The novel that Priscilla started on Willans’s advice was her third – the other two are lost. Once again, she took for her model Alec Waugh’s first autobiographical novel which, if little read today, enjoyed a succès d’estime (and de scandale) for its portrayal of homosexuality at an English public school. The Loom of Youth – in which Priscilla’s father featured prominently as the ‘great god’ of Waugh’s soul – was a fictionalised account of the author’s time at Sherborne under SPB’s inspirational tutelage. Turned down by several publishers, the manuscript was accepted by Grant Richards, mainly thanks to SPB and Doris, and on publication became as famous as Tom Brown’s Schooldays a century before. ‘My dear Alec,’ SPB wrote to Waugh in October 1917, ‘Your book on every stall & in the mouths of every one who matters.’ Forty years on, Priscilla wanted the same reception.
She regarded Waugh as her literary godfather ever since reading ‘To Your Daughter’, the poem he had composed for her birth. Like The Loom of Youth, her book would be an autobiographical Bildungsroman, taking in its sweep her upbringing in Sherborne and Hove, her move aged nine to Paris, her life during the Occupation. At its core would be her four and a half years in Nazi France.
When Priscilla flew back to England in October 1944, she had learned to distrust what she had been taught and not to depend on what anyone told her. And yet about one thing she was clear-sighted. She had brought with her out of France material for a cracking story, not about an elite coming to terms with fascism, but about ordinary people – ordinary women especially – adjusting, screwing up, and developing survival skills of a deeply primitive and totally understandable, if ruthless, kind. It was a story that would give Alec Waugh and even John Buchan a run for their money, and compete with any novel that SPB had written. In Priscilla’s Electra-like struggle with her father, her book would be a way of communicating and identifying with him, and also her weapon and revenge.
Priscilla narrated her story through the eyes of two young women: Crystal, based on herself, and Chantal, based on Gillian. In one of those coincidences which make their relationship even more poignant, Gillian had, unknown to Priscilla, decided to write about her own life in pre-war Paris, with a character based on Priscilla. Gllian’s novel, written in French and also the first of several attempts to shape the material that they shared, received the same rejection. ‘My novel went to 5 publishers, nearly taken by Gallimard, one vote missing.’ Gillian at least finished Un Etrange Maître, on 17 March 1957. When Priscilla’s ‘novel’ reached the scene where Daniel Vernier lowered his pistol inside the clinic in Saint-Cloud, it disintegrated into a mass of notes and scribbles.
35.
TOO MUCH GIN
Survivors pay with their conscience. Not to Raymond, not to Gillian – not even to Zoë – did Priscilla admit the extent of her friendships with Emile Cornet, Max Stocklin and Otto Graebener. Nailed to the cross of her secret past, she preserved the silence of Garbo on her years in Occupied France.
Once, Priscilla was rereading Candide and noticed she was eating all the time, and realised that she had read the novella in a state of semi-starvation at Besançon. There were triggers she tried to avoid – being jostled in the Underground or anyone in uniform. But her past was a phosphorus that continued to burn. A breath of cool wind over the Nissen mushroom sheds goose-pimpled her bare arms, and at its touch she was back in a freezing courtyard, back with the noise and snow and queues, the eye-stinging smell of the stove, the bitter taste of the soup, the clop of the wood-soled boots on the long stone corridors, and the piercing toot of the trains at night in the remoteness of the town.
Arthur Koestler said that guilt should be forgiven but not hushed up. Priscilla had held her shame at bay through the 1940s and 50s, but it was eating away inside, and finally it overwhelmed her. Unable to relieve the pressure through writing, unable to speak out candidly, she resorted to Gordon’s gin. From about the time that she abandoned her third attempt at a novel, Priscilla, the once-priggish young woman who for many years never sipped anything stronger than milk, was to her intimate friends a drunk.
It was a refrain of guests at Church Farm: ‘Oh, where’s Priscilla, I’d like to say goodbye.’ My mother admired the way that she stood up in the middle of her own dinner party and went to bed. ‘I wished I could do that.’ She never knew that Priscilla had become a member of AA. ‘I was just aware of everyone drinking like mad.’
Upstairs, Tracey remembered her stepmother weaving down the passageway to get to bed. ‘She was very clever at disguising it. She thought we were asleep.’
Her father could tell, though. After a visit to Church Farm, SPB wrote in his diary: ‘Too much gin as usual.’
Priscilla and Raymond were part of a circle of friends who were hard drinkers. And yet she paid a ruinous price. She had resembled Grace Kelly for so long. Now alcohol put lines beside her mouth; her skin grew blotchy, her neck thickened, the once-blue eyes that looked at you were blood-shot. She broke out in excessive sweats, making her blonde hair damp and stringy.
John Sutro loved Priscilla, and invited himself to stay whenever at a loose end during Gillian’s absences. He was struck by Priscilla’s deterioration: ‘She’s lost all her looks poor thing.’ After seeing it for herself, Gillian wrote to Vertès that their friend had become fat. Vertès’s reply: ‘Priscilla fat? That doesn’t surprise me. Already in December, I found her quite voluminous. She’s soon going to be a very obese woman. That shouldn’t make her unhappy since she has the character of a fat person.’
Ravaged by an inner despair, her health suffered. She had aches and pains. She stopped going to the cinema after she began seeing double. She lost interest in driving; even in reading. Her sole interest – to ‘get at the drink quickly’. And yet for all the cunning that she deployed to get drunk, Priscilla could no longer hide the effect. From the early 1960s, the sadness that I had picked up on as a child started to reveal itself.
One afternoon, she went to tea with Gillian and passed out. On coming-to, Priscilla lurched against a table, smashing an antique vase. ‘When Gillian remonstrated with me, I roared with laughter, thus adding insult to injury. Appalled by this story I decided that something had to be done. After all, I had known her all my life and she was closer to me than my own sister. This is when the idea of AA first entered my mind.’
In December 1963, Priscilla stood up to address her first AA meeting in London, afterwards writing in her notebook: ‘Resolutions: to save my marriage, to save my health, to save my looks.’ Throughout early 1964, she attended meetings in Brighton, Bognor and Swiss Cottage, where her fellow members were: a delightful woman called Nina, a foul-mouthed Soho greengrocer, two burglars, and some hold-up men.
By April, Priscilla had been dry for two months. She enjoyed reading again, watching films. ‘I felt a new lease of life.’ She looked forward to a sailing holiday with Raymond. ‘My life is full of excitement and our new boat “Drusilla” was acquired at just the right moment for me. I no longer spend my “all” in pubs and secret bottle-hoarding. Perhaps I shall be able to take up writing again and fulfil my ambition to have a book published. I am happier than I have ever been and am full of hope instead of despair.’
Then on 2 May, Priscilla suffered a terrible ‘defeat’. Committed to go to an AA meeting in Bognor, she did not attend ‘because of bloodcurdling row with SPB’.
Priscilla’s last and most dramatic rift with her father had its origins six years earlier, when he asked for money.
SPB was one of the radio casualties that failed to make the transition into television. A pioneer of television, he had come off screen when transmission ceased in 1939, when there were only 18,000 sets in Britain. By the time the service resumed in 1946, he was, at sixty-one, too old. He had to fall back on his voice and his pen, but he found it hard to earn a living.
Not one of SPB’s novels sold more than 5,000 copies. It Isn’t Far from London sold 2,765 copies and earned £77 in royalties [£2,000 in today’s money]. The most he earn
ed from any book was £850 – for I Return to Scotland.
Unable to support himself and Winnie through writing and broadcasting, and lacking a pension, he was reduced to the humiliating tradition of sending out begging letters. Until well into the 1960s, SPB continued to importune friends like Henry Williamson and Alec Waugh.
A fairly typical SOS was one written to Waugh in June 1965, from SPB’s final address, Flat 20, Bliss House – a modern low-rise building owned by the Samaritans in the Sussex village of Lindfield. ‘Dear Alec, you were kind to me when I was last in touch. Be kind again. I have just moved into this doll’s house of a flat which is really a superior old people’s home, though the rent is £234 a year plus rates of £60. The government expects me to get by on my old-age pension of £4 a week. It doesn’t keep me in cigars. I can’t afford to get my hair cut, shoes repaired or shaving cream. I can’t afford this writing paper . . . But you made such a packet out of Sunshine Island [sic] I have no compunction whatever in asking you to help me pay rates & the bills that fall – money to beautify this cesspool of an asylum.’ He referred to himself as ‘the ghost of Mr Chips’ and concluded with an appeal that he knew Waugh would find helpless to resist: ‘I just want to remind people that I am NOT the author of The Loom of Youth.’
This sly reference to Waugh’s first book was calculated to graze Alec’s conscience: no one had contributed more to its success than SPB – or looked out for its teenage author with such boisterous care.
SPB had been a paternal figure to Alec Waugh after his expulsion from Sherborne, and a visitor to his home in North London during a period when Waugh was ‘lonely and without a friend’. SPB had no son. Waugh came closest to filling this role. ‘My good ox,’ SPB called him. ‘I say and I say again that you have it in you not to be merely clever but a genius.’
Their close relationship alarmed Alec’s supersensitive father, who happened to be SPB’s publisher at the time. If ever Arthur Waugh had a rival for his favourite son’s attention it was SPB during 1916 and 1917. Arthur made a wounded observation to this effect in January 1917, after SPB went to stay with Priscilla at ‘Underhill’. Waugh moved swiftly to reassure his father. ‘Please don’t think I put Mais before my family. I don’t. He has no standards, often his opinions infuriate me, but he has the most wonderful personality. No one can understand him who has not come directly under it.’
Alec Waugh remained loyal to his old teacher, and to the end of his life appreciated SPB’s central part in making The Loom of Youth a success. Furthermore, Waugh knew what it was to scrape professional and financial rock-bottom. He had faced exactly this situation in the early 1950s. The person who had guided Waugh from his ‘all-time low’ back to the surface, if inadvertently, was, for a second time, my grandfather.
Waugh’s son Peter told me the background. ‘In January 1953, Alec had the pills lined up. He was looking at the packet and thinking, “Do I do it now?”’ But just when Waugh saw no option other than to swallow a mouthful of barbiturates, he recalled a story that SPB had told him years before at Sherborne: how SPB’s great-great grandfather, a sugar merchant in Bristol, had eloped to Jamaica and raised a black family in Kingston. The vivid image of Harry Mais spawned the Fleury family and a novel, Island in the Sun, for which Waugh received what was then one of the largest movie advances ever. Within four weeks, Waugh had earned a quarter of a million dollars [several million in today’s money]. A film was made starring Harry Belafonte and Joan Collins; the title song topped the charts and gave birth to the reggae label, Island Studios. Alec Waugh’s life was not merely saved, but overturned. ‘I had become overnight a different person.’
For these obvious reasons, Waugh was more than willing to help when, soon after the film came out, SPB approached him for financial assistance to cure Winnie of her depression. Winnie had lived with SPB for thirty years and her guilt at not being married, exacerbated by their constant lack of money, threatened to make her ‘dangerously ill’. It appears from what happened next that Waugh’s contribution was not enough, forcing SPB to reach out elsewhere.
He had already approached my mother. She told me: ‘When I was seventeen, he said “We’re desperate for money. Can we have your savings?” It was not more than £100, but it was all my savings since I was a child. I didn’t ask what it was for.’ Now that she was married to a Times journalist who earned only £500 a year, and had a baby, she had no spare pennies.
On a cloudless day in May 1958, SPB and Winnie joined my parents and Priscilla at Church Farm. My grandfather, in shorts, spent his time cutting wood, collecting compost and playing with his one-year-old grandson, Slogger, as he had decided that I was to be nicknamed. But SPB was ‘worn to a frazzle’ by Winnie’s continued depression. ‘She kept on saying “I want to die.”’ On 7 May 1958, SPB wrote in his diary: ‘She thinks she is going mad. We walked to the sea. I rolled the lawn; borrowed £3 from Priscilla to get home.’ The loan was an ominous prelude.
Back in Oxford, Winnie’s doctors insisted that she undergo immediate electric therapy treatment. SPB could not meet the bills. In late November, he turned to the one person whom common sense ought to have warned him to spare.
I have their letters in front of me, three from Priscilla and one from Winnie. Together, they dramatise the proverb: ‘When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.’
‘29/11/58, Church Farm, Wittering
‘Darling Winnie,
‘Send me your bills and I will settle them by postal order, providing they don’t exceed £20 as that is all I possess in the world and I was saving it for Christmas.
‘Priscilla’
‘29/11/58 Church Farm, Wittering
‘Darling Daddy,
‘I’ve written to Winnie about the money as this seems to be her main domain.
‘In return for my help you can answer me a few questions (although I don’t suppose you will).
‘Why do you expect me to help you? What have you ever done for me except give me the “gift of life”? This can’t have been too difficult for you – it was more troublesome for Mama, surely?
‘The one time I turned to you for help in 1937 you utterly failed me. Although you were famous and presumably well off you allowed me to go to France with £5 in my pocket borrowed from a friend! The sum of £50 then meant more to me than any money can mean to you now. In fact it was my life at stake and you didn’t give a damn. You had no pity and as far as I can see you have never cared about anyone but yourself.
‘As for Winnie, why the hell should I worry about her? She broke up my home when I was 9 without hesitation, causing me great unhappiness and now she has the nerve to moan about her fate to me.
‘You are both utterly selfish and irresponsible,
‘Love, Priscilla’
‘1st Dec 1958, 116 Woodstock Road, Oxford
‘Priscilla (why do you hate me darling),
‘The sting of your letter is very bitter and I wish I could talk, rather than write, this to you.
‘You seem to have got the details in your life so mixed up that there is scarcely any truth left.
‘1. You accuse me of breaking up your home when you were nine. The fact is that Doris and Daddy never got on, not even during their honeymoon, and by the time I met Daddy, Doris was living with, and planning to go to Paris with Bevan Lewis. Also Vivien was 5 or 4, the child of Neville Brownrigg and Doris, who incidentally left him, as indeed all her men have done, for another woman.
‘2. In 1937, I believe that was the year you were pregnant by one of your many young men, and I vividly remember both Daddy and I imploring you to have the child and we would look after you. But Doris had already persuaded you to have an abortion and given you an address in Paris where it could be done.
‘3. You accuse us both of irresponsibility. Daddy paid handsomely for your and Vivien’s education and ballet dancing in Paris and we have always been delighted to have you stay, as a child, adolescent, & adult during which visits (as
a child) I suffered considerably because your mind had from the start been poisoned against Daddy and me.
‘As for the accusation of selfishness, may I say that I have remained faithful to Daddy since the day I met him, have given him two daughters and have slaved to give them a good education and a stable background.
‘For years now I have worked in the house without help and taken a job outside and even the money I earned from that has had to go into housekeeping.
‘I met Daddy with an overdraft and he has never been able to get free. Now in his old age he is still working for a pittance and I am still looking after him as well as I can, but I am also getting old and it is not easy to get jobs in competition with youth.
‘Think again, Priscilla, for you have got such a cock-eyed idea of what has happened.
‘Recriminations are not good and I am sorry you have had such a rotten home life as a child but remember it broke up long before I met Daddy.
‘My love, Winnie’
‘22/12/58, Church Farm, Wittering
‘Darling Daddy,
‘Your letter with enclosures arrived as I was leaving England. I had thought that you had found some other way round your problems, owing to your long silence. Meanwhile, naturally I had spent my ‘worldly possessions’ on Christmas presents. Therefore I had to ask Raymond if he could help and he agreed reluctantly to write a cheque for the smaller bill (the other one is out of the question – I told you that £20 was the limit). You put me in a very difficult position where Ray is concerned. He has enough responsibilities of his own without my adding to them.
‘With regard to Winnie I would merely like to say that I consider her last letter to me (did you see it?) unforgivable, and I have no intention of ever seeing her again or mentioning her name. As far as I am concerned she no longer exists and that is final.
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