Priscilla (28 page)

Sitting in her coat before the stove, which smoked so thickly that the windows had to be opened, Priscilla thought of London fog.

In London, SPB was broadcasting
The Kitchen Front
to an audience of five million. ‘In many ways this was my finest hour.' At fifty-four, he was too old to don goggles and fight, but after a stint as an air raid warden on the South Downs, he soared on the airwaves. The war allowed him to expand his repertoire. Following his series on the countryside and on the unemployed, and after his years of broadcasting on English literature to schools and the troops and the Empire, he had found a new role: ‘to play the part of low comedian'.

He had received the telegram in early June:
CAN YOU COME BROADCASTING HOUSE TOMORROW MIDDAY TO DISCUSS URGENT BROADCASTING PROPOSAL
.
SPB was asked to join a panel for a series of early morning discussions based on information supplied by the Ministry of Food. The five-minute talks would go out at 8.15–8.20 a.m. and SPB would be paid a fee of £6. The series was to be called
The Kitchen Front
. Largely because of it, SPB would become ‘most unexpectedly, one of the most famous men in England'.

The first series kicked off on a glorious summer morning as the Germans advanced on the French capital. ‘Friday 14 June 1940 Germans take Paris. I broadcast food at 8.15 a.m.' He cast himself as a Socratic gadfly, irritating his listeners into sitting up and concentrating on the cheap and easy recipes that he offered. ‘But the most needful recipe is the general one of cheerfulness.' He promoted Potato Pete and issued warnings against the ‘Squander Bug' – slogans which gave one of his producers, George Orwell, whose wife Eileen worked on the programme, good copy for the Prolefeed dispensed by the Ministry of Truth in his novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.

SPB wrote in his diary that the programmes created a ‘quite extraordinary interest', and told with relish the reaction of a porter on Taunton station who, spying the letters SPBM embossed on his attaché case, exclaimed: ‘The one and only.' Letters from listeners poured in at the rate of about 500 a day, to tell Priscilla's father that he was their early morning cup of tea, their daily tonic, and causing even Winston Churchill to say of him, ‘That man Mais makes me feel tired.' SPB's producers congratulated him. ‘“The Mais Tonic” . . . seems to have been exhilarating a lot of people recently . . .'

‘I am desperately keen on the series,' SPB replied. ‘After all, it was my child.'

He had not heard from Priscilla since 6 May. On 20 June, halfway through the series, wearing the red tie that she had given him for his fiftieth birthday, he lunched with Alec Waugh at the Gargoyle Club, anxious to learn at first hand what was happening in France. Waugh had been evacuated from Boulogne on 23 May. He had no news of Priscilla.

On 22 January 1941, a van drove through the gates. Loudspeakers announced the arrival of food parcels from England. Within seconds, women were running out to snatch packages. In each was a tin: 18 inches by 9, containing dried
milk, blackcurrant purée, steak and kidney pudding, Cooper's marmalade, Lyon's tea and Woodbine cigarettes. And a greeting card from the Queen.

Priscilla wove the string into table mats and used the tins for cooking. Nothing was wasted. Whatever she could live without, she bartered. She swapped cigarettes for soap, and gave three Woodbines to Sergeant Lune in exchange for posting another letter to Robert.

She had not lost faith that her husband was agitating on her behalf. Ruth Grant, after being released in February, hammered on door after influential door in a bid to extract her daughter. Jacqueline said: ‘Mother did everything she could think of to get me out of the camp and plodded from one Kommandantur to another, saying her daughter was skin and bone and telling them they were inhuman, unmenschlich.' Her persistence seems to have worked: the Germans finally freed Jacqueline in July.

Classes started up in the projection room. Miss Owen taught Babylonian history. Professor Eccles, an Oxford don, gave lessons in French literature. Out in the courtyard, Miss Stanley, a lesbian with wonderful legs, organised open-air gymnastics. Yvette Goodden joined a Welsh choir. ‘I made a note in my will that I want “Bread of heaven” sung at my funeral.' She belted out her descants in the shed where Priscilla peeled frost-blackened mangel-wurzels.

Rita Harding said: ‘I don't know how the days passed. We just meandered.'

Some did go mad. They remained in bed weeping or reciting Shakespeare. Or reverted to childhood, speaking in a baby voice. An Indian mother with three children attempted to burn herself to death.

Fortune-telling flourished in this febrile atmosphere, where no one could imagine the future. Among Priscilla's papers is the result of a palm-reading: ‘In your life you have had some difficult passages. Very soon you will receive news from a person who is dear to you and with whom a little later you will make a happy journey.'

A happy journey
. . . Around her, Priscilla was conscious of people trying to get out of the camp to reach the Swiss mountains. Jacqueline Grant said: ‘We all used to stand up and look out of the window and see lovely hills and we'd protest, “If only we could escape.”' She remembered ‘a dear little roly-poly
woman, very plump, beautiful white sweater, I'm afraid we called her United Dairies,' who jumped off a high wall in her tight sweater and high heels, only to land on a group of German sentries. Not all attempts were so ill-planned. ‘Several people did escape,' Priscilla wrote. ‘Some dressed in German nurses' uniforms and some in Red Cross uniforms.' A nurse, appropriating a patient's X-rays, managed to reach home on medical grounds. Two Senegalese POWs carried out a young woman curled up inside a dustbin. From Paris came news that Elisabeth Haden-Guest had escaped with her son through the station buffet immediately on arriving at the Gare de Lyon. These reports intensified Priscilla's despair – what Jacqueline Grant called that ‘awful feeling of not being able to get out, being trapped and very young. One was afraid of going round the bend.' Jaqueline was thinking of Priscilla in particular – and was not the only person alarmed by her mental state. ‘Berry was very worried about Pris and she said, “We must get you out of here,” and Pris said, “I don't see how you can because I'm perfectly healthy.”'

Sergeant Lune had pinned the letter inside his narrow khaki trousers. Priscilla recognised her husband's minute handwriting. But her excitement evaporated even as she read it. ‘Robert answered solemnly that I was not to do anything rash because of his lands and his mother etc.' He had not lifted a finger. ‘I was beginning to get very fed up with this line of argument.'

It had taken six months for Priscilla to appreciate the extent to which Robert and his family had failed to support her. She never forgave them. ‘After all, I was going through this catastrophe entirely because of him.'

Now that he knew where she was, Robert did at least organise food parcels to be sent from Boisgrimot. In Normandy, there was no shortage of fresh dairy products. Maurice Bezard, working on Robert's farm, recollected, ‘As part of our lease, we needed to supply butter, chickens, cream and milk. The family would come to Boisgrimot to eat – and they would eat well, above all during the war.' The steward's daughter packed up the meat and butter and sent a weekly food packet to Paris, from where it was forwarded to the parcel office in Besançon.

Thanks to the neatness of her handwriting, Yvette Goodden secured a position in the parcel office, a job that required her to write out a list of the recipients and pin it on the door by lunchtime. In the presence of a German soldier, Goodden or another volunteer opened Priscilla's packets in front of her, to check whether they contained books or written material; or forbidden products – like white ‘meta' tablets used to heat up food. ‘The Germans were afraid that if you chewed them, you would commit suicide.'

Priscilla was one of few internees to receive fresh food parcels. ‘Most people had to wait for things to come from England, and of course that took months.' She shared the Doynels' chicken, cheese and butter with her room mates, which meant that her diet did not radically improve. Quite often she bartered her portion to post yet more uncensored letters, not all of them to Robert.

‘I even had a visit while I was there.'

In early February, Sergeant Lune sidled into her room. A man had smuggled himself into the camp, desperate to see Priscilla. He refused to give his name, saying only that she would know him as ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel'. He was downstairs.

Tears sprang into Daniel's eyes when he saw how she looked. The last occasion they had seen each other was the night before her arrest, when Daniel invited her to dinner in Rue Beaujon. Priscilla had found the scene set for seduction: flowers everywhere, champagne – which she had primly refused to drink. Daniel cooked her a meal and afterwards, ignoring his warm invitation to stay, she put on her coat. When he repeated his request ponderously, staring out in front of him, she said: ‘I had better go home in case Robert rings up early.' It was 11 p.m. by the time she returned to her empty apartment. ‘Because of my virtuous behaviour I spent the next three months in a concentration camp.'

Besançon had changed her. She was touched by Daniel's unequivocal response to her appeal for help. He ‘moved heaven and earth to get me out of the camp' – whereas Robert, she wrote scathingly, ‘did nothing at all'. She did not reveal how the Scarlet Pimpernel planned to extract her, but his willingness to put himself in danger for Priscilla's sake – and endanger his wife and children who might have been punished had she escaped – had a
transforming effect. Daniel was not in her terms handsome, but ‘he showed such devotion and friendship that I felt I had treated him very badly by not giving him what he wanted so much. I resolved to become his mistress as soon as I was free to do so, as I was fed up with Robert and the whole of his family. However, before I could escape I had an opportunity which I seized and which enabled me to get out miraculously.'

The five doctors in the camp, French POWs under the charge of an incompetent young Prussian, met once a week to discuss which prisoners might be eligible for release.

Priscilla was in her third month at Caserne Vauban when the list of those entitled to leave was expanded to include anyone expecting a child. One morning loudspeakers summoned the Bluebell Girls' founder to the Kommandantur: Margaret Kelly was several months' pregnant. Another beneficiary was Priscilla. After dreaming all her life of having a child, she was to be saved by the ‘miracle' of a phantom pregnancy.

‘One day our German nurse came round and asked if any of us had any children. When she came to me, without thinking I answered “Not yet”(meaning I hoped to have one some day).

‘She looked at me straight in the eye and said, “You can have a medical examination tomorrow.”

‘When she had gone, I was very worried about it.'

But everyone else in B.71 expressed delight. ‘You're pregnant!' said Berry. Priscilla's pregnancy would ensure her release.

More than forty years later, Jacqueline Grant recalled Priscilla's droll reply: ‘She said, “Well, that's rather sad and rather funny. But I can't be. My husband, although he's a perfect dear and comes from a very good family, is impotent.”'

Her pregnancy was a physical impossibility, Priscilla explained. Married for two years, she had not made love since her honeymoon.

‘The Germans don't know that,' said Berry, and told Priscilla what to tell the doctors, that she was being sick every morning. ‘After all, you did see your husband recently – it is feasible.' And hadn't her periods stopped?

The others agreed. Priscilla must pretend to be pregnant. ‘My companions told me I had better try and bring it off,' she wrote. ‘So the next day I presented myself trembling to a French doctor who was also a prisoner.'

The French doctor who examined her was Jean Lévy.

Shula Troman exclaimed when I mentioned his name. Of course she remembered Dr Lévy! He became a lifelong friend as well as Troman's doctor in Paris, where he had ended his career as professor of gynaecology at the Hôpital Foch. ‘He delivered both my children, and when I had breast cancer he operated.' She hunted around for a black and white photograph, taken at the camp in 1941 and showing a clean-shaven man in French army uniform, smiling. ‘He was lovely, with a formidable sense of humour and an extraordinary silhouette, a little bit hunched, like a faun.'

A French Jew from Colmar who had joined the army as a doctor and was captured by the Germans, Lévy was in constant danger. His mother and sister lived in Paris, but his wife and small daughter – who died soon afterwards of scarlet fever – were in hiding. The potential that existed for reprisals against Lévy's family was considerable and underscores his courage. ‘I owed so much to him,' wrote Drue Tartière, another inmate of the camp, after Lévy convinced the Germans that Tartière had ovarian cancer and needed treatment in Paris. Priscilla, too, had reasons to be indebted.

Dr Lévy examined my aunt ‘in front a lot of nuns and old bodies'. In Priscilla's account, he looked at her carefully and then winked.

‘Yes, madame,' he said. ‘You are pregnant, but I am afraid that you will have to see a German doctor to confirm my verdict.' He added in her ear. ‘He is very young and probably won't know whether you are pregnant or not. It is difficult to tell at three months. Good luck.'

Priscilla returned to her room and told Berry that Dr Lévy had agreed to provide a medical certificate stating that she was expecting. But she was nervous.

‘What do I do if they keep a check on me after I get out? Walk around with a pillow under my dress?'

‘You can always say that you have had a miscarriage. Anyway the next thing to do is convince the German doctor.'