It was at Priscilla’s house-warming party at Church Farm on 8 September 1948 that my mother came face to face with Doris. ‘I met her in an upstairs corridor. I was seventeen and staying there. “Who are you?” she said. I told her, and immediately she turned the other way and walked on without a word, not even hello.’ It was the first and last occasion when Doris set eyes on SPB’s ‘other’ family.
Raymond had hated working for Lloyds. ‘I love the open air,’ he had written to Priscilla, ‘and it will certainly take a lot to make me incarcerate myself in some bloody office again fifty feet underground.’ At Church Farm, he remade himself – first, growing strawberries and tomatoes; then as a mushroom farmer.
The business expanded from four mushroom houses to thirty, producing 35,000 lbs of mushrooms a week. Priscilla was the company secretary. She learned terms such as turning, spawning, beds, La France disease. The faint sweet smell of horse manure pervaded everything. There was mud on the stairs, indeed in all the rooms. After a weekend visit, Gillian sent a description to Vertès, who shook his head. ‘What a funny idea, darling, that while John is away you should want to live in the countryside with Priscilla in a chaotic and no doubt badly-heated household full of children among the mushrooms . . . Why?????’
Zoë also came to stay, bringing her baby son, who was Gillian’s godson, and news from France, none of it heartening. Her mother had disappeared one night, announcing that she was going to watch a film, and flung herself into the Seine. Zoë’s badly shaken father identified the body at the morgue. Zoë heard about it while on a delayed honeymoon with her husband, recently released after five years at a POW camp in Münster.
With Gillian, Zoë had refused to speak about the Occupation. Gillian assumed that the subject was too painful, too recent to bear discussion. ‘Later it struck me that a certain unease floated whenever I brought up the subject. I remember hearing, “C’était une grande tragédie . . . nos pauvres prisonniers . . . les fridolins . . . les privations . . .” I never heard the words “la résistance, le maquis, radio-Londres”.’
Not in Paris, nor in London, only in Wittering with Priscilla, who had lived through it with her, did Zoë open up.
They went on walks where Raymond could not overhear, multitudes of gulls standing in the mud and a restless band of oyster-catchers scurrying up and down. Beside a landward marsh, they watched red-sailed fishing boats wind their way up the estuary, and to the sonorous bubbling of a curlew caught up on the years.
On 26 December 1944, a Free French firing squad executed Henri Chamberlin and eleven members of his gang at the Fort de Montrouge; they had been betrayed by Priscilla’s neighbour in 12 Rue Beaujon, Monsieur Joseph. In the puritan flood, the ban on dancing which coincided with Priscilla’s hasty departure from Paris had extended to brothels. The Panier Fleuri had closed, and the One-Two-Two was now the Union of Leather and Skin Trade workers. Arletty’s three-year acting ban had come to an end. Albert Blaser was back at his old job at Maxim’s. Stocklin’s friend Comtesse Marie Tchernycheff-Bezobrazoff, the ‘Red Princess’, had been released from Fresnes and declared bankrupt. That was two months before.
Seated on the flower-covered sea wall, the two friends remembered Max Stocklin, in Fresnes prison. Otto Graebener – in Switzerland, last they heard. Emile Cornet, ensconced in the royal palace in Monte Carlo after winning the Belgian Grand Prix (‘To be sick, broken-hearted and jailed was a maximum!’ he had written to Priscilla. ‘I got over all that! I have become very friendly with the young prince of Monaco, who is an enthusiast of all things to do with car racing etc . . .’). Daniel and Simone, still together in Paris (Cornet had bumped into them, in a restaurant where he had gone with another racing-driver. ‘He didn’t understand why we weren’t put at the same table!’). Pierre, now in Tourcoing. It all seemed so remote and so foreign that they began to laugh. And tears filled their eyes.
Suddenly, Priscilla found herself responsible for two small children who were upset by their mother running off and puzzled by Priscilla’s relationship with Raymond, wanting to know: ‘Why do you sleep in Daddy’s room?’
She struggled in the role of stepmother. Tracey remembered walking into Priscilla’s room each morning to ask what to wear. ‘She was terrified of us to begin with. She didn’t know how to be a mother because she’d never been mothered or had children.’ Panic seized her if she had to organise a party. The children’s big treat was to dance after tea or sit quietly by the drawing-room fire.
Priscilla found Tracey complex, observant, with a phenomenal memory; also lazy, a beater-around-the-bush who never asked for anything outright and ‘generally tried to curry favour because she feels her brother has more charm’. Carleton stuttered, spending ten seconds on a word, burst into tears easily, had no memory and could never find anything. ‘Always has hair in his eyes,’ she noted, describing him also as ‘hardworking, shy, obedient, affectionate, loves soft things such as animal fur or skin.’
Although never a convincing maternal figure, Priscilla was there for them and cared about them, and it was not long before both of Raymond’s children, having initially addressed her as ‘Aunty Priscilla’, started calling her ‘Mummy’. Carleton was once taken to hospital with earache. Priscilla was allowed to visit only on a Sunday. When finally she was with him, he said, breaking her heart, ‘I didn’t think you were ever coming back, Mummy.’
Their real mother’s departure continued to unsettle them, and for several years they had trouble sleeping. Priscilla would leave the radio on in the passageway, playing music, and quietly come back to check if they were asleep, and turn it off.
‘I doted on my stepchildren,’ she wrote. ‘However, I found that I had too much time on my hands when they went to school, so I took up writing.’
She started to write after an embarrassing stab at modelling. Priscilla had been back in London less than two months when Gillian organised a photoshoot for her at Vogue.
Everyone agreed that Priscilla was beautiful, but the stilted portraits that resulted from her Vogue audition failed to bear this out. She presented two to Robert Donat, who claimed to love both unconditionally, before back-tracking, saying of one that it ‘lowered my blood considerably’ – she looked like a gangster’s moll. Pierre was unimpressed by the portrait chosen for him: ‘I find it photographed from a bad angle.’ Gillian posted a copy to Vertès in New York. His reaction – ‘I would never have recognised her.’ A French admirer called Bernard remarked only that she possessed remarkable hands.
Priscilla’s first husband spoke for all those sceptical that her future lay in modelling. ‘I want to say how happy and touched I am that you sent this photo. It is beautiful and you are beautiful.’ Nonetheless, he would have chosen her portrait taken before the war in Avenue de l’Opéra. He wrote diplomatically: ‘One is a little cork, the other is a woman of character. What a mixture you are . . .’ He wondered if the English weather was making her so sad.
Her eyes had enchanted Robert Donat and numerous admirers, but Priscilla saw nothing when she looked into them. The urge to break the mirror on her dressing-table to see something – to be present to herself – lay behind her redemptive compulsion to write. She wanted to straighten out her thoughts in the hope of understanding those things which had always troubled her.
Priscilla’s French husband had tilted her in the direction which she now took. ‘If you’re going to work in the future, I think you would have greater success in writing articles.’ He advised her to buy some magazines, study the articles, their construction, and copy them, but making sure to inject a personal and original tone. ‘Your father could give you a serious helping hand in this area and open some doors. All this advice is given out of concern for your future and your happiness in which I hope, whatever happens, I shall always remain interested. I hug you with all my tenderness, R.’
Every day she sat and looked down at the yard. She watched Raymond’s workers stack the boxes, spade the compost, tug on plastic gloves before disappe
aring inside the sheds, canisters of fungicide strapped to their backs.
Priscilla titled an essay that she wrote at her dressing-table ‘Life as a mushroom farmer’s wife’. It is hard to tell from this whether she had a developed sense of irony, but elsewhere she could be drily droll in her writing. It is also possible that when observing the struggles involved in growing Raymond’s champignons de Paris (not only protecting them from La France disease, but against the ink caps that caused the mushroom spores to disintegrate into a black squidgy mess), Priscilla may have reflected on certain parallels with what she was doing, and with her long losing battle to produce an account of a life that was now so ordinary but had been so extraordinary.
Raymond fulfilled his emotional function for Priscilla. Terrible though his possessiveness may have been, it was something that she needed. But in order to keep his protection and security, she had to remain mute – and in a place called Wittering. The only thing to do if she wanted to express herself and disinfect the past was to write it down. Even so, she kept this under wraps. ‘I never knew she was writing or wanting to write,’ said my mother. Not even Gillian suspected. ‘I often said to Pris that she should write about her years in Paris as they were very strange, but she showed no desire to put pen to paper.’ Only in her bedroom, in secret, did Priscilla try to repair and stabilise her life by indexing what had happened. After her travails, it was a way of affirming her will and character; a way of shouting ‘I’m here, I haven’t vanished!’
Many of the significant emotional moments of Priscilla’s life had occurred in wartime France. It was a period which she came to regard as separate from the rest of her life. An interval which Simone de Beauvoir called a ‘no man’s land’ in time – when Priscilla had lived on another level and according to values which had little in common with her previous existence.
But the entr’acte was over, and Priscilla had no continuity to slip back into. Her French years fell suddenly into the category of a shameful subject not to be spoken about, like Vichy. ‘But why should we proclaim the Republic?’ was de Gaulle’s testy reaction on the day after Paris’s liberation: ‘She has never ceased to exist.’ Priscilla’s time in France was another non-dit. It belonged to a null and void piece of history, to be treated as though it had never actually taken place.
In any case, by September 1945 the war had ended. No one having just gone through the past five years wanted to read about it. ‘There is at the moment a great resistance to books dealing with any aspect of the war,’ was one publisher’s response when rejecting the memoirs of an American woman who had fought in the Resistance. This indifference was the same whether you were a hero or a victim. Even if, like Primo Levi, you did find someone to publish your story, you could not expect a large readership: his masterpiece If This Is a Man sold less than 1,500 copies.
In particular, no one was going to want to read about Priscilla’s war. As Gillian pointed out, Priscilla had not been in a camp like Levi or Jorge Semprún: Besançon was not Auschwitz, nor Buchenwald. Her experience was not one of victory over the enemy, but of personal defeat and a sense of shame. Priscilla’s need to piece together a narrative which could make sense of her life was therefore at odds with everything that most people were prepared to accept. The British view of adultery was Brief Encounter: a clandestine handshake on a railway station. The story of Priscilla’s adulteries would have been incomprehensible. After Belsen was liberated in April 1945 and the public saw the newsreels, it became even harder to accept the Germans – and more or less unthinkable to admit to any intimacies with them. In Paris at the time, Gillian reported back how the pianist Alfred Cortot was cat-called at a Chopin recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées after someone in the audience yelled: ‘Do you dedicate that to your friend Hitler?’ Cortot fled to Switzerland, and in the opinion of a friend would sooner bite off his tongue than speak about the incident. The majority of Englishwomen interned with Priscilla in Besançon opted for silence over honesty. Rosemary Say wrote: ‘I had learned to keep my mouth shut about the survival tactics of those I knew.’
And there was an extra worry. Raymond.
When, aged fifty-seven, Gillian went to live in Monaco, she often visited Graham Greene in Antibes to seek advice about her memoirs. ‘Tell all,’ he said. But if Priscilla did tell all, if she did succeed in facing what was most difficult to face, and exposed what Semprún called the ‘truest and deepest part, the opaque, unspeakable heart of the experience’, would she be able to show it to her husband?
Priscilla’s predicament was her father’s: SPB could not in his diary speak of his feelings for Priscilla in the knowledge that Winnie was going to type it up. Nor could Priscilla, aware of Raymond’s intolerance of Germans, aerate – to use a composting term – certain episodes. ‘If she had told the truth,’ said Carleton, ‘my father would have been destroyed.’
To cover or to expose. She had learned from SPB how Jane Austen pushed her manuscript under the blotter if anyone came into the room. From her late twenties up until her early forties, Priscilla was torn between two opposing impulses; between feeling that she had to shut away what she had written – in the chest beneath the television which Raymond watched every night, with a tray on his lap containing a baked egg and cream – and wishing with every particle for it to be broadcast.
This complicated mixture of shame and embarrassment on the one hand, and, on the other, bloody-minded determination, touched the deepest springs of Priscilla’s feelings about her father. While it was not the only reason she wrote, her writing became more and more what earlier she had used her body for: a means of establishing a relationship to save herself.
Priscilla completed her first article, describing her imprisonment at Besançon, six weeks after landing in London. She sent the manuscript to SPB, hoping that he might bring to it the transformative magic he had performed thirty years before on Alec Waugh; encourage, criticise and find a publisher. Her father had been a genuinely legendary teacher – not merely to Waugh, but to writers like J. R. Ackerley, Brian Aldiss and Jon Stallworthy. He was the one person who might have taught Priscilla how to write. Had he taken the time to sit down and help her, he might also have started to understand what she had gone through.
Priscilla’s story was her heart’s blood and she felt brutally rejected when she received a reply not from SPB, but from Winnie. ‘Daddie is ill again & has been in bed since Thursday. He sends his love & says he should think the New Statesman the best paper to send your story.’ Winnie’s disabling brush-off set the tone for Priscilla’s post-war dealings with SPB and was one more instance of their not communicating successfully. It was a completely missed opportunity, the last hope he had of reconnecting with his eldest daughter. Her father’s rejection was the most cruel, but it anticipated the reaction of each and every agent, magazine editor and publisher to whom she offered her work.
Paper-clipped together in chronological order at the bottom of Priscilla’s papers was a neat stack of rejection slips. They painted a caricature of the struggling writer and attested to her persistence in the face of continual disappointment.
She submitted her first manuscript in December 1944, when she was involved with Donat; her last, in March 1957. Again and again, what she had written had ‘not been found quite suitable’ – by the editors of Home Chat, Modern Woman, Woman’s Own, Queen, even Yachting Monthly (although the latter did express interest in her sketches, ‘which show promise’). The reasons for turning her down: ‘Stories bringing in the war are not liked now . . .’ ‘Anything morbid or sordid is no use at all . . .’ ‘The sustained amoral atmosphere will, I fear, put it out of court for most publishers . . .’
Everything that Priscilla was obsessed to gather together in her padded chest braided into the same story: the drama of a woman with a past nobody was interested in – not even her own father – but who was compelled to write it down, however incriminating.
Priscilla had been writing for nine years when she started a diary. He
r life was boring and dull. She and Raymond had argued about money. ‘Yesterday I posted off a short story which I have high hopes for. If only I could earn some money I should feel more independent. It is hell for a woman to have to beg for every penny.’
12 November 1953: ‘High hopes for story end in dismal failure. It has been sent back and obviously not read by my agent. Generally she keeps a story for a month. This time it is back in two days.’
Her writing and its subject repudiated, she sent one of her stories to a friend who was a popular author, soliciting his advice. Geoffrey Willans was the creator of Molesworth and author of Down with Skool, who in 1958 dedicated The Dog’s Ear Book to Priscilla’s schnauzer Viking – pencilling on the title page: ‘who undoubtedly has the dirtiest arse in West Sussex’. His tact was exemplary. ‘My dear Pris, I’ve read the short story and dear Pris, I know you’re going to hate me for this but I don’t think you will sell it, not because it isn’t interesting and well-written, which it is, but because it breaks a fundamental rule of the women’s press. This is that a woman may have lustrous gold hair, trim ankles, shapely legs BUT, for this kind of work, she stops below the shoulder and above the knees. In other words, any heroine loves romance, music, a glamorous man but she can’t even go to bed with her husband, let alone take a lover. In other words, you can deal with love and even the very slight temptation, but never with the basic result of it, which isn’t even admitted.’ He concluded: ‘You might get away with your story in a novel, but never in a woman’s paper.’
Priscilla’s story may have been too saucy or unsavoury for most contemporary publishers. And yet it would probably never have been published anyway, even with her excellent literary contacts. The pile of rejection slips that she so assiduously kept told a truth about her writing talents – a truth that she must have found excruciatingly difficult to reconcile with her ambition, or for that matter her need. Her writing was just not very good.
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