Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  A financially reckless philanderer, Cyril Hammond was an army man without an army. He battled to conduct his home life with the discipline of a former Guards officer. ‘But he treated the family far worse than soldiers,’ Gillian wrote. A creature of rigid habits, he expected his wife’s inedible meals to be served on the dot – and everyone to be turned out impeccably. He wore thick wool khaki knee socks and shaved every morning, save for the neat stiff military moustache that he never discarded. On evenings when he did not don a dinner jacket, he wore a blazer with Irish Guards buttons which he took care to polish every day. Dinner over, he immersed himself in a book.

  When she thought of her joyless father, Gillian visualised a skeletal figure sunk back in his armchair, twiddling his moustache and reading Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham – and war memoirs. He was hooked on battles. The German officer who occupied their Paris apartment in 1940 said approvingly, examining the shelves: ‘The English officer is very knowledgeable about history.’

  Gillian tensed to recall the hollow snapping sound of books being opened and banged shut to let the dust fly off. The clop-clop was like a sharp slap in the face. Nor did she forget the glou-glou of wine being poured from bottle to glass when no one was around.

  Drunk, her father bragged about women. One of his conquests was Priscilla’s mother. Gillian once overheard him boasting. ‘At the drop of a hat, she’ll lie on her back, hooves in the air.’ Gillian wrote: ‘He had sampled Doris. I remember thinking how odious he was to speak in such a way of a woman he had bedded.’

  This was the society into which Priscilla first came to live in 1926, a skinny, nervy child, as Gillian recalled, tall for her age, with pale lank hair scraped back from her face. Paris would be her home for the next seven years.

  * * *

  Priscilla’s new ‘stepfather’ Dominic Bevan Wyndham-Lewis was, when her mother met him, a satirical journalist on the Daily Express, thirty-three years old, a short, stocky, combative Welshman with a box face, receding black hair and fierce blue eyes. In the family he became known as Boo. He was a friend of Hilaire Belloc, who described Boo as the wittiest man he had ever met – this despite his pronounced stammer, a result of two bouts of shell-shock in France. At the Daily Express, he had shared an office with SPB – who described Boo, later, as ‘a bald, irritable man who quarrelled violently with everyone in a very excitable voice that rose almost to a treble as his anger became less restrained’. Boo in his turn parodied SPB as a travel writer of such classics as With My Wombat in the Vosges. He wrote a humorous column which he signed ‘Beachcomber’ and on defecting to France bequeathed the pseudonym to J. B. Morton, who made it famous. During the eight years that Boo lived with Doris in Paris, he wrote tart biographies of three French kings, and compiled a well-received anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl. He described himself as ‘impulsive, lazy, easily imposed upon, distinctly Celt, full of strong loves and hates’. To Priscilla, he was a temperamental and difficult man, a recent Catholic convert who ultimately never forgave himself, or Doris, for the fact they were living in sin.

  ‘I thought he was wonderful,’ said Vivien, who had originally christened him ‘Boo’. ‘I couldn’t understand for many years why Priscilla hated him more than anyone.’

  But hate him she did. A photograph in Priscilla’s album shows her standing on the beach at Brighton between her father and Wyndham-Lewis: SPB holds her left shoulder, Boo her right. His face has been scratched out.

  * * *

  At the time, Priscilla explained only to Gillian the cause of her rupture with Boo. Until war separated the two girls, they knew the backwaters of each other’s lives, every painful detail. ‘My most intimate girlfriend’ is how Gillian described Priscilla in one of her notebooks, adding ‘Pris and I were birds of a feather.’ Priscilla felt the same strong pull: ‘We were closer than sisters.’

  But their lifelong friendship was slow to germinate. Thrown together because of their parents, and enrolled at the same lycée at 25 Rue Alexandre Dumas and in the same ballet class, they began by disliking each other enormously.

  Promiscuous, and mired in her own vapours, Doris had nevertheless brought up her daughters ‘fairly strictly’. She made Priscilla wear her hair in plaits and forbade her to read newspapers or visit the cinema. If she attended a concert, she needed a chaperone. And politeness at all times. Aged fifteen, Priscilla was stopped from going to the theatre after she uttered the word ‘bugger’. She did not smoke, or drink anything stronger than milk and orange juice.

  Gillian considered Priscilla an inexperienced ignoramus and a prig. Although one year younger, Gillian was the more mature and street-wise. Her obsession was the cinema – her ambition to be an actress. Ever since Priscilla could remember, Gillian had adopted the habit of not smiling.

  Smiling, Gillian had read, would give her lines.

  Indifferent to film, Priscilla had never heard of Gillian’s icon, Greta Garbo, nor the stars whose photographs Gillian pinned to her bedroom walls, cut out of film magazines like Pour Vous and Cinémonde. Instead, Priscilla’s brightest moments came when she was alone in the two-storey studio apartment in Rue Galvani, which Boo rented from 1930. In the sitting room, the Maples Persian rug was rolled up so that she could put on a record and invent a dance. There on the polished parquet floor, Priscilla Mais balanced on her sandalled toe and pretended to be Anna Pavlova.

  Her cheerful Russian governess Nina had introduced her to Pavlova. Priscilla was mesmerised when she watched her perform ‘The Dying Swan’ at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She moved as Priscilla had never seen anyone move. Priscilla stuck a newspaper cutting of the dancer into her first scrapbook – ‘On shoe tip she had looked more like an air-borne sylph and less like an earth-bound woman’ – and above the photograph wrote her own name, ‘Priscilla Mais’. Pavlova was what Priscilla, still a shy and relatively passive girl, now decided that she wanted to be.

  Enrolled with Gillian in Madame Nesterovsky’s class, Priscilla impressed the teacher with her physical grace – unlike Gillian, who detested ballet, and was, Priscilla felt, ‘about as graceful as a young elephant’. For four years, she attended lessons. ‘I studied ballet-dancing very seriously as I intended to make it my career. It was a passion – I never had any doubts that that was how I wanted to spend my life.’ But her passion was cut short brutally.

  On 23 January 1931 Pavlova died of pleurisy at The Hague aged forty-nine. One afternoon, Priscilla raised her right leg and felt an ache. Within hours, she came down with a high fever.

  Round the corner in Boulevard Berthier – where, following Cyril’s bankruptcy, the Hammonds had moved to a studio a few months before – Gillian overheard her parents discussing Priscilla. A priest was by her bed, Priscilla’s mother was away with Boo in London, it was all very sad.

  ‘Is she going to die?’ Gillian asked hopefully.

  Priscilla’s illness was a flare-up of a baffling pain in her jaw. Exacerbated by her concentration on ballet five days a week, the soreness had crept into her legs. The diagnosis: osteomyelitis, a serious bacterial infection of the bone.

  Priscilla ran a temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit for seventeen days. ‘She was at death’s door,’ Vivien said. ‘They carved open her upper legs, scraping them down to the bone, leaving hideous open wounds three inches wide and eight inches long – and this before penicillin or painkillers.’

  Doris hurried back. Priscilla told Gillian: ‘She found a priest praying at my bedside and very little hope left for my survival. As soon as I saw her, I took a turn for the better and gradually got stronger, until after three months I was allowed to leave the nursing home. I couldn’t walk, of course, and had to be carried everywhere.’

  Gillian was ashamed of her earlier reaction and decided that if Priscilla recovered she would be ‘very, very nice to her’. She visited Rue Galvani and was startled to find a plump-looking girl lying on a bed with her blonde head completely shaved, an image that Gillian remembered sixty yea
rs later.

  Priscilla’s high fever had caused her hair to fall out. Doris’s hairdresser insisted that it would never grow again unless it was all clipped off. Doris had clicked the scissors.

  Gillian was as riveted by Priscilla’s bald head as by the scars on her legs. Priscilla shrugged. ‘If people don’t like them, they can look the other way.’ Gillian sensed that the scar left at having to give up dancing was deeper. A ballet career was out of the question.

  ‘As Priscilla couldn’t go out or move off her bed, she didn’t mind as much as she might have done.’ Impressed by her stoicism, from now on Gillian tried to see Priscilla every day after school.

  Of the four Hammond siblings, Priscilla initially had much preferred Gillian’s elder brother Nicky – in September 1926, SPB had met Priscilla off the steamer at Newhaven: ‘P talks of nothing but proposal of marriage (at 10) for Nicky Hammond (aged 11).’ Five years on, Priscilla began to transfer her attention to his fourteen-year-old sister.

  * * *

  In December 1998, the upstairs neighbour in Gillian’s apartment block in Monaco forgot to turn off his bathroom tap. Gillian’s living room was flooded and the novel ruined which she had been writing about Priscilla. Gillian lamented in a notebook: ‘Parts of my MS got soaked and caused ink to run, rendering the text illegible. I have had to dry out soaked book, weigh down swollen pages with heavy irons.’

  She died a few months later, before having rewritten the text, but from her notebooks, and from Priscilla’s novel which featured Gillian as a central character, it is possible to establish a detailed picture of a friendship that lasted fifty-seven years and took root during this period.

  Gillian spent most of her spare hours with Priscilla. She helped Doris’s Italian maid carry her from room to room and, if Marguerite was unavailable, had Priscilla lower herself on the Persian rug and dragged her around the parquet floor.

  Priscilla’s bedroom was their den. Gillian knelt beside her and they talked. There was not much else to do. United by a similar ‘inferiority complex’, as Gillian called it, they were opposites who absorbed each other, Gillian all elbows and sharp (despite her adolescent chubbiness) to Priscilla’s passive roundness. This tension kept their relationship alive. Gillian saw it as her duty to distract Priscilla from the reality that she would never perform ‘The Dying Swan’. Priscilla became Gillian’s outlet for all that Gillian, or ‘Chou-chou’ as Priscilla nicknamed her, could not discuss at home. For the year that she was confined to her bed, Priscilla entered the world largely through Gillian’s eyes.

  To keep Priscilla’s mind from gnawing on her disappointment, Gillian lent her film magazines and helped with her lessons. Priscilla’s education had been neglected owing to her dance classes and then because of illness. She was unable to attend the Lycée Carnot, Gillian’s new school, but as part of a joint cost-cutting exercise they now shared a stern governess, Mademoiselle Yvonne, who set them homework. Gillian sometimes finished Priscilla’s homework for her while Priscilla locked herself in the lavatory with a book – a habit that Gillian adopted. All through their lives, Priscilla and Gillian were to use the lavatory as a place of escape, to read books or love letters.

  A halted dancer, her limbs still ‘full of lingering’, Priscilla filled the sudden empty space with reading. Banned from newspapers, she escaped into the pages of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Tolstoy. Her favourite novels at fourteen were Wuthering Heights and War and Peace.

  Her father chose many of the books: it was how he kept in touch – with regular parcels of novels. After her operations, too busy to get away, and not believing for an instant that she was dying, he had sent a daily postcard in his crabbed handwriting. Finally, she wrote back. She missed him desperately, but she had taken badly the news that he had started another family with Winnie. Gillian found Priscilla in tears just before her fifteenth birthday. SPB had written to her, announcing the birth of her half-sister, Lalage – my mother.

  Doris was unsympathetic. She put her daughter down for resembling her father too much, and blamed Priscilla for the sacrifices that she had had to make. ‘I would have left your father years before if it hadn’t been for you.’ That was a frequent gripe.

  8.

  SPB

  While she convalesced, Priscilla conceived the two ambitions of her life. To have a child; and to publish a book, like her father.

  She saw him in Sussex for a few days each summer, heavily chaperoned by her French governess. But in Paris, depending on favourable atmospheric conditions, she listened to him as often as possible, twiddling one of the three round knobs on Boo’s wooden wireless to the National Programme – radiated from the Daventry long-wave transmitter on a wavelength of 1554.4m. Stretched out on the couch, immobile, she heard SPB’s disembodied voice speaking ‘with the gloves off’, and immediately was pushing through the heather, breathing in smells of mud and wet tweed as she followed him on foot after the hounds, always struggling to keep up. Hunting, he used to say, was ‘the purest of human pleasures’.

  Priscilla had a lot of her father in her. She adored him, and went on adoring him, despite periods of separation and disappointment. But their relationship was complex because he was such a public figure, and had a life that did not involve her.

  While Priscilla was living in France, her father had become famous. In 1927, his rich mellow voice attracted the attention of the BBC. He made his impact as a pioneer of radio, with a belief, compellingly expressed, that without radio ‘any man – but especially the workless man – is only half alive today’. The philosopher Bryan Magee told me: ‘I grew up in a working-class home in Hoxton and even I was entirely used to hearing him mentioned.’ In 1954, Magee hired SPB’s youngest daughter Imogen as his secretary. ‘When I said to my grandmother and two aunts, “My secretary is SPB’s daughter,” they were awe-struck. It was a little bit like, “My secretary is Salman Rushdie’s daughter,” or during an earlier generation, “My secretary is Somerset Maugham’s daughter.”’

  SPB epitomised Englishness: most of his many books and radio talks were celebrations of England’s history, geography, culture and language. He was – in a phrase he concocted – ‘the golden voice of radio’. ‘My voice,’ he wrote with apparent absence of irony or embarrassment or false modesty, ‘was held to be “a clean steady trade-wind blowing”.’ It was heard in corners of the Empire as far away as New Zealand, and familiar on programmes like Time to Spare, The Kitchen Front and The Brains Trust where his audience was not limited to the working class. In January 1933, The Times reported that ‘the Queen listened with great interest to the broadcast talk by Mr S. P. B. Mais recently on his tour of unemployment centres in Liverpool and Birkenhead.’

  He rose to prominence during the Depression when he came to be known as the ‘Ambassador of the English Countryside’. In January 1932, the BBC commissioned a topographical series, This Unknown Island, to encourage tourism to Britain’s holiday resorts. SPB travelled to seventeen regions and spent a week exploring each. A book with the same title appeared soon after, one of more than two hundred books that he published.

  His message for people to go out and explore what lay on their doorsteps, preferably on foot, held a powerful appeal to those who could not afford the cost of travelling abroad, still less a car. The public responded in huge numbers. In July 1932, he was joined by 16,000 people – including Priscilla – on the Sussex Downs to watch the sun rise over the Iron Age fort at Chanctonbury Ring. Four special trains had to be laid on for this midnight excursion.

  E. M. Forster praised his broadcasts, suggesting that for his next venture he might visit ‘the Unknown Tyne, Mersey and Clyde’, and, rather than winkle out beauty spots, examine ‘the quite intolerable horror of the unemployed man’s life’. SPB jumped at the challenge, persuading the BBC to let him deliver a series of eleven talks on the unemployed. The series was introduced by the Prince of Wales, and proved vivid and popular, giving a human face to the misery and hopeless condition of three million men a
nd women. A second series was commissioned in April 1934, transmitted at peak listening time and causing a nationwide furore on the eve of the final reading of the Unemployment Bill. Angry questions were asked in Parliament, with MPs citing SPB’s talks to mock the government’s claims that the unemployed were better off. The BBC’s prickly director-general John Reith was summoned to Downing Street and ordered by the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to desist with the programmes. Reith replied that he would order S. P. B. Mais to report on air that the half-hour silence about to follow was owing to the Government’s refusal to allow the unemployed to express their opinions. The programmes continued.

  When SPB travelled to America the following winter, he was the first to transmit a series of live weekly programmes from the United States, or indeed from anywhere outside Britain. He invited Priscilla to come as his secretary, but to Priscilla’s everlasting bitterness Doris refused to allow this. The ground-breaking talks, aired simultaneously on NBC, were introduced by the American ambassador, with this impressive claim: ‘It is the first time in the history of broadcasting that such an effort has been made, in which a national of one country will visit another country, study its people, and try to interpret them to his own nationals.’ His discursive method worked, and trail-blazed the way for, thirteen years later, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. Billed as ‘a modern Columbus’, SPB toured fourteen states in three months, and President Roosevelt granted him an audience. ‘I had been called the Ambassador of the English Countryside,’ SPB wrote in the inevitable companion volume. ‘I was now to be regarded as the Ambassador of the English People.’ I have not been able to listen to the recordings, but the talks were incorporated into his book A Modern Columbus, and reading them I understand his popularity. Unsnobbish, he approached everything with excited curiosity.