Priscilla (9 page)

Graham Greene told me that he, too, had made a pilgrimage to see my grandfather. A scourge of old fogies, SPB had been kind to him when he was a young writer and he felt genuine gratitude – which Greene acknowledged by using his name for a character in
Brighton Rock
: ‘See that man going to the Gents'? That's Mais. The brewer. He's worth a hundred thousand nicker.'

In the real world, SPB was worth nothing of the sort. It seems unfair on him that he flourished at a time before journalists with his profile were properly paid. I grew up with the lesson that his fame had brought him no fortune at all. And yet he continued to cling to a hope – which Priscilla inherited – of writing that one book which would rescue him from penury and the bailiffs, and earn a life-changing sum greater than the £100 advances which he latterly received for
Books I Like
, its sequel
More Books I Like
, and for leisurely travel books such as
Mediterranean Cruise Holiday
,
South African Cruise Holiday
,
Continental Coach Tour Holiday
.

He wrote in his diary on 30 December 1939: ‘I would give a great deal to write a really good book that would move people.' But he was too oppressed by financial worries and depression to apply to his own work the craftsmanship that he admired in his successful friends. His syntax betrayed his agitation. ‘I still feel I have it in me, but I can't as yet dig down to it because I've never had enough time to write it before having to switch off to earn quickly money to live meanwhile.' In his struggle to maintain some kind of footing, he may have been unable to sit with his work longer. One of his radio producers complained: ‘You seem to write books faster than I can write letters,' after receiving a copy of SPB's ‘boy's book',
The Three-Coloured Pencil
– puffed by its author as ‘a superb achievement in the true Buchan manner which I hope you will both approve and read
in that order
'.

SPB most aspired to write a book like
The Thirty-nine Steps
. He regarded John Buchan's spy thriller, published in 1915, as containing one of the finest descriptions of a man-hunt that he knew, and was twice spurred to emulate it.
The Thirty-nine Steps
was among the first novels that he sent to Paris for Priscilla to read in her convalescence, and which caused Doris to complain in her sharp voice: ‘You always have your nose buried in a book.'

With Gillian's support, Priscilla recovered her health – until the day arrived when she could stand up. Gillian observed her walking across the bedroom and recognised how Priscilla had grown while she had been ill. The transform­ation was striking. The immature girl who had spent a year on a stretcher
was a young woman with a figure. Her puppy fat had fallen away, her straight hair had sprouted back in thick blonde curls. Her body was riper, and she was as tall as Doris.

Her mother did not hide her resentment. ‘You think you are pretty. Fair hair and blue eyes are very commonplace – your sister and I with our dark hair and grey eyes are far more interesting. We are exotic.' She made personal remarks about her daughter in front of others: ‘Priscilla is developing quite nice breasts.' Priscilla would blush furiously and leave the room.

Doris insisted on dressing Priscilla in itchy black woollen stockings which French children never wore, causing Priscilla to feel self-conscious. Her only attractive clothes were a white broderie Anglaise party dress and a tweed suit which Doris had bought her – grudgingly – on Boo's persuasion.

Boo was another who appreciated how Priscilla had changed.

Doris and Boo were not getting on. Their violent rows woke Priscilla in the night. The arguments had grown more acrimonious since it became clear
that SPB was most unlikely to sue Doris for divorce. Doris later explained to the divorce court judge: ‘He said it would ruin him and nothing was done.'

On Boo's part, the friction caused by his Catholic guilt over their unorthodox marital state was sharpened by Doris's flirtations with Gillian's father, and by her tendency to nag Boo about his drinking habits and short temper.

On Doris's part, Boo's inability to earn a living from his writing was too reminiscent of her husband.

SPB paid them a visit, leaving Winnie in a café while he called on Doris. It was the only time he came to see Priscilla in Paris. Looking around the apartment, he recognised the oak commode, the Persian carpet. Priscilla and Vivian ran up to give a welcoming kiss. Priscilla dragged him off to inspect the books in her bedroom.

Boo said that he would not be joining them for lunch.

‘He only takes his meals in liquid form,' said Doris after he left.

‘I hope he never comes back at all.' Priscilla scowled.

There was a reason for Priscilla's vitriol. Years later, Vivien discovered that Boo had tried to molest her.

Boo's interest in Priscilla had started when she was back on her feet. He took her side in any argument with Doris and offered to help Priscilla with her homework or piano practice. Soon he was paying too much attention, said Vivien, ‘nothing beyond attempted caresses in unmentionable places, but naturally causing anger and upset'. Priscilla told Gillian: ‘Whenever I ask him to help me with my Latin he starts mauling me.'

The tariff that Boo imposed for his Latin tuition was that she should kiss him and let him shove his hand under her skirt. Priscilla found this sinister, but was not frightened until one night, while Doris was away, Boo got drunk ‘and tried to rape me'. Priscilla revealed this to her mother only when, during one of his trips to London, Boo wrote to say that he would not be returning. Priscilla found it difficult to forgive her mother's reaction: ‘She slapped me hard on the face. She blamed me, of course, for the break-up. Slowly, I was beginning to see her as she was: a selfish, vain, stupid woman entirely wrapped up in her own affairs.'

The family packed their belongings and left for England. Priscilla was sixteen. They would never hear from Boo again. The next time Priscilla read his name she was sitting in a London cinema watching Alfred Hitchcock's film
The Man Who Knew Too Much
– and saw Boo credited as the screenwriter, and remembered his exploring fingers.

9.
MARRIED ALIVE: 1936

When Priscilla returned to London in 1932, her father already had one daughter with Winnie. Doris finally served divorce papers on SPB because she wanted to marry again. In 1934, after being abandoned by Wyndham-Lewis, and following a series of unhappy relationships, including one with the English cricket captain Wally Hammond, Doris was introduced to an adventurous young naval surgeon, Bertie Ommaney-Davis.

Bertie was twenty-nine and had recently received a congratulatory telegram from George V for sailing a 54-foot ketch without an engine from Hong Kong to Dartmouth. Practically the first woman he met on stepping ashore after a year at sea, with only four naval officers for company, was forty-two-year-old Doris. ‘He fell like a ton of bricks,' said Vivien. ‘He was out of his mind with love. I couldn't think what the hell he was on about.' But Doris saw in the infatuated Bertie an anchorage, and after ten choppy years hoped to start a life with him ‘and have someone she could call her lawful husband'. The problem was that in order to end her twenty-one-year marriage, either she or SPB had to agree to be the guilty party. And SPB, after initially agreeing, refused.

To read the press coverage about Doris's unsuccessful petition is to be reminded of the shame that hedged the subject of divorce. In 2011, there were 144,000
divorces in Britain. For the first time, more than half the children born in Britain were born out of wedlock. But what we now take for granted was inconceivable seventy-five years ago.

Nothing more characterised the judgemental atmosphere in which Priscilla was raised than the Matrimonial Causes Act, unaltered since 1857. To obtain a divorce in 1936, it was essential that both parties did not agree to seek one: an agreement constituted collusion. To protect the sanctity of marriage one party had to be seen to be at fault. This role fell by tradition to the husband who, even if not guilty, was advised to travel with an amenable woman to a hotel, normally in Brighton, and there arrange to be caught in flagrante by a credible witness – explaining Doris's request for Priscilla to ‘give evidence and say in court that she had seen her father in bed with Winnie'.

The MP and writer A. P. Herbert who did most to change this antiquated law was a friend of my grandfather. In his 1934 novel
Holy Deadlock
, Herbert drew on details of SPB's domestic situation to lampoon the ludicrous legal pickle in which SPB had found himself – and as a result Herbert believed that he ‘helped to create a more favourable attitude' to divorce law reform.

The Maises' divorce case was heard two years after Herbert published
Holy Deadlock
, and marked a watershed, mobilising public opinion, drawing attention to an unjust statute, and stimulating Parliament to reform it. After Doris appealed to ‘the discretion of the court', Justice Bucknill decreed that neither party was fit for marriage, both of their records being ‘too bad to allow either to be free to contaminate other partners' – and according to this twisted logic refused to grant a divorce. Until their deaths, SPB and Doris would be ‘joined together in unholy matrimony' – in Herbert's phrase – or ‘married alive'. In November 1936, four months after Justice Bucknill delivered his verdict in the community's interest, Herbert introduced a more humane Matrimonial Causes Act, which became law on 1 January 1938 and allowed divorce without requiring proof of adultery. Priscilla's evidence, and specifically the requirement that forced Doris to make her daughter testify against her father, had played a contributory part.

Another reason why Justice Bucknill decided against granting Doris's petition was that SPB fought it.

At the time that Doris had first requested a divorce, in 1925, SPB was not so hostile to the idea: he could cast himself as the wronged party without injuring his standing as a journalist. The arrival of Winnie and a child complicated his position. Plus the fact that he now worked for the BBC. When Doris got in touch again nine years later, after meeting Bertie, SPB agreed not to defend her action. His one condition: she would have to divorce him. He changed his mind only after Doris's lawyers demanded that he play the guilty partner.

First, SPB could not stomach the systemic hypocrisy of the conditions. It was Doris who had run off – not once, but twice. He explained in the witness box that he wished the whole truth to be brought into the open in order to preserve his reputation. One after another, he named his wife's lovers. Brownrigg. Wyndham-Lewis. A man called Frank Young (Doris denied this). He may not have known about Wally Hammond or about Gillian's father.

Second, SPB wished to keep his job. He could not, professionally speaking, risk entering the public record as a divorcé. The BBC, in which he had now forged a successful career, was an institution that refused to employ divorced people on its staff. In 1929, the director-general John Reith sacked his senior engineer merely for being cited in a divorce case; in the following year John Heygate was expelled from the BBC after eloping with Evelyn Waugh's wife. It is likely that Reith would have withdrawn his patronage even from such a well-known freelance as SPB, and evidence exists that for a time Reith did so. A confidential internal memorandum from the head of children's programmes reads: ‘Mr Mais is seeking further work in
Children's Hour
. . . Am I right in believing that there is a feeling militating against this speaker?'

This was the punitive situation that A. P. Herbert had dramatised in
Holy Deadlock
, converting SPB's dilemma into the character of Martin Seal, ‘who was employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and must not be so much as breathed upon by scandal'. Seal's predicament was SPB's: ‘He's on the BBC and is afraid of losing his job. They're very particular. Used to run
Children's Hour
. He's one of the announcers now . . . It would never do for the British public to hear the “Weather Report” from the lips of a co-respondent.'

Either SPB's fear that a divorce would jeopardise his career was greater than his concern to keep secret his irregular domestic life, which was about to become still more irregular since Winnie was eight months pregnant with their second child; or else he hoped that once he contested Doris's petition, she would withdraw it. Whatever his calculations, they misfired. Asked to lie, he was punished for telling the truth. He wrote in his diary: ‘I am unable to regard the law of the land with anything but suspicion and contempt after that.'

The financial and social repercussions were mortifying. SPB was ordered to pay the costs of £880 (approximately £50,000 in today's money). ‘I am reduced to no assets. I cannot overdraw for 18 months.' He was forbidden to take communion in his local church – ‘I was excommunicated,' he wrote with bitterness in his diary; and when his youngest daughter Imogen was born one month later,
The Times
refused to let him place an announcement in the birth column.