Beret down over her forehead, not daring to look anyone in the face or to appear in any way conspicuous, Priscilla set off. Her reaction on her release from Besançon, two years before, had verged on the insouciant. ‘One soon got used to seeing German uniforms about the place and one ignored them.’ But the Paris of March 1943 was not the triumphant Paris of March 1941. The Germans had surrendered at Stalingrad in February, with 200,000 dead; the Allies had defeated Rommel at El Alamein; and the Germans had marched into Vichy. The whole of France lay under Nazi rule, with Gestapo numbers in Paris increased to 32,000. In their repressive measures, it was possible to read signs of nervousness.
Priscilla turned the corner into Rue Lord Byron and kept on walking. A gendarme glanced back at her twice, his eyes drifting down her front as if looking for a yellow star.
Cornet had prevented her from appreciating the danger she was in. She was an ‘espèce sans carte’ in a city where notices on every corner demanded to know: ‘Etes-vous en règle?’ But her documents were not in order. Her British passport was a liability. Her French carte d’identité had expired four months earlier. And Cornet’s possessiveness, combined with his fierce antipathy towards Daniel Vernier, had prevented Priscilla from letting Vernier supply her with fresh papers.
With Cornet not there to protect her, the gravity of Priscilla’s situation was exposed. She could not go to the Mairie without a valid identity card to claim her monthly coupons for food and clothes. But more dangerous for a ‘resortissante britannique’ like Priscilla was to be caught without papers or with the wrong papers. She risked being bundled into a police van and sent to Libenau, a women’s internment camp in Germany, as had happened to an English gymnast she had known in Besançon.
Priscilla crossed Avenue de Friedland. A policeman stopped the traffic to let three German lorries go by. She continued walking towards Rue Beaujon, merging into the early morning crowds. Her fear was to run into a police checkpoint. Sudden curfews and round-ups were a permanent feature following the introduction of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), compelling French men over eighteen and French women over twenty-one to go and work in Germany. Since February, Gestapo officers in plain clothes watched for signs of anyone going backwards at the sight of barriers being put up outside the Métro or cinemas. The Gestapo were looking for STO defaulters, but also Jews, saboteurs, spies, and – after murderous attacks on Germans – random hostages.
‘The only time I was afraid was coming out of the Métro,’ Yvette Goodden said. ‘They would take unwitting victims at the sortie and put them against the wall in the Place des Ternes at the end of our street. I used to hear the shots early in the morning.’
All of this was against the backdrop of a much darker process that had begun in July 1942 and which took place out of sight. A young Jewish woman wrote in her diary: ‘The terrible thing in all this is that you see very few people actually doing it.’ A rare glimpse was afforded to Goodden. It was still dark on the July morning when she heard a commotion in the building opposite. ‘My son used to play in the Bois de Boulogne with a little Jewish girl who lived there, a sweet pretty thing with dark curls and a big red bow in her hair. When I looked outside they were picking up mother and daughter, putting the mother in one truck, the girl in another. They were taken to the Vél d’Hiver, then to Drancy. We knew they had camps. We didn’t know they had death camps.’
Shula Troman, one of the Besançon three, was at Vittel when French police arrested her father. ‘He was trying to get me out of the camp by proving that I was not English. He was hiding in Le Vésinet when he came back to fetch something from our apartment, and the concierge, Madame Le Brun, denounced him for being Jewish. He was asked to come to la Préfecture de Police and he thought that since he’d been asked so politely it was maybe something to do with me, so he went with my mother and little sister, and they were waiting for him and that was that. The concierge received 5,000 francs. He was sent to Drancy for nine months and in July 1942 sent to Auschwitz.’
The telephone that rings without answer, the door that remains closed, the concierge who looks away. Was this to be Priscilla’s fate?
25.
‘SIMONE VERNIER’
There is a simple explanation for why Gillian failed to contact my aunt during the Occupation, and why Gillian’s French lovers drew repeated blanks when they enquired after Priscilla Doynel on their secret missions into France: in the spring of 1943, Priscilla went underground with a changed name.
The figure who ‘stepped into the breach’ after the Gestapo expelled Cornet to Belgium was the person who had put the Germans on to his tail, Priscilla’s former lover Daniel Vernier.
A bruised ‘I told you so’ – arms folded, his face wanting to show surprise – was Vernier’s reaction on that morning when Priscilla arrived breathless outside 12 Rue Beaujon and jabbed the bell. Vernier let her in, but rejection had hardened Priscilla’s carefree beau of 1940 and 1941. He was thinner, pricklier, more cynical, and with a hurt glaze in his crinkly eyes. ‘By now his love for me, although still strong, was bitter and he found it hard to forgive the Emile episode. He realised that I had felt a stronger emotion with Emile than I ever had with him and he resented it.’
At the height of their affair eighteen months earlier, Vernier had introduced Priscilla to his wife’s brother Alain, then on the run from the Germans. Captured near Rheims, he had been put to work on a potato farm in Austria. Unlike Priscilla’s husband, Alain had escaped, but he possessed no documents. Vernier had taken him to ‘a specialist for identity papers’, a family friend who owned a publishing company that printed directories for leather-workers and furniture-makers. On 18 October 1941, Daniel and Simone saw Alain off on a train to Toulouse in the free zone with a laissez-passer in the name of Daniel Vernier.
Vernier now moved with urgency, asking his friend to perform the same trick for Priscilla. The publisher pasted her photograph on to a pale blue concertina of ten pages, scuffed it with grease and sandpaper, and inserted it into a wallet beneath old cellophane, the Germans being suspicious of new identity cards. He also supplied her with a four-page laissez-passer. In both documents he entered Vernier’s own address as her’s: 12 Rue Beaujon.
The building which Priscilla gave as her Paris home provides an arresting snapshot of the limited world she inhabited. 12 Rue Beaujon was owned by a well-connected Nazi, thirty-five-year-old Freddy Kraus. The tall voluble Austrian who passed her in the hallway was a senior figure in Bureau Otto.
Miserly as his ‘landlord’s lights’, which turned off after thirty seconds, are the details Kraus has left us, after disappearing in a flash at the end of the war. The image which stays is that of a man who knew how to exploit his connections. Kraus’s contacts reached into the heart of the British government through Jacqueline, his twenty-five-year-old wife.
Jacqueline Kraus – lively, Heathfield-educated – was a second cousin of Winston Churchill. Priscilla had met her with Gillian and Vertès, who could not believe how much Gillian looked like Jacqueline, and also like another darkly attractive woman at the same party, dressed in a sequined jacket, with shiny make-up in contrast to everyone’s powdered faces. This was Jacqueline’s mother, Daisy Fellowes, a woman described to me by someone who knew her: ‘No one was more despicable, nor was anyone better company.’ Jacqueline was nicknamed ‘Little Daisy’ after her.
Now sitting out the war in the Dorchester as the mistress of Churchill’s Minister of Information, Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, Daisy ‘Wanton’ Fellowes had been the inspiration for Schiaparelli’s Shocking Pink; Vertès had painted her and illustrated a novel that she had completed in the sporadic intervals between lovers. Black-haired, high-cheeked, highly-sexed, Daisy, too, had seen herself mirrored in Gillian – who in turn wrote: ‘Vertès delighted that Daisy Fellowes admired my looks.’ Interestingly, Gillian also recorded that Cecil Beaton commented on her resemblance to Jacqueline.
To bump into ‘Little Daisy’ was to be reminded of Gillian at a
moment when Priscilla missed her more than ever.
Did Jacqueline Kraus tell the German authorities who Priscilla was? Unlikely. Since 1941, Jacqueline had acted as a courier for the Resistance, collecting letters destined for SOE in London, and getting her husband to deliver them to a soap-manufacturer’s office in Marseilles. Jacqueline also protected Allied pilots needing shelter, claiming that she was personally responsible ‘for helping sixteen French and British aviators to escape from the Gestapo’. Freddy Kraus’s untrustworthiness is easier to be sure of. He was discovered after the Liberation to have been a German intelligence agent: he had shown all of Jacqueline’s letters to the Abwehr.
Kraus was not the only significant Nazi associated with 12 Rue Beaujon. Inhabiting the same building since 1942 was Henri Chamberlin’s number two, Joseph Joanovici. The cliff-faced ‘Monsieur Joseph’ was a complicated character, a Bessarabian Jew and former rag-and-bone man who, while occupying a top position in the French Gestapo, later claimed like Jacqueline Kraus to have saved the lives of many people on the run. He rented a maid’s room off Freddy Kraus and, according to his mistress, used it to hide refugees. ‘He calculated that one will never look for a Jew, a resistant, or an American parachutist in the house of a German officer who runs a bureau d’achat.’
Simone Vernier’s brother Alain was another fugitive who put down 12 Rue Beaujon as his address.
Priscilla, a visitor to this building since November 1940, bumped into all of these people. Through his immediate neighbours, Daniel Vernier had direct access to Brandl, Chamberlin and the apparatus of the German and French security services. It would have been simple to alert the Gestapo to Emile Cornet’s transgressions.
More startling than the identities of those who shared Priscilla’s new address was to discover her new name: Simone Vernier.
Gillian was the only one to whom Priscilla confided her wartime persona. ‘Through a very rich French lover called Daniel Vernier, she obtained an identity which was the exact replica of Daniel’s wife Simone, who was also fair and blue-eyed. He pretended his wife had lost her papers – so there were two Simone Verniers.’
It simplified matters that both women looked alike and were fond of each other. But was Simone in the loop? Did she have any inkling that Priscilla was bicycling around Paris pretending to be Madame Vernier and dressing like her? Gillian wrote: ‘Every time Daniel gave Pris a piece of jewellery he gave the same replica to his wife.’ Priscilla herself was never sure to what extent Simone was aware that Daniel and she had been lovers. ‘Simone was very sweet to me during the whole of this time and I couldn’t make up my mind whether she knew about Daniel and me or not. She must have known that he was unhappy.’
I telephoned Simone and Daniel’s daughter to see if she could solve the mystery of the two blonde Simone Verniers who ventured out in matching jupe-culottes, wearing the same brooches. She could not. ‘I’m busy, the story doesn’t interest me, my parents never spoke to me about it, I’m sorry, goodbye.’
‘Aren’t you interested in looking at photographs?’
‘No.’
‘Your parents saved my aunt’s life during the war.’
The line was dead.
It might have consoled her to learn that her father was never in danger of squandering the Vernier fortune on Priscilla. ‘When Pris tried to sell a sapphire ring in London,’ Gillian wrote, ‘she was told it was phoney, very good imitation.’
One needed to be a good imitation to survive in the spring of 1943. Becoming Simone Vernier took getting used to. Priscilla had to guard her response when someone hailed her who knew her from Boisgrimot or who had studied at the same lycée. And never a word of English. Although once or twice she thought of England and the past came back with a sharp pang, and she was Priscilla Mais again.
Everyone she knew masqueraded. Her mother had changed by deed poll from Mais to Ommaney-Davis. So had Priscilla’s great rival for her father’s affections, Winnie Doughty, changed her name – to Mais. It was a period which encouraged doubles and pseudonyms. Arthur Koestler emerged from the French Foreign Legion office as Swiss taxi driver Albert Dubert. In London, Gillian’s boss at BCRA, André Dewavrin, adopted the nom de guerre of the Passy Métro station. In Paris, Gillian’s previous upstairs neighbour in Boulevard Berthier, Leonie Bathiat, transformed into the actress Arletty.
The Gestapo were not infallible. They never found out that Vercors, pseudonymous author of Le Silence de la Mer, was Jean Bruller. Or that Priscilla’s fellow internee at Besançon, Drue Tartière, was the broadcaster Drue Leyton of Radio Paris-Mondiale; or that Marie Cornet was another Besançon inmate, Antonia Hunt. And they failed to associate Priscilla Doynel with SPB Mais, at least for a few more months; and never with Simone Vernier.
‘I have got false papers, but I feel like a hunted animal,’ Priscilla wrote. She had become like Richard Hannay in her father’s favourite book – ‘going off to hide instead of going to the police’, as SPB scribbled in a stage direction for his radio adaptation of The Thirty-nine Steps.
As ‘Simone Vernier’ Priscilla could appear genuinely French. It allowed her to be in the street on a day-to-day basis, pass through checkpoints and travel where she wanted, which would have been impossible with a British passport. Even so, it is hard to explain why the authorities did not pursue Priscilla once her French identity card expired. Perhaps they accepted she was safely tucked away in a nursing home and ill. Or maybe they presumed that she had escaped France, like Jacqueline Grant, Elisabeth Haden-Guest, Rosemary Say. A lot of this is unknowable.
She could move about freely, although she avoided Cornet’s apartment. For the next three months, she slept at the nursing home in Ville d’Avray. But she had to support herself, and it was risky to apply for a job as the false ‘Simone Vernier’.
Priscilla had not needed to work since leaving Robert in May 1942. Cornet covered the costs of everything with his boundless supply of new banknotes. She had lived well. ‘You could buy anything if you had money,’ she told her AA meeting twenty years later. ‘Food and clothes were terrifically expensive, but providing you were willing to pay you could get anything coupon free. Before the Americans arrived, a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes cost £2 [at least £75 in today’s money]. One never saw any milk. Coffee and tea were almost impossible to get even on the black market. Clothes were easy if you went to Paquin, Worth or Molyneux. You needed no coupons . . . you merely had to pay!’
But she had no money and Cornet had been expelled to Belgium, and she could hardly go looking for work if she was supposed to be ill.
John Sutro’s view on Priscilla’s activities in France, wrote Gillian, was ‘that people who had not gone through the Occupation should not judge those who had. Even today, new facts emerge which are not to the credit of certain people, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There were heroes and there were traitors, there were brave men and others who preferred to make a great deal of money out of the black market. An enemy occupation does not always bring out the best in people. But who can tell what would have happened in England had we endured an occupation? No one can pretend there was no black market in London during the war. It was just a question of money.’
With money, you could imagine that nothing had changed. A German officer passing through Paris in October 1943 sat in the Ritz and rubbed his eyes at the wealth of luxury articles on display. ‘People here live as though there had never been a war, and certainly not a war that France had lost!’
But Von Studnitz spoke for a mere handful. If Cornet, Stocklin, Chamberlin and Brandl formed one distorted and privileged part of the black market, on the other side were the majority who found it impossible to keep within the law and make ends meet. In London, Simone Weil famously starved herself to death when she tried to live on the official rations permitted to Parisians. After the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942, cutting off an estimated 40 per cent of foodstuffs from the African continent, the French suffered even greater food shorta
ges, Parisians in particular.
Suddenly on her own, Priscilla no longer had access to Robert’s food parcels or to Vernier’s largesse. Vernier refused to assist further unless she came back to him, which she resisted. Her relationship with him on hold, she made her life day by day, as best she could.
Getting up early for bread with the little money she had left, she might have been back at Besançon. And, anyway, had her departure from there made any difference? The bartering, the queues, the clogs, the green clay soap that never lathered, the ersatz food and cigarettes made from Jerusalem artichokes – all were familiar from the internment camp. Priscilla had learned at Besançon that to survive one had to behave in an extraordinary way, and that everything was ersatz.
She had gone underground, but not to join the Resistance; rather, to dissolve into the crowd. And if, to keep warm and secure a meal, she did things that Priscilla Mais or Priscilla Doynel might have known in their inward conscience was wrong, then she was also part of the mass. She was not unique in the painful choices that she faced, the compromises she made, but representative.
‘To be a hero is honourable; not to be one is not necessarily dishonourable,’ wrote the Swiss historian Philippe Burrin. At first glance, I found it embarrassing to discover what Priscilla got up to. Of course, I wished for my aunt to be heroic. I wanted her to be an exception. But she was not an exception, she was an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances. Her struggles, bizarre as they are, were not heroic, like the famous Odette Hallowes; or like Yvette Goodden who sheltered a downed Canadian pilot. Neither was Priscilla a grasping tart who sold everyone down the river. Like the Doynels, she was bang in the middle.
This is not a criticism or disparagement. The impulse to cast people as heroes or traitors ignores the muddled and shifting reality of the overwhelming part of the population who drifted nervously with the stream; prudent, unaffiliated, not committing themselves to resistance or collaboration, not fitting into a neat moral category, playing a number of ambiguous and provisional roles, ready at any instant to change direction with the current. At this dark moment in France’s history, a friend of André Gide said that he felt ‘like a cork floating on the filthiest water’. That summed up Priscilla.
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