Priscilla (8 page)

Gillian was as riveted by Priscilla's bald head as by the scars on her legs. Priscilla shrugged. ‘If people don't like them, they can look the other way.' Gillian sensed that the scar left at having to give up dancing was deeper. A ballet career was out of the question.

‘As Priscilla couldn't go out or move off her bed, she didn't mind as much as she might have done.' Impressed by her stoicism, from now on Gillian tried to see Priscilla every day after school.

Of the four Hammond siblings, Priscilla initially had much preferred Gillian's elder brother Nicky – in September 1926, SPB had met Priscilla off the steamer at Newhaven: ‘P talks of nothing but proposal of marriage (at 10) for Nicky Hammond (aged 11).' Five years on, Priscilla began to transfer her attention to his fourteen-year-old sister.

* * *

In December 1998, the upstairs neighbour in Gillian's apartment block in Monaco forgot to turn off his bathroom tap. Gillian's living room was flooded and the novel ruined which she had been writing about Priscilla. Gillian lamented in a notebook: ‘Parts of my MS got soaked and caused ink to run, rendering the text illegible. I have had to dry out soaked book, weigh down swollen pages with heavy irons.'

She died a few months later, before having rewritten the text, but from her notebooks, and from Priscilla's novel which featured Gillian as a central character, it is possible to establish a detailed picture of a friendship that lasted fifty-seven years and took root during this period.

Gillian spent most of her spare hours with Priscilla. She helped Doris's Italian maid carry her from room to room and, if Marguerite was unavailable, had Priscilla lower herself on the Persian rug and dragged her around the parquet floor.

Priscilla's bedroom was their den. Gillian knelt beside her and they talked. There was not much else to do. United by a similar ‘inferiority complex', as Gillian called it, they were opposites who absorbed each other, Gillian all elbows and sharp (despite her adolescent chubbiness) to Priscilla's passive roundness. This tension kept their relationship alive. Gillian saw it as her duty to distract Priscilla from the reality that she would never perform ‘The Dying Swan'. Priscilla became Gillian's outlet for all that Gillian, or ‘Chou-chou' as Priscilla nicknamed her, could not discuss at home. For the year that she was confined to her bed, Priscilla entered the world largely through Gillian's eyes.

To keep Priscilla's mind from gnawing on her disappointment, Gillian lent her film magazines and helped with her lessons. Priscilla's education had been neglected owing to her dance classes and then because of illness. She was unable to attend the Lycée Carnot, Gillian's new school, but as part of a joint cost-cutting exercise they now shared a stern governess, Mademoiselle Yvonne, who set them homework. Gillian sometimes finished Priscilla's homework for her while Priscilla locked herself in the lavatory with a book – a habit that Gillian adopted. All through their lives, Priscilla and Gillian were to use the lavatory as a place of escape, to read books or love letters.

A halted dancer, her limbs still ‘full of lingering', Priscilla filled the sudden empty space with reading. Banned from newspapers, she escaped into the pages of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Tolstoy. Her favourite novels at fourteen were
Wuthering Heights
and
War and Peace
.

Her father chose many of the books: it was how he kept in touch – with regular parcels of novels. After her operations, too busy to get away, and not believing for an instant that she was dying, he had sent a daily postcard in his crabbed handwriting. Finally, she wrote back. She missed him desperately, but she had taken badly the news that he had started another family with Winnie. Gillian found Priscilla in tears just before her fifteenth birthday. SPB had written to her, announcing the birth of her half-sister, Lalage – my mother.

Doris was unsympathetic. She put her daughter down for resembling her father too much, and blamed Priscilla for the sacrifices that she had had to make. ‘I would have left your father years before if it hadn't been for you.' That was a frequent gripe.

8.
SPB

While she convalesced, Priscilla conceived the two ambitions of her life. To have a child; and to publish a book, like her father.

She saw him in Sussex for a few days each summer, heavily chaperoned by her French governess. But in Paris, depending on favourable atmospheric conditions, she listened to him as often as possible, twiddling one of the three round knobs on Boo's wooden wireless to the National Programme – radiated from the Daventry long-wave transmitter on a wavelength of 1554.4m. Stretched out on the couch, immobile, she heard SPB's disembodied voice speaking ‘with the gloves off', and immediately was pushing through the heather, breathing in smells of mud and wet tweed as she followed him on foot after the hounds, always struggling to keep up. Hunting, he used to say, was ‘the purest of human pleasures'.

Priscilla had a lot of her father in her. She adored him, and went on adoring him, despite periods of separation and disappointment. But their relationship was complex because he was such a public figure, and had a life that did not involve her.

While Priscilla was living in France, her father had become famous. In 1927, his rich mellow voice attracted the attention of the BBC. He made his impact as a pioneer of radio, with a belief, compellingly expressed, that without
radio ‘
any
man – but especially the workless man – is only half alive today'. The philosopher Bryan Magee told me: ‘I grew up in a working-class home in Hoxton and even I was entirely used to hearing him mentioned.' In 1954, Magee hired SPB's youngest daughter Imogen as his secretary. ‘When I said to my grandmother and two aunts, “My secretary is SPB's daughter,” they were awe-struck. It was a little bit like, “My secretary is Salman Rushdie's daughter,” or during an earlier generation, “My secretary is Somerset Maugham's daughter.”'

SPB epitomised Englishness: most of his many books and radio talks were celebrations of England's history, geography, culture and language. He was – in a phrase he concocted – ‘the golden voice of radio'. ‘My voice,' he wrote with apparent absence of irony or embarrassment or false modesty, ‘was held to be “a clean steady trade-wind blowing”.' It was heard in corners of the Empire as far away as New Zealand, and familiar on programmes like
Time to Spare
,
The Kitchen Front
and
The Brains Trust
where his audience was not limited to the working class. In January 1933,
The Times
reported that ‘the Queen listened with great interest to the broadcast talk by Mr S. P. B. Mais recently on his tour of unemployment centres in Liverpool and Birkenhead.'

He rose to prominence during the Depression when he came to be known as the ‘Ambassador of the English Countryside'. In January 1932, the BBC commissioned a topographical series,
This Unknown Island
, to encourage tourism to Britain's holiday resorts. SPB travelled to seventeen regions and
spent a week exploring each. A book with the same title appeared soon after, one of more than two hundred books that he published.

His message for people to go out and explore what lay on their doorsteps, preferably on foot, held a powerful appeal to those who could not afford the cost of travelling abroad, still less a car. The public responded in huge numbers. In July 1932, he was joined by 16,000 people – including Priscilla – on the Sussex Downs to watch the sun rise over the Iron Age fort at Chanctonbury Ring. Four special trains had to be laid on for this midnight excursion.

E. M. Forster praised his broadcasts, suggesting that for his next venture he might visit ‘the Unknown Tyne, Mersey and Clyde', and, rather than winkle out beauty spots, examine ‘the quite intolerable horror of the unemployed man's life'. SPB jumped at the challenge, persuading the BBC to let him deliver a series of eleven talks on the unemployed. The series was introduced by the Prince of Wales, and proved vivid and popular, giving a human face to the misery and hopeless condition of three million men and women. A second series was commissioned in April 1934, transmitted at peak listening time and causing a nationwide furore on the eve of the final reading of the Unemployment Bill. Angry questions were asked in Parliament, with MPs citing SPB's talks to mock the government's claims that the unemployed were better off. The BBC's prickly director-general John Reith was summoned to Downing Street and ordered by the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to desist with the programmes. Reith replied that he would order S. P. B. Mais to report on air that the half-hour silence about to follow was owing to the Government's refusal to allow the unemployed to express their opinions. The programmes continued.

When SPB travelled to America the following winter, he was the first to transmit a series of live weekly programmes from the United States, or indeed from anywhere outside Britain. He invited Priscilla to come as his secretary, but to Priscilla's everlasting bitterness Doris refused to allow this. The ground-breaking talks, aired simultaneously on NBC, were introduced by the American ambassador, with this impressive claim: ‘It is the first time in the history of broadcasting that such an effort has been made, in which a national of one country will visit another country, study its people, and try to interpret
them to his own nationals.' His discursive method worked, and trail-blazed the way for, thirteen years later, Alistair Cooke's
Letter from Americ
a. Billed as ‘a modern Columbus', SPB toured fourteen states in three months, and President Roosevelt granted him an audience. ‘I had been called the Ambassador of the English Countryside,' SPB wrote in the inevitable companion volume. ‘I was now to be regarded as the Ambassador of the English People.' I have not been able to listen to the recordings, but the talks were incorporated into his book
A Modern Columbus
, and reading them I understand his popularity. Unsnobbish, he approached everything with excited curiosity.

SPB's correspondence fills two trolleys at the BBC's sound archives in Caversham. His producers, who included George Orwell and Graham Greene's cousin Felix, experienced the same problems with his handwriting as did Priscilla, and routinely had it typed out. ‘Dear Petre, Thank you for your brief illegible letter,' is a typical complaint.

So atrocious was his handwriting that when invited to lecture at Bomber Command he sent back a letter asking if he could bring his wife. A telegram came by return:
DELIGHTED BRING BITCH BUT STATE SIZE BECAUSE OF RATIONING
. He answered that his wife was not a bitch, weighed 9 stone 6 pounds and stood 5 foot 7½ inches. The reply this time:
SOME MISTAKE SURELY NO BITCH 9ST 6LB WE HAVE TWO MASTIFFS BETTER LEAVE BITCH BEHIND
. The ‘bitch' was my grandmother. Alone in being able to read what he had written, to Winnie fell the task of typing out his journals and books.

He never owned a house. As his fame grew, so did the procession of visitors to the homes he rented, in Sussex and then, after war broke out, in Oxford. My mother remembered meeting Henry Williamson (‘he didn't like beds and slept on the floor'), George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Betjeman (he gave the speech at her wedding) and A. P. Herbert.