She concocted fantasy menus. Her memories of studying cordon bleu relatively fresh, she invited Berry to fictitious banquets. She selected the dishes from her meals with Robert and Gillian in pre-war Paris.
I tried in Besançon to find anyone who remembered the English internees. At Le Coucou restaurant down the hill, the patron Patrick Langlade greeted my questions with a dubious smile. ‘No one ever told me – and I arrived here in 1960.’ In 1972, as a nineteen-year-old parachutist, Langlade spent four weeks’ military service at Caserne Vauban. ‘Perhaps I slept in her bed!’ But he looked unconvinced. I was finishing my meal when I heard a shout. ‘Come over here!’ He had googled it. ‘Look! Margaret Kelly. She was at Besançon. The Bluebell Girls were prisoners!’
Until the camp’s Christmas Eve party, Priscilla had not realised that the dance troupe and their Irish founder were inmates. Their show at the Folies Bergère was the first that Robert had taken Priscilla to see, three years before. Moreover, she had pretended to the abortionist that she was one of the dancers. Now, in the large shed that doubled as a projection room, lit by candles which the nuns had provided, and wearing dresses stitched from bedsacks, the Bluebell Girls performed what Yvette Goodden remembers as ‘a good dance routine – there was an enormous amount of double meaning and the Germans didn’t see it and laughed their heads off.’ Laughing and sobbing, Priscilla watched comic sketches which mocked the long queues. She listened in silence to the choir that followed. And at the top of her voice with a thousand others sang ‘J’attendrai’, in a version which included new lines about escaping, and – once the Commandant and his staff had tactfully stood up and left – ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ plus two emotional renditions of the national anthem.
It was the largest assembly that Priscilla had attended since her arrival. Several tear-stained faces calling for encores were familiar. Jacqueline Grant and her mother. The wife of a British trainer whom Priscilla had met at Chantilly with Guy and Georgette. A gigantic black man in an apple green turban who made the coffee at Maxim’s, one of the small group of men caught in the round-up. A broad black hat also seemed familiar – worn by the sixty-eight-year-old theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig. Priscilla recalled Craig visiting Gillian’s parents in Boulevard Berthier. Suddenly vivid in her memory was the inlaid wooden box that Craig, son of the Victorian actress Ellen Terry, had given to Gillian’s mother.
At other times Priscilla bumped into women she had known in Paris. An English friend married to a Frenchman and torn away from her two babies. ‘She was feeding the youngest still, but was not allowed to take it with her as it was born in France and therefore French. She nearly went mad.’ She also met a contact from her modelling days who had worked as a designer for Norman Hartnell and was adept at converting army greatcoats into skirts and bonnets. Then there was Elisabeth Haden-Guest, the daughter-in-law of an English MP, who had been interned with her three-year-old son Anthony (later the inspiration for a character in another favourite novel of Priscilla’s, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities). Like Priscilla, Elisabeth had lived in a chateau in Brittany and was passionate about ballet. She had been a regular at the downstairs café of the brothel Panier Fleuri and had watched the same naked girl hoover up coins from the corner of a table (‘She tried to teach me how to do it . . .’). Elisabeth had been driving ambulances in Rouen the last time Priscilla saw her.
Priscilla left no glimmering wake at Besançon. None of the three women I spoke to recall hearing anything about her or recognised Priscilla from photographs that I showed them; not even Shula Troman, who used to draw portraits of the internees with charcoal from her stove.
Unremarked, she was anonymous, like the nameless in the Cimetière Saint-Claude. In this respect, she did not stand out from anyone else in the camp. Though alive, they were, all of them, effectively dead to the world.
Jimmy Fox had also put me in touch with the journalist on Besançon’s main newspaper who had accompanied me around the barracks. Eric Daviatte was yet one more person to register surprise when he learned the story of British internees. He sympathised with my frustration that no one in his town, or in France generally, seemed to have been aware of their incarceration. And told me of his aunt in Pas de Calais. In the Resistance, pregnant, captured, taken to a camp in Germany, baby born – ‘then a German soldier kicked it with his boot and killed it.’ The aunt survived, but lived the rest of her life outside the village, mad, a taboo. ‘I don’t even know her name.’
After our tour of Caserne Vauban, Daviatte agreed to run an interview in his newspaper L’Est Républicain. His article was given a prominent display. In it, I appealed to readers who might have any recollection of several thousand British women imprisoned in Besançon during 1940–41, and my email address was supplied. The readership of his newspaper was over 300,000. Not one reader replied.
The camp’s only full-length mirror was at the entrance, for the German guards to dress properly when they walked into town. On the whole, it was just as well that Priscilla could not see herself.
Her gums turned black from the diet. She lost 30 pounds and stopped menstruating. Her grim face, thin and dirt-streaked, was covered in blue marks from her bedsack and bug-bites. Until the arrival of Red Cross parcels, she had no access to proper soap, make-up or shampoo. Other women’s heads became piebald as their dyed hair faded. Priscilla’s thick blonde curls falling uncombed over her collar were the chief indication of her sex and youth. A young inmate wrote: ‘Jokes were made as often as possible, but in repose these faces were mostly stamped with a melancholy that I shall never forget.’ Dressed in the scratchy blue capot of a dead soldier, with a pair of old underpants around her neck as a scarf, and her shoes slopping around inside overlarge boots, Priscilla resembled no one more closely than Robert when he was a POW.
At the police station in Batignolles on the morning of her arrest, Priscilla had asked Georgette to contact Robert. Priscilla was confident that once Robert found out where the Germans had taken her he would not rest until he had secured her release. But the German authorities allowed no post for the first weeks. Almost a month passed before Robert discovered Priscilla’s whereabouts.
In January, detainees were permitted to send and receive two letters per month via the Red Cross – typed messages of less than 25 words. Yvette Goodden showed me a communication that she wrote to her husband in Sherborne on 23 January 1941. ‘Am well, hope to join Michael soon, inform Swansea, don’t trouble.’ A censored message like this was not appropriate for what Priscilla had in mind. ‘I decided that it was no fun at all. I must escape. I wrote several letters to Robert telling him how awful everything was and I managed to get them smuggled out of the camp.’
Priscilla had befriended a French soldier, Sergeant Lune, who, since he was local, was able to bribe the guard at the gate, and thus went home every night. At tremendous risk to himself, since a pot-bellied Gestapo official nicknamed ‘Bouboule’ was liable to frisk him, Lune agreed to post Priscilla’s letters in a box at the Café Lapostale on Place de la Révolution – and, using the café as a poste-restante, to bring any letters to her.
December passed and then January while she waited for Robert to communicate. On 8 January, workmen started to install indoor lavatories following an outbreak of dysentery. Word in the corridor gave the credit to Winston Churchill: via the Red Cross, he had apparently let it be known that unless sanitary conditions improved significantly he would shift all German civilians in Britain to the frozen tundra of northern Canada.
In the makeshift chapel in Bâtiment C, Priscilla knelt before her new Catholic God and prayed that Robert was following Churchill’s example, putting pressure on the German authorities to let her out. Whenever the music stopped on the Commandant’s wall, she broke off what she was doing and moved to the window.
From December to early February, the loudspeakers rasped out the names of more than a thousand women who were being freed under certain conditions, either because of
ill-health or old age or having left young children at home.
Among the first to be released was Edward Gordon Craig, the man with the black hat, following the intercession of a German thespian who wanted to buy his theatre archive. Early in the New Year, it was the turn of Elisabeth Haden-Guest and her son, the result of an appeal to Fernand Brinon, the Vichy government’s representative in Paris. Elisabeth, considered a ‘prominent’ hostage, was taken to Paris by armed guards to be kept under house arrest. On 4 February, Priscilla’s English friend who had been separated from her two children was let go, ‘as were all women with children under 16 and all women over 65. This didn’t include me or my elderly friend Berry. Then the Commandant decided to set free all the Australians in the camp. It appeared that Australia had not interned German women, so this seemed reasonable.’ The large black man from Maxim’s was also liberated: the German clientele had complained about the decline of the coffee since his arrest.
And still from Robert, nothing.
Listeners that winter to The Brains Trust, a BBC programme on which Priscilla’s father sometimes appeared, heard the panel respond to a question from the fiancée of a wounded POW in hospital in enemy-occupied territory.
What in the opinion of the panel was the best way for a prisoner to pass time?
All that Priscilla’s second husband Raymond had to report about her life as a prisoner was that she spent most of it asleep. With no radio and no newspapers, she was blind to the world outside and forced in upon herself.
‘We were like children,’ said Jacqueline Grant. ‘I suppose that being confined to one room with the same companions for most of the twenty-four hours of every day, seven days a week, week after week, brought us back to our schooldays.’
On her bunk in B.71, Priscilla remembered the lycée that she attended with Gillian in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, her only formal education. Like Besançon, the lycée had its own rules and uniform. She remembered lessons starting at 8.30 a.m., and entering class wearing a pink pinafore and carrying a heavy satchel loaded with books. She sat at a desk fixed to the floor. The teacher had walked up and down, slowly reading out dictée – each phrase twice, with punctuation. Priscilla, knowing hardly any French, felt bewildered. She remembered the sound of sergeant-major nibs scratching on lined paper and the purple ink in its little porcelain container on the right of her desk – she recognised the same purple ink in the police station at Batignolles and in the parcel office at Caserne Vauban.
If nature called, Priscilla put up her hand and said: ‘Madame, je peux sortir?’ She remembered the scratchy rolls of paper in the lavatory, the smell of dust. And the skulls of two girls who had been shaved for lice.
Lunch took place in the school refectory. Priscilla ate at one of the long wooden tables with nine other girls; on her table, a carafe of vin ordinaire and a wicker basket of sliced bread. She began the meal with beetroot salad, potatoes, and a triangle of La Vache qui rit. Then: navarin de veau on Monday, sausages and white beans on Tuesday, parmentier potatoes on Wednesday, cassoulet on Thursday and fish, generally cod, on Friday. Dessert was an apple or orange. At 4 p.m., she was entitled to a petit pain, grabbed from a woman distributing them at the open window of the refectoire. In her room at Besançon, she remembered with a pang of hunger those petits pains passed through the window.
For the first time, Priscilla wished she had gone back to England. She wished the cold outside was winter from her childhood in Hove – a log fire in the main room and her father singing ‘Widecombe Fair’. She remembered walking with him through the snow-covered Grampians, the whole length of Loch Rannoch below. And his broadcasts on the unemployed. The family in Birmingham who had 11s.4d. a week to spend on food. The slag heaps in Glasgow, men lying on the still-smouldering embers in an attempt to keep warm, leaving one side of their body frozen, one side scorched. She remembered him saying how dangerous it was to be left on your own with nothing to do. ‘Few things are harder than the capacity to put yourself in the place of someone who is suffering if you are not suffering. If you have never been out of work you can no more realise the horror of unemployment than you can realise the horror of leprosy.’
Sitting in her coat before the stove, which smoked so thickly that the windows had to be opened, Priscilla thought of London fog.
In London, SPB was broadcasting The Kitchen Front to an audience of five million. ‘In many ways this was my finest hour.’ At fifty-four, he was too old to don goggles and fight, but after a stint as an air raid warden on the South Downs, he soared on the airwaves. The war allowed him to expand his repertoire. Following his series on the countryside and on the unemployed, and after his years of broadcasting on English literature to schools and the troops and the Empire, he had found a new role: ‘to play the part of low comedian’.
He had received the telegram in early June: CAN YOU COME BROADCASTING HOUSE TOMORROW MIDDAY TO DISCUSS URGENT BROADCASTING PROPOSAL. SPB was asked to join a panel for a series of early morning discussions based on information supplied by the Ministry of Food. The five-minute talks would go out at 8.15–8.20 a.m. and SPB would be paid a fee of £6. The series was to be called The Kitchen Front. Largely because of it, SPB would become ‘most unexpectedly, one of the most famous men in England’.
The first series kicked off on a glorious summer morning as the Germans advanced on the French capital. ‘Friday 14 June 1940 Germans take Paris. I broadcast food at 8.15 a.m.’ He cast himself as a Socratic gadfly, irritating his listeners into sitting up and concentrating on the cheap and easy recipes that he offered. ‘But the most needful recipe is the general one of cheerfulness.’ He promoted Potato Pete and issued warnings against the ‘Squander Bug’ – slogans which gave one of his producers, George Orwell, whose wife Eileen worked on the programme, good copy for the Prolefeed dispensed by the Ministry of Truth in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
SPB wrote in his diary that the programmes created a ‘quite extraordinary interest’, and told with relish the reaction of a porter on Taunton station who, spying the letters SPBM embossed on his attaché case, exclaimed: ‘The one and only.’ Letters from listeners poured in at the rate of about 500 a day, to tell Priscilla’s father that he was their early morning cup of tea, their daily tonic, and causing even Winston Churchill to say of him, ‘That man Mais makes me feel tired.’ SPB’s producers congratulated him. ‘“The Mais Tonic” . . . seems to have been exhilarating a lot of people recently . . .’
‘I am desperately keen on the series,’ SPB replied. ‘After all, it was my child.’
He had not heard from Priscilla since 6 May. On 20 June, halfway through the series, wearing the red tie that she had given him for his fiftieth birthday, he lunched with Alec Waugh at the Gargoyle Club, anxious to learn at first hand what was happening in France. Waugh had been evacuated from Boulogne on 23 May. He had no news of Priscilla.
On 22 January 1941, a van drove through the gates. Loudspeakers announced the arrival of food parcels from England. Within seconds, women were running out to snatch packages. In each was a tin: 18 inches by 9, containing dried milk, blackcurrant purée, steak and kidney pudding, Cooper’s marmalade, Lyon’s tea and Woodbine cigarettes. And a greeting card from the Queen.
Priscilla wove the string into table mats and used the tins for cooking. Nothing was wasted. Whatever she could live without, she bartered. She swapped cigarettes for soap, and gave three Woodbines to Sergeant Lune in exchange for posting another letter to Robert.
She had not lost faith that her husband was agitating on her behalf. Ruth Grant, after being released in February, hammered on door after influential door in a bid to extract her daughter. Jacqueline said: ‘Mother did everything she could think of to get me out of the camp and plodded from one Kommandantur to another, saying her daughter was skin and bone and telling them they were inhuman, unmenschlich.’ Her persistence seems to have worked: the Germans finally freed Jacqueline in July.
Classes started up in the projection room. Miss Owen taught Babyl
onian history. Professor Eccles, an Oxford don, gave lessons in French literature. Out in the courtyard, Miss Stanley, a lesbian with wonderful legs, organised open-air gymnastics. Yvette Goodden joined a Welsh choir. ‘I made a note in my will that I want “Bread of heaven” sung at my funeral.’ She belted out her descants in the shed where Priscilla peeled frost-blackened mangel-wurzels.
Rita Harding said: ‘I don’t know how the days passed. We just meandered.’
Some did go mad. They remained in bed weeping or reciting Shakespeare. Or reverted to childhood, speaking in a baby voice. An Indian mother with three children attempted to burn herself to death.
Fortune-telling flourished in this febrile atmosphere, where no one could imagine the future. Among Priscilla’s papers is the result of a palm-reading: ‘In your life you have had some difficult passages. Very soon you will receive news from a person who is dear to you and with whom a little later you will make a happy journey.’
A happy journey . . . Around her, Priscilla was conscious of people trying to get out of the camp to reach the Swiss mountains. Jacqueline Grant said: ‘We all used to stand up and look out of the window and see lovely hills and we’d protest, “If only we could escape.”’ She remembered ‘a dear little roly-poly woman, very plump, beautiful white sweater, I’m afraid we called her United Dairies,’ who jumped off a high wall in her tight sweater and high heels, only to land on a group of German sentries. Not all attempts were so ill-planned. ‘Several people did escape,’ Priscilla wrote. ‘Some dressed in German nurses’ uniforms and some in Red Cross uniforms.’ A nurse, appropriating a patient’s X-rays, managed to reach home on medical grounds. Two Senegalese POWs carried out a young woman curled up inside a dustbin. From Paris came news that Elisabeth Haden-Guest had escaped with her son through the station buffet immediately on arriving at the Gare de Lyon. These reports intensified Priscilla’s despair – what Jacqueline Grant called that ‘awful feeling of not being able to get out, being trapped and very young. One was afraid of going round the bend.’ Jaqueline was thinking of Priscilla in particular – and was not the only person alarmed by her mental state. ‘Berry was very worried about Pris and she said, “We must get you out of here,” and Pris said, “I don’t see how you can because I’m perfectly healthy.”’
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