Priscilla (52 page)

Paper-clipped together in chronological order at the bottom of Priscilla's papers was a neat stack of rejection slips. They painted a caricature of the struggling writer and attested to her persistence in the face of continual disappointment.

She submitted her first manuscript in December 1944, when she was involved with Donat; her last, in March 1957. Again and again, what she had written had ‘not been found quite suitable' – by the editors of
Home Chat
,
Modern Woman, Woman's Own
,
Queen
, even
Yachting Monthly
(although the latter did express interest in her sketches, ‘which show promise'). The reasons for turning her down: ‘Stories bringing in the war are not liked now . . .' ‘Anything morbid or sordid is no use at all . . .' ‘The sustained amoral atmosphere will, I fear, put it out of court for most publishers . . .'

Everything that Priscilla was obsessed to gather together in her padded chest braided into the same story: the drama of a woman with a past nobody was interested in – not even her own father – but who was compelled to write it down, however incriminating.

Priscilla had been writing for nine years when she started a diary. Her life was boring and dull. She and Raymond had argued about money. ‘Yesterday I posted off a short story which I have high hopes for. If only I could earn some money I should feel more independent. It is hell for a woman to have to beg for every penny.'

12 November 1953: ‘High hopes for story end in dismal failure. It has been sent back and obviously not read by my agent. Generally she keeps a story for a month. This time it is back in two days.'

Her writing and its subject repudiated, she sent one of her stories to a friend who was a popular author, soliciting his advice. Geoffrey Willans was the creator of Molesworth and author of
Down with Skool
, who in 1958 dedicated
The Dog's Ear Book
to Priscilla's schnauzer Viking – pencilling on the title page: ‘who undoubtedly has the dirtiest arse in West Sussex'. His tact was exemplary. ‘My dear Pris, I've read the short story and dear Pris, I know you're going to hate me for this but I don't think you will sell it, not because it isn't interesting and well-written, which it is, but because it breaks a fundamental rule of the women's press. This is that a woman may have lustrous gold hair, trim ankles, shapely legs BUT, for this kind of work, she
stops
below the shoulder and above the knees. In other words, any heroine loves romance, music, a glamorous man but she can't even go to bed with her husband, let alone take a lover. In other words, you can deal with love and even the very slight temptation, but never with the basic result of it, which isn't even admitted.' He concluded: ‘You might get away with your story in a novel, but never in a woman's paper.'

Priscilla's story may have been too saucy or unsavoury for most contemporary publishers. And yet it would probably never have been published anyway, even with her excellent literary contacts. The pile of rejection slips that she so assiduously kept told a truth about her writing talents – a truth that she must have found excruciatingly difficult to reconcile with her ambition, or for that matter her need. Her writing was just not very good.

The novel that Priscilla started on Willans's advice was her third – the other two are lost. Once again, she took for her model Alec Waugh's first autobiographical novel which, if little read today, enjoyed a succès d'estime (and de scandale) for its portrayal of homosexuality at an English public school.
The Loom of Youth
– in which Priscilla's father featured prominently as the ‘great god' of Waugh's soul – was a fictionalised account of the author's time at Sherborne under SPB's inspirational tutelage. Turned down by several
publishers, the manuscript was accepted by Grant Richards, mainly thanks to SPB and Doris, and on publication became as famous as
Tom Brown's Schooldays
a century before. ‘My dear Alec,' SPB wrote to Waugh in October 1917, ‘Your book on every stall & in the mouths of every one who matters.' Forty years on, Priscilla wanted the same reception.

She regarded Waugh as her literary godfather ever since reading ‘To Your Daughter', the poem he had composed for her birth. Like
The Loom of Youth
, her book would be an autobiographical Bildungsroman, taking in its sweep her upbringing in Sherborne and Hove, her move aged nine to Paris, her life during the Occupation. At its core would be her four and a half years in Nazi France.

When Priscilla flew back to England in October 1944, she had learned to distrust what she had been taught and not to depend on what anyone told her. And yet about one thing she was clear-sighted. She had brought with her out of France material for a cracking story, not about an elite coming to terms with fascism, but about ordinary people – ordinary women especially – adjusting, screwing up, and developing survival skills of a deeply primitive and totally understandable, if ruthless, kind. It was a story that would give Alec Waugh and even John Buchan a run for their money, and compete with any novel that SPB had written. In Priscilla's Electra-like struggle with her father, her book would be a way of communicating and identifying with him, and also her weapon and revenge.

Priscilla narrated her story through the eyes of two young women: Crystal, based on herself, and Chantal, based on Gillian. In one of those coincidences which make their relationship even more poignant, Gillian had, unknown to Priscilla, decided to write about her own life in pre-war Paris, with a character based on Priscilla. Gllian's novel, written in French and also the first of several attempts to shape the material that they shared, received the same rejection. ‘My novel went to 5 publishers, nearly taken by Gallimard, one vote missing.' Gillian at least finished
Un Etrange Maître
, on 17 March 1957. When Priscilla's ‘novel' reached the scene where Daniel Vernier lowered his pistol inside the clinic in Saint-Cloud, it disintegrated into a mass of notes and scribbles.

35.
TOO MUCH GIN

Survivors pay with their conscience. Not to Raymond, not to Gillian – not even to Zoë – did Priscilla admit the extent of her friendships with Emile Cornet, Max Stocklin and Otto Graebener. Nailed to the cross of her secret past, she preserved the silence of Garbo on her years in Occupied France.

Once, Priscilla was rereading
Candide
and noticed she was eating all the time, and realised that she had read the novella in a state of semi-starvation at Besançon. There were triggers she tried to avoid – being jostled in the Underground or anyone in uniform. But her past was a phosphorus that continued to burn. A breath of cool wind over the Nissen mushroom sheds goose-pimpled her bare arms, and at its touch she was back in a freezing courtyard, back with the noise and snow and queues, the eye-stinging smell of the stove, the bitter taste of the soup, the clop of the wood-soled boots on the long stone corridors, and the piercing toot of the trains at night in the remoteness of the town.

Arthur Koestler said that guilt should be forgiven but not hushed up. Priscilla had held her shame at bay through the 1940s and 50s, but it was eating away inside, and finally it overwhelmed her. Unable to relieve the pressure through writing, unable to speak out candidly, she resorted to Gordon's gin. From about the time that she abandoned her third attempt at
a novel, Priscilla, the once-priggish young woman who for many years never sipped anything stronger than milk, was to her intimate friends a drunk.

It was a refrain of guests at Church Farm: ‘Oh, where's Priscilla, I'd like to say goodbye.' My mother admired the way that she stood up in the middle of her own dinner party and went to bed. ‘I wished I could do that.' She never knew that Priscilla had become a member of AA. ‘I was just aware of everyone drinking like mad.'

Upstairs, Tracey remembered her stepmother weaving down the passageway to get to bed. ‘She was very clever at disguising it. She thought we were asleep.'

Her father could tell, though. After a visit to Church Farm, SPB wrote in his diary: ‘Too much gin as usual.'

Priscilla and Raymond were part of a circle of friends who were hard drinkers. And yet she paid a ruinous price. She had resembled Grace Kelly for so long. Now alcohol put lines beside her mouth; her skin grew blotchy, her neck thickened, the once-blue eyes that looked at you were blood-shot. She broke out in excessive sweats, making her blonde hair damp and stringy.

John Sutro loved Priscilla, and invited himself to stay whenever at a loose end during Gillian's absences. He was struck by Priscilla's deterioration: ‘She's lost all her looks poor thing.' After seeing it for herself, Gillian wrote to Vertès that their friend had become fat. Vertès's reply: ‘Priscilla fat? That doesn't surprise me. Already in December, I found her quite voluminous. She's soon going to be a very obese woman. That shouldn't make her unhappy since she has the character of a fat person.'

Ravaged by an inner despair, her health suffered. She had aches and pains. She stopped going to the cinema after she began seeing double. She lost interest in driving; even in reading. Her sole interest – to ‘get at the drink quickly'. And yet for all the cunning that she deployed to get drunk, Priscilla could no longer hide the effect. From the early 1960s, the sadness that I had picked up on as a child started to reveal itself.

One afternoon, she went to tea with Gillian and passed out. On coming-to, Priscilla lurched against a table, smashing an antique vase. ‘When Gillian remonstrated with me, I roared with laughter, thus adding insult to injury.
Appalled by this story I decided that something had to be done. After all, I had known her all my life and she was closer to me than my own sister. This is when the idea of AA first entered my mind.'

In December 1963, Priscilla stood up to address her first AA meeting in London, afterwards writing in her notebook: ‘Resolutions: to save my marriage, to save my health, to save my looks.' Throughout early 1964, she attended meetings in Brighton, Bognor and Swiss Cottage, where her fellow members were: a delightful woman called Nina, a foul-mouthed Soho greengrocer, two burglars, and some hold-up men.

By April, Priscilla had been dry for two months. She enjoyed reading again, watching films. ‘I felt a new lease of life.' She looked forward to a sailing holiday with Raymond. ‘My life is full of excitement and our new boat “Drusilla” was acquired at just the right moment for me. I no longer spend my “all” in pubs and secret bottle-hoarding. Perhaps I shall be able to take up writing again and fulfil my ambition to have a book published. I am happier than I have ever been and am full of hope instead of despair.'

Then on 2 May, Priscilla suffered a terrible ‘defeat'. Committed to go to an AA meeting in Bognor, she did not attend ‘because of bloodcurdling row with SPB'.

Priscilla's last and most dramatic rift with her father had its origins six years earlier, when he asked for money.

SPB was one of the radio casualties that failed to make the transition into television. A pioneer of television, he had come off screen when transmission ceased in 1939, when there were only 18,000 sets in Britain. By the time the service resumed in 1946, he was, at sixty-one, too old. He had to fall back on his voice and his pen, but he found it hard to earn a living.

Not one of SPB's novels sold more than 5,000 copies.
It Isn't Far from London
sold 2,765 copies and earned £77 in royalties [£2,000 in today's money]. The most he earned from any book was £850 – for
I Return to Scotland
.

Unable to support himself and Winnie through writing and broadcasting, and lacking a pension, he was reduced to the humiliating tradition of sending
out begging letters. Until well into the 1960s, SPB continued to importune friends like Henry Williamson and Alec Waugh.

A fairly typical SOS was one written to Waugh in June 1965, from SPB's final address, Flat 20, Bliss House – a modern low-rise building owned by the Samaritans in the Sussex village of Lindfield. ‘Dear Alec, you were kind to me when I was last in touch. Be kind again. I have just moved into this doll's house of a flat which is really a superior old people's home, though the rent is £234 a year plus rates of £60. The government expects me to get by on my old-age pension of £4 a week. It doesn't keep me in cigars. I can't afford to get my hair cut, shoes repaired or shaving cream. I can't afford this writing paper . . . But you made such a packet out of
Sunshine Island
[
sic
] I have no compunction whatever in asking you to help me pay rates & the bills that fall – money to beautify this cesspool of an asylum.' He referred to himself as ‘the ghost of Mr Chips' and concluded with an appeal that he knew Waugh would find helpless to resist: ‘I just want to remind people that I am NOT the author of
The Loom of Youth.'

This sly reference to Waugh's first book was calculated to graze Alec's conscience: no one had contributed more to its success than SPB – or looked out for its teenage author with such boisterous care.