Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  A two-way link between my parents and me, Jessie accepted without any hesitation the responsibility put on her so capriciously. If ever you get lost, she would say to me, I’ll be able to find you because you’ll be the boy with two moles on his back. Far from usurping motherhood as another might have done, in letter after letter she is at pains to stress that I miss my parents, I cherish their photographs and often speak of them: “his last thought is of you two when he goes to bed.” She had lived through Poppy’s postnatal depression, and I imagine that she was afraid of some sort of relapse. Poppy had to be re-assured that she still had the son she always had. Explicitly she exhorts, “I pray you are keeping yourself well in hand, my Poppy, and not letting your nerves run away with you.”

  Jessie was also providing bulletins of family news. Lily had received her first letter from Elie, in which he says that as a prisoner he is being well treated. Lily had been afflicted with boils, and Bubbles went back into France, to Biarritz, to fetch medication for her. Throughout the summer, Eduardo was at Vichy but he had contrived to go to Royaumont and Paris; “everything very sad looking.” The Spanish flag protected Royaumont, but the cellars and the provisions there had been looted. The cows were let out of the farm. The gardener was the ringleader, she believes, his expression when the family left showed that he was thinking he could take whatever he liked. Max expected everyone to live with him in the Villa in Cannes. “There is always that question of food but I think it will be the same for all countries this end of the world. Roast beef [i.e. England] will be alright as she keeps the key of the larder, so far we have had plenty of everything, may it continue.”

  “Are we down-hearted? No!” Right is bound to prevail, she repeats. It must have encouraged – perhaps amazed – Poppy to see how the inflexible Jessie was refusing any thought of surrender:

  Hitler is neither master of the seas nor the skies but until he is, invasion is bound to failure. The awe-inspiring courage of the British people, wrote W. Lippmann in the New York Herald Tribune in September could not be sustained if along with their brave hearts they did not also have clear heads, they fight on and are determined to fight back, not in the manner of men resisting blindly, but as men who know their position and odds and real alternatives. Only a great people could do this. The British are a great people and now they are led by a man who knows their history, and having the quality of greatness and being greatly led, their reason does not undermine but on the contrary strengthens the courage of their hearts.

  Early in the blitz, on 8 September, a bomb hit York Gate. That night Alan and Poppy had been sleeping in the dining-room on the ground floor. At three in the morning, bombs seemed to be dropping so close that they went down to the kitchen in the basement. Minutes later, the bomb fell, breaking windows, cracking a wall and filling their beds with glass and brick. “I know that you are the bravest of the three girls,” Jessie commiserated to Poppy, “but this was too much and how grateful we are all of us that you and Alan were spared. Happily David was not there.”

  The choice was between joining Mitzi at the Villa Preciosa or Max in the Villa Les Oeillets. Portugal was an unknown quantity. Jessie was frank with Poppy, “I don’t care to go on such a journey on my own, but if you insist, I must. One is safe nowhere.” Then, “Bubbles says she can’t take David without your consent so I suppose you will be getting a wire to that effect. Granny wants him to go to her but I say of two evils choose the least, and I think we had better go to Max but will abide by your decision whatever that may be…. I would like you to write to Bubbles and tell her to do for David as she would for her own two, in every way…. Bubbles has just been in to say a wire from Eduardo says it will be alright for myself and Nannie, and with papers to fill up and finger prints to take, I don’t care so long as they don’t take David away from me. For me, it is a sacred charge, and I must deliver him over to his Mummy.”

  With hindsight, to leave neutral Spain and re-enter Vichy France was tempting providence. Heedlessly, we were going towards the dangers that so many others around us, including friends and relations, were trying to get away from. Exceptionally, Philippe de Gunzbourg, Aline’s brother, was already set on a heroic course as head of a resistance movement in the south-west. Like the sort of conceptual artwork that contains its own comment, a photograph exists of Bubbles and Philippe smiling as they pose on the Croisette beside a photograph of him on a wall-poster that offers a reward for his capture.

  “In a way I’m pleased to be here,” Jessie reports from the Villa Les Oeillets at the end of October 1940, “it will lengthen their summer a little, and for Max who is always lost without his sisters, and we miss you, my Poppy.” Her own attitude remained Churchillian. “We still have faith, hope and confidence that right will be victorious over might; and you have the honour to be living in a very plucky, right little, tight little island. I hope you are not worrying, for we must take things as we find them.” Another letter ends, “A great poet said what I’ve told you before, ‘Come they from the three corners of the earth and we shall shock them, and nothing rue, if England to herself do be but true.’ Oh what a nice little island.”

  Those who could afford it were finding somewhere to live and if possible arranging to escape abroad while it was still legal to do so. Au Pilori, the French publication as viciously anti-Jewish as Der Stürmer in Germany, was soon jeering that Jews were turning Cannes into Kann-sur-mer. There was a social life of sorts, involving visits from friends or relations whom Poppy had known – women at present without husbands – and Jessie names: Rose d’Ormesson, Sylvia de Castellane, Claude Getting, Nadine Blondel. Another English nanny, identified simply as Bradbury, had been in Paris and Jessie tells Poppy her story, “they rounded up all the roast beefs and took them away to a camp…. I am sorry for Bradbury as she is old but it will give her time to think about all the good dinners she used to give her dog.” Antoinette, wife of Philippe de Gunzbourg, had bought a house nearby [the Germans would have been glad to know that]. Dr Metzl has come to Cannes to see his dentist. Max has taken the house on for another three months; he is very thin, “not unhappy, but where will it all end?” Eduardo is also looking for a farm or place in the country for his family – no respecter of persons, Jessie nicknames him Flopsy Bunny. Bubbles went to winter sports for a week and broke her leg: “She has taken up a good bit of my time.” Strangely she refers to Lily in many of her letters without once mentioning that Lily had married Elie by “procuration.” Conducted by a mayor, this civil procedure in France allows one party to marry in the absence of the other. Photographs caught the rather grim little bureaucratic ceremony attended only by her brother and sister. All her life Lily was to quip about having married an empty chair.

  Attic-like, my room was on the top floor of the Villa. I was allowed to read in bed. The books had elaborate pictorial covers and told thrilling tales of adventure about dashing spahis and zouaves, cruel Barbarossa and even crueller Bluebeard, with illustrations in primary colours. For Christmas 1940 Jessie bought two books, addressed and stamped them herself and had the postman tell me that this parcel came from my parents in England. “David has had a very happy time as far as we could make it, the usual tree but very small, about thirty candles on it and a small quantity of silver trimming and a few mandarines.”

  Our life in Vichy France, she tries to get across to Poppy, was almost normal. She could write, “Until now they get plenty to eat, thank goodness.” Knock on wood, David is marvellous, “no bad colds, no earache, no tummy aches, in fact it seems to suit him here, rosy cheeks, grown, one meter ten and weighs just nineteen kilos. I can’t seem to get him over that weight but so long as he does not lose I don’t mind.” I played marbles with Philip, and cards with Elly. “Elly is Spanish, isn’t she?” I apparently asked one day, and hearing the answer yes, I said exactly what would have pleased Jessie, “Well I’m an Englishman, thank God.” Elly and I fight, she says, but can’t do without each other. David “talks to himself as if he were writing a book,
knows all the capitals of Europe which for the time being have changed a bit.” I had a toy pistol whose caps went off with a loud crack and some satisfactory smoke. Twice a week I had a bath. Philip developed severe whooping cough, Elly had it less badly, and I was hardly aware that I was even ill with it.

  Jessie had a bicycle and bought me one too, again pretending that it was a birthday present from my parents. The two of us would go round the local streets foraging for food. My weight didn’t increase because we were in fact not getting plenty to eat. To keep Poppy’s spirits up, she would mask reality. “I assure you the children have enough to eat, parcels from Granny also from Eduardo make up what we can’t get here, condensed milk etc.” Among the questions I never thought to ask Bubbles or Eduardo was whether we qualified for ration cards – probably not. Jessie had spotted a garden with a hole in its wire netting and would wait for the moment to send me in to pull up vegetables while she stood guard. In a local shop the sole thing for sale that gave some impression of filling and sustaining were little round red tins of Réglisses, a brand of licorice bits either a centimeter long or cone-shaped, for obvious reasons known to Jessie as Mouse’s Number One and Mouse’s Number Two. When hungry, you are at the mercy of the pit of your stomach. Meals in the Villa were brief and joyless. At one point we shared a single cauliflower between us all, and on another occasion we were reduced to sucking fish-bones. Mouse’s Number One or Two did nothing to help. The aunts used to bicycle to country farms to buy what they could – Jessie praised Lily for going about 25 kilometers in search of some eggs. One day they didn’t pay attention to a piece of meat left on one of their bicycles, and a passing dog snatched it. Once on the Croisette, the aunts gave me an oyster, but it was so slithery and slimy in the mouth that I vomited. Furious at the waste, the aunts went for me, and I have never eaten an oyster since. Years later I found out that Jessie and Nannie Stainer had been competing, each getting up early and creeping downstairs in the hope of being undetected as they made sure that their charges had the best of anything there was to eat. Jessie couldn’t resist making cracks to Poppy about her lifelong counterpart and rival. “Nannie has not been very well, old age I think, and Philip is one too many for her.” Or when it came to travel, “Can’t you see Nannie up in the plane, Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  To me, Eduardo was “Mon Oncle,” and as a small boy I was Flannelfoot to him, the nickname borrowed from some film. During the years when he had retired we frequently discussed the events of 1940. Prewar contacts with personalities like Pierre Laval, Pétain’s Prime Minister at Vichy and the prime mover of collaboration with Hitler, ought to have stood him in good stead in Madrid. Spanish foreign policy was in the hands of Ramón Serrano Suñer, at that time an unqualified supporter of his brother-in-law General Franco and an outright Nazi sympathizer who expected Hitler to win the war. In the civil war Hitler had greatly helped the Nationalists to victory, and now that he was redrawing boundaries in Europe even greater spoils might be had. Getting in first, Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10 June in the belief that he was laying the foundations of a Mediterranean empire. Four days later, with the limelight on the Wehrmacht marching into Paris, Spanish troops occupied Tangier, hitherto an international zone. The difficult course now was to befriend Hitler enough to assure his continuing approval of Spanish aims but not enough to alienate the Allies and risk the punishment they could inflict. At the meeting with Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October, Franco got this balance right, skillfully arguing that Spain was in too desperate a state to help the common cause but was obliged to stay neutral until the damage of the civil war was repaired. In words often quoted, a disappointed Hitler remarked afterwards that he would rather have teeth drawn than negotiate again with Franco.

  The initiative Eduardo had taken in Bordeaux to issue transit visas for Spain was bound to be seen in Madrid as a favour to the Allies which exposed Franco and his regime unnecessarily to German pressure. In a letter to Lequerica, in charge of the embassy in Vichy, Serrano Suñer gave vent to his prejudice, describing Eduardo as someone “who served the interests of French Jewry.” Rumour has it that Eduardo took jewels and a valuable picture out of France in his wagon-lit on behalf of the Rothschilds. His repudiation, quoted by James K. McAuley, is certainly equivocal, “What need had the Rothschilds of my intervention?” At any rate on 2 February Serrano Suñer demoted Eduardo. A telegram had the brutal order, “You have 24 hours to leave your post and you go to Larache.” – he had been more or less dispatched into exile as vice-consul in what was then a small fishing village on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. (Serrano Suñer eventually apologized, Eduardo became an ambassador, and after his death Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, honoured him as a Righteous Gentile for saving Jews in the hour of need.)

  Jessie well understood that our fate depended on the international political configuration. Someone so patriotic can’t have enjoyed suggesting, “as for Gibraltar we may perhaps have to lend it to them for a short time.” She had been kept in the picture, for on 1 February she wrote that there had been some question of Eduardo leaving his post, “but I think it has been arranged and he is staying where he is for the time being.” Whether or not she knew about Eduardo’s punishing telegram that very next day, she gives her reason for staying out of England, “I quite understand that you want your little boy” but “I think I should be taking him into worse danger than here.” She repeats herself, “David and I shall come as soon as it is reasonably possible to do so, but we must wait until the sausage has tried to swallow the roast beef, pray let it be soon.” Six weeks later, on 14 March, she was putting it more strongly: “Yes! I’ll bring him when the time is ripe, as promised, but friends and family are against it now, the risk is far too great for the time being. I know this is very hard on you both. ‘I know, don’t tell me,’ as David would say.” (At the same time, she asks Poppy to send a card to her sisters in Horspath and “tell them that half a gammon of bacon does not come our way.”)

  During the course of March, the family had to re-adjust to Eduardo’s new post. We were to live in Tangier rather than Larache. At the end of the month, Mitzi in Estoril heard from Eduardo that he had left Vichy for good. “He says the reason given him that he helped too many Jews out of France is surely not the real one. He is very upset to have left his family and not to be able to look after them, Alfort etc. What will happen to Alfort etc now, God alone knows.” Only if he and Bubbles were able to look after me could she leave for Canada with a clear conscience. Sure enough, she concluded, “They asked me if I thought David ought to go to Tangier. How difficult to know! But I do feel he ought to stay with Phil and Elena and so be under Eduardo’s protection.”

  The second bomb to fall on York Gate was an incendiary that burnt out the house. That night (9 May as far as I can make out) Alan and Poppy happened not to be there. Mrs Kay and her two sons were unharmed. “I send her a handshake.” Jessie was rather perfunctory considering how lucky everybody had been, and that now we had no home to come back to. Her final letters from Cannes show that she was in several minds. She is sorry that Poppy can’t have me back. “I made a false move when I brought him here instead of taking him to Granny, but we can’t always see how things are going to turn out.” She explains, “Fate has decided that I shall go with the Proppers which is much against my will. I had so hoped I would be able to hand you over your little boy. There have been plenty of chances which we have not taken as we all agreed we were sending him into danger. Anyway you must think, and know, that we’ve done for the best where he is concerned. The voyage from here to Lisbon is terrible, everyone is agreed on that point. If we go with Eduardo it is not so terrible, in two hours we are at Lisbon by air, the family will be separated again, it will only be for a short time.”

  The departure from Cannes of the Propper parents and children, the two nannies and me – seven of us in all, because Max and Lily chose to remain behind – was on 5 July 1941. The heavy luggage went separately via Marseilles and Oran. Be
tween us, we carried 21 bits of hand luggage and parcels, including the little pigskin suitcase that I clung to. Accompanying us was a Mrs FL – unidentified, presumably English – who claimed to know Alan and promised to deliver photographs of me to him. “We are on the move again,” Jessie writes, “but with all these ups and downs I can’t seem to put my mind to letter-writing.” The crucial letter containing some information is on paper of the Ritz Hotel in Madrid but undated. In it, Jessie says the journey has been very tiring for everyone. We were detained at the frontier for four hours. Missing the train, she goes on, we went into the station buffet “where we all ate two bananas each and a bottle of lemonade.” Dinner was in a hotel nearby “and they did put it away.” Woken at three in the morning, an hour later we caught the train to Barcelona. “They brought up fourteen boiled eggs for our breakfast,” Bubbles and Philip each ate three. “I am not sorry in a way to change places, it was necessary for the children’s food question.” Her weight has gone down 14 kilos. During this part of the journey I lost my purse with 80 francs in it, and Eduardo lost the box with his brand new official hat in it, but no name or address on it.

  After a pause in Madrid, we went by train from Cádiz to Algeciras and then by boat to Tangier, landing finally in Morocco on 24 July. The Minzah Hotel was, and still is, a repository of the Oriental charm of which Edward Said so disapproved. On arrival, we ordered a meal. The waiter who brought it to the rooms wore a red tarboosh that set off his white jacket. His spherical figure showed that he was a serious eater. Watching us devour the food, he stayed wobbling with laughter and pleasure, becoming an instant living legend for us as The Fat Man of the Minzah. That night I slept for the first time in the mysterious half-light of a mosquito net.