Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  De Gaulle arrived next afternoon. Bed-ridden, Priscilla could not join in the delirious crowds of more than a million who cheered him on foot down the Champs-Elysées on 26 August 1944. She lay in the almost deserted nursing home knowing that among the faces milling outside there would be English and American soldiers. In her apartment at 37 bis Avenue du Roule, Yvette Goodden would hear a commotion on the stairs and see a white cap coming up the steps, her husband. ‘I just felt panic-struck that this stranger was my husband. We clung to each other speechless.’

  When dusk fell, men and women paired off. In tents and vehicles or in the open, around the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, beneath the chestnuts in the Bois de Boulogne, on the warm grass in the Jardin des Plantes, couples made love. A female soldier remembered how everything was quiet in the Jardin des Plantes . . . ‘or at least, almost quiet . . . from all around there were stifled sighs and ticklish giggles. Many Parisian women were too charitable to let our lads spend their first night in the capital alone.’ Gilles Perrault stopped in his tracks to absorb the stifled cries. ‘Transfixed – God forgive me – with near-religious feeling, I spent a long moment there listening to Paris make love.’ A Frenchwoman explained this precious moment, the end of 1,533 nights of occupation: ‘You cannot understand how wonderful it was to fight finally as free men and women, to battle in the daylight, under our own names, with our real identities, with everyone out there, all of Paris, to support us, happy joyful and united. There was never a time like it.’

  And yet my aunt could not enjoy any of this. On the night when Paris made love, Priscilla was alone in her room. Pierre had returned to Annemasse.

  32.

  TONDUE

  Suddenly next morning everyone woke up in the Resistance.

  ‘Were things getting a bit dodgy for her towards the end of the war?’ Gillian asked in a notebook. ‘YES. EPURATION. FFI came to the clinique; she might have been jailed or had her head shaven.’

  The existence of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur had passed unnoticed by Priscilla until a few days earlier. All changed with the German exodus. Outside her window roamed up to 60,000 ill-disciplined men and women, dressed in white armbands with the initials FFI embroidered on them, clutching guns, animated by the slogan: ‘A chacun son Boche’ – each person should take out a German.

  A large proportion of these ‘volunteers of the thirteenth hour’ were mockingly rebranded members of the RMA – Resistants of the Month of August. They strutted about in uniforms which they had jettisoned in June 1940, giving rise to another name: ‘mothball men’ or Napthalinards. The writer Paul Léautaud called them ‘nothing but a “gang of Apaches”’. Their vindication was to chase down anyone who had not maintained ‘a sufficiently independent attitude with respect to the enemy’. All it required was a stabbing finger and the shriek of ‘collaboratrice!’ for a frenzied crowd to start tearing at your clothes. On 25 August, Léautaud wrote: ‘It’s a chase; it’s a bloodbath; it’s a bloody hunting party.’

  In a broadcast defending P. G. Wodehouse, who was one of those arrested, for having delivered six radio talks on Radio Berlin, George Orwell argued that ‘few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best, it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats – police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with Germans soldiers – are hounded down, while almost without exception the big rats escape.’

  The first victims were young women. On Gillian Sutro’s refectory table in 58 Rue de Clichy a group of men with FFI armbands raped a German girl in uniform. Women who had slept with Germans presented the readiest target for a nation in need of a symbolic act of purification. Anyone guilty of ‘relations with the Germans’ was labelled a prostitute, standing in for the dishonour of France. In the Lot-et-Garonne, an Englishwoman known as ‘Miss Betsy’ was shot when she refused to confess the reason behind her frequent travel with Germans. But summary executions were not the norm. ‘The violence has been mostly haircutting,’ observed an OSS agent in Normandy.

  Up to 20,000 women that summer had their lives fractured by a pair of scissors. ‘The first thing they did was to shave heads,’ Shula Troman told me. ‘I saw it at Vittel, the tondues, it was disgusting, and it happened immediately.’

  Yvette Goodden had returned to her apartment after cheering de Gaulle when cries from the street drew her to the window. A dense crowd advanced along Avenue du Roule, screaming deprecations. ‘As they approached, we saw two women with shaved skulls carrying their hair in their hands with swastikas on their cheeks. The crowd hemmed them in and stopped them from putting their hands in front of their faces and hurled the grossest insults at them. This was the punishment for having slept with German soldiers. From Batignolles they were.’ The two women were jostled through Saint-Cloud, where Priscilla’s nursing home was, the crowd kicking at them and scratching at their faces and earrings with long fingernails to make them stumble along faster.

  Most tondues came from Robert’s area of north-west France, home to the least number of available Frenchmen and the largest concentration of Germans, or ‘fridolins’ as they were sometimes known. In the Manche department, 621 women were arrested for ‘collaboration sentimentale’ – a crime punishable by forced labour and imprisonment. So incensed was one FFI interrogator that he slapped an accused woman, then produced a ruler, demanding to know about her fridolin’s performance in bed.

  In Robert’s village of Sainteny, a community of less than 800, twenty girls were known to have slept with Germans, including one who had borne two children by a Wehrmacht soldier. Sainteny having been razed to the ground, there was no haircutting party. But up the road in Carentan, the reprisals began with the arrival of the 101st Airborne on 12 June. Twelve women, stripped half-naked and with their breasts exposed and slogans scrawled in lipstick over their torsos, were dragged by neighbours to the town square. In some cases, a father would cut off his daughter’s hair. More often, the local hairdresser wielded the clippers.

  ‘Their look,’ said an American soldier watching, ‘was that of a hunted animal.’

  Afterwards, bald craniums daubed with mercurochrome, and to the dirge of a drum, the women were pushed roughly through a gauntlet of men who struck them on their bare bottoms shouting, ‘Putains des fridolins, filles aux boches!’

  In Germany, a surprising number of France’s 1.8 million POWs had liaisons with local girls – in particular those prisoners sent, like Robert’s brother Guy, to work on farms – but not one Frenchman had his head shaved for sleeping with a German woman or was condemned for this. Horizontal collaboration was a crime uniquely pinned on French women, for whom sleeping with the enemy may have been the only way to feed their children. In the expiatory fervour, it was as if the male population, who had humiliatingly failed for four years to protect their families, were battling to reclaim a moral authority they had lost in the stupendous defeat. Something about the degradation made them feel respectable again.

  The liberation caused many who had supported Pétain to change their tune. But it was the same siren song of expediency. The music written to accompany Pétain on the pro-German newsreel agency France Actualités – and which resulted in the arrest of its composer – was exactly the music used by France-Libre-Actualités to follow de Gaulle on screen as he walked down the Champs-Elysées. And yet even for de Gaulle, in his speech on that day, it was necessary to absolve the hysterically cheering crowds and to stress the fiction that collaboration was merely the work of ‘a few unhappy traitors’.

  A woman’s shorn hair was nailed to the front of her house, or burned in large heaps which could be smelled for miles. Some women committed suicide from the humiliation. Others shunned public contact. In 1983, the year that the last collaborator was released from prison, a former tondue was discovered in the Auvergne still living as a recluse nearly four decades on. The majority of women dared to hope that once their ha
ir sprouted back, people would forget the shearing and there would be no necessity ever to speak or think of it again. This was what another tondue, Marie-Rose Dupont, fervently believed when she reopened her hairdressing salon in Moissac – until the morning she walked into the salon and saw her traumatised eight-year-old son seated in one of the chairs, bald.

  Her hair, her famous hair. Priscilla was thrown back to the last time it was scissored off, when she was fourteen, and Gillian had hauled her around the floor of Doris’s studio on a Persian rug. Stretched out in her room at the nursing home, she was constrained in her movements, like Pierre’s fidgety bird. Pierre had promised to look after her. Where was he?

  ‘It was very unfortunate to be bed-ridden at such a time,’ she wrote. If not for Emile Cornet and Max Stocklin, they would be after her for Otto Graebener.

  Without Pierre to tell her what was going on, she relied on the nurses. It was clear that everyone was living in terror of denunciation, no matter how high up you were in the gratin. Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, a member like Robert of the grand social and dining club Cercle Interallié, had, apparently, witnessed an impromptu FFI tribunal interrogating a dishevelled Duchesse de Brissac, a fur coat like Priscilla’s hastily thrown on over her underclothes; the Duchesse was known for her romantic attachments to German officers. Another fashionable tondue was the woman who had shared Priscilla’s address, Gillian’s lookalike: Jacqueline Kraus had her dark hair shaved in the streets.

  ‘Accusations rained on people,’ Gitta Sereny told me. ‘Everyone was in danger of going to prison’ – like Isabelle de la Bouillerie, president of Sereny’s charity. ‘She was sent to Santé and died there. She was not pro-German, but she was not beyond getting help from Germans when she needed it. And the Germans were the only people who could give this help.’

  Overnight, the men who might have helped Priscilla had melted away. Otto gone; Pierre gone; Emile, still in Fresnes; Daniel and Robert hurt beyond measure. She was an obvious target for revenge: not of French origin, well fed and dressed because of her association with Germans. She had lain beside Otto Graebener’s warm fire while the rest of France shivered.

  Priscilla was in her room one evening when she heard raised voices in the corridor. She gripped the iron frame of her bed.

  The door was flung open and Daniel Vernier marched in, dressed in a tight-fitting uniform that she had last seen him wear in Rouen during the Phoney War, and produced, with an extremely shaky hand, a revolver which he pointed at her. His gloomy face trapped in a big beret was white. ‘I had not noticed the FFI band on his arm until then and thought he had come to murder me.’

  There was a ring of absurdity about the scene: the demented ex-lover smelling of camphor, the petrified convalescent – and between them that canary.

  She stared back into the muzzle of Vernier’s trembling gun and dreadful images flashed through her mind.

  If Vernier did not pull the trigger, then more than likely he would insist on taking Priscilla to Fresnes where a grisly pageant was unfolding.

  The crowded cells mimicked the recent bedlam in her room. One woman staring out between the bars was the actress Arletty, arrested because of her relationship with a Luftwaffe colonel. ‘What kind of government is this,’ she complained, ‘which worries about our sleeping arrangements!’ It was being whispered in the nursing home that her breasts had been cut off.

  Jacqueline Kraus’s sister was in Fresnes, and the well-known opera singer Germaine Lubin, whose crime was to have sung for Hitler. ‘Except for having eaten the flesh of children there was nothing I was not accused of.’ She shivered at what she was compelled to witness: ‘In the corner, garbage was mixed with the hair of women who had had their heads shaved the night before. During the course of the day another four were shaved completely bald except for one on whom, for laughs, they had left a tug in the middle of her head which hung down like the mandarin’s pigtail.’

  It was not only bald women who were jammed into the cells and prison yard. Albert Blaser, the head waiter of Maxim’s who had led Priscilla to her table, was arrested. And Maurice Chevalier, whose manager had been engaged to Gillian’s sister; Chevalier had sung on the German station Radio-Paris. Otto Graebener, arriving from Hendaye for further interrogation, brushed shoulders with his rival Emile Cornet. Arrested on the Swiss border, Max Stocklin arrived in Fresnes on 17 November. He joined 4,500 inmates.

  In Sainteny, the rumour spread like pink-eye that Robert’s brother Georges had spent time in Fresnes.

  No one in Sainteny considered Georges Doynel a collaborator, and his son Dick denied that he was ever arrested. But when the wind blew down the oaks in the avenue in the winter of 1940, Georges had summoned a forester who owned a sawmill at Le Chalet des Pins. Joseph Carer, the steward’s son, was one of those called upon to clear the fallen branches. ‘I saw the tractors pulling the oaks, but the tractors broke down because the woodcutters sabotaged them, so the Germans came in half-tracks and dragged the trunks to the mill.’ At least fifteen sawyers were involved in cutting the estimated 5,600 trees into planks, some of which went to Cherbourg and Speer’s Organisation Todt to make pill boxes and railway sleepers for the Atlantic Wall; the rest of the timber was burned into charcoal. Carer said: ‘I helped cut the trees and load them into wagons, and also the charcoal that was sent to Paris for gasogenes. And that was the beginning of the problem for poor Georges Doynel. It cost him dear.’ Communists in the FFI accused Robert’s brother of ‘having participated in the war effort’ and for sucking up to the Germans during their residence at Boisgrimot. After the war, Georges sold the gutted chateau in panic-stricken haste and was rumoured, inaccurately, to have fled to Bolivia. The last time Jacqueline Hodey saw him was during the 1960s, in the village square. Georges had turned up at the café run by her parents, to seek their support in his denial that he had been a collaborator. Reluctant to talk in front of others in the bar, he tried to persuade Jacqueline to go outside in private, using the over-familiar ‘tu’ instead of ‘vous’. She said: ‘He came to the café and knocked at the door. “Jacqueline, je veux te voir, I want to see you, come here,” and I didn’t go. Times had changed. He left without saying anything.’

  In Priscilla’s nursing home on that hot day in August 1944 Daniel Vernier turned on his heels, walked away.

  Soon afterwards, a nurse came into the room with a letter. Kikki Johanet had dropped it off. Priscilla’s guardian angel and carrier pigeon had lacked the wings to give her Pierre’s message in person.

  ‘My love, my love, my love. Blessed is he who has never known love. That’s the state I’m in after fifteen hours of agony and having returned home. You wrote to me a while ago, “I’m frightened of loving you because I know it will make me suffer.” I confess I didn’t believe you, because, just like you, I felt that our love was so passionate a thing that it would be impossible for us to cause each other the slightest pain. But I’m feeling close to madness and intensely depressed. You, Pris, who knows the deepest part of me – you will know what it costs me to write this word of farewell. You took my heart. One only loves once in one’s life. My heart has loved you above anything that you can possibly imagine. So I offer it as a parting gift – it’s yours . . .’ Pierre’s letter trails off at this point, not even signed.

  Nothing could be more awful than the fact he was not coming back. She sat erect and did not hear the nurse take away her tray and did not say anything. She just read it and closed her eyes and felt something inside her tear apart.

  Priscilla abandoned the nursing-home and entered a clinic in Rue Mirosmenil. To protect herself from marauding FFI she sent out a nurse to bring an Allied officer to see her. ‘I wanted an Englishman, but they were few and far between and I had to be content with an American’ – a swaggering Texan pilot called Jimmy Richardson. ‘I asked him about England as he had come from there and that was my first news of home for four long years.’

  Paris continued to fill with Allied soldiers and diplomats.
Early in October, Priscilla moved back into her garçonnière in Place Saint-Augustin. She shared it with Pierre’s canary and Paco Diez, her companion on the harrowing bicycle ride from Le Havre. Graebener’s associate in looted masterpieces now masqueraded as an art student at the Académie Julian. There was no fuel for the stove and the one electric heater worked on a reduced current. Priscilla was sitting in her coat reading beside the single bar, when there was a knock on the door. A tall officer introduced himself in a sing-song English voice as Harold Acton, a friend of Gillian’s and best man at her wedding.

  Acton was staying with the Sutros in London when the BBC announced that Paris had been liberated and he was ordered to the French capital with the SHAEF censorship unit. He asked Gillian if he might leave behind a suitcase containing his airforce uniform. Gillian sought a favour in return. She had no address for Priscilla, but she had – at last – a lead: Joseph Kessel had managed to get hold of a telephone number. Gillian begged Acton to use this to track Priscilla down and gave him a letter to deliver in the event that he was successful.

  On 5 October, Acton flew to Paris. He observed in his memoirs: ‘Externally Paris had changed far less than London during these tragic years. Externally . . . What of the heart?’ From his billet in the Hôtel Chatham, he dialled the number that Kessel had supplied. Priscilla’s laconic voice answered.

  Over ‘a big tin of caviar and champagne consumed in a freezing room’, Acton told Priscilla of Gillian’s concern for her during the last four and a half years, and produced the letter in which, Gillian wrote, ‘I had offered to harbour her while she sorted herself out.’

  The war was still raging. To leave Paris was very difficult. Acton passed on the message that if Priscilla needed assistance, she was to contact Gillian’s sister, Jacqueline Hammond, at the British Embassy, now reopened in Faubourg Saint-Honoré.