Priscilla (5 page)

SPB was a schoolmaster earning £150 a year and already in debt; furthermore, he could not take Doris back to Rossall, on the Lancashire coast, since the school did not employ married teachers. Major Snow, her father, had consented to the marriage on condition that SPB insure his life for £1,000 and settle it on Doris.

His mother begged him to cancel the wedding. ‘You're going to regret this all your life.' Rather in the way that Major Snow shuddered to contemplate SPB, so had she formed an ‘ineradicable aversion' to her prospective daughter-in-law (and after their marriage refused to have anything to do with her). She viewed Doris as a flibbertigibbet out to snare her only child and sensed, correctly, that the pair had no common interests. The Snow family regarded reading as a waste of time (‘I always think that books spoil the look of a house,' said Mrs Snow). Doris hated walking and was not demonstrative about scenery. She liked playing the pianola, billiards and bridge, otherwise basking in the glow of male attention. She did not like cricket.

Doris at least had the gumption to try and call off the engagement. A week before their marriage, SPB took his headstrong fiancée to a cricket match from which she bolted. She said she was going home, hated the sight of him, and wanted no more to do with him. It was his last chance and he should have snatched it. But SPB was by then obsessed with the thought of their soon-to-be-life-together, and threatened suicide if rejected.

The extent of his mistake was revealed on honeymoon in Porlock Bay. He dragged his new wife through thick bracken to watch the staghounds at Cloutsham, Dunkery and Exford. They paddled up Badgworthy Water to the Doone Valley, went bathing at Porlock Weir, climbed to the top of Selworthy Beacon, caught an excursion steamer to Ilfracombe to see his aunt, and watched polo in the grounds of Dunster Castle. The one thing they did not do, according to Vivien who told me this, along with other extraordinary details, was to make love.

There were two explanations. Doris had her period, which invariably caused her agonies, said Vivien. ‘Ma was used to lying on the sofa and being brought cups of tea and biscuits, with much love and empathy. On the other hand SPB knew nothing of such things, never having had anything to do with young women and their monthly sufferings. So the honeymoon was a disaster, because one of these periods occurred after a week, with Ma expecting tea and sympathy in the hotel lounge, and her adoring husband – who had no sympathy for such lack of ‘oomph' – going off into the countryside to walk and explore and chat with anyone he met.'

The second reason was that neither partner knew how to consummate a marriage. SPB wrote that his father had preserved his silence on the topics of money, God, and sex. Major Snow seems to have been just as non-communicative with his daughter. Vivien told me: ‘Ma allegedly had no idea how babies were created, and SPB, apparently, was equally ignorant of the “how”. It took three years before they finally sought advice about procreation, and on 12 July 1916 my sister Priscilla Rosemary Mais was born in Sherborne.'

SPB's novels were so autobiographical that they gave me additional information which I did not receive from Vivien. I learned that on the day of Priscilla's birth he spent the morning at school to keep his mind from brooding. ‘From nine to one I taught, speaking all the time, trying to concentrate on quadratic equations and Army English. I went up at lunchtime and was told to disappear to four o'clock. I went for miles on my bicycle seeing nothing, my mind a blank, except for the ever-recurring sentence: “Oh, God! grant that it may be all right.”'

He was shown Priscilla in her cot on his return. She had been born at half past one. ‘She is beautifully proportioned and has large blue eyes and regular features.'

Still, his eldest child made him afraid. The first time he held her, he found it impossible to believe that this new life was part of himself, ‘something which would in the future regard him as her father'. He seems to have infected Priscilla with his fear, planting in her a fundamental insecurity even before she came to consciousness.

A fortnight on: ‘She has an extraordinary amount of individuality: unluckily, she is terribly frightened of any sudden noise. This must be inherited . . .' He stood over Priscilla for hours, trying ‘to probe into the future for what it held in store for her'.

In the summer of her birth, a local fortune teller in Sherborne supplied one of two predictions for Priscilla. I found it among her papers, written in an upright pencilled hand. ‘Generally shrewd, deep thinker, critical and alert. These are her main characteristics. Very secretive, she would make a safe friend to entrust confidences to. But to these qualities must be added a too ardent love nature . . . short journeys are good, especially when unexpected and require to be taken at short notice . . . Her happiest time will come after marriage, which should come early in life and probably to a man older than herself who will be devoted and most kind and generous to her . . . The death of father will end much disagreement.'

The second prediction took verse form.

Priscilla was three months old when a former pupil of SPB at Sherborne sat down in his room at Sandhurst and composed a poem to mark her birth. Its author was eighteen and unknown. Published two years later, ‘To Your Daughter' introduced Alec Waugh's sole volume of poetry,
Resentment
. By then, Waugh, who became a sort of muse for Priscilla, was exceptionally famous.

In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I ordered up
Resentment
. Published at 3/6d in July 1918, it was a virgin copy: the pages not yet cut. A young librarian took a table knife out of a drawer and sawed the poem open.

Dedicated to Priscilla's parents, ‘To Your Daughter' is long and rather gloomy. A few lines give the flavour:

And dust's the end of every song . . .
Yet happiness is not life's aim
.

Unflinching you will face the truth,
And others not so nobly wise

Will lay before your feet their youth,
Their hopes, and their heart's treasuries
.

So though you deem the gift of life
Better not had, those others torn
And bleeding in the throes of strife
Will thank their God that you were born
.

Priscilla's first home was a new semi-detached red-brick house overlooking Sherborne Castle, called ‘Coldharbour'. SPB rented it for £35 a year. He had accepted a teaching job at Sherborne after turning down an offer to be the Government Inspector of Schools in Ceylon, mainly out of pressure from his mother-in-law. The jerry-built house was crammed with ugly oak furniture (‘the monstrosities of Maple') and a Persian carpet that Mrs Snow had bought as a wedding gift, and became associated in SPB's mind with a period of his life that made him flinch.

The only child of a preoccupied vicar and a reluctant mother who farmed him out to elderly relatives, SPB knew very little about how to be a husband and a father. This was his first experience of family life and he was shell-shocked. Alec Waugh spent a weekend with SPB, Doris and the four-month-old Priscilla, afterwards describing to his father Arthur the amazing difference between the Waughs' home life and the chaos of the Mais household. ‘Mais rolls down to breakfast swearing and shrieking. “Your shoe is undone,” says Doris. “Do it up,” says Petre and puts his foot on her knee . . .'

It did not help that Mrs Snow visited often. A son had died young and she found it a burden to be separated from her only daughter. Her visits increased after ‘bonny' Priscilla's birth. A photograph in Priscilla's album shows a tiny woman with round wire spectacles and door-knob cheeks. She has cleared any smile from her face. Her son-in-law longed for her departure, but she seemed to take root.

An admirer of Thomas Hardy, SPB was one day proud to report that he had spent the morning with the novelist's wife. Mrs Snow's acid response
was: ‘A most unpleasant and unhealthy-minded writer.' She accused SPB of being selfish in buying a bicycle: he was no longer a carefree bachelor. ‘You must learn to save for the sake of the house.' She commented on the size of his appetite, his bad manners and untidiness, and irritated him into saying nasty things to Doris that he did not mean – until the day arrived when Doris, adopting Mrs Snow's nagging Scots accent, declared that her husband seemed to love the countryside more than he loved his wife.

Her parents' antics were Priscilla's bedtime stories. How SPB walked and biked and ignored Doris, preferring his precious Downs; how Doris had gone off with one of his pupils. Mainly, it was SPB in the wrong – selfish, obsessive, spendthrift.

‘Authors as a rule are much better in their books than they are in real life,' SPB wrote in
Rebellion
– a novel that he managed to complete in the first fortnight of 1917 while staying with Priscilla at Alec Waugh's home in North London. This was also Doris's opinion.

What Doris was too naïve or inexperienced to recognise was her husband's predisposition to manic depression. The Downs were not an escape from her; he needed them in order to re-enter himself.

There are people who walk into a room and immediately hijack it. At Oxford, SPB had been a cross-country running Blue. Alec Waugh remembered him striding through the Courts at Sherborne with a pile of books under his arm, as though limbering up for a marathon. Writers who had been his pupils looked back on him as their best teacher; he fired in them a passion for plays, poems and novels, and gave them a warm and friendly shove into becoming authors themselves. But his energy was fuelled by a bipolar disorder that remained undiagnosed until 1964 and rigged his sails so as to be swelled with any gust of enthusiasm – and to be emptied just as abruptly. ‘He had overflowing enthusiasm, but very little ballast,' the Master of Sherborne wrote in 1917 after sacking him.

When SPB was skimming the waves, no one was more invigorating; anything seemed possible. ‘Then everyone wanted to be near him,' said my mother. But the down periods were costly, confusing, painful and chaotic, and made him hard to live with. Then his black moods and self-generating dramas threatened to capsize his professional contacts, as well as his nearest and dearest.

Priscilla grew up listening to SPB remonstrate with her mother: ‘But you loved me once.' And Doris snapping back: ‘For God's sake, don't keep harking back to the past ages – I may have liked caper sauce once, but I've out-grown my love for you, and nothing can bring it back.' The quarrels were protracted and savage – the clocks never wound up, the flowers always dead, the silver unpolished. Doris frequently was left weeping on the floor.

When Priscilla was three, Doris shifted her affections from SPB to another young man who had been his pupil. Neville Brownrigg was a demobbed lieutenant from the 20th Hussars whom SPB had taught at Rossall before the war, ‘an unruly angular Irish boy of no intelligence but a certain ease and charm of manner'. SPB once invited Brownrigg home to Tansley, where his
mother viewed him in the same incinerating light as she did Doris. ‘He's a born parasite. He'll eat all you've got and then rob you and run. You'll see.' But SPB admired Brownrigg, a good cricketer, for his wildness and courage. ‘He had no brains, but he was great fun and never cared what he did.'

They had met again, in 1919, on the station platform at Tonbridge where SPB had gone from Sherborne to teach. Brownrigg was staying nearby with his uncle, out of a job after five years fighting in Egypt and France. In an impetuous move, SPB invited Brownrigg to stay in the large house that Tonbridge School had provided. He needed a secretary, while his wife and daughter, he felt, could do with the companionship.

In the High Court seventeen years later, Justice Sir Alfred Bucknill observed the outcome with bewilderment: ‘I am sorry to say that the result of Mr Mais's kindness was that his wife and Mr Brownrigg fell in love and misconduct started between them.' Doris was twenty-seven. Her relationship with someone four years younger marked the start of what the Divorce Court judge described as ‘this strange existence of Mr and Mrs Mais'.

A brown envelope in SPB's archives contained cuttings from
The Times
, the
News of the World
and the
Daily Mirror
– which devoted its front page to the story, under the headline ‘PETITION DISMISSED IN COMMUNITY'S INTEREST'.

On 16 July 1936, in one of the most publicised cases of the year, Doris Mais had sued Priscilla's reluctant father for divorce. She wished to dissolve her broken marriage to a spouse with whom she had not lived since 1925.

Doris's case being weak, for those days, counsel advised her to cast SPB in the role of sexual pervert. In a move no modern court would condone, Doris summoned Priscilla to give evidence against her father. Priscilla's humiliating experience in the witness box forced her to relive her childhood in churning detail.

She remembered her parents as always on the move, carrying their unhappiness with them. The fraught atmosphere had helped to make Priscilla a
difficult and neurotic child. Doris's mother guarded Priscilla ‘like a dragon'. Redundant, her father fed on the patter of his daughter's feet, her thrice-repeated ‘g-night, Daddy' after he left her to go down to supper, ‘and even her cries at night'.