Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Jacqueline Grant, who later worked for British Intelligence, believed ‘that Intelligence had informed Churchill and he warned Hitler that if we crossed the border into Germany he would retaliate against German women interned on the Isle of Man.’ This might explain why the precision of the round-up contrasted with the disorganised reception. The secrecy surrounding the initial arrests had been well kept, even from the German soldiers who were supposed to guard them. They were unprepared utterly for the arrival of an estimated 3,900 British-passport holders, mostly women, some with screaming babies and dogs, some old and ill, all hungry and anxious and cold.

  The train jolted to a halt in Besançon, in the Jura. ‘We arrived like a flock,’ said Shula Troman, ‘in a kind of dream.’ Yvette Goodden recalled a funny little station with German troops lining the platform. It was snowing hard. A convoy of vehicles, hastily arranged, waited to bundle the older passengers to the camp. The youngest had to walk. Priscilla’s legs were swollen from hours on the hard-slatted seats. She trudged up the hill, passing under a stone bridge and the gaze of French women and children who leaned over the parapet, staring down in silence: they had been told that these women were spies. ‘Oh, it was ghastly,’ said Rita Harding.

  Priscilla was herded through the thick snow and between the tall iron gates of a disused barracks. Just inside on the left was a manège, a covered yard of beaten earth used for exercising horses. Numb and dirty, she was ordered to wait until a cart rolled up spilling suitcases. She dug hers out and opened it for inspection to a German woman who also riffled though her handbag, searching for flashlights, sharp objects, mirrors, books proscribed by the Otto List. The novel that she had been reading was confiscated for a censor to examine. Her name was written down and her passport removed.

  Besançon, birthplace of Victor Hugo, means House of Light. The internment camp that looked down on the town – situated in the Forbidden Zone on the Swiss border – was Caserne Vauban or Frontstalag 142. More than half a century later, Gillian was incensed to read that my aunt had called it a concentration camp. But the Germans did designate the penitentiary at Besançon a Konzentrationslager, and the term was common at this period, used by Gillian’s friend Arthur Koestler, himself a prisoner in France, as well as by Yvette Goodden: ‘I call Besançon a concentration camp. My son picks me up every time. Always, it was referred to as concentration camp. We didn’t know how bad a real concentration camp was. We just thought it was a place where one was imprisoned.’

  Priscilla’s father was another to use the term. In his book Continental Coach Tour Holiday (1960), SPB wrote in the copy that he gave her: ‘We started off again at 2.50 p.m. to face the climb over the Vosges where my eldest daughter Priscilla was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during the war.’ Priscilla, responding to all the errors, had marked ‘!!!!’ in the margin.

  SPB never made it to Besançon on his 1959 coach trip with Winnie. The closest he came was Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a hundred miles north. ‘At one place we passed an inn bearing the sign “À la Bonne Truite” just beyond which we caught up with a girl with long flaxen hair of the same colour as Priscilla’s and about the age that Priscilla was when the Germans captured her. It was odd and made me feel a little frightened.’ SPB and Winnie stopped for a drink at the Nouvel Hotel. ‘I was very much moved when Winnie suddenly said, “We will dedicate our book to Priscilla.”’ The dedication would read, with geographical inaccuracy: ‘For PRISCILLA who has good reason to remember the Vosges’. It was the only book that her father dedicated to her.

  Priscilla never went back to Besançon. On the sole occasion that Shula Troman attempted to look around the barracks, many years after the war, a French sentry barred the way. Troman laughed. ‘I told him: “For five months, the Germans would not let me out.”’

  To gain access is hard even today. Caserne Vauban has been closed since 2006, but Brigadier Fouquet in command of the 19th Régiment du Génie – which is stationed in Besançon and formerly occupied the premises – organised for one of his men to unchain the gates and accompany me. Excessively polite and equipped with a camera, the officer had instructions to photograph our visit. The internment of British women in what used to be the regimental headquarters had come as news to his Brigadier: he wanted a record. Also in our group was a local journalist, Eric Daviatte.

  The officer re-padlocked the cast-iron gates behind us. The cold air smelled of dead leaves. We stood facing a potholed tarmac quadrangle surrounded by buildings dating back to the eighteenth century.

  Bâtiment B lay on the far side. I knew where to go, thanks to Jimmy Fox, who had emailed: ‘With a magnifier on faded paper and written in pencil, I suddenly found the name DOYNEL and the number of her room.’

  A chipped tiled staircase led us to the fourth floor. The rooms no longer had numbers, but B. 71 would have been among the largest.

  I walked down a high-ceilinged corridor, darting my eyes into room after empty room. A poster of a beach in Tahiti. Graffiti of a skull. A row of smashed urinals. You could tell that the place had been occupied by soldiers.

  The Vauban barracks, built in the Napoleonic Wars, was arranged about a huge cinder courtyard planted with small trees. It comprised three dour buildings, four storeys high, with architraved windows and grey mansard roofs. The Germans labelled them Bâtiments A, B and C. Each building was divided into nine blocks and each block contained 33 sections. Loudspeakers affixed to the side of the Kommandantur, an elegant building near the gates, played German classical music. It was impossible for Priscilla to lose herself in the music since this was continually being interrupted by announcements.

  The barracks until a few days before her arrival had housed 10,000 French and British POWs captured in the Maginot Line. These men had been hurriedly moved out to a stalag in Germany, leaving their mess. Jimmy Fox said: ‘The Red Cross didn’t have time to come and spruce it up.’ Instead, two English ‘Tommies’ in shabby battledress, acting as interpreters, and 150 French soldiers, many of them black Senegalese, stayed behind to receive the new detainees. Priscilla wrote: ‘They looked rather astonished when they saw all these bedraggled females arriving.’ In the mistaken belief that they were preparing the camp for the Wehrmacht, the POWs had flung buckets of water into the rooms, tossed mattresses out of the windows and stamped on the cutlery. Not for another four days was Priscilla given a tin plate.

  A timid French sergeant dressed in leather gaiters led her up four flights of cement steps that were swimming in mud, to room 71. A black stove stood in the centre. Scattered about on the soaking wet concrete floor were thin decaying straw mattresses, old shoes, helmets; urine and excrement were everywhere.

  Priscilla looked around. Stacked close together against the walls were simple wooden double-decker bunk-beds. Priscilla let Berry because of Berry’s age have a bottom bunk, and took the top one.

  Shula Troman in Bâtiment C managed to get hold of two brown blankets. ‘I put them over my coat, but a French soldier who was helping everyone said, “Never put them together. Put one underneath and one on top, because it’s warmer.” Till now, I always do.’

  At 9.30 p.m. a bugle sounded and the dismal lights blinked; five minutes later the lights were switched off. Priscilla lay in the dark with her fur coat on. She slept badly, kept awake by sounds of coughing and sobbing. A woman moaned in her sleep, ‘I’m cold, I’m so cold.’ Further away, Priscilla heard the noise of convoys leaving Besançon, of trains hooting. Rita Harding said, ‘I get gooseflesh today if I hear trains tooting.’

  The most horrible sound was a tiny plop that came not from the direction of the station but from above Priscilla’s head. The bugs dropped on to her face as soon as the lights went out. Yvette Goodden said: ‘They crawled out of the holes left by pin-ups on the walls and bit your arms and neck, leaving red lumps. Small flat brown things, the size of the top of my little finger. You could smell them coming towards you, a putrid, disgusting smell.’ When Shula Troman squashed them with her shoe, they emit
ted a smell even more revolting.

  Priscilla’s education at the lycée in Saint-Germain-en-Laye had prepared her. She could cope with the punaises de lit by pouring boiling water onto the wall behind her bed. What she could not cope with was the lack of sanitation.

  Hygiene was non-existent in the camp, the lavatories a single hole-in-the-ground privy on each floor, doorless, with ridged footprints on either side of the hole, and covered by a grating. Jacqueline Grant said: ‘We called these places “Stand and Deliver”.’ The latrines were for hardened troops, not suitable for women and children. They were not sanctuaries where you could lock yourself away with a book. They quickly blocked and were closed off, forcing long queues to form outside in the snow for an ‘awful hut’ known as a ‘tinette’.

  There were five of these hazardous sheds, built by French POWS and mucked out by a retired English jockey from Chantilly called W. C. Bottom. He was paid for his labours – 80 francs a week – and called out ‘Bottom’ before he entered, blowing on a whistle. He joked that he had never seen so many bottoms before and that his job might be dirty ‘but the money I earn is clean’. The women knew him as Fred.

  P. G. Wodehouse wrote of his shifts in an internment camp lavatory: ‘until you have helped to clean out a Belgian soldiers’ latrine “you ain’t see nuttin’.”’

  The women perched on planks with holes in them, placed above a deep trench. The draught coming up through the hole was always icy. Another of Fred Bottom’s duties was to retrieve watches and rings that had slipped out of pockets into the trenches. The stench was appalling and the ditches alive with rats ‘as large as rabbits’. With one latrine for every 200 inmates, the excrement overflowed on to the ice and mud. It was impossible for Priscilla to keep her clothes clean.

  ‘Most of the older people couldn’t cope with the straddling,’ she wrote, ‘so they performed on the side and everything got frozen up and one sometimes slipped and fell in.’ In the local cemetery, a row of white crosses marked the graves of a mere nine out of a much greater number of elderly prisoners who, in temperatures below zero, failed to scramble back out and in the morning were found dead in the snow.

  Not until 20 May 1942, sixteen months later, did Sir William Davison, MP for Kensington South, stand up in the House of Commons and challenge Anthony Eden. ‘Why was no information given to the public of the indescribable sufferings of these 3,000 or 4,000 British women and children who were locked in trains at the Gare de L’Est for many hours before their 18-hour journey?’ Was the Foreign Secretary aware that owing to the conditions which existed at Besançon ‘over 700 British women and children died’? Replying, Anthony Eden stated his belief that only twenty-four deaths had occurred.

  The nauseating cesspits below the tinettes were hurriedly filled in just before a visit by the Geneva Red Cross, and the number who had fallen into them is unknown. But Davison’s figure was close to the estimate of one of the few male prisoners, Samuel Hales, a seventy-two-year-old New Zealander: ‘During the three and a half months we were there about 600 died!’ Most of the women who perished at Besançon – of frostbite, pneumonia, diarrhoea, food poisoning or the dysentery that spread through the camp in the New Year – were ‘buried like a dog’ in an anonymous grave.

  Priscilla was interned at Besançon during its very worst months. That winter of 1940 was even colder than the year before. Arctic winds blasted up the stairs, slamming shut the door which had to be opened with a penknife. Snow slanted into Shula Troman’s room through a hole in the roof, and icicles formed on the inside of the windows. In Priscilla’s building, the water pipes burst. She developed chilblains, for which the only remedy was an ineffectual green ointment dispensed by one of the nuns who visited the room each morning in the company of a German nurse.

  She was shivering all over. The whole day she was shivering. In Jacqueline Grant’s building in January, a mother discovered her four-year-old boy dead on the top bunk.

  So cold was the camp – and so under-dressed the inmates – that the Commandant, a stocky former PE teacher called Otto Landhäuser, issued sleeping bags: cotton bed-sacks, crudely dyed in a blue and white check which rubbed off on Priscilla’s skin. From a stash discovered in the north tower, Landhäuser also distributed a hundred pale blue military cloaks, their brass buttons still on. ‘Alas! They were mostly blood-stained,’ wrote a Scottish nun. Children of five and six ran about the yard swamped in these cloaks, which were leftovers from the First World War, belonging to French soldiers who had died. The visit on 28 January 1941 by the International Red Cross – a group said to include Göring’s wife – was followed by an official report which noted that Landhäuser had additionally handed out ‘heavy boots in leather with wood soles’. These oversized hobnailed army boots were far too large for Priscilla and she continued to walk around wearing her Paris shoes inside them. Many things would fade from her memory, but not the double echo of her cumbersome footwear clattering up the draughty cement staircase.

  A young French prisoner in an earlier war had scratched these lines on the wall of his cell.

  Only when crows are white

  And snow falls black

  Will the memories of Vauban

  Fade from my mind.

  Rita Harding said: ‘It’s all fresh in my mind as though yesterday, though seventy years have passed.’

  The black stove provided the only heat. Priscilla and a room mate collected the firewood in a two-handled box, dragging it back across the snow with a rope. The firewood was damp and green, producing a bitter thick smoke that stung her eyes and made her cough.

  ‘In the room I was in there were 48 other women,’ she wrote. Like each of her room mates, Priscilla was assigned further voluntary chores. Stella Gumuchian, who organised the ‘tasks’ of various detainees, mentioned – in a document unearthed by Jimmy Fox – ‘DOYNEL, PRISCILLA’ in group ‘C’. The functions assigned to Priscilla were: ‘waitress/canteen, library, housework’.

  The canteen was open two days a week, 9 a.m. to noon, and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., the items paid for with a prisoner’s monthly allowance of 300 francs. Shula Troman remembered buying a tube of toothpaste with money earned from her sketches of other inmates. Priscilla bought ginger beer and cheese. Prices were high, but the canteen was so popular that internees wearing armbands had to be dragooned to stop women pulling off each other’s coats as they fought for places in the line-up. Serving behind the counter as a waitress, Priscilla was fortunate to work indoors. Her duties at the camp library also kept her out of the cold and the quarrels for the silent hour between 1.30 p.m. and 2.30 p.m.

  The prisoners’ library was in the former French officers’ library and consisted mainly of ‘musty old military history’. The bookworm daughter of a prolific author, Priscilla was a natural choice to spice up the selection. She requested donations from the YMCA, the American Library in Paris, and art books from the Red Cross. The German censor checked the titles against the Otto List, ensuring that none were anti-German or written by Jewish authors. Once lessons started up in February, Priscilla arranged for maths, French, German and Latin texts to be sent up from the town. She used her imprisonment to read Chateaubriand’s memoirs and Candide.

  Her third chore – ‘housework’ – involved everyone in B.71, and explained why she never did housework at Church Farm.

  Older women like Berry were known as the Vestals. They kept the stove going and swept the floor. It fell to the younger women to carry back buckets of water from the horse troughs in the ground-level washroom; to go out into the courtyard and collect the meals and firewood; most of all, to queue.

  ‘We had to queue up all day long in the snow,’ Priscilla wrote. ‘We had to queue up for letters, for parcels, for our midday “soup”, for the canteen, for a wash and for the “lavatories”.’

  Jacqueline Grant said: ‘Our lives became obsessed by queuing.’

  The dark liquid that Priscilla ferried back to her building was groaningly called ‘cuvée de café’. Another inm
ate wrote in an unpublished memoir: ‘We drank it until one day we found a mass of tousled hair at the bottom of the can.’

  At midday Priscilla was out queuing again, for lunch – a monotonous broth called ‘Eintopfgerichte’, a sweetish brown mixture of animal lungs and barley and stirred with a long wood pole. She wrote, ‘Our food consisted of one soup a day which tasted like dish-water with a few rotten potatoes thrown in.’

  The meat was generally horse, scraped from one of the pack animals that had been tethered in the manège, and tossed into the aluminium vat by a prisoner with fingers bandaged in dirty rags. Once, a German guard shouted at two girls who had a dog, ‘That dog will have to go!’ and pointed at the vat; but they sobbed in such a frantic way that their pet was left alone. Nettles were ladled out when there were no potatoes; or mangel-wurzels, a yellowish root used before the war without much success to feed cattle.

  The diet gave Priscilla stomach pains. Jacqueline Grant fainted from hunger. ‘We just weren’t getting enough to eat.’

  Priscilla was back outside at 6 p.m. to collect the evening meal. ‘We had one tea-spoonful of synthetic grease or jam in the evening’ – a dollop of beetroot jelly or tasteless ersatz cheese (‘made from the bark of some tree’, suspected Jacqueline), and which Priscilla squeezed from a tube on to a finger of black bread.

  The German bread was the most horrible aspect of Priscilla’s diet. She queued for it every two or three days in the perpetually falling snow, with another inmate holding out a blanket to catch the round loaves that were dropped from a window in a long low building behind Bâtiment C. The ration was two kilos per person per week and the bread, baked from rye and bran, was hard-crusted and green with mould. A date was stamped on the outside, almost always days old. Priscilla toasted her portion on the side of the stove, or else rolled the rancid-smelling uncooked dough into pellets to plug holes in the wall.