Priscilla (46 page)

On another day, Robert appeared and made a scene. He had returned to Paris. His club remained open in August because no one had gone away. He brought news of Boisgrimot, the unrecognisable skyline. Sainteny was in the hands of the US VII Corps. American soldiers, hoping to endear themselves to the scattered population, were using phrases provided in the US Army newspaper
Stars and Stripes
. One phrase was: ‘Are you married?' Another: ‘My wife doesn't understand me.'

No one was more upset with Priscilla than Daniel Vernier. He walked in unannounced with Simone – to catch Priscilla in the arms of Pierre. Vernier was speechless. This was the first time that he had suspected anything between Priscilla and his brother-in-law. Pierre pulled away from her, ‘sheepish at first and then with an increasing bright manner'. He chastised Vernier for avoiding
him lately. He had been trying to get in touch to invite him to dinner. He was very excited. He wanted Daniel and Simone to be the first to know: Priscilla and he were getting married and they were giving an engagement party next week. Vernier rushed from the room.

Troop movements prevented Pierre from returning to his home in Annemasse. What he intended to say to his wife is anyone's guess. He wrote to Priscilla eight months later: ‘We spent six marvellous weeks together during which we got to know each other better.' But it had weighed on him that she would not now be able to bear their daughter.

Priscilla loved Pierre. Wishbone thin, she lay stretched out on her bed, staring at everyone and no one, thinking of him. But their time together was almost up, their engagement party postponed indefinitely by spontaneous street celebrations featuring columns of excitable young men chanting the Marseillaise – alternating with the crack of rifles from Laval's pro-German paramilitary force, the Milice. Chamberlin's French Gestapo eliminated 110 people between 17 June and 17 August, dumping their tortured bodies on the pavement, eyes ripped out, fingerless. Loudspeakers ordered Priscilla to be indoors by 9 p.m. Yvette Goodden did not dare leave her apartment for four days following an encounter with the Wehrmacht. ‘They are in a devilish temper,' she wrote after bicycling to Montmartre. ‘The Germans were emptying out a big shop and were shooting at everyone who drew too close.'

On 12 August, as the Abwehr began shredding its secret files, railway workers went on strike. On the same platform at the Gare de l'Est where Priscilla had waited to be transported to Besançon, German women and whimpering children assembled in scared groups, not knowing how they were supposed to leave Paris. The Métro ceased working altogether on 15 August. The boulevards were choked with hundreds of vehicles departing for Germany, their roofs covered with branches for camouflage, and weighed down with bottles of wine, bidets, whatever the drivers had managed to grab. Trucks piled with stolen valuables rolled in a clanking procession down Rue Lord Byron, tyres flapping and tense men perched on the mudguards. As in June 1940, everyone was taking to the road. The city was falling as it had
been captured, the chorus line of handsome youths which had entered Paris four years earlier now resembling the bedraggled French soldiers that they had routed.

Parisians cheerfully waved the Germans off with lavatory brushes. ‘We shout insults and sometimes an angry driver swerves and knocks us down,' wrote Antonia Hunt. But it was dangerous to be associated with the scornful crowd, as it was for Priscilla to stand at her window in case she was mistaken for a sniper. ‘People who visited me took risks as the Germans were trigger-happy and a girlfriend of mine had a narrow escape one day when bullets whizzed past her.' Zoë was on her way to the nursing home when a garbage can on the pavement sprang back, hit by a bullet.

On the radio, a woman sang Joseph Kessel's words that he had composed at the Ashdown Park Hotel in Sussex: ‘Take the guns, the munitions and the grenades from under the straw . . .'

The Allies had landed unopposed in the south of France; five days later a Free French unit swept into Hendaye, in time to stop the green Mercury containing Otto Graebener and Alois Miedl. On 18 August, Annemasse fell.

Pierre was agitating to get back to his wife and children. He reported news of fighting outside Fresnes prison, where Cornet was still incarcerated. He had seen bonfires of uprooted German street signs, with people feeding torn-up photos of Hitler and Göring into the flames, after carefully removing the glass from the frames. Priscilla watered the canary.

On 19 August, the BBC prematurely declared Paris's liberation – but with the peals of St Paul's rather than Notre Dame. Not for another five days did Priscilla tune in to a radio announcer, who was about to speak live to a captain of the Free French. He had arrived in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville, his shabby column of eleven half-tracks and three Shermans safely guided through the back streets by an Armenian on a moped. The announcer said: ‘I have in front of me a French captain who is the first to arrive in Paris. His face is red, he is grubby and he needs a shave, and yet I want to embrace him.'

Two hours later, at 11.22 p.m, a large bell started tolling: the 13-ton Gros Bourdon of Notre Dame – the first time that Priscilla had heard its F-sharp
since 1940. Soon, other church bells rang out over the darkened rooftops. The sound reached the Hôtel Meurice where General Choltitz, Military Commander of Greater Paris, was speaking to Berlin. He held the telephone to the window just as, five years before, an English correspondent had raised her receiver to catch the grinding of German tanks crossing the Polish border. Choltitz explained: ‘What you are hearing is that Paris is going to be liberated and that Germany without doubt has lost the war.'

No one in Priscilla's nursing home slept that night. Elderly patients pinned medals to their nightgowns. Excited nurses, with tricolour cocades in their curled hair, stitched flags from sheets to hang from the balcony. A thin old man smelling of ether was carried into the main entrance on a stretcher so that he could hear the singing in the street. He repeated over and over: ‘They're here.'

Yvette Goodden wrote in her diary: ‘We're going to go for a walk and we sing bare-headed with the crowd, Marseillaise, Tipperary, the Chant du départ, à bas les boches, Hitler au poteau. We climb on to the roof and there's a magnificent crescent moon, to the west an immense conflagration, also to the east, the race course at Longchamps, the Germans firing on 2nd Arrondissement. We see tracers in the sky.'

De Gaulle arrived next afternoon. Bed-ridden, Priscilla could not join in the delirious crowds of more than a million who cheered him on foot down the Champs-Elysées on 26 August 1944. She lay in the almost deserted nursing home knowing that among the faces milling outside there would be English and American soldiers. In her apartment at 37 bis Avenue du Roule, Yvette Goodden would hear a commotion on the stairs and see a white cap coming up the steps, her husband. ‘I just felt panic-struck that this stranger was my husband. We clung to each other speechless.'

When dusk fell, men and women paired off. In tents and vehicles or in the open, around the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, beneath the chestnuts in the Bois de Boulogne, on the warm grass in the Jardin des Plantes, couples made love. A female soldier remembered how everything was quiet in the Jardin des Plantes . . . ‘or at least, almost quiet . . . from all around there were stifled sighs and ticklish giggles. Many Parisian women were too charitable
to let our lads spend their first night in the capital alone.' Gilles Perrault stopped in his tracks to absorb the stifled cries. ‘Transfixed – God forgive me – with near-religious feeling, I spent a long moment there listening to Paris make love.' A Frenchwoman explained this precious moment, the end of 1,533 nights of occupation: ‘You cannot understand how wonderful it was to fight finally as free men and women, to battle in the daylight, under our own names, with our real identities, with everyone out there, all of Paris, to support us, happy joyful and united. There was never a time like it.'

And yet my aunt could not enjoy any of this. On the night when Paris made love, Priscilla was alone in her room. Pierre had returned to Annemasse.

32.
TONDUE

Suddenly next morning everyone woke up in the Resistance.

‘Were things getting a bit dodgy for her towards the end of the war?' Gillian asked in a notebook. ‘YES. EPURATION. FFI came to the clinique; she might have been jailed or had her head shaven.'

The existence of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur had passed unnoticed by Priscilla until a few days earlier. All changed with the German exodus. Outside her window roamed up to 60,000 ill-disciplined men and women, dressed in white armbands with the initials FFI embroidered on them, clutching guns, animated by the slogan: ‘A chacun son Boche' – each person should take out a German.

A large proportion of these ‘volunteers of the thirteenth hour' were mockingly rebranded members of the RMA – Resistants of the Month of August. They strutted about in uniforms which they had jettisoned in June 1940, giving rise to another name: ‘mothball men' or Napthalinards. The writer Paul Léautaud called them ‘nothing but a “gang of Apaches”'. Their vindication was to chase down anyone who had not maintained ‘a sufficiently independent attitude with respect to the enemy'. All it required was a stabbing finger and the shriek of ‘collaboratrice!' for a frenzied crowd to start tearing at your clothes. On 25 August, Léautaud wrote: ‘It's a chase; it's a bloodbath; it's a bloody hunting party.'

In a broadcast defending P. G. Wodehouse, who was one of those arrested, for having delivered six radio talks on Radio Berlin, George Orwell argued that ‘few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best, it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats – police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with Germans soldiers – are hounded down, while almost without exception the big rats escape.'

The first victims were young women. On Gillian Sutro's refectory table in 58 Rue de Clichy a group of men with FFI armbands raped a German girl in uniform. Women who had slept with Germans presented the readiest target for a nation in need of a symbolic act of purification. Anyone guilty of ‘relations with the Germans' was labelled a prostitute, standing in for the dishonour of France. In the Lot-et-Garonne, an Englishwoman known as ‘Miss Betsy' was shot when she refused to confess the reason behind her frequent travel with Germans. But summary executions were not the norm. ‘The violence has been mostly haircutting,' observed an OSS agent in Normandy.

Up to 20,000 women that summer had their lives fractured by a pair of scissors. ‘The first thing they did was to shave heads,' Shula Troman told me. ‘I saw it at Vittel, the tondues, it was disgusting, and it happened immediately.'

Yvette Goodden had returned to her apartment after cheering de Gaulle when cries from the street drew her to the window. A dense crowd advanced along Avenue du Roule, screaming deprecations. ‘As they approached, we saw two women with shaved skulls carrying their hair in their hands with swastikas on their cheeks. The crowd hemmed them in and stopped them from putting their hands in front of their faces and hurled the grossest insults at them. This was the punishment for having slept with German soldiers. From Batignolles they were.' The two women were jostled through Saint-Cloud, where Priscilla's nursing home was, the crowd kicking at them and scratching at their faces and earrings with long fingernails to make them stumble along faster.

Most tondues came from Robert's area of north-west France, home to the least number of available Frenchmen and the largest concentration of Germans, or ‘fridolins' as they were sometimes known. In the Manche department, 621
women were arrested for ‘collaboration sentimentale' – a crime punishable by forced labour and imprisonment. So incensed was one FFI interrogator that he slapped an accused woman, then produced a ruler, demanding to know about her fridolin's performance in bed.

In Robert's village of Sainteny, a community of less than 800, twenty girls were known to have slept with Germans, including one who had borne two children by a Wehrmacht soldier. Sainteny having been razed to the ground, there was no haircutting party. But up the road in Carentan, the reprisals began with the arrival of the 101st Airborne on 12 June. Twelve women, stripped half-naked and with their breasts exposed and slogans scrawled in lipstick over their torsos, were dragged by neighbours to the town square. In some cases, a father would cut off his daughter's hair. More often, the local hairdresser wielded the clippers.

‘Their look,' said an American soldier watching, ‘was that of a hunted animal.'

Afterwards, bald craniums daubed with mercurochrome, and to the dirge of a drum, the women were pushed roughly through a gauntlet of men who struck them on their bare bottoms shouting, ‘Putains des fridolins, filles aux boches!'

In Germany, a surprising number of France's 1.8 million POWs had liaisons with local girls – in particular those prisoners sent, like Robert's brother Guy, to work on farms – but not one Frenchman had his head shaved for sleeping with a German woman or was condemned for this. Horizontal collaboration was a crime uniquely pinned on French women, for whom sleeping with the enemy may have been the only way to feed their children. In the expiatory fervour, it was as if the male population, who had humiliatingly failed for four years to protect their families, were battling to reclaim a moral authority they had lost in the stupendous defeat. Something about the degradation made them feel respectable again.

The liberation caused many who had supported Pétain to change their tune. But it was the same siren song of expediency. The music written to accompany Pétain on the pro-German newsreel agency France Actualités – and
which resulted in the arrest of its composer – was exactly the music used by France-Libre-Actualités to follow de Gaulle on screen as he walked down the Champs-Elysées. And yet even for de Gaulle, in his speech on that day, it was necessary to absolve the hysterically cheering crowds and to stress the fiction that collaboration was merely the work of ‘a few unhappy traitors'.