Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  Leaving me with Jessie, Poppy in her green tweed WVS uniform with mauve trimmings was away a good deal in London, settling refugees, interpreting, arranging transport and shelter. The nannies had seen to it that she spoke English without an accent. A refugee herself, she had around her a few people from her past. On 28 December 1941, Kenneth Rae was the first guest to sign the Castle Hill visitors’ book. Four weeks later, his sister Gwynedd stayed. Both lived with their old mother at Knowles Bank, a short walk away through Harry’s woods whose chestnut trees were cropped for hop-poles. We’d have tea and play spillikins with old Mrs Rae. Gwynedd wrote and illustrated books about Mary Plain, an adventurous bear from the Berne bear-pits and a prototype for Paddington Bear. Mary Plain’s admirers included the Owl Man, evidently modelled on Kenneth Rae and drawn with unmistakable likeness. In one of these books, my six-year-old self plays a part under my own name. The drawing, also very lifelike, shows me holding the little pigskin suitcase that had come with me from Vichy France.

  Elisabeth de Waal was the one and only relation Poppy had in England. A cousin through the Ephrussi connection, she and her brother Ignaz – Iggy – had spent the First War in Meidling and they both recalled Baron Gustav. In his book her grandson Edmund de Waal captures her independent spirit; he also arranged the publication of a fine novel she had written about the complex attitudes she encountered returning to Vienna after the war. She and her Dutch husband had finished up in Bletchington Road in suburban Tunbridge Wells. We’d bicycle there to hear tales about Mitzi and good old days. Her eldest son, Tascha, became Dean of Canterbury, a deserter in uniform Eugène would have called him. In a cottage in the nearby village of Pembury was Mary Apponyi, a close friend from Vienna. Born into the Hungarian aristocracy, she had married Anthony Irby, then an officer in the Rifle Brigade. Their three sons were my friends. Mary had beautiful, proud looks, and a temperament to match. She and Poppy egged one another on. Once when Mary had come to tea, the two of them laughed so much they started chucking sandwiches and scones at one another. (Poppy lived long enough to know that Mary had died of cancer.)

  The Castle Hill visitors’ book all the same testifies to vestiges of the pre-war social round. Among guests were Raymond Mortimer, Cyril Connolly, Patrick Kinross, Janet and Reynolds Stone, and James Pope-Hennessy. Noel Annan’s bald head gleamed as he stooped over the bed to kiss me goodnight. Commissioned by Alan, Kenneth Rowntree stayed for a month to do a water-colour of the house. Stanley Morison of the Times Literary Supplement came to sound out whether Alan might succeed him as its editor. Every so often Harry and Vere visited. In the hope that I would be as good a shot as him, Harry gave me a single-barrel 410. I had permission to shoot rabbits, and Mr Carter taught me to skin them. Adrian, now a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards, brought Betty Elliot, a cousin of Poppy’s childhood friend Lulu Esmond. Independent and generous, Betty cared for him with a devotion that was surely unrequited love. Passionate about the theatre and opera, she introduced us after the war to famous friends of hers in the musical world, Tito Gobbi, Carlo Maria Giulini and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Torpedoed during an Atlantic convoy, Guy de Rothschild had survived many days on a raft, and came to Castle Hill whenever he could. The close encounter with death by starvation or drowning had left him gaunt and white. To me, he was another of the men winning the war.

  “David is very intelligent,” Poppy boasted in correspondence to Aline de Gunzbourg. She kept my French going by reciting or reading French poetry with me. My French accent, she and Alan feared, would not be understood by boys my own age, and accordingly I might be bullied. Kent College for Girls was at the edge of Pembury, a little more than a mile away, and it had already admitted one other boy. Neil Willson and his parents, Sir Walter and Lady Willson, lived in a house a few hundred yards from the school. The headmistress was prepared to make another exception for me. Neil had a splendid train set that I envied. Out of pure mischief, one cold day when he and I were alone in the grounds, I pushed him fully dressed into the deep end of the swimming pool. He could not swim. There was nobody to help us. As he was gasping and going under the water again I could just reach his outstretched hand, and with difficulty pull him out. By the time I got home, Poppy was waiting in the porch, to greet me with, “What have you done?”

  The girls were not bullies, it was true, but between lessons they were likely to take me into a convenient shed and remove my clothes. We were all far too young to go any further. Miss Earnshaw (as I shall call her) taught the class. Blond and with sparkling blue eyes, she was very attractive, very energetic and I felt something close to love for her. She wanted us to learn about things like wild flowers. In the course of one lesson, she happened to remark that Jews were wicked, the war was their fault, they had wanted it. I sat up. We came into this somehow. I had heard of Jews without knowing who or what they were, and here was Miss Earnshaw dropping a clue that sounded like an opening to the adult world. After school, I could hardly wait to tell Poppy. We went out of the door at the back of the house. In a corner of the field where I used to shoot rabbits was a ruined orchard. Poppy sat on the trunk of a fallen apple tree, and said, You’ve been with the family and you know them all, do you think they wanted the war? In order to lose everything and have to run for their lives away from home? I asked if they really were Jews and we went through them one by one: Granny yes, Uncle Max yes, Aunty Bubbles yes, Aunty Lily yes – and then Poppy herself, Yes. So why had this pretty teacher been making things up like this? We went back to the house and Poppy drove off to the school.

  In Alan’s papers is an unpublished poem, “Ash Vale 1940.”

  Under the Surrey common, the horrible cheap hotel

  A wind roared round in the dark like a sea-shell

  Killed the Capstan smoke, the bitter-slops on a tiled table,

  Guzzling up the dust, winnowing the foul bath of beard-stubble,

  Bucking the bed, the stiff Tate Gallery bed where I was

  Loving in oils the accurate body splashed on the canvas.

  Our bed kicked. I worked a poor seam, used a scrap of night

  Mining for sex in the usual discomfort and plain fright,

  When to the brilliantine pillow that wind came; and there

  Suddenly a diamond shone in the roots of his hair

  And live love, the expensive and successful, burst like a next-door

  Neighbour in the room, calling us names and shocking for

  The reckless, the impossible, the huge catastrophe,

  Bullying us with the size of the moment. But we

  Lay fascinated, spilled and blown, shiftily.

  Lightly deleted on the typescript, the concluding word originally had been “wonderingly,” which would have transformed this account of a chance sexual encounter into open celebration. “Shiftily” implies guilt. “You and your pansy friends,” Poppy sometimes said. For much of the war, Alan was away from Castle Hill, and she cannot have been privy to “the huge catastrophe” of his private secrets.

  From the War Office Alan was posted to Bletchley. His particular responsibility was the battle order of the German army. This involved analysing everything from Enigma and other sources that might indicate the likely performance of units in the field: where in Germany the men had been recruited and trained, whether morale was high or low, what equipment they had. Attention was paid to the character of senior officers, their political convictions, the strengths and weaknesses that might be clues to their responses and decisions. One colleague was Eric Birley, whose area of scholarship was the battle order of the Roman army. For security reasons, everyone employed at Bletchley was forbidden to keep a diary. Alan regretted that he had not recorded this period of his life, and almost invariably claimed he couldn’t remember anything about it. Bletchley, he once summed up, “was a place where the office boys quoted T. S. Eliot and whistled themes from Bartók.”

  In 1943 John Murray published on behalf of the Ministry of War a paperback of sixty pages with the title The Enemy, a coll
ection of photographs edited by Alan (the hyphen omitted from his surname) from material at Bletchley. My imagination moved on from Mary Plain. The cover shows a helmeted German soldier holding by the handle the grenade he is about to throw. Here are other Wehrmacht soldiers, parachute troops and members of the S. S. Totenkopf division in action, manning mortars and machine-guns, and the whole range of artillery. At the time I knew by heart the captions under photographs of the tanks and guns we were up against. With Jessie beside me, I spent hours at the table in our room drawing maps of the various fronts where these men and their weapons were engaged. We had crayons to mark positions with national flags, a little swastika and hammer and sickle out in Eastern Europe, the Union Jack in the Western desert, the tricolore at Bir Hakeim.

  A day came early in June 1944 when military traffic started to build up on the road that ran in front of the house. After some hours the three-ton trucks had become an interminable slow-moving convoy. I sat on the five-bar gate at the entrance to Castle Hill as this tremendous force ground up the hill towards Mr Hickmott’s house and so on to the Channel and D-Day. The men in the trucks were solemn and silent. In the afternoon, the bomber squadrons came over one after the other in continuous formations as though the skies were picked out with a pattern of black dots. Two Mustang fighters collided. One pilot bailed out somewhere over the horizon. The other plane crashed several fields beyond the ruined orchard where Poppy and I had talked. By the time I joined the little crowd that had gathered to gape, the wreckage had been on fire and the charred figure of the pilot was silhouetted in the cockpit.

  In the dawn some days later I was woken up by a spluttering across the sky overhead. I hurried to the window, and there was a missile flying close and low in the direction of London. Castle Hill was directly in the flight path of the V1s. And then there was another. Within days, anti-aircraft batteries surrounded the house and barrage balloons rose like giant mushrooms. Talkative elderly men for the most part, the gunners spent much of their time drinking tea in the kitchen. However incessantly they fired, they never hit anything, and we had become accustomed to the racket.

  Tomatoes were growing in the vegetable bed planted up against the wall of the granary close to the house. Poppy and I were out there to pick what we could when without warning a V1 came over. On its tail was a Spitfire firing bursts to shoot it down. Beginning to veer and lose height, the V1 looked as if it must hit the house. Bullets from the Spitfire’s guns thudded across the garden and against the end wall of the house. Next to the tomato plants, Poppy pulled me down on the path and lay on top of me. It happened too quickly for me to feel the deep fear of death or to appreciate what Poppy had done.

  Ironing in her room upstairs, Jessie thought that the crumps behind her back meant that a fuse had blown, and so her reaction was to switch off the electricity. At what seemed the last moment, the V1 glided over and landed a few hundred yards away in woods belonging to Harry on the far side of the main road. We were among the first to get there. Eventually a small crowd stood around the crater in which the V1 was stuck, its fin more or less at eye level. The Home Guard figure or ARP warden who arrived was absurdly wearing a tin helmet. He started copying down in a notebook the instructions in black lettering on the fuselage, and saying what a pity it was that none of us could translate them. Poppy stepped forward and he took down her dictation.

  As I lay in bed that night I could see stars through the holes in the wall where Jessie had been standing.

  FIFTEEN

  Post-Mortem

  FIRST TO RETURN to Royaumont was Uncle Adrian. A fortnight or so after D-Day the Guards Armoured Division had landed in Normandy. He and Rex Whistler had been in the same company, two aesthetes in the unlikely role of commanding tanks. In paintings done in the early years of the war, Whistler had portrayed Adrian in uniform, reading a book in the officers’ mess. In action, Adrian had seen him climb out of his tank to help another that had been hit, only to be decapitated by a shell.

  The German general quartered in Royaumont had taken care of it. Nothing had been stolen from the house except the leather, cut off chairs and even golf bags, destined presumably for Wehrmacht boots. On high ground nearby, the Germans had prepared defensive positions, and had they not pulled out in time the house almost certainly would have been destroyed. In the second week of September 1944 Adrian liberated it by walking up the terrace steps and slipping a note under the closed and locked main door.

  Without the Spanish flag flying there thanks to Eduardo, Royaumont would have been expropriated as property abandoned by its Jewish owners. That was not his only service to Royaumont. Called up to the army, Marcel Vernois the estate manager had been taken prisoner in the collapse of 1940, and sent to some camp in Germany. Eduardo negotiated his release and Marcel protected the family’s interests throughout the occupation. He could be relied on to do the right thing. Bombers and fighter escorts passed regularly over Royaumont. Marcel was watching a dogfight one day when an Allied fighter plane was shot down. The pilot managed a parachute jump that was bound to land him in the Royaumont woods. Marcel hurried to the spot. The pilot had injuries. Having done his best to bury the parachute, Marcel got the pilot as fast as he could to the farm and hid him there. The Germans had also seen the pilot coming down, and they soon discovered the parachute in the woods. Searching the farm but finding nothing, they suspected Marcel and threatened to put him up against the wall. If they shot him, he replied, they wouldn’t be able to find out anything from him.

  The hide-out was never discovered. Bicycling down from Viarmes in full view of any Germans who might be on duty, Dr Darène treated the injured pilot. His courage was also undoubted. At the back of his very bald head was a huge disfiguring hole where he had operated on himself, looking into a mirror to gouge out a tumour. When the pilot had recovered, Marcel and Dr Darène contacted the network specialising in returning shot-down airmen, and they sent him back to England. On a page of the Royaumont visitors’ book is the entry, “Flight Lieutenant Tony Vidler, arrived the first time (unwillingly!) by parachute 20.4.1944. Stayed until 21. 5. 1944. Arrived second time (willingly) 12.12.1946.”

  Visas to travel to France were virtually unobtainable. Poppy pleaded that she had a French family and it says something about her will and ability to pull strings that six short weeks after the end of the war she was at Royaumont. Another entry in that visitors’ book reads, “Thérèse Pryce-Jones (née Fould-Springer) left 2 February 1940, returned 23 June 1945.” On the terrace that summer she was photographed with Adrian still in battle dress and so presumably on leave, come back to celebrate. Again on the terrace, Mitzi’s four children lined up for a photograph of their homecoming. Max’s letter to his mother about the occasion prompted an entry in her diary, “Max was impressed by Poppy who has turned into a grand little woman.” For her part Poppy found that “Max has aged terribly and alas, his eyes are full of anxiety,” which led Mitzi to reflect, “I wouldn’t be astonished if that poor old boy went off his head. What a sad life he has had because of his odd mentality.” After five years of separation she still could not query a bed-rock conviction that where her children were concerned she was always the innocent and wrongfully harmed party. So Max’s odd mentality was the cause of his sad life, rather than her spontaneous suppression of him.

  Poppy had travelled alone. Alan was away in Vienna, a liaison officer with the Russians, coincidentally but conveniently stationed next to Meidling at Schönbrunn. I was refused a visa for France and in any case my English accent had improved enough for me to move on to Beachborough, a preparatory school in Northamptonshire, selected sight unseen because my cousin Philip had spent a term there before the war. In honour of the German surrender, the boys were given a holiday. That same day, The Times published photographs of the dead and dying discovered in concentration camps in Germany. Mr Chapple, the headmaster, pinned this page up on the school notice board. We stood about in the corridor silent before the reality of mass-murder.

  P
reparing her return to Europe, Mitzi was selling her apartment in Montreal and packing up a quantity of possessions to be shipped. She had Canadian friends and for the longest time in her life had been her own cook. In a writing desk of hers, I once found a notebook in which she had recorded income on the left-hand page and expenditure on the right-hand page. Day after day, she had placed a single Canadian dollar on the kitchen table for Frank, pocket money for a drink, but only one. “My angel,” as she makes plain in her diaries, had had quite enough of Canada. On 8 August they sailed on a Danish liner, the Euria, from New York. “I am not frightened of hardship in Europe,” she told herself, but, “I should so much rather live anywhere than in France.” She makes some immediate but banal reflections on the atom bomb and typically derives sentimental satisfaction from the fact that, while she was at sea, peace with Japan was declared on 14 August, which would have been Eugène’s sixty-ninth birthday.

  Docking at Liverpool, by chance encountering their old friend Noël Coward in the station, they made their way to London, to the Dorchester Hotel. “I was alone when my little one arrived. We were just pure joy and delight. Just kissed and hugged and laughed. She found me quite unchanged and she is a magnificent little lady…. Then we called up David. Can’t note all the wonderful stories Poppy told about him. He said, ‘I must say I don’t remember you, Granny, but I am so happy to see you soon.’ etc. etc.” When at last my mother brought me round to the Dorchester, “My angel took him to have his hair cut, they got on like a house on fire and a lovely sight they are together.”