Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  If that was the case, would it be wiser to have no children?

  I imagine Robert at Boisgrimot, pacing the lawn in his hacking jacket and trilby, his awkward walk, tall when he remembers to stand upright, devout to a deity who was not always there, his nights interrupted by the gurgles of disappearing comrades weighed down by 20-kilo packs, images of men on barbed wire, the flooded shell craters, smells of gas, mud. Robert could not confide to Priscilla about his dreams. So often he became emotional – here he was, with her, a wonderful meal and wine . . . and his friends were trapped in mud, and he might have been there with them, and he would start to shake, unable to hold his cup of coffee, let alone a young woman. The doctors put it down to ‘nerves’. He no longer had fainting fits, but every day he woke up exhausted, and went to bed in the same state.

  ‘Mon tout petit bouchon,’ he wrote to Priscilla in England, ‘I feel fractured every time I leave you. Je t’embrasse avec tout mon amour.’ And a few days later: ‘This is the third time I’ve written to you since you left and only God knows how much it has cost me to be separated from you. I’m still hesitating about making you come back to France . . .’

  Why Priscilla and not any of the others? He had had girlfriends before. Swedish, Hungarian, Austrian, French. Probably he would never be able to work it out, this fatal impulse to want to rescue someone. To believe that he could.

  His mother would need persuading, of course, but he had his eldest brother’s support. Guy would vouch for her social credentials. And if he could get Priscilla to become a Catholic – that might facilitate matters tremendously.

  ‘I love you more and more,’ he wrote. ‘I, too, am very concerned about events and would much prefer it if right now you were in France. I have made a very surprising decision and out of prudence I am going to send a telegram to ask you perhaps to return.’

  By ‘events’ he meant Munich.

  The noise of an aeroplane died down. Cars ceased to hum. In Shoreham with Winnie and their two daughters, SPB turned on the wireless, a new Ecko radiogram for which he had paid 39 guineas. ‘Waiting for the 9.40 news was like waiting to hear the news of an operation. How strangely knit are men’s fortunes that we should be dependent on this one man’s voice.’ At 9.45 p.m., SPB wrote down in his journal: ‘Hitler has made his speech. He warned London and Paris and we heard the high excited pitch of voice of the madman and the wild cheers of his young Nazis.’

  Three days later, Chamberlain’s decision to fly to Germany to speak with Hitler was ‘the most surprising news of a wild week. It has been a dreadful time of tension.’ SPB recorded the sight of men and women hand in hand with drawn faces, ‘the total absence of laughter and whistling’.

  His anxiety intensified after the two leaders met on 22 September.

  ‘24 Sept Saturday. The worst day of year. Chamberlain flies home. All quiet in Westminster. No flags. Business at usual. Though in a few hours we might be wiped from the air.’

  On the Sussex coast, SPB’s mind was ‘in a shambles’ after he had a gas mask fitted and saw visions of his gasping daughters. He had converted the dining room in case of an attack. ‘We look for cellophane to do our windows. There are gas-proof devices for babies, and gas-proof devices for animals. Is any war worth the sight of a child being killed by poison gas? I have got £70 in £1 notes sitting in a drawer waiting to be used for racing the children to a junk-hole if the worst comes.’ On 30 September, hours after the signing of the Munich Agreement: ‘Every train westward out of London is crammed in triplicate.’ SPB did not dare to play tennis, listen to the radio, read the news. ‘Walked over downs and it seemed that perhaps they too would take on an immortal scar.’

  Across the Channel in Paris and Caen and Sainteny, mobilised soldiers had been commandeering buses and painting the glass shades of the street lamps blue. Robert sent a telegram to Horsham, where Priscilla was staying with her grandmother. PLEASE RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP WAR IMMINENT STOP WISH TO INTRODUCE YOU TO MOTHER.

  12.

  BOISGRIMOT

  In Paris, a Doynel told me with pride: ‘We are related to the Montmorencys who came over to Hastings with William the Conqueror.’

  The first written mention of the name Doynel does not occur, in fact, until 1391 – although the family’s unofficial genealogist, Jean Durand de Saint-Front, wrote tantalisingly that ‘in a fragment in my possession’ there was a ‘Doisnel living in 1280’. Saint-Front at least allowed that the origins of the Doynels’ elevation to the aristocracy were obscure.

  Before they were Vicomtes, the Doynels were caretakers-cum-milliners. They held the keys to the windmill of Hautonnière in Fougerolles – so that clothes and bows and arrows could be kept safe: fourteenth-century hat-check girls, in other words.

  Saint-Front was tireless in his pursuit of every Doynel who ever breathed, to nab and to name them. In the Saint-Lô archives – not very extensive, following the flattening of the city in 1944 – I combed quite quickly through his 1200-page family history, hunting for Priscilla’s name.

  A Jean Douesnel was condemned to death in 1391 for violence in the town of Teilleul; a Doynel cousin, Robert de la Sausserie, was Eleanor of Aquitaine’s caretaker. In 1637, François Doynel galloped into a wood with 100 cavalrymen under his command – slap into an ambush: 600 men on horseback and 120 musketeers. ‘In the presence of such a danger, there was but one thing to do – flee.’ In 1800, the Doynels spread their shoots into the German aristocracy when Vicomte René Doynel married the Westphalian heiress Caroline Giessen. But not until December 1895 was the name expanded – after Robert’s grandfather René insisted on changing his surname from Doynel to the more noble-sounding Doynel de la Sausserie. Like many Doynels, René became strong only when he looked backwards.

  Saint-Front terminated his lifetime’s project with a caveat: ‘To sum up, a great family, brilliant, who contracted the best alliances, but who are not as ancient as they have tried to make one believe, and some of whose claims – their presence at Hastings, for example – do not seem entirely justified.’

  One has to leaf through a thousand of Saint-Front’s pages before arriving at the family trees of Robert’s parents. I followed the branches of their eleven children – all with the names of their spouses and offspring – until I came to the last, Robert René Francois Henri-Joseph.

  The entry was simple and chilling: ‘Married an Englishwoman, no children (divorce).’ No dates. Not even a name. Six hundred years of Doynel alliances scrupulously recorded, and yet her identity was not considered worth mentioning. Her excision fitted with the legend told to me by the present Vicomtesse, who had the clear and firm impression that Priscilla had died ‘very young, near the start of the war’.

  ‘Priscilla? A mystery. The enigma of the family,’ said a local historian.

  But in the village of Sainteny they remembered her.

  The farmhouse looked run-down and empty. I was turning to leave when the door shuddered open and an old man stepped out. He carried a stick and had a fresh scab on his bald dome.

  I did not say her name. I told him only that my English aunt had been married to Robert Doynel.

  ‘Priscilla Mais!’ peering at me through his spectacles, stunned, and clapped a hand to his head.

  Joseph Carer had been the son of the family steward. This was a powerful staff member, who, unlike an English estate manager, controlled the whole staff as well as the property itself. To talk to Joseph was to be plunged into the pre-war feudal relationship that existed between the peasants and the nobility.

  The Carers – Breton-speakers – arrived from Brittany in 1937. Joseph’s father looked after the Doynels’ three farms: Le Chalet des Pins, La Paysanterie, Le Pavillon. Another of his duties was to collect the family from the station at Carentan in a horse and buggy.

  One summer – he was eight – Joseph watched his father trotting down the oak avenue with Robert and a young woman seated beside him in a wonderful fur coat. Robert’s fiancée.

  Joseph invited
me inside. He was shaking as he sat down at the table. The kitchen was bare. The only decorations: two cracked blue plates wired to a beam above the stove.

  ‘Your aunt was a beautiful woman, everyone spoke of her beauty, that was what they talked about.’ Her name – uttered unprompted and pronounced as ‘Ma-ease’ – was bringing everything back. ‘Priscilla Mais . . .’

  Joseph recalled what Robert’s oldest brother Guy loyally said about her: ‘Priscilla is from an English noble family.’

  He remembered seeing Priscilla with Robert up at the chateau. ‘On Thursdays, I would carry milk from the farm to Boisgrimot. I would open the bedroom door to Robert’s mother, followed by Robert, or if he was not there, Georges, and a maid carrying a tray.’ He remembered the day when Robert gave him the two blue plates on the beam – he had rescued them from an attic in Le Chalet des Pins after the Americans destroyed the house with grenades. ‘If those plates could talk . . .’ He looked at me. ‘Priscilla Mais!’ shaking his head, his face reddening. And taking off his spectacles, he started to weep.

  The Doynel chateau of Boisgrimot lay on the edge of the village of Sainteny. Before visiting the house, I walked to the main square. Old postcards show that before the Second World War the square was smaller and had an area of flattened earth scattered with gravel. Place Saint-Pierre was now tarmacked over, the cast-iron pump no longer there. Outside the reconstructed church of Saint-Pierre, glinting in the weak sun like malachite, a traditional layering of broken green glass covered Robert’s plain grave.

  Jacqueline Hodey was witness to these changes: she grew up in the café opposite when it was a grocery run by her parents. She could recall the three Doynel wives riding their horses through the square. She was at Robert’s funeral in 1978, as she had attended his mother’s funeral in 1943, and his father’s before that, in 1935.

  Jacqueline’s father had been gassed in the First War. ‘He couldn’t stand people who didn’t do anything, but he had great respect for Robert’s father, the chatelain.’ Jacqueline’s memory reached back to Joseph Carer’s father pushing the old Vicomte in a wheelchair around the estate. ‘He was called Le Père-Grand and I thought he was God.’

  And his children? ‘As they did no serious work, they were not respected so much.’ In particular Robert’s brother Georges, the heir, was regarded warily because of his over-familiar manner with the villagers, always tutoying them.

  Jacqueline was fourteen when she walked for the first time up the oak avenue to the chateau, to collect funds for the parish. The avenue was reserved for God’s car – a black three-door limousine with a chauffeur. Peasants made sure to keep to the side. ‘If you decided, to hell with this, I’m going up the avenue, and you didn’t have the right, you were thrown out.’

  Only the children who attended catechism at the local school were allowed to walk up the middle of the avenue on the heels of the priest. Plus the family. On Sundays for Mass, and for Vespers, the Doynels trooped into Sainteny. Jacqueline remembered Priscilla strolling on Robert’s arm to church, and watching my aunt genuflect in the Doynel chapel.

  ‘I was very small, but I saw Madame Robert. It was a big attraction to see people of the chateau. Because I was from another world than them.’

  The chateau was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in Normandy. By the time the shelling stopped, Boisgrimot, Saint-Pierre church and the Doynel tombs had been obliterated, and hardly a house in Sainteny remained standing.

  Sainteny’s mayor told me: ‘The community was literally destroyed.’

  The destruction included the archives, said Jean-Paul Pitou, who was the local historian. He had spent two decades researching into Sainteny’s past. Such was the resistance to talking about this period at all, not to mention the mistrust in the neighbourhood towards those who might have collaborated with the Germans, that even when documents did turn up, they were destroyed. And in a morose voice from which he could not keep his regret, Pitou recalled the secretary of the association that looked after war victims, a woman whose responsibility was to assess the refugees, and who removed their papers and photographs from their houses for safekeeping. ‘When she died in the 1960s, her children made a bonfire and burned all the files, for two days and two nights.’

  A photograph in Comte Paul Doynel de la Sausserie’s privately printed Genealogical History of the House of Chivré was one of the few images to survive of the chateau of Boisgrimot as it looked in 1944. The windows blown out, the shutters gone, the brickwork torched as if a bush fire had swept through. The trunk of a solitary oak twists up over the damaged roof, charred and spindly.

  The black and white ruin bore no resemblance to the magnolia-painted building that I approached on a mild September afternoon. I walked over a narrow moat filled with water, over a lawn planted with pampas grass and pressed my face to a window. ‘Now it’s a bourgeois house, excuse me,’ the local historian had cautioned.

  Destroyed by bombs in July 1944, and sold with panic-stricken haste by Robert’s brother Georges, Boisgrimot had endured a sterile renovation, and was now available for rent. Visible through a windowpane was the sole link to the former proprietors, a stone fireplace engraved with three mallards – the Doynel crest.

  There was no one around – the present owner lived in Cherbourg – and I made a circuit of the buildings, poking into the conical dovecote. In a corner of the stables, covered with hay, was a dilapidated wood carriage, streaked with blue paint.

  The only image of Boisgrimot as it was in Priscilla’s time was a tinted postcard of the chateau, owned by Jacqueline Hodey. Pitou told me that it took eighteen months to persuade her to show it to him. When I explained to Jacqueline that I was here to find out what had happened to my aunt, she said: ‘On fera sortir les fantômes’ – It’ll bring out the ghosts.

  On this, her first visit, it was a warm day without sun; not a good hunting day, what the French call a jour des dames. The steward, Monsieur Carer, collected Robert and Priscilla from Carentan station in the blue pony trap. The French government had issued Priscilla with a gas mask, a grey oblong box which hung at her side.

  The stout horse lumbered them though a flat landscape bordered by thick hedges into Sainteny and down a gravel drive overarched by oaks. These ancient trees were the joy of Robert’s father, who had forbidden his children to saw off a single branch. His dying words: ‘Leave my trees alone.’ Robert felt a peace whenever he saw them.

  The chateau that emerged from beneath this natural arch was a long two-storied manor house, painted oatmeal and rather plain on the outside. The building dated back to the tenth century, but more recently someone had added on a pigeonnier – a sign of aristocracy.

  Stables in sight, the horse quickened pace, throwing them together on the buggy seat.

  Small dogs pressed their noses into her skirt as Priscilla stepped down. Robert’s mother Adelaide stood on the steps, a small, very old, alert-faced woman dressed in a black jacket edged with embroidery. She kissed Priscilla with some affection and led the way, through a hall that smelled of gun oil and expensive leather tackle, into a large square drawing room, with windows on both sides.

  About twenty Doynels stood waiting – Adelaide’s seven surviving children and their families. Priscilla’s overriding impression was how ancient they were. Two of Robert’s four sisters seemed old enough to be her grandmother. An unmarried woman, Priscilla shyly kissed their hands.

  Forty-three-year-old Guy, Priscilla already knew. She was now introduced to the brother who had somersaulted over Guy to become head of the family. Georges, who was forty-one, was the wealthiest and cleverest of Adelaide’s three sons. He had married a rich woman and made money dealing in antiques and paintings. In looks and in temperament he was quite unlike Robert: astute and energetic, but with a dreadful temper, generally sparked by the most trivial incident. The family tip-toed around him.

  His twenty-nine-year-old wife, Yolande de la Sayette, was a crashing snob who believed in living ‘selon son rang’ –
according to one’s rank – and mingling with exclusive people only. But an eccentric dress code sabotaged her bids to appear stylish. ‘She had no taste in clothes and when she was well dressed it was generally a fluke,’ wrote Priscilla. Their character was conveyed by an advertisement placed recently in The Times. ‘Young French Married Couple, best society, would take well-educated young people desiring to learn French in their comfortable villa near Dinard, July–September.’

  Yolande greeted Priscilla, and smiled as far as her narrow mouth would let her. She sported a strange bird’s feather in her hat. ‘She took an immediate dislike to me,’ Priscilla wrote, ‘when I told her in answer to a question that I had not been presented at Court.’

  English girls were rare at Boisgrimot. Yolande was automatically suspicious of the young woman whom Robert had invited to stay. Priscilla’s white complexion challenged Yolande – those lazy blue eyes that could suddenly become very concentrated, those rounded arms and shoulders, those firm breasts, that tall and slender figure, that hair, and smoothing a dress so obviously purchased for her. Yolande saw une arriviste, a provincial interloper from the old enemy. In this part of France, she would warn Priscilla, they did not much care for the English – they knew the history. But she could not deny that Priscilla held herself well. She had radiance, she had presence. And Robert loved her.

  Robert had told his family about Priscilla; how splendid she looked, standing on deck in a warm wind. Her provenance, Sherborne, the town of Roger of Caen; her ancestry, one of aristocrats and eminent authors.

  Catholic? No. But that was being seen to.

  What did her father do? A famous writer. On the wireless. The Prince of Wales had introduced one of his programmes. The Queen listened to him. He had met President Roosevelt. They nodded.