Priscilla (50 page)

Poor eyesight had thwarted Raymond Thompson's ambitions to be a pilot. Demobbed from Air Force Intelligence, he had followed his father, a wealthy insurance broker, into Lloyd's, but resigned shortly before meeting Priscilla; he was still jarring from the shock of his failed first marriage in 1946, after his wife, according to Gillian, ‘ditched him for his best friend at an airport leaving him with the children' and went to live in Guatemala. Professionally and personally speaking, Raymond was in a terrible state when he introduced himself to a tanned Priscilla. Gillian recalled: ‘We were sunburnt, slim, and wore the minimum.' While Gillian went on exhausting walks through the streets of Paris with her new lover, film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, Priscilla was left on her own with Raymond.

He told her of his marital situation, how he had escaped into drink and gambling, his passion for sailing, his abhorrence of the City, how keen he was to start another life in the Sussex countryside, this time as a market gardener.

Priscilla gave him the sketchiest account of her life in France. Like everyone she knew, she talked of anything but the Occupation. ‘One asked nothing in Paris in those days,' wrote Martha Gellhorn. ‘There was a terrible discretion between friends, after the years of separation, and not knowing what the friends had thought or done or where they had been.' Even so, it touched Priscilla to discover their overlapping histories. Raymond's ex-wife, Carmen Hochstetter, had attended Priscilla's cookery school in pre-war Paris. Carmen's mother was Doris's ex-bridge partner. Carmen's elder sister Sylvia had been seduced by Priscilla's first love – Gillian's brother Nicky. And a connection closer to home: Raymond and Carmen had rented a cottage during the war in the same Sussex village where Doris had come to live. They had Paris and Bosham in common.

After a few days in Paris, Priscilla and Gillian continued on to the French Riviera. A smitten Raymond wrote to Priscilla from his hotel in Rue d'Alger. ‘I don't often write letters unless I have to – (& this is not a “have to” letter in
the accepted sense) – consequently I'm not much of a hand with a pen.' What he wished falteringly to say was that ‘Paris is very empty and autumnal without you' and that ‘I can't help thinking of you lying in the sun building up that “honey-brown” tan & wishing that I were with you.'

Back in England, Raymond could not erase Priscilla from his mind. ‘The other day I saw “2000 Women”. Have you seen it? A film of life in a German internment camp for women in France. It made me think of you & wonder what it was really like.' Priscilla had been due to return to London with Gillian the following Sunday. Anxious to speak to Priscilla on her way through Paris, he booked a call to Gillian's apartment – but no response. ‘Have I got the number wrong or have you escaped again?' He tried several more times. Then, ominously: ‘I shall have to put you on a chain!!' She had arrived back at 5 Lees Place when he wrote inviting her to a race-meeting at Fontwell Park (‘We could go together? Why not? Why not?'). Although Priscilla did not enjoy horse racing, she accepted.

Tough-as-teak, upright, unswerving in whatever course he set himself, Raymond had the attributes of his cross-Channel ocean racer,
Mary Bower
; and he adored Priscilla until her death. But in an adverse wind, he could be
dictatorial, intractable and jealous. His manager at Church Farm, John Bevington, described him as tunnel-visioned on certain things – ‘and very bad-tempered if you didn't do what he wanted. Once he'd gone off the boil with you, you never got back into his good books.'

Introduced to Raymond, Vivien found him prickly. ‘He was atheist, domineering, and had a chip because his wife had left him. And Priscilla was still always frightened, hated rows and generally a timid sort of person.' Vivien advised Priscilla to take more time before deciding to commit. Raymond might offer long-term security; but he might prove to be a most unsuitable liaison.

Gillian was warmer in her encouragement, writing to Priscilla in the New Year, after Raymond threw a party in Paris for Priscilla's friends: ‘I thought Raymond quite human. He is not ugly either. I rather admire his “hawk” profile and I like the way his hair grows. You were looking pretty and very happy.'

Raymond was convinced that he had found a stepmother for Tracey, born in 1942, and Carleton, born in 1944. He had agreed to a divorce on condition that he had custody, but his wife refused to give up the children unless there was a woman in the house. Vivien said: ‘He was looking for a mother for them and this is exactly what Priscilla was looking for: two children to mother – and so, eventually, they got married.' The reaction of Raymond's mother clinched it. ‘Priscilla will be wonderful with them,' she decided after meeting her. ‘She has a face which shows truth and sincerity.'

Their marriage on 4 June 1948 at Caxton Hall Register Office in Westminster attracted headlines. ‘VICOMTESSE WEDS'. ‘BRIDE WAS IN GESTAPO GAOL'. ‘She was Nazis' captive who was arrested by the Germans and kept in a concentration camp.' The French press joked that she was exchanging one set of chains for another.

Afterwards, the couple assembled for a group photograph with their witnesses. Gillian was in Paris, but John Sutro was there, and Vivien and Doris. Once again, there was a father-shaped absence. ‘The 31-year-old bride is a daughter of Mr S. P. B. Mais, the author.'

Priscilla wrote only one sentence about her wedding day. It hints at a pattern of hard drinking and horse racing: ‘Couldn't get out of bed until Ray
fetched me Amber Moon' – a pick-me-up of Tabasco, raw egg and whisky. It was also Derby Day, and directly after the reception they went to Epsom to watch the race, won by My Love.

In the evening, Raymond drove Priscilla in his silver Lancia to their new home in Sussex by the Sea.

34.
LIFE AS A MUSHROOM FARMER'S WIFE

Wittering was where the Saxons first landed in England, a village of thatched cottages with small gardens that smelled of honeysuckle, mud and rotting seaweed.

Inevitably, SPB had written about it, after taking the inward journey by boat from Bosham. ‘I disembarked on a long sea wall, fringed with tamarisk and gorse. There was a gorgeous medley of inland and marine flowers, of land and sea birds, of marsh and meadow.' From near here, Vespasian began the conquest of Britain, King Canute defied the waves, and Harold spent the night before making his unfortunate visit to William of Normandy. Twinned with the French village of Moutiers-les-Mauxfaits, Wittering was a reminder that Britain was occupied too, but never had to process the trauma since the occupiers had never really left. ‘From the point of view of history you could not hit on a better place,' SPB wrote in
It Isn't Far From London
(1930). ‘Pitch your tent or stay your caravan in the Wittering fields and you will find yourself transported not seventy miles or seventy minutes from Hyde Park Corner, but back to ad 700 in the days of St Wilfrid of York, seven million miles away from the noises and odours and distractions of a civilised world.'

But not even this distance proved far enough for Priscilla.

Raymond had bought a seven-bedroom red-brick Georgian house next to a grey stone church. Church Farm was originally the beach cottage for the Dukes of Richmond. It was ramshackle, with an untended walled garden and a view of the Isle of Wight. There was no furniture. They ate their meals sitting on packing cases. Priscilla laid felt on the staircase and stained the floorboards in their bedroom. She found the all-important padded chest in an antique shop in Peacehaven.

To make the place homely for their house-warming party, Priscilla's mother Doris came over from Emsworth, where she was now living, and sewed the curtains.

Doris had been abandoned – again. She had spent the war in Bosham, pretending to be the wife of Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Bertie Ommaney-Davis. Then in March 1948, Bertie asked Vivien, whom he called Widge, because she was quite small, to visit him at the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar, where he worked. ‘Widge, I've something to tell you. I simply can't stand your mother another minute. I've been appointed to Malta and I'm not going to take her with me. I'm going to buy her a cottage in Emsworth, with an allowance.'

The cottage into which Doris had since moved was less than six miles from Wittering. A dutiful Priscilla used to drive over with Tracey and Carleton for lunch. The atmosphere was formal, Tracey remembered. ‘We knew her as Mrs Davis, and she served stewed rabbit.'

Vivien told me about the rest of Doris's life. In Malta, Bertie got married to a South African with an enormous nose, but appointed back to Haslar four years later, he decided that he needed Doris's cottage for himself and his new wife, and turned Doris out. Vivien wrote to him: ‘That's a shit's trick' – and never spoke to him again. Homeless once more, and still legally bound to SPB, Doris went to stay with her mother in Horsham, thirty miles away.

Vivien said: ‘At some point she met Lambert White, a married fruit importer in London. He fell for Doris and bought her a flat in Shepherd's Bush.' When his wife died, Lambert moved in with Doris. They had boiled eggs for supper
and lunched every day at the Portman Hotel. ‘After one lunch, Lambert says he has to go and have a pee. My mother waits in the hall. The porter, not looking, crashes into her with a huge suitcase and breaks her hip. She's eighty-three.' With Vivien's help, Priscilla put Doris and Lambert into a nursing home in West Wittering, one room with a wide bay-window and a brass plate on the door: ‘Colonel White & Mrs Davis'. There, just up the road from Church Farm, Doris drank gin, played bridge and did the hard
Telegraph
crossword, but she failed to complete the puzzle of her relationship with Priscilla, despite their proximity. Vivien told her son: ‘I never want to be like my mother who was so cold-hearted and selfish and when she had money never helped anyone else out.' Priscilla felt the same.

It was at Priscilla's house-warming party at Church Farm on 8 September 1948 that my mother came face to face with Doris. ‘I met her in an upstairs corridor. I was seventeen and staying there. “Who are you?” she said. I told her, and immediately she turned the other way and walked on without a word, not even hello.' It was the first and last occasion when Doris set eyes on SPB's ‘other' family.

Raymond had hated working for Lloyds. ‘I love the open air,' he had written to Priscilla, ‘and it will certainly take a lot to make me incarcerate myself in some bloody office again fifty feet underground.' At Church Farm, he remade himself – first, growing strawberries and tomatoes; then as a mushroom farmer.

The business expanded from four mushroom houses to thirty, producing 35,000 lbs of mushrooms a week. Priscilla was the company secretary. She learned terms such as turning, spawning, beds, La France disease. The faint sweet smell of horse manure pervaded everything. There was mud on the stairs, indeed in all the rooms. After a weekend visit, Gillian sent a description to Vertès, who shook his head. ‘What a funny idea, darling, that while John is away you should want to live in the countryside with Priscilla in a chaotic and no doubt badly-heated household full of children among the mushrooms . . . Why?????'

Zoë also came to stay, bringing her baby son, who was Gillian's godson, and news from France, none of it heartening. Her mother had disappeared one night, announcing that she was going to watch a film, and flung herself into the Seine. Zoë's badly shaken father identified the body at the morgue. Zoë heard about it while on a delayed honeymoon with her husband, recently released after five years at a POW camp in Münster.

With Gillian, Zoë had refused to speak about the Occupation. Gillian assumed that the subject was too painful, too recent to bear discussion. ‘Later it struck me that a certain unease floated whenever I brought up the subject. I remember hearing, “C'était une grande tragédie . . . nos pauvres prisonniers . . . les fridolins . . . les privations . . .” I never heard the words “la résistance, le maquis, radio-Londres”.'