Priscilla (25 page)

Georgette arrived on foot. Seeing that Priscilla was nearly in tears, she approached a kind-looking elderly lady and asked her to look after Priscilla. This was Miss Norah Beresford, a retired Indian Army nurse. Over the next weeks, the fifty-five-year-old Beresford or ‘Berry' became a mentor for Priscilla and for Priscilla's young English friend Jacqueline Grant, who left this description of her. ‘She had white hair parted in the middle and dressed over her ears in macaroons, and she mothered us. And she was dressed for the event, as she had very thick woollies and jodhpurs and she looked capable of tackling anything.'

After waiting for several hours with nothing to eat, Priscilla and Berry were packed into a police van and transported to the Gare de l'Est.

Still arriving from all over France, hundreds of panic-stricken figures milled about on the platforms. Women of every class and age, with young children and babies, some pregnant, some middle-aged with dogs. A handful of bewildered old men stood out, mostly poor, who had avoided the round-up of Englishmen in August.

Shula Troman was a seventeen-year old art student arrested that morning. She described for me the pitiful scene, the German soldiers yelling orders in terrible French. ‘They were always counting. “Put yourselves in groups of four!” “Young people with young people there, mothers with children there!” We didn't know where we were going.'

Coal-fired locomotives hissed out jets of black steam. Rumours rippled along the platforms. Their arrest was a reaction to Hitler's thwarted invasion,
now delayed to the spring. It was a reprisal for the British government's internment of German civilians on the Isle of Man. Their destination was a concentration camp in Frankfurt. Troman said, ‘We all thought, because it was Gare de l'Est, we were going to Germany.'

Towards evening, Priscilla and Berry were crammed shivering into an unheated carriage. Through windows on the platform side, stony-faced German Red Cross nurses passed cups of pea soup made from powder, even as soldiers wrapped barbed wire around the door handles to seal the compartment. A shriek of whistles and the train shuddered and began to grind out of the station.

Sixty-one years later, I was in Paris on the winter day when the chief executive of the French national railway delivered a public apology: ‘In the name of the SNCF, I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported, and before the suffering that still lives.' He made his landmark contrition in the suburb of Bobigny, from where 20,000 Jews were taken to Nazi camps. France was the first European country to give full rights to Jews, and yet between 1941 and 1944, the SNCF carried 76,000 European Jews in cattle cars to the French – German border, and thence to extermination camps in Poland.

Less well known is the SNCF's part in transporting upwards of 4,000 British female passport-holders, not to an extermination camp but to an internment camp in Besançon near the Swiss border.

Who were these women? Incredible to relate, no complete record exists. Priscilla's name does not appear in Besançon's archives, nor in documents relating to English internees in the French National Archives. Priscilla's father never knew where the Germans had interned her. Why was her experience not accurately reported, more widely discussed?

Two explanations seem likely. First, hers was but one of millions of similar stories; a civilian narrative of dispossession, degradation and deportation that no one wanted to listen to by the time it became possible to tell. Secondly, the internment camp was German-run and involved non-French detainees, and so the French were not that interested. Rita Harding arrived at the camp at the same time as Priscilla. ‘I still have French schoolfriends who whenever
I mention Besançon look blank,' she said. ‘No French person knows. I don't know if they're ashamed. It's never, never mentioned. But now I think about Besançon all the time since I met Jimmy.'

I managed to find Jimmy Fox in Paris. He suggested a drink at the Hôtel Lutétia, 45 Boulevard Raspail. ‘This used to be the HQ of the Gestapo,' he said, sipping his tomato juice. It was in this room of looking-glasses, black marble and chandeliers that the Gestapo plotted Priscilla's arrest and transportation.

Fox, a former editor-in-chief of the Magnum photographic agency, had spent his retirement investigating the history of the British internees. He knew more about what happened at Besançon than anyone alive – more, it was possible to believe, than many of those who were imprisoned there. Rocking forward in his red velvet chair, he talked of crucial documents locked in an archive near Paris, of files going missing – the interrogation reports from the SS offices in Rue Lauriston, for example. ‘Someone wanted to make a film, but they had a big problem with the Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon. Oh no, it still smells.'

My aunt's name rang no immediate bell, but Fox promised to look through his papers.

Priscilla's first piece of writing after returning to England in October 1944 was an account of her months in Besançon. Her experience of internment dictated the way that she lived for the remainder of the Occupation, and it was so vital for her to get down on paper that she interrupted her love affair with Robert Donat. With the help of this memoir, I tracked Priscilla's journey to the camp.

I also went to see three women who were imprisoned with her:

Shula Troman lived surrounded by books and paintings in a cottage on the Brittany coast. An artist born in Palestine, she showed me her drawings of other inmates, plus a photo of the doctor who had saved Priscilla. Our conversation lasted eleven hours.

Rita Harding lived in Rue Paul Doumer in Paris, in a period apartment of gilt mirrors and cornices. I sought her out because it was possible that she had shared Priscilla's room in the camp.

Yvette Goodden, aged ninety-three, lived outside Sherborne, Priscilla's birthplace in Dorset.

These three women, all widows living on their own, were among the last articulate witnesses who could help me to comprehend Priscilla's experience.

Her fellow passengers were a diverse group, from jockeys' wives to the daughter of an Indian maharajah, who had boarded the train dressed in a veil and a sable coat. Many did not speak English and had never been to England, but had married an Englishman. Some were trapped in France like Priscilla's companion Berry, on her way to Nice to fetch home a friend who was invalid, or on holiday when the Germans invaded. They numbered aristocrats, governesses, nannies, nurses, couturiers, prostitutes, professors, students, bar owners, clairvoyants, dancers, Palestinians, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, plus 487 nuns from eighty-nine orders – including a nun who had remained in the same cloister for thirty-five years and of the outside world had only ever seen ‘the planes that flew over my head'.

Priscilla shared her compartment with eleven women, sitting face to face on slatted wooden seats and standing up in turns so others could stretch out. There were no corridors. One woman defecated into her sponge bag.

‘You've never seen a third-class French train carriage in 1940 . . .' said Yvette Goodden, who was picked up that morning in Bordeaux. She had not forgotten the spectacle of her fellow passengers, some still in their dressing gowns, and of being shunted back and forth during a journey that in her case lasted two days. Goodden, then twenty-three, was married to an English naval commander and had a two-year-old son, Michael, whom she was forced to leave behind in Bordeaux. Like Priscilla and Shula Troman, she feared that the train was taking her to Germany.

Jacqueline Grant, who later worked for British Intelligence, believed ‘that Intelligence had informed Churchill and he warned Hitler that if we crossed the border into Germany he would retaliate against German women interned
on the Isle of Man.' This might explain why the precision of the round-up contrasted with the disorganised reception. The secrecy surrounding the initial arrests had been well kept, even from the German soldiers who were supposed to guard them. They were unprepared utterly for the arrival of an estimated 3,900 British-passport holders, mostly women, some with screaming babies and dogs, some old and ill, all hungry and anxious and cold.

The train jolted to a halt in Besançon, in the Jura. ‘We arrived like a flock,' said Shula Troman, ‘in a kind of dream.' Yvette Goodden recalled a funny little station with German troops lining the platform. It was snowing hard. A convoy of vehicles, hastily arranged, waited to bundle the older passengers to the camp. The youngest had to walk. Priscilla's legs were swollen from hours on the hard-slatted seats. She trudged up the hill, passing under a stone bridge and the gaze of French women and children who leaned over the parapet, staring down in silence: they had been told that these women were spies. ‘Oh, it was ghastly,' said Rita Harding.

Priscilla was herded through the thick snow and between the tall iron gates of a disused barracks. Just inside on the left was a manège, a covered yard of beaten earth used for exercising horses. Numb and dirty, she was ordered to wait until a cart rolled up spilling suitcases. She dug hers out and opened it for inspection to a German woman who also riffled though her handbag, searching for flashlights, sharp objects, mirrors, books proscribed by the Otto List. The novel that she had been reading was confiscated for a censor to examine. Her name was written down and her passport removed.

Besançon, birthplace of Victor Hugo, means House of Light. The internment camp that looked down on the town – situated in the Forbidden Zone on the Swiss border – was Caserne Vauban or Frontstalag 142. More than half a century later, Gillian was incensed to read that my aunt had called it a concentration camp. But the Germans did designate the penitentiary at Besançon a
Konzentrationslager
, and the term was common at this period, used by Gillian's friend Arthur Koestler, himself a prisoner in France, as well as by Yvette Goodden: ‘I call Besançon a concentration camp. My son picks
me up every time. Always, it was referred to as concentration camp. We didn't know how bad a real concentration camp was. We just thought it was a place where one was imprisoned.'

Priscilla's father was another to use the term. In his book
Continental Coach Tour Holiday
(1960), SPB wrote in the copy that he gave her: ‘We started off again at 2.50 p.m. to face the climb over the Vosges where my eldest daughter Priscilla was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during the war.' Priscilla, responding to all the errors, had marked ‘!!!!' in the margin.

SPB never made it to Besançon on his 1959 coach trip with Winnie. The closest he came was Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a hundred miles north. ‘At one place we passed an inn bearing the sign “À la Bonne Truite” just beyond which we caught up with a girl with long flaxen hair of the same colour as Priscilla's and about the age that Priscilla was when the Germans captured her. It was odd and made me feel a little frightened.' SPB and Winnie stopped for a drink at the Nouvel Hotel. ‘I was very much moved when Winnie suddenly said, “We will dedicate our book to Priscilla.”' The dedication would read, with geographical inaccuracy: ‘For PRISCILLA who has good reason to remember the Vosges'. It was the only book that her father dedicated to her.

Priscilla never went back to Besançon. On the sole occasion that Shula Troman attempted to look around the barracks, many years after the war, a French sentry barred the way. Troman laughed. ‘I told him: “For five months, the Germans would not let me out.”'

To gain access is hard even today. Caserne Vauban has been closed since 2006, but Brigadier Fouquet in command of the 19th Régiment du Génie – which is stationed in Besançon and formerly occupied the premises – organised for one of his men to unchain the gates and accompany me. Excessively polite and equipped with a camera, the officer had instructions to photograph our visit. The internment of British women in what used to be the regimental headquarters had come as news to his Brigadier: he wanted a record. Also in our group was a local journalist, Eric Daviatte.

The officer re-padlocked the cast-iron gates behind us. The cold air smelled of dead leaves. We stood facing a potholed tarmac quadrangle surrounded by buildings dating back to the eighteenth century.

Bâtiment B lay on the far side. I knew where to go, thanks to Jimmy Fox, who had emailed: ‘With a magnifier on faded paper and written in pencil, I suddenly found the name DOYNEL and the number of her room.'

A chipped tiled staircase led us to the fourth floor. The rooms no longer had numbers, but B. 71 would have been among the largest.

I walked down a high-ceilinged corridor, darting my eyes into room after empty room. A poster of a beach in Tahiti. Graffiti of a skull. A row of smashed urinals. You could tell that the place had been occupied by soldiers.

The Vauban barracks, built in the Napoleonic Wars, was arranged about a huge cinder courtyard planted with small trees. It comprised three dour buildings, four storeys high, with architraved windows and grey mansard roofs. The Germans labelled them Bâtiments A, B and C. Each building was divided into nine blocks and each block contained 33 sections. Loudspeakers affixed to the side of the Kommandantur, an elegant building near the gates, played German classical music. It was impossible for Priscilla to lose herself in the music since this was continually being interrupted by announcements.