Priscilla (21 page)

A report on 16 June that the British Government had offered to join France and England together in a Franco-British Union was the last mention of the subject. On 17 June, Priscilla heard the dry coughing voice of an eighty-four-year-old man saying that he had asked the enemy to put an end to hostilities and that he would remain with them in the dark days as the new head of the government. ‘Nous, Philippe Pétain . . .' The plural was majestic, comforting. A narcissistic and doddery philanderer who fell asleep at cabinet meetings had woken with a jerk to find himself king.

Pétain made no mention of England's position, merely hinted that the Old Enemy had failed France. ‘In June 1918 we had 85 English Divisions with us . . . in June 1940 we had ten English Divisions.' Priscilla was aware that she had straightened in her chair. ‘The attitude taken by Mr Churchill is inexcusable.' When she heard Pétain say that France owed its disasters to the ‘people's love of pleasure' and to ‘too few babies' her eyes met Yolande's and Priscilla knew that her time was running out.

On 25 June, the Armistice came into force. Its terms were not divulged, but Yolande and Georgette took for granted that it would bring about their men's release and that the invasion of England was imminent. Weygand's
opinion: ‘Britain won't wait a week before negotiating with the Reich.' The navy's head, Admiral Darlan, was certain that England would be completely conquered by Germany within five weeks.

Yolande was in the hall, moving forward the hands of the clock. As Priscilla stepped outside into the unmowed grass, she saw grey feathers and black ash. The chateau was no longer languorous, but stifling. She walked down the avenue to the village, now occupied by a German parachute division.

Sainteny had sent 200 men to fight in the First World War. Sixty did not come back and their houses had remained empty. The majority of those who did return were invalids; or, like Robert, they remained traumatised by their experience. One veteran who watched German troops enter Sainteny that summer fell on his face with the shock.

Jacqueline Hodey remembered the morning when the Germans arrived. ‘On 17 June, at 11a.m. they made a tour of the place and they came into our grocer's shop. They were wearing helmets and machine guns. One took his bayonet off and we thought we'd be killed. But he was looking for butter.'

No one could get over the amount of French butter Les Fritz ate. They wolfed it straight off the slab like ice cream.

Vehicles surged night and day through the narrow streets. Dark green tanks with black-goggled faces taking in the tower of Saint-Pierre from the open turrets; troop-carriers; motorbikes with sidecars, canvas-covered wagons with branches on them. Robert's general in Rouen had possessed not one detailed map of the region under his command. These men knew every lane.

And how strong and handsome and young they looked. It had needed only half a million of them to rout a French army ten times the size.

French newspapers had trumpeted that German soldiers had nothing to dress in but rags. They survived on a diet of ‘fishless fish paste'. Their tanks were made out of cardboard. But the men who marched in neat grey-green uniforms past Sainteny's graveyard, singing their songs, past the Mairie draped with a swastika, looked like film stars: proud, healthy, tanned. ‘They must really have been chosen,' a woman told me who had watched them. ‘They
looked straight ahead like effigies, like something abstract, like symbols. And as the day went on, more people came into the street – and more smiling people. “But look, they behave correctly.”'

The villagers had heard of their brutal behaviour in Poland, but Jacqueline Hodey recalled only one instance of violence in those early days, when the Germans requisitioned the teacher's car and manhandled two lady teachers who objected. Otherwise, the men who occupied the vacant houses were very polite as they emptied your petrol tanks, very disciplined. Two of them, simple NCOs – after seventy-one years she could remember their names, Hans Schumann and Albert Jung – were billeted upstairs, in rooms next to her. Jacqueline's mother forbade her to talk to them.

German soldiers stripped outside the grocery to wash their naked torsos from the water pump. It troubled the priest, Henri Yon, the way the young women of his parish lingered to watch these blond barbarians shave or perform their gymnastics. ‘They are sons of the devil, you'll catch a disease.' But it was hard to tear your eyes away.

‘It was like being fascinated by a snake,' a woman wrote. These men doing their outdoor exercises in short red swimming trunks were so unlike the pitiable shambles of the French army – the columns of defeated poilus whom the Germans marched through the village to an unknown destination, heads lowered, spattered in mud and blood, uniforms ripped, falling down with fatigue. So unlike Robert – wherever he was.

At the entrance to the oak avenue, a German soldier stopped Priscilla. ‘I was asked to show a proof of my identity so I showed my driving licence. This had British written on it, but I kept my thumb over the dreaded word and was allowed to pass.'

German planes flew continually over, heading north. After France, England.

Priscilla had become an alien with the signing of the Armistice. It was forbidden to speak English. Forbidden to listen to the English wireless. ‘The English tell us only lies.' But if she reversed the positions of the aerial and earth leads, closed the doors and windows and kept the volume turned low, she could hear her father's voice talking about tinned food.

Tyres on the gravel. A German officer in a scarlet-lined cloak. He strode into the house, down the corridor, past the smoke-cracked portraits, saluted Adelaide in her wheelchair. He was requisitioning the chateau.

Most officers found billets in Sainteny. ‘But the Grand Capitaine lodged at Boisgrimot,' Jacqueline Hodey said.

The Captain left it to the Doynels to decide which rooms they required for themselves; he promised to treat these as out of bounds. His men would live in farm buildings or in tents.

In the summer heat, the Captain's men lay on the grass with their shirts off, studying maps of England and plotting the inevitable invasion. The crossing of the Channel was a formality. See that moat, it was no wider than that. President Roosevelt shared General Weygand's view: ‘The show is over. I don't think Great Britain can hold out.' The Germans planned to put ashore 90,000 men in the first wave in a simultaneous landing from Folkestone to Brighton. In a few weeks' time, the Captain would march into SPB's favourite pub in Shoreham and, after shooting dead the publican, tell his men to help themselves. England was doomed. England was everyone's enemy. England stood in the way of the new order which every day brought a fresh decree.

There were so many decrees, it was hard to catch up. Robert's shotguns were to be handed in at the Mairie. The Tricolore was banned, the word Boche forbidden. Clocks had to be moved forward an hour to Berlin time. You could not go outside between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

In their bewilderment, the Doynel women were like every wife, daughter and mother of an estimated 1.8 million French prisoners of war. All they cared about was for their captured husbands to be freed. Three empty chairs kept the men's places at dinner.

The days passed. Still no news of Georges, Guy, Robert. At the belote table, the women laid out their cards and waited as they used to wait for the sound of male voices bringing back pheasants and rabbits. The Captain thought their husbands would be home soon. If they were alive. He told Yolande that British soldiers in France had been paid twenty times more
than French soldiers. And in surprisingly good French reminded her that it was England who had got France into this war, England who had deserted her.

A chill went through the room in the first week of July. To prevent the ships from falling into German hands, the English had opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, killing 1,297 French sailors. The Maréchal sounded incandescent.

On 4 July, France broke off diplomatic relations. Pierre Laval, the man appointed by Pétain to lead his government, spoke from Vichy: ‘France has never had and never will have a more inveterate enemy than Great Britain. Our whole history bears witness to that . . . I see only one way to restore France to the position to which she is entitled: namely, to ally ourselves resolutely with Germany and to confront England together.'

The family mood had shifted. When Priscilla looked at Adelaide's face, it seemed familiar but unrecognisable, like the street in Carentan that had been renamed after Pétain.

In a stream of bulletins, the Maréchal promoted his new order of Family, Work, Fatherland; in each area, Priscilla was made to feel by her in-laws as if his decrees were a direct response to her shortcomings. On 4 August, Pétain ordained it compulsory for beach-goers to wear knee-length two-piece bathing costumes. ‘No more shorts, no more French women disguised as men – La Révolution Nationale marche.'

Furtively upstairs, Priscilla struggled to tune in to the BBC. The Home Service transmitted on medium wave in three wavelengths and on short wave in two, including, since February 1940, a new
Programme for Forces
. But it was harder to pick up than before. A radio station was a beacon to anyone flying towards it; to avoid giving help to the Germans, the BBC had established a system ‘which confused the transmission from the navigational point of view'. Reception was apt to be good during daylight hours, but poor after sunset and liable to deteriorate during air raids.

Priscilla was only twisting a knob. Even so, it was dangerous what she was doing. The act of listening to her father constituted ‘wireless crime',
punishable by up to two years in prison – and in extreme cases, later on in the Occupation, death.

One evening, Yolande surprised Priscilla adjusting the angle of the wireless on the window sill, desperate to hear a matter-of-fact English voice. Priscilla waited for her to say, ‘Isn't it time you made up your mind?'

The French radio to which they listened downstairs was predicting that the invasion was days away. Very soon the English would be sharing in this defeat. And then Georges would come back and the Germans would leave, perhaps.

Some whole days they managed not to talk of their missing husbands, the war. Georgette, who had hurriedly married Guy in May, scissored up an old grey bed sheet and showed them how to sew it into blouses. Priscilla collected the dogs' clippings to make a sweater. Yolande, doing something with a tablecloth, had learned that the children of the Belgian king were living on the other side of Carentan with their gym teacher.

Convinced that ‘Il faut s'arranger avec eux', Yolande could be overheard making nervous boasts to the Captain about her German connections, the Westphalian cousins, Georges' chalet in Kitzbühel. Her small mouth was laughing. She dropped Georgette's name, now that Alsace was part of the Reich. She watched Priscilla take a candle to bed, as if she was going to signal the enemy.

12 July. Her twenty-fourth birthday. Priscilla celebrated it with a walk through the fields. Monsieur Carer, the steward, in a black jacket and a streak of mud on his shoe, took her aside and warned her to be careful of denunciations. And to avoid a certain woman from the village, Yvonne Finel. One word to the Kommandantur about a ‘sale Anglaise' living in the chateau . . . Madame Robert must do nothing to alert anyone's suspicion.

She learned to accept the news from Monsieur Virette, the town carpenter, as though she was hearing it for the first time. Ex-Prime Minister Blum's arrival in Argentina with a sackful of jewels. De Gaulle's death sentence. The destruction of London. She betrayed none of her worries to Monsieur Philippe when he insisted on giving her a punnet of his gooseberries, wanting to know who was going to bring in the harvest.

The champing of the German horses kept her awake at night. She thought of Rottingdean and felt a pang for rolling downs and white cliffs. Seagulls flew in front of her windows, mimicking the planes still passing overhead. Monsieur Carer said the birds had come in from the ports looking for waste food. She watched them settle greedily in the furrows behind the tractor that Monsieur Bezard was driving up and down, sowing ‘only products decreed by the German authority'. The buggy which had collected her from Carentan now lumbered with wooden boxes to the station, packed with meat and butter for the Reich. Another decree banned shooting. Priscilla had never seen so many hares in the fields, so many pheasants strutting along the hedgerows. How envious Robert would be, she thought.

Had he survived? If so, was he wounded? Was he getting proper medical attention? The Captain had confiscated the Doynel limousine and her Simca, but she persuaded Monsieur Carer to ride her to Carentan so that she could scour the list of prisoners and casualties outside the train station. In the middle of August one afternoon, she watched a woman younger than herself stagger back.

And still they waited. During the last war, someone remembered, many German soldiers were not repatriated until 1921.

On 23 August, a new decree: Englishwomen had to go daily to their local police station to sign a book. Priscilla heard the news before her sister-in-law hastened to bring it to her. She had decided not to notice Yolande, but turned at once to the window when she walked into the room. ‘What are you going to do?' She realised Yolande was speaking to her. Confronted with her own deliberately unseeing reflection, Priscilla was frozen by a vision of Winnie with her father and their two daughters in Shoreham. Ignore it, Priscilla replied. ‘I reckoned that I could pass as a Frenchwoman any time.'

Across the room a white nose flaunted its hostility. Georgette, too, had a doubting smile. The problem of Priscilla continued to absorb them until, in a flurry of news, all three sisters-in-law learned that their husbands were alive.

Georges had been ‘lucky as usual and was in the Free Zone'. He had reached the south of France after evading capture at Evreux; he was expected at Boisgrimot shortly.