Priscilla (22 page)

Guy had been captured and sent to a POW camp in Germany.

The Red Cross communicated Robert's fate in a salmon pink postcard pre-printed with phrases, all crossed out with a pencil except for the seventh: ‘I am a prisoner and in good health.' He was in a camp near Chartres.

‘I immediately decided to go and see him.'

Not waiting to welcome Georges home, Priscilla took a train to Chartres. She passed through a landscape littered with derelict cars and prams. She saw no men working in the fields, only women.

The street signs of Chartres were in German, in unfamiliar Gothic letters. A soldier at the Kommandantur issued her with the wrong pass – to a POW camp outside the city. When she reached it, Priscilla was told that her husband was on a farm a few miles away. She started walking. A German truck stopped and picked her up and dropped her in a village that she identifies only as ‘C.'

In a field on the far side of C she recognised a dreadfully thin figure leaning over a wooden gate. Robert. She had been impatient to see him, but the badly shaven man who looked at her was in total shock. His hands began to shake. He was in such a state that she did not know if she should kiss him. Tears fell down his face, the only sign that he knew who she was. He fumbled to wipe them away and his eyes stared at her and he smiled.

She walked with him to a café in C where, over a lukewarm chicory coffee, he told her what had happened since they last saw each other three months ago. He had fled Rouen on foot – his battalion reduced from 1,200 to a few sergeants and corporals. No orders. No officers – they had taken off in staff cars. Not even a bicycle. A lorry had come loaded with bicycles from Belgium, but the prices rocketed from 25 francs at the time of Priscilla's departure to 1,000 francs. Robert had stuffed a serviette into the barrel of his rifle as a sign of surrender, and walked and walked towards the south, walking until his shoes flapped apart. He had stolen chickens and lived off half-eaten meals in houses that had been hastily abandoned. Eventually, he arrived in
Tours – France's capital for two days – only to find that the bridge had been blown up. Robert stood on the riverbank, looking at the dead fish in the water and wondering how to cross the Loire, when the Germans arrested him. His rifle was taken away and crushed under a tank. The tears started to fall again.

In Chartres, a group of women had famously smeared themselves with mustard to sting the Germans if they raped them. But the women were left alone, and French soldiers once taken prisoner were not harmed; in the case of Robert, they were not even guarded.

Robert spoke reasonable German and mentioned to his captors that he knew about agriculture. After a few weeks in a camp, he was put to work on a farm, digging up potatoes. The work was hard, he was not treated well. He did not know when he would be freed.

Priscilla tried to sound upbeat. ‘But you have no guards, why don't you escape? I'll come again and bring you civilian clothes and we will both get down to the Unoccupied Zone.'

Dejected, Robert looked at her. She did not understand. If he escaped, the Germans would retaliate and seize his lands or imprison his mother.

Her husband's defeatist attitude touched a rebellious nerve in Priscilla. ‘Damn his mother and his lands. This was an opportunity too good to miss. From the south of France we could get to Spain and perhaps even to England.'

She asked: ‘What am I supposed to do?'

But Robert had frozen up. He told her, staring at his hands: ‘I can't make any decisions.'

They spent the night together on the farm. She brought him up to date with the situation at Boisgrimot, the fate of Guy in Germany, Georges' imminent return. In the morning, he told her to go back to Normandy and ask Georges for advice. His brother was head of the family. He would know what to do.

Priscilla had no suspicion of the murky discussions which had been taking place at the Doynel stronghold.

A civilised new officer had come to the chateau, a German doctor with the parachute division. ‘For him, uniforms meant nothing,' said Joseph Carer,
the steward's son. The doctor was a morphologist, interested in the shape of people's skulls. He announced to Joseph one day, after inspecting the boy's mouse-coloured hair: ‘You're not from Brittany. You are from southern east Europe.' It chimed with a story that Joseph's parents had told him about his first ancestors. How knights on the First Crusade, on their way home from Jerusalem, found an orphan by the side of the road, shoved him up on to their saddle and brought him back to Brittany.

The story alarmed the Doynels. If a German doctor, by the mere act of glancing at little Joseph's head, could tell where his family came from 700 years before, how soon before he recognised Priscilla's origins? He had no suspicion – yet – when he greeted Priscilla in the hall that he was saluting an English national, possibly because he had not measured her skull. Like the Captain, he assumed the young Vicomtesse to be French. But the local historian believed that Priscilla made ‘a monumental error' when she insisted on holding on to her English passport, which had enabled her to travel unchallenged through the French streets only three months before. ‘She believed her British identity would protect her. In July, August 1940, perhaps – but after that . . .'

Priscilla refused when Yolande bustled her into the bathroom and hissed that she had to flush her passport down the lavatory. Like France, she was physically occupied, but some part of Priscilla's mental space must have felt free through keeping her British papers – her last link to England and to her father. ‘The fact that I had retained my British nationality didn't strike me as being important.' That was until the Captain ‘put up notices to the effect that any inhabitant hiding a British subject would be shot'.

On 15 October, the Kommandantur in Paris published a decree to come into force on 20 October. ‘As of this moment any citizen sheltering or housing a British citizen must immediately declare the name of this person and their whereabouts, and consequently any person found negligent of this act will be condemned to death.' This notice ‘produced a big impression upon my mother-in-law'.

The catastrophe that awaited her had been smouldering since the Armistice. She had taken it for granted that the family would protect her, but Yolande
was right: Priscilla was not one of them. Word had got back about her behaviour in the jazz cafés of Rouen. Priscilla's close relationship with her mother-in-law was over.

On his arrival home, Georges held an urgent family conference about Robert's English wife. Beside the carved stone fireplace? In the drawing room? Outside, in the oak avenue where the Germans exercised their horses? Details of this crucial moment are not entered into any diary. I can only speculate where it took place and who was present. Yolande? Tante Priscilla's nephews and nieces? Georgette, who had become known to locals as ‘l'Autrichienne' – the Austrian? Gillian Sutro was always doubtful about Georgette's attitude to Priscilla, suspecting that she may have intended to denounce her. Did Adelaide attend? Or did the old lady prefer to leave it to her son, and remain in bed, sipping Joseph's milk, her thin hair gathered in a knot behind her head, while Georges made his way upstairs to tell a stunned Priscilla of the Doynels' plan for her?

At Vichy, France's former Prime Minister Leon Blum had watched ‘all the courage and integrity one knew certain men possessed disappear before my eyes, corroded and dissolved in a human swamp'. There is no doubt that Priscilla came to feel that this was how the Doynels had behaved. But although she could be forgiven for feeling betrayed, it does not fairly describe their treatment of her.

Robert's family was, in a sense, powerless; the old belle-mère, the daughters-in-law, the brother and heir. Germany had won the war in six weeks; England was about to fall. No one could imagine how long the Germans would stay – the writer Vercors believed that the Occupation might last another hundred years. And Georges, as head of the family, was the sort of local worthy whom the Nazis took hostage to ensure that the local population behaved themselves. The presence among them of a twenty-four-year-old potential Fifth Columnist was a threat to a dynasty which was supple in defending its interests, and limited in its choices. Perhaps it would have been different had Priscilla given Robert a child, but Georges was the only Doynel brother on the spot. If Priscilla was so pig-headed that she would not give up her British
passport, why should the Doynels risk death to protect her? Every single person in the village would have known that she was English.

What she remembered was how rigid Georges looked. ‘You can't stay here.' The voice was emphatic. His polished round spectacles enhanced his ragged expression. ‘My mother is too old to run the risk of hiding you. Go back to your flat in Paris and go to the police.'

‘As usual I did what I was told.' Terrified, she caught a train to Paris and registered with the Préfecture as an enemy alien. The German military authorities ordered the young Vicomtesse to sign a book daily at her local police station. She was not to leave her apartment in Rue Nollet after sunset, the city at any time, and Robert's wireless was taken away, although not her telephone. ‘Life in Paris,' she wrote about the next two months, ‘was far from gay.' She lived through these weeks in a haze.

The waiter in her usual café glanced at Priscilla curiously. The tables were grey with Germans taking advantage of the official policy: ‘Jeder Einmal nach Paris' – everyone must visit Paris once. She no longer fitted. Everywhere she looked there were Germans. Speeding past in sleek open cars; on the balconies of the Hôtel Meurice, reading and smoking and, except for small bathing slips, naked beneath their peaked hats.

She soon went through the money that Georges had thrust into her hand. Pinned to the bolted door of the British Embassy, now being used as a furniture depository, a note advised her to seek help at the US embassy, where she was eligible for a relief payment of £10 a month. The deputy British Consul had reported to London in July that the distress of British subjects was growing more acute every day. There was concern that with not enough men to gather or sow the crops ‘something like famine conditions' would soon prevail. ‘Maybe the BBC would authorise a week's good cause appeal to such cases.' But the British government had priorities closer to home.

At Boisgrimot early in September, Priscilla had heard on Paris Radio that a bomb had hit Victoria Station. ‘Bombs fall all over the place, and the fires flame up. Thick clouds of smoke spread over the roofs of the greatest city in
the world.' The Luftwaffe strafed the city again the following night, and for fifty-five consecutive nights.

Rumour in France was that 250,000 troops were about to land on the south coast of England. A mysterious gas used to capture the fort at Liège was to be released over Britain to send the population to sleep. Priscilla pictured Piccadilly with German soldiers goose-stepping up it towards Eros, Nazi officers in Bendicks, a red and black flag draped over the upper floors of the Ritz.

Dancing was forbidden while the Germans made their final preparations to cross the Channel. The silence at night was that of the countryside around Boisgrimot, a bark, a car accelerating, the stammer of a telephone, the hollow tap of a wood-soled shoe hurrying to beat the curfew. The Eiffel Tower blinked with red warning lights. From her bedroom, Priscilla watched the searchlights go up, pale and white like Robert's fingers.

Out on Rue Nollet, strange boiler-shaped cylinders appeared, bolted to the backs of buses and certain cars, called gasogenes. Fed by wood and charcoal – some of it coming, she later discovered, from the oaks at Boisgrimot – the gasogenes did not travel fast. The smoke that they belched out gave her a headache.

Lonely, hungry, cold, she found the telephone number of the Scarlet Pimpernel – her married and chaste admirer from Rouen – who was delighted to hear Priscilla's voice. Daniel's wife and children were still living in the south, and he was temporarily on his own in a grand apartment in Rue Beaujon. They arranged to meet. ‘He paid enthusiastic court to me,' Priscilla wrote. He invited her to restaurants, exhibitions, bought her clothes, ‘taught me to take more care of my appearance, to see my stockings were on straight etc.' However, she refused to let him take her stockings off.

Priscilla liked Daniel and was grateful to him, but ‘I must confess that I had no difficulties in keeping him at arm's length.' This was fortunate, because at the end of November the telephone rang. Robert had been released. A crop-producing landowner, he was suddenly vital to the German war effort.

Her husband spent a distressing night with Priscilla on his way to Boisgrimot. Fearing a famine, the Germans had set him free ‘on condition that he should cultivate his land in Normandy'. But he would not be able to live with Priscilla whose status as an enemy alien prevented her from joining him in the countryside. He planned to spend the weekdays at Boisgrimot, the weekends with his wife in Paris. Yet what a life it was going to be. How could he farm with enthusiasm, knowing that he was growing his crops for the Reich? Guy was still in Germany. Robert realised the situation would not change. He felt guilt over his capture. He was miserable and difficult to talk to.

Priscilla tried in vain to cheer him up. It was better than digging potatoes in Chartres. Or being in a prison camp. At least he was free.

She remembered his fingers whitening around the knife handle; his bloodshot eyes bulbous and shiny. ‘You still haven't grown up. You don't realise what war means. There will be nothing to smile about until this war ends.' There were cuts on his cheeks where he had shaved with cold water. It was one of their worst evenings – made more fraught by the news from Boisgrimot. A tempest had torn through the avenue which the Doynels held so sacred.

Monsieur Carer believed that the wind-broken oaks which fell crashing to earth would have obliterated the division of Rommel's troops that, until the day before, was camped beneath them. The gale came at night and was strong enough ‘to take the horns off a cow'.