Her pleasures during those months sprang from her winter’s grief as a prisoner in a camp in the Jura. ‘She had been released shortly before I saw her first and she was unbalanced and out to enjoy herself at any cost. Underneath her cynical behaviour I sensed her to be good. She consoled herself by leading a wild life of her own . . . Often she lied to me, telling me that she was spending the day with a girlfriend, when really she was with some man . . . and as her husband was not jealous and gave her plenty of freedom, she satisfied her every whim.’
21.
DANIEL VERNIER
Priscilla had given herself to Daniel in the way that she jumped into the sea, eyes closed. ‘I felt myself needed physically and I had no conscience as I was taking nothing away from Robert.’
From the spring of 1941, Priscilla led ‘a very strange life.’ Robert came down from Normandy and spent half the week with her. Despite the attrition of his physical indifference, she still wanted to be his wife. Divorce was not in her husband’s religion, which was hers now; in the armistice of their marriage, it remained the demarcation line – not to be crossed.
The other half of the week she spent with Daniel. ‘I was never at any time in love with him. He was a sweet person at that time – very fresh and untouched by life’s disappointments and disillusions. He spoiled me as I had never been spoiled before and I was happy.’
Graham Greene told Gillian Sutro: ‘What two lovers do in bed is no one’s business but their own. One may have a fairly shrewd idea of what does go on, but I would not dream of putting it on paper. People have a right to privacy in that domain.’ Gillian would not always be so respectful of Priscilla, but over the Scarlet Pimpernel she was discreet. The important thing that Gillian exposed about him in her ‘PRIS’ notebook was his surname.
Daniel Vernier had married into a wealthy textile family from Tourcoing, in the north of France. ‘He was charming,’ wrote Gillian, who later received from him the gift of a Hermès desk diary. ‘After the war, Daniel made a pass at me on the night ferry to London. I said, “No. Pris is my dearest friend.”’
According to what Priscilla told Gillian, ‘Daniel was the man who helped her the most.’
The Occupation had its own morality. Priscilla’s on-again, off-again relationship with Vernier reflected the ambiguity of the times. Wanting to behave well, she decided to end her ‘double life’ with him shortly after his wife dropped the explosive news that she was coming to Paris.
Vernier had parked Simone at the beginning of the war in a chateau in the Dordogne owned by her father. But towards the end of 1941, Simone announced that she was bringing their four children to live with him.
In panic at the prospect of his family’s arrival from Siorac, Vernier asked Priscilla to leave Robert. ‘Let’s go away. You have no children, nothing to lose.’
‘I just can’t walk out on him and that is that.’
Vernier persisted. ‘I will tell my wife that I can’t live with her again and we will start life again somewhere else.’ His proposal threw Priscilla. She was considering what to do when Vernier committed the surprising error of introducing the two women.
The meeting of Priscilla and Simone changed everything. Tall and blonde, the thirty-one-year-old Simone was a dead-ringer for my aunt. Their resemblance may explain Daniel Vernier’s initial attraction; it is not too much to say that it later on saved Priscilla’s life.
‘We liked each other immediately,’ Priscilla admitted, ‘and it was then that my conscience started to worry me. I decided that I must stop the affair as I didn’t want to break up their marriage.’
Her solution was radical. She informed both Vernier and Robert that she was going to escape back to England through Spain. ‘I can’t wait to get home,’ she told them. ‘I have been so homesick! You have no idea.’
On the morning of 20 May 1942, leaving behind all her possessions, Priscilla climbed on to her bicycle and disappeared.
Why, then, was Priscilla still in Paris in October 1944? It perplexed Gillian. ‘I certainly never understood why she did not come to England after Besançon.’
Priscilla’s insistence on staying also puzzled W. H. Aston, a wounded English soldier at the Centre Maxillo-Facial at Neuilly. Before he slipped out of the hospital in April 1942 and headed for the Spanish border, Priscilla had gone to see him with her English friend Jacqueline Grant. They sat unsupervised on Aston’s bed and played board games, while he rehearsed his escape plans. Aston, who had met Priscilla in Rouen during the Phoney War, thought both young women ‘incredibly pretty’. At the same time, they seemed to have lost their roots in life. ‘They had broken their ties with England while resisting assimilation into the life of France.’ Aston could not help thinking that they would have done better to have left Paris before the Germans entered, rather than let themselves fall into enemy hands. The one thing Aston was determined at all cost to avoid was being sent to Germany. He and another officer were ‘going to hop it’ – he encouraged Priscilla and Jacqueline to do the same. But how easy was it for a young Englishwoman to escape France?
Since September 1940, General Haase’s forces operating out of Tourcoing monitored the northern route across the Channel. A fisherman warned: ‘We are watched all the time and the waters are rigidly controlled.’ One route was to travel east, across the Swiss border from Annemasse, where professional passeurs charged upwards of 5,000 francs a head. Most fugitives headed south to Marseilles, from there crossing the border into neutral Spain and then to Portugal. And yet the route over the Pyrenees, as with Annemasse, was not only formally opposed by the French government, and expensive, but downright dangerous.
Files in the National Archives in Kew show just how hazardous it could be to ‘hop it’. First, there was the arms-length attitude of the British government towards women like Priscilla, whom the war had isolated on the Continent. Priscilla needed money to bribe the passeurs and to pay for travel and false documents – 100,000 francs, Aston calculated, ‘for a complete set of papers and the cost of the journey to Lisbon’. But there was no question of the British government helping her out financially. One claimant, a Mrs Mainwaring, wrote to the Home Office requesting assistance for her niece who was married to a Frenchman and was destitute. The reply she received came from the highest level: ‘Mr Churchill regrets that under existing regulations it is not possible for payments to be made to the British-born wives of Frenchmen in unoccupied France.’
A document dated 10 February 1941 reflected the official position: ‘As regards the British women in Occupied France, while their plight is a most unfortunate one, there are other British civilians who have been much longer in captivity.’ Of more concern was the repatriation of 1,200 British servicemen estimated to be stranded in France. Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, remarked ‘of a strange want of interest in this question in London. We have been given few, if any instructions as to the financing of this large undertaking.’ It was left to individuals like Aston to make their own arrangements.
The Kew archives offer several disastrous examples of those who tried to escape. A British soldier from the 5th Battalion of the Buffs walked 180 miles south in the autumn of 1940, only to be betrayed. ‘On Sept 7 met a real swine of a French captain (one of the “French German” officers) who put us under armed guard and had us marched back to the frontier to the German post – the sod!’ Up until 5 May 1941, British POWs were placed under a regime of liberté surveillée which made it fairly easy for them to get away, but following strong German pressure a Vichy order imposed a stricter watch. An English soldier imprisoned in Vichy in June wrote to his parents: ‘Day and night we are guarded by armed French soldiers who do not hesitate to shoot if anybody attempts to escape.’
If Priscilla did make it to Marseilles without being stopped or shot by the French, she would next have to contend with a notoriously unhelpful British consul, Major Hugh Dodds, who worked for the British Interests Section of the American consulate in Marseilles. Dodds, a Yorksh
ireman, was generally rumoured to be obstructive towards those whom, in a private letter, he called ‘these idiots who insist on staying’.
Based in Marseilles, two British soldiers, Captain Charles Murchie and Sergeant Harry Clayton, had managed to help up to 150 servicemen escape across the Pyrenees. But the attitude of General Franco’s authorities posed a threat. On 11 June 1941, the British Consul General in Barcelona wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare of his concern that nearly all the British who escaped France believed that once they reached Spain their troubles were at an end, ‘whereas in many cases they have only just started, and their condition and treatment is sometimes worse than that to which they were subjected in France’. The American Consul General in Marseilles, on hearing that prisoners had been shot whilst crossing the frontier, emphasised to Hoare that it was not wise to encourage anyone who was British to escape.
In his hospital bed in Neuilly, W. H. Aston was aware of these dangers. But they would not dissuade him. Nor did they deter Jacqueline Grant and other Besançon internees like Elisabeth Haden-Guest and Rosemary Say, all of whom succeeded, like Aston, in getting back to England. ‘We could not help feeling that they had been spurred on by the example of our escape,’ Aston wrote, ‘but we could never understand why they had not done it many months earlier . . .’
The situation was obviously pretty strange and dangerous. Priscilla was an enemy alien, in a place where she was increasingly liable to be taken out and shot if caught listening to her father on the radio. What made her stay?
Priscilla had absorbed the fatalistic public mood, which, as Sir Samuel Hoare gauged it, ‘assumed that we could not win and that the war would come to an end in some way or another’. If she did find the courage and luck to make it back to London, what was waiting for her? Rosemary Say wrote to her parents one year earlier, before she was taken to Besançon: ‘I am busy and individual here, which suits me better than to be thrown into the melting pot of National Service anyway for a bit – perhaps I am wrong – anyway I am happy.’ Was Priscilla content to glide along like this? Gillian believed that the atmosphere of wait-and-see fitted her character. ‘Had she come to England, she would have been called up and made to work.’ But Priscilla’s ostensible inertia was more complicated than that.
She had stayed initially because of her marriage in a country which had become more of a home than England. Priscilla felt a whole tangle of loyalties and congested emotions about England as epitomised by her father, whom she both loved and hated. Despite his unorthodox private life, SPB represented wholesomeness and Englishness – at least in his broadcasting and books – and Priscilla was none of these things at this particular time. Her life – seedy by many people’s standards, sordid, dodgy – was the antithesis of the uncomplicated world that SPB promoted so ardently. But what could she do? All moral values had broken down. The signposts about how to behave had been removed and she did not know where she was, what would happen.
In this muddled and futureless present, more important than any division between cowardly and heroic was the pressure imposed on her to construct a new moral system.
Priscilla never found a world into which she fitted except in Paris, and for a while, ghastly as it was, she became part of it. She would not have suspected this at the time, because it was so terrifying; but in a curious way the Occupation was when her life came to fruition. The war gave her a new identity. It taught her to live in the moment and to throw off the burden of her father and the past.
But the likeliest reason that Priscilla remained in France is also the simplest: she was – unexpectedly and infatuatedly – in love.
22.
EMILE CORNET
She remembered the cigarette burn of his look. He touched the inside of her arm and she felt the current jitter through her. I do not know how she met Emile Cornet, and there is no one left to ask. But he unsettled Priscilla from the start, and though their rapport was for the most part physical, it marked her life. Her relationship with Robert had been all about surface; with Cornet, everything flared from within, from what remained hidden.
‘He was rather an ugly little man with a sort of twisted face, but he was full of vitality and personality and he swept me off my feet.’
His full name was Emile-Hubert Cornet du Fonteny. He was born in 1905 near Charleroi, the son of a minor Belgian aristocrat whose title he used when it suited him. Known on the Grand Prix circuit as ‘le baron Belge’, Cornet took over management of the family enamelworks, selling them in 1937 to concentrate on motor racing. He was planning to compete in the São Paulo Grand Prix when German tanks smashed over the Belgian border.
He was reckless, with a short man’s large appetites. His impetuous, over-decisive nature often landed him in hot water. Months before he embarked on his ‘impossible amour’ with Priscilla, Cornet had attempted to flee into Spain, but according to an Intelligence report in Kew he was arrested by the Spanish police and delivered back to the Nazis in Hendaye – ‘by whom he has apparently been third-degreed and has given away practically everything viz the Murchie & Clayton case, he having been in contact with these in France.’ Cornet’s testimony resulted in Murchie and Clayton – organisers of the chief British escape network – spending prolonged periods in various Spanish prisons. His unpleasant experience discouraged Priscilla from attempting to cross the border. Any plan to leave France was shelved after they met.
‘He attracts me and makes me laugh.’ For the first time, Priscilla’s companion was an available man who satisfied her physically and with whom she imagined herself in love. Invincible in the strength of her infatuation, she forgot her married lover, her husband, the police. When her Jewish friend Hans expressed his concern, she shrugged. ‘I don’t care. Let them search for me. I shall just disappear.’
‘For the first few weeks everything was perfect,’ she wrote.
Cornet invited her skiing to Megève. An extension of Maxim’s and Fouquet’s, Megève had a reputation as ‘the white capital of the black market’. The pair stayed in a hotel on the outskirts and saw no one who knew them. Cornet was an expert skier. Priscilla had difficulty in following him down the pistes, but he was patient. His winter sports clothes set off his dark looks.
He told her: ‘Without looking at you, I know every movement you make and every person you talk to.’
‘It’s the same with me.’
She was out of her head. She felt no guilt. She had never been happier, she thought. Before she knew it, she was living with him – ‘and long was I to regret my folly’.
Robert and Vernier believed that Priscilla had escaped to Spain. In fact, between May and July, she was staying with Cornet in a large house near Paris, coming in once a week to sign at the police station in Batignolles.
Jealousy can be slow to show its fangs. ‘I will never let you go,’ he said rather too often. ‘I don’t care what happens. You cannot escape from me.’ She mistook his possessiveness for strength.
The couple moved about ‘fairly freely’. Priscilla did not ask herself what he lived on. Cornet never appeared to work. She supposed that it was difficult for him to find a job, being Belgian. He could not motor-race, which was all he cared about. Even so, he seemed to have plenty of money, although how he made it was a mystery. Because of petrol rationing, cars were forbidden to most of the population; only 7,000 private vehicles were licensed in Paris. But Cornet enjoyed unexplained access to a car – and sometimes to a lorry – in which he chauffeured Priscilla at full throttle.
Her love of speed dates from this period. Cornet later reported to Priscilla how he had driven with the wife of the motor-ace René Dreyfus: ‘She is very sporty and drives like a man. Almost as well as you. Which is a compliment.’ She continued to drive like the clappers in post-war England. ‘I am not a lover of motoring,’ SPB wrote, after a hair-raising car journey with Priscilla through the Highlands. ‘Usually we go too fast. Pris likes touching the hundred and reminds me of Mr Toad.’ Like Mr Toad, she was heedless of the dangers that
she raced towards.
‘I still intend to marry you if one day you ever make the mistake of accepting me.’ Cornet’s obsession with Priscilla outlived the war. His letters confirm their mutual attraction. ‘Since you left, it’s been impossible to envisage having a love affair, still less a liaison. And everything is empty, empty, empty.’ He addressed her as ‘femme fatale’, ‘mon ping-pong’, ‘mon future better-half’. He longed to settle down with her. ‘You were, and will always remain for me, the woman I loved most. And I do not regret our “impossible amour”. Oh no!!’ One letter ends: ‘Write me when you feel like it, and if once you want to come back let me know and don’t go straight back to Robert! Bye! Your best friend. Emile.’
Cornet hated the thought of Robert touching her. ‘I can’t bear the way he looks at you and speaks to you,’ Cornet said, following a charged encounter with her husband, after Robert discovered that she had not escaped to England. She had known Cornet barely a month and already he was pressing Priscilla to divorce Robert and marry him. She was never free when Cornet wanted her; only when her sclerotic nitwit of a husband deigned it. Worn down by his demands, Priscilla finally petitioned Robert for an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that no child had issued from their union nor ever could, and ‘offered to give proof of a certain number of facts’.
A burning Robert instructed his lawyer to take advantage of a recent law which encouraged the judge to seek delays and promote reconciliation. Important correspondence in Robert’s possession proved that during their four years of ‘unclouded union’ the couple had never ceased to show one another feelings of the tenderest attachment. For instance, a few days after ‘brusquely abandoning the marital home, to go and live with a certain Emile’, Priscilla had written Robert a letter which concluded: ‘I kiss you tenderly.’ Another letter from Priscilla contained the following passage, the few sad lines being all that remain of her letters to Robert: ‘I hope that everything is going to get better with E . . . Thank you again for everything you did. I relax and try to think as little as possible. Until now I have managed to avoid the blues. I’m thinking of coming back just after Pentecost, but I won’t stay longer than 48 hours in Paris before going to Le Touquet . . . I leave you with a strong hug.’
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