Sergeant Lune had pinned the letter inside his narrow khaki trousers. Priscilla recognised her husband’s minute handwriting. But her excitement evaporated even as she read it. ‘Robert answered solemnly that I was not to do anything rash because of his lands and his mother etc.’ He had not lifted a finger. ‘I was beginning to get very fed up with this line of argument.’
It had taken six months for Priscilla to appreciate the extent to which Robert and his family had failed to support her. She never forgave them. ‘After all, I was going through this catastrophe entirely because of him.’
Now that he knew where she was, Robert did at least organise food parcels to be sent from Boisgrimot. In Normandy, there was no shortage of fresh dairy products. Maurice Bezard, working on Robert’s farm, recollected, ‘As part of our lease, we needed to supply butter, chickens, cream and milk. The family would come to Boisgrimot to eat – and they would eat well, above all during the war.’ The steward’s daughter packed up the meat and butter and sent a weekly food packet to Paris, from where it was forwarded to the parcel office in Besançon.
Thanks to the neatness of her handwriting, Yvette Goodden secured a position in the parcel office, a job that required her to write out a list of the recipients and pin it on the door by lunchtime. In the presence of a German soldier, Goodden or another volunteer opened Priscilla’s packets in front of her, to check whether they contained books or written material; or forbidden products – like white ‘meta’ tablets used to heat up food. ‘The Germans were afraid that if you chewed them, you would commit suicide.’
Priscilla was one of few internees to receive fresh food parcels. ‘Most people had to wait for things to come from England, and of course that took months.’ She shared the Doynels’ chicken, cheese and butter with her room mates, which meant that her diet did not radically improve. Quite often she bartered her portion to post yet more uncensored letters, not all of them to Robert.
‘I even had a visit while I was there.’
In early February, Sergeant Lune sidled into her room. A man had smuggled himself into the camp, desperate to see Priscilla. He refused to give his name, saying only that she would know him as ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’. He was downstairs.
Tears sprang into Daniel’s eyes when he saw how she looked. The last occasion they had seen each other was the night before her arrest, when Daniel invited her to dinner in Rue Beaujon. Priscilla had found the scene set for seduction: flowers everywhere, champagne – which she had primly refused to drink. Daniel cooked her a meal and afterwards, ignoring his warm invitation to stay, she put on her coat. When he repeated his request ponderously, staring out in front of him, she said: ‘I had better go home in case Robert rings up early.’ It was 11 p.m. by the time she returned to her empty apartment. ‘Because of my virtuous behaviour I spent the next three months in a concentration camp.’
Besançon had changed her. She was touched by Daniel’s unequivocal response to her appeal for help. He ‘moved heaven and earth to get me out of the camp’ – whereas Robert, she wrote scathingly, ‘did nothing at all’. She did not reveal how the Scarlet Pimpernel planned to extract her, but his willingness to put himself in danger for Priscilla’s sake – and endanger his wife and children who might have been punished had she escaped – had a transforming effect. Daniel was not in her terms handsome, but ‘he showed such devotion and friendship that I felt I had treated him very badly by not giving him what he wanted so much. I resolved to become his mistress as soon as I was free to do so, as I was fed up with Robert and the whole of his family. However, before I could escape I had an opportunity which I seized and which enabled me to get out miraculously.’
The five doctors in the camp, French POWs under the charge of an incompetent young Prussian, met once a week to discuss which prisoners might be eligible for release.
Priscilla was in her third month at Caserne Vauban when the list of those entitled to leave was expanded to include anyone expecting a child. One morning loudspeakers summoned the Bluebell Girls’ founder to the Kommandantur: Margaret Kelly was several months’ pregnant. Another beneficiary was Priscilla. After dreaming all her life of having a child, she was to be saved by the ‘miracle’ of a phantom pregnancy.
‘One day our German nurse came round and asked if any of us had any children. When she came to me, without thinking I answered “Not yet”(meaning I hoped to have one some day).
‘She looked at me straight in the eye and said, “You can have a medical examination tomorrow.”
‘When she had gone, I was very worried about it.’
But everyone else in B.71 expressed delight. ‘You’re pregnant!’ said Berry. Priscilla’s pregnancy would ensure her release.
More than forty years later, Jacqueline Grant recalled Priscilla’s droll reply: ‘She said, “Well, that’s rather sad and rather funny. But I can’t be. My husband, although he’s a perfect dear and comes from a very good family, is impotent.”’
Her pregnancy was a physical impossibility, Priscilla explained. Married for two years, she had not made love since her honeymoon.
‘The Germans don’t know that,’ said Berry, and told Priscilla what to tell the doctors, that she was being sick every morning. ‘After all, you did see your husband recently – it is feasible.’ And hadn’t her periods stopped?
The others agreed. Priscilla must pretend to be pregnant. ‘My companions told me I had better try and bring it off,’ she wrote. ‘So the next day I presented myself trembling to a French doctor who was also a prisoner.’
The French doctor who examined her was Jean Lévy.
Shula Troman exclaimed when I mentioned his name. Of course she remembered Dr Lévy! He became a lifelong friend as well as Troman’s doctor in Paris, where he had ended his career as professor of gynaecology at the Hôpital Foch. ‘He delivered both my children, and when I had breast cancer he operated.’ She hunted around for a black and white photograph, taken at the camp in 1941 and showing a clean-shaven man in French army uniform, smiling. ‘He was lovely, with a formidable sense of humour and an extraordinary silhouette, a little bit hunched, like a faun.’
A French Jew from Colmar who had joined the army as a doctor and was captured by the Germans, Lévy was in constant danger. His mother and sister lived in Paris, but his wife and small daughter – who died soon afterwards of scarlet fever – were in hiding. The potential that existed for reprisals against Lévy’s family was considerable and underscores his courage. ‘I owed so much to him,’ wrote Drue Tartière, another inmate of the camp, after Lévy convinced the Germans that Tartière had ovarian cancer and needed treatment in Paris. Priscilla, too, had reasons to be indebted.
Dr Lévy examined my aunt ‘in front a lot of nuns and old bodies’. In Priscilla’s account, he looked at her carefully and then winked.
‘Yes, madame,’ he said. ‘You are pregnant, but I am afraid that you will have to see a German doctor to confirm my verdict.’ He added in her ear. ‘He is very young and probably won’t know whether you are pregnant or not. It is difficult to tell at three months. Good luck.’
Priscilla returned to her room and told Berry that Dr Lévy had agreed to provide a medical certificate stating that she was expecting. But she was nervous.
‘What do I do if they keep a check on me after I get out? Walk around with a pillow under my dress?’
‘You can always say that you have had a miscarriage. Anyway the next thing to do is convince the German doctor.’
When the summons came, Priscilla did not have time to worry. She was shown into a small room and a young fair German in uniform greeted her curtly.
‘I am told that you are expecting a child.’ He stared at her. ‘Are you quite certain of it?’
‘Oh yes,’ in a feeble voice. ‘Absolutely certain.’
‘Very well. That being so, you will be free to go soon.’
Her legs could hardly carry her from the room.
Early in February, the loudspeakers interrupted a Schubert
piano sonata and called out Priscilla’s name: she was to report to the Kommandantur.
On the day of Priscilla’s departure in spring 1941, she was searched. Her British passport was returned, plus her compact mirror and flashlight. She was handed two typed documents in German. The first entitled her to free transport by bus or train, and asked the authorities to allow her to travel unhindered. The second demanded that she present herself each day to the Mairie of her Paris neighbourhood – she was not allowed to take up residence in any ‘coastal region’ – and listed six further orders.
Her husband did not know that she was coming home. But she no longer worried about the possibility of retribution on Robert or his family. Her thoughts were of Daniel, the Scarlet Pimpernel, who cared so much for her that he had risked his wife and children. A strange starved determination to start living spread through her. ‘I was hungry for pleasure.’
PART FOUR
18.
LONDON: OCTOBER 1944
An autumn evening, three years later – after the Nazis had left Paris. Gillian Sutro heard a taxi draw up outside her home in Mayfair. She pushed back the curtain and observed Priscilla step out.
‘She was carrying a suitcase, wearing a navy polka-dot frock. She was suntanned and looked beautiful. I rushed out and we fell into each other’s arms. I still remember her first words, “Oh, it’s good to see you. I got out just in time.” In the euphoria of our retrouvailles, I hadn’t time to ponder her words.’
Jubilant, Gillian bustled Priscilla into the house, ‘a shoulder-bag swinging as she walked through our front door’. Priscilla begged for a cup of tea and collapsed on the sofa while Gillian boiled the kettle.
‘I asked Pris about her journey to England. Being British, she managed to get on to a military freighter. No seats. She sat on the floor, relieved to get away as the witch hunt had started.’
Priscilla could share her bedroom, Gillian said. ‘I told her that John had his own room,’ and gave a summary of their marital situation as she helped Priscilla upstairs with her suitcase – ‘which I couldn’t wait to open. It was packed with French couture clothes, Schiaparelli, Patou, metres of pure silk . . . which made my British clothes look all of a sudden rather dreary.’ An ivory dress prompted Gillian to recount her excitement at discovering that this house, 5 Lees Place, had sheltered Elsa Schiaparelli before the war: ‘It was near her couture shop on Grosvenor Street.’ And hanging up the frilly dress in the built-in cupboard, Gillian was carried back to those afternoons in Paris when she had sketched Priscilla modelling Schiaparelli’s very latest designs for Britannia and Eve.
The war dissolved. They were two single girls, sharing secrets. ‘The bliss of seeing Pris again. She slept in my room – there were two beds. We talked and talked about our lives. It took us days, weeks to catch up on our mutual friends, news.’
Priscilla’s arrival at 5 Lees Place had a tonic effect on Gillian’s husband. Gillian’s ugly beast stood looking at her and his thick lips grinned. Gillian noticed how Priscilla hugged him ‘as though she had known him all her life’. The two sat on the sofa while Gillian served drinks. ‘Pris had a sort of cat-like behaviour with men. She stroked John’s hand as they talked. John was almost purring as Pris ran her hand over his hair in an absent-minded way. I had not seen her for five years. I had forgotten the caressing act which was second nature to her and which enchanted her admirers . . . I was delighted that John and my closest friend got on so well, as she was to be our guest while she sorted out her life. She stayed for quite a few months.’
I got out just in time. Only much later did Priscilla’s words keep coming back to Gillian. ‘This seemed to me at the time an odd thing to say. Why the hurry after the Nazi departure?’ Gillian had used the same phrase in June 1940, when telling John about her exodus from France. ‘But what was Pris fleeing from? I didn’t know exactly what was going on in France, except that there were a great many réglements de compte at the Libération. It was called the Epuration and sounded horrid. Women who had slept with Germans had their heads shaved and were paraded in the streets for all to see.’ Sure enough, Gillian noticed a ‘roaring trade’ in wigs on her return to Paris a few months later. ‘On a windy day I saw a woman clutching her mop of hair as though it were a hat. Une tondue.’
Even so, for the next forty-eight years Gillian chose to ignore Priscilla’s words. ‘I loved Pris. We were childhood friends. Anyway, who am I to pass judgement?’ She thrust what Priscilla had said to the back of her mind. ‘I was so excited to see her after so long that her words did not penetrate me until later. But I never forgot them.’
Priscilla was evasive about her activities after her release from Besançon. On 3 December 1963, she stood up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in London and, in an exercise intended to lay her life bare, condensed into a few lines the three and a half years following her internment. Normally such gatherings are confidential, but – extraordinarily – Priscilla wrote out her speech.
‘I went back to my flat in Paris and tried to make a go of my marriage on the rare occasions when I could see my husband but, in 1942, I decided I couldn’t go on. I left home on my bicycle, leaving everything I possessed, and went to stay with friends. From then on until the end of the war I led a precarious existence with no money and false papers, unable to get a job or get a divorce. In 1943, I had a serious internal operation and again in 1944 I had another. When Paris was liberated I was repatriated.’
No mention of any Daniel, Emile, Pierre, Otto.
Nor do her father’s diaries fill in the blank. SPB did not hear from Priscilla between May 1940 and October 1944. From what he wrote about her in his autobiography, he seems to have assumed that his daughter had remained interned all this while, either in Besançon or in Vittel; or perhaps she allowed him to go on believing this so that she would not have to account for her actions. Her sister Vivien told me, ‘She couldn’t get away till the end of the war. I don’t know what went on. There was absolutely no communication at all. No, that’s not true. There was one call. I was staying with my grandma in Horsham. Her telephone number was Horsham 87 and I picked it up and said “Horsham 87”, and a man spoke a whole conversation in French. I said: “How did you know I spoke French?” He said: “Your voice is exactly like your sister’s,” and he told me the news. She was living in the country, more or less all right.’
And yet she was not living with Robert at Boisgrimot, according to Jacqueline Hodey, the grocer’s daughter: ‘After 1940, one never saw her again.’ As far as Hodey and the Carers and the Bezards were concerned, Madame Robert had been uprooted from the landscape as emphatically as the oak trees in the Doynels’ avenue.
19.
BRAZEN LIES
So what was Priscilla doing between the spring of 1941 and the autumn of 1944 when she came through Gillian’s door in Mayfair?
I had hoped the contents of her padded chest would tell me. I was mistaken. All that the letters made clear was that Priscilla had had a relationship with a Frenchman called Daniel soon after her release from Besançon, and then, or at the same time, with men called Emile, Pierre, Otto. But as to who they were, and in particular Otto, who sounded suspiciously German, I had no answer. And while I had learned more about Priscilla from her incomplete manuscripts, large parts of her puzzle were missing. She remained a passive enigma, drifting in and out of view; a cork on a troubled sea.
There she might have stayed. Without knowing the identities of her lovers, I could not make Priscilla’s story with all its ambiguities and blanks come whole. Although I am a novelist, it seemed to me that to resurrect Priscilla in the guise of fiction would not be true to her life, however falsely she might have lived it. And I was troubled by the manner in which the Doynel family had denied her – not mentioning her name in their 1200-page genealogy and killing her off forty years early, at the start of the war.
Then, in the Special Collections Room of the Bodleian Library, less than a ten-minute walk from where I lived in Oxford, I m
ade an elating discovery. I was in the final stage of putting to bed an edition of Bruce Chatwin’s letters, a project which had occupied me intermittently since 1991, when I noticed a reference to a Sutro Collection, recently catalogued and stored in the same building. In no real spirit of expectation, I pulled out the catalogue and saw that the Sutro archive had been bequeathed by Gillian; further, three specific boxes related to my aunt.
I ordered them up. The first box contained letters from Priscilla to Gillian. There were photographs of the two of them in France before the war, on holiday soon after it in Sainte-Maxime, of Gillian’s wedding in London, of Priscilla’s second wedding to Raymond, and of the Sutros at Church Farm. Interesting, I thought, but nothing more, and opened the second box, which was full of red and yellow notebooks.
Then I read my name.
This was the line: ‘She was never in a concentration camp like Nicholas Shakespeare writes in his piece in Telegraph magazine 14 November 1992.’ Besançon, Gillian wrote angrily, was an internment camp; but the mistake – which was my mistake, since Priscilla had never spoken to me about it – had a combustive effect, uncorking a lifetime of deliberately suppressed information and of secrets and suspicions about my aunt which Gillian had bottled up, until now. ‘Since reading the brazen lies she told her journalist-writer nephew, I have no scruples over telling the truth about her life and war record in Occupied France. Had she not lied I had intended to keep to myself what I knew.’
Priscilla Page 20
