frenchman, and doted on Gillian, who always sat at the same table and treated the place as her bistro du coin.

  Life was never dull with the Colonel, who talked non-stop. ‘He told me that he had a weakness for English girls, and that virgins smelled of shrimp as they never used or possessed a bidet.’ He was proud of his penis which, he proclaimed, had served him well. ‘It was a quite memorable one because of its slight curve and perfect size. “Très rare, et très apprécié” – these revelations delivered during meals at Claridge’s.’

  Even more than to seduce women, the Colonel loved to fly. Gillian knew of his operations to France. She called in a favour.

  ‘As I was worried about her, I told him about Priscilla who had married a Frenchman but who had kept her British nationality. As far as I knew, she was still in Paris, although her husband had some chateau in Normandy. Edouard thought my friend was in a bad position as the Nazis had brought in a decree stating that hospitality given to Britishers, military or civilian, had to be declared at the Kommandantur before 20 October 1940. After that date, anyone harbouring a Britisher without informing them would be shot. I told Edouard about the weedy husband and the brother and sister-in-law. I felt sure they would denounce my friend! “In that case,” Edouard said, “she’ll have been interned in the Besançon camp for Britishers.”

  ‘“Are you sure?”

  ‘“Quite sure,” he said. “Hope she’s not Jewish.”

  ‘“No, she’s the sort of girl Germans go f
or – blue eyes, fair hair, tall, with a marvellous figure.”

  ‘“Why didn’t she come to England?”

  ‘“She loved Paris and has many friends there.”

  ‘“She’s made her choice,” Edouard said, “and can only blame herself for whatever happens. So stop worrying about her.” He gave me a sexy look. “Worry about me instead.”’

  Gillian wrote in her notebook: ‘Although I was not to know the facts, I was right to be worried about her fate.’

  PART THREE

  17.

  BESANÇON

  Priscilla was woken by the bell ringing. Bleary-eyed, she opened the door of her apartment and saw a gendarme standing in the freezing darkness. He asked her to pack a suitcase.

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘We have orders to pick up all British subjects.’

  He had received his instructions at 5 a.m. All over France that morning, without warning and with military efficiency, the same procedure was taking place – wherever a woman with a British passport had registered with the Kommandantur.

  The gendarme allowed Priscilla to dress in private. From her bedroom, she quickly telephoned her sister-in-law, Guy’s wife Georgette, who was back in Paris. As Priscilla replaced the receiver, she could not help regretting that had she stayed the night with the Scarlet Pimpernel, as he had pressed her to do, she might have avoided this trouble. ‘The news would be all over Paris in a few hours and I could surely have got down to the south and perhaps to England, given sufficient warning.’ She packed into her suitcase the book she was reading, culottes, a pullover, ski gloves – it was bitingly cold; on the way out she grabbed her fur coat and handbag.

  The blackout was still in force and she followed the beam of the gendarme’s torch down the stairs to a waiting car. She could make out people watching in silence from windows and balconies. The gendarme said nothing and neither did Priscilla as they drove to a building which she recognised: the police station where she walked each day to sign her name.

  Inside, chaos. ‘Women of all sorts and sizes, of all colours and of all nationalities were gathered there. They had only one thing in common: a British passport.’ She presented hers to a policeman, who took down the details. Priscilla was one of 1,965 British women recorded by the Germans as living in the Paris area and arrested on 5 December 1940. Approximately only a quarter had been born in England.

  Georgette arrived on foot. Seeing that Priscilla was nearly in tears, she approached a kind-looking elderly lady and asked her to look after Priscilla. This was Miss Norah Beresford, a retired Indian Army nurse. Over the next weeks, the fifty-five-year-old Beresford or ‘Berry’ became a mentor for Priscilla and for Priscilla’s young English friend Jacqueline Grant, who left this description of her. ‘She had white hair parted in the middle and dressed over her ears in macaroons, and she mothered us. And she was dressed for the event, as she had very thick woollies and jodhpurs and she looked capable of tackling anything.’

  After waiting for several hours with nothing to eat, Priscilla and Berry were packed into a police van and transported to the Gare de l’Est.

  Still arriving from all over France, hundreds of panic-stricken figures milled about on the platforms. Women of every class and age, with young children and babies, some pregnant, some middle-aged with dogs. A handful of bewildered old men stood out, mostly poor, who had avoided the round-up of Englishmen in August.

  Shula Troman was a seventeen-year old art student arrested that morning. She described for me the pitiful scene, the German soldiers yelling orders in terrible French. ‘They were always counting. “Put yourselves in groups of four!” “Young people with young people there, mothers with children there!” We didn’t know where we were going.’

  Coal-fired locomotives hissed out jets of black steam. Rumours rippled along the platforms. Their arrest was a reaction to Hitler’s thwarted invasion, now delayed to the spring. It was a reprisal for the British government’s internment of German civilians on the Isle of Man. Their destination was a concentration camp in Frankfurt. Troman said, ‘We all thought, because it was Gare de l’Est, we were going to Germany.’

  Towards evening, Priscilla and Berry were crammed shivering into an unheated carriage. Through windows on the platform side, stony-faced German Red Cross nurses passed cups of pea soup made from powder, even as soldiers wrapped barbed wire around the door handles to seal the compartment. A shriek of whistles and the train shuddered and began to grind out of the station.

  Sixty-one years later, I was in Paris on the winter day when the chief executive of the French national railway delivered a public apology: ‘In the name of the SNCF, I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported, and before the suffering that still lives.’ He made his landmark contrition in the suburb of Bobigny, from where 20,000 Jews were taken to Nazi camps. France was the first European country to give full rights to Jews, and yet between 1941 and 1944, the SNCF carried 76,000 European Jews in cattle cars to the French – German border, and thence to extermination camps in Poland.

  Less well known is the SNCF’s part in transporting upwards of 4,000 British female passport-holders, not to an extermination camp but to an internment camp in Besançon near the Swiss border.

  Who were these women? Incredible to relate, no complete record exists. Priscilla’s name does not appear in Besançon’s archives, nor in documents relating to English internees in the French National Archives. Priscilla’s father never knew where the Germans had interned her. Why was her experience not accurately reported, more widely discussed?

  Two explanations seem likely. First, hers was but one of millions of similar stories; a civilian narrative of dispossession, degradation and deportation that no one wanted to listen to by the time it became possible to tell. Secondly, the internment camp was German-run and involved non-French detainees, and so the French were not that interested. Rita Harding arrived at the camp at the same time as Priscilla. ‘I still have French schoolfriends who whenever I mention Besançon look blank,’ she said. ‘No French person knows. I don’t know if they’re ashamed. It’s never, never mentioned. But now I think about Besançon all the time since I met Jimmy.’

  I managed to find Jimmy Fox in Paris. He suggested a drink at the Hôtel Lutétia, 45 Boulevard Raspail. ‘This used to be the HQ of the Gestapo,’ he said, sipping his tomato juice. It was in this room of looking-glasses, black marble and chandeliers that the Gestapo plotted Priscilla’s arrest and transportation.

  Fox, a former editor-in-chief of the Magnum photographic agency, had spent his retirement investigating the history of the British internees. He knew more about what happened at Besançon than anyone alive – more, it was possible to believe, than many of those who were imprisoned there. Rocking forward in his red velvet chair, he talked of crucial documents locked in an archive near Paris, of files going missing – the interrogation reports from the SS offices in Rue Lauriston, for example. ‘Someone wanted to make a film, but they had a big problem with the Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon. Oh no, it still smells.’

  My aunt’s name rang no immediate bell, but Fox promised to look through his papers.

  Priscilla’s first piece of writing after returning to England in October 1944 was an account of her months in Besançon. Her experience of internment dictated the way that she lived for the remainder of the Occupation, and it was so vital for her to get down on paper that she interrupted her love affair with Robert Donat. With the help of this memoir, I tracked Priscilla’s journey to the camp.

  I also went to see three women who were imprisoned with her:

  Shula Troman lived surrounded by books and paintings in a cottage on the Brittany coast. An artist born in Palestine, she showed me her drawings of other inmates, plus a photo of the doctor who had saved Priscilla. Our conversation lasted eleven hours.

  Rita Harding lived in Rue Paul Doumer in Paris, in a period apartment of gilt mirrors and cornices. I sought her out because it was possible that
she had shared Priscilla’s room in the camp.

  Yvette Goodden, aged ninety-three, lived outside Sherborne, Priscilla’s birthplace in Dorset.

  These three women, all widows living on their own, were among the last articulate witnesses who could help me to comprehend Priscilla’s experience.

  Her fellow passengers were a diverse group, from jockeys’ wives to the daughter of an Indian maharajah, who had boarded the train dressed in a veil and a sable coat. Many did not speak English and had never been to England, but had married an Englishman. Some were trapped in France like Priscilla’s companion Berry, on her way to Nice to fetch home a friend who was invalid, or on holiday when the Germans invaded. They numbered aristocrats, governesses, nannies, nurses, couturiers, prostitutes, professors, students, bar owners, clairvoyants, dancers, Palestinians, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, plus 487 nuns from eighty-nine orders – including a nun who had remained in the same cloister for thirty-five years and of the outside world had only ever seen ‘the planes that flew over my head’.

  Priscilla shared her compartment with eleven women, sitting face to face on slatted wooden seats and standing up in turns so others could stretch out. There were no corridors. One woman defecated into her sponge bag.

  ‘You’ve never seen a third-class French train carriage in 1940 . . .’ said Yvette Goodden, who was picked up that morning in Bordeaux. She had not forgotten the spectacle of her fellow passengers, some still in their dressing gowns, and of being shunted back and forth during a journey that in her case lasted two days. Goodden, then twenty-three, was married to an English naval commander and had a two-year-old son, Michael, whom she was forced to leave behind in Bordeaux. Like Priscilla and Shula Troman, she feared that the train was taking her to Germany.