Priscilla (47 page)

A woman's shorn hair was nailed to the front of her house, or burned in large heaps which could be smelled for miles. Some women committed suicide from the humiliation. Others shunned public contact. In 1983, the year that the last collaborator was released from prison, a former tondue was discovered in the Auvergne still living as a recluse nearly four decades on. The majority of women dared to hope that once their hair sprouted back, people would forget the shearing and there would be no necessity ever to speak or think of it again. This was what another tondue, Marie-Rose Dupont, fervently believed when she reopened her hairdressing salon in Moissac – until the morning she walked into the salon and saw her traumatised eight-year-old son seated in one of the chairs, bald.

Her hair, her famous hair. Priscilla was thrown back to the last time it was scissored off, when she was fourteen, and Gillian had hauled her around the floor of Doris's studio on a Persian rug. Stretched out in her room at the nursing home, she was constrained in her movements, like Pierre's fidgety bird. Pierre had promised to look after her. Where was he?

‘It was very unfortunate to be bed-ridden at such a time,' she wrote. If not for Emile Cornet and Max Stocklin, they would be after her for Otto Graebener.

Without Pierre to tell her what was going on, she relied on the nurses. It was clear that everyone was living in terror of denunciation, no matter how high up you were in the gratin. Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, a member like Robert of the grand social and dining club Cercle Interallié, had, apparently, witnessed an impromptu FFI tribunal interrogating a dishevelled Duchesse de Brissac, a fur coat like Priscilla's hastily thrown on over her underclothes; the Duchesse was known for her romantic attachments to
German officers. Another fashionable tondue was the woman who had shared Priscilla's address, Gillian's lookalike: Jacqueline Kraus had her dark hair shaved in the streets.

‘Accusations rained on people,' Gitta Sereny told me. ‘Everyone was in danger of going to prison' – like Isabelle de la Bouillerie, president of Sereny's charity. ‘She was sent to Santé and died there. She was not pro-German, but she was not beyond getting help from Germans when she needed it. And the Germans were the only people who could give this help.'

Overnight, the men who might have helped Priscilla had melted away. Otto gone; Pierre gone; Emile, still in Fresnes; Daniel and Robert hurt beyond measure. She was an obvious target for revenge: not of French origin, well fed and dressed because of her association with Germans. She had lain beside Otto Graebener's warm fire while the rest of France shivered.

Priscilla was in her room one evening when she heard raised voices in the corridor. She gripped the iron frame of her bed.

The door was flung open and Daniel Vernier marched in, dressed in a tight-fitting uniform that she had last seen him wear in Rouen during the Phoney War, and produced, with an extremely shaky hand, a revolver which he pointed at her. His gloomy face trapped in a big beret was white. ‘I had not noticed the FFI band on his arm until then and thought he had come to murder me.'

There was a ring of absurdity about the scene: the demented ex-lover smelling of camphor, the petrified convalescent – and between them that canary.

She stared back into the muzzle of Vernier's trembling gun and dreadful images flashed through her mind.

If Vernier did not pull the trigger, then more than likely he would insist on taking Priscilla to Fresnes where a grisly pageant was unfolding.

The crowded cells mimicked the recent bedlam in her room. One woman staring out between the bars was the actress Arletty, arrested because of her relationship with a Luftwaffe colonel. ‘What kind of government is this,' she
complained, ‘which worries about our sleeping arrangements!' It was being whispered in the nursing home that her breasts had been cut off.

Jacqueline Kraus's sister was in Fresnes, and the well-known opera singer Germaine Lubin, whose crime was to have sung for Hitler. ‘Except for having eaten the flesh of children there was nothing I was not accused of.' She shivered at what she was compelled to witness: ‘In the corner, garbage was mixed with the hair of women who had had their heads shaved the night before. During the course of the day another four were shaved completely bald except for one on whom, for laughs, they had left a tug in the middle of her head which hung down like the mandarin's pigtail.'

It was not only bald women who were jammed into the cells and prison yard. Albert Blaser, the head waiter of Maxim's who had led Priscilla to her table, was arrested. And Maurice Chevalier, whose manager had been engaged to Gillian's sister; Chevalier had sung on the German station Radio-Paris. Otto Graebener, arriving from Hendaye for further interrogation, brushed shoulders with his rival Emile Cornet. Arrested on the Swiss border, Max Stocklin arrived in Fresnes on 17 November. He joined 4,500 inmates.

In Sainteny, the rumour spread like pink-eye that Robert's brother Georges had spent time in Fresnes.

No one in Sainteny considered Georges Doynel a collaborator, and his son Dick denied that he was ever arrested. But when the wind blew down the oaks in the avenue in the winter of 1940, Georges had summoned a forester who owned a sawmill at Le Chalet des Pins. Joseph Carer, the steward's son, was one of those called upon to clear the fallen branches. ‘I saw the tractors pulling the oaks, but the tractors broke down because the woodcutters sabotaged them, so the Germans came in half-tracks and dragged the trunks to the mill.' At least fifteen sawyers were involved in cutting the estimated 5,600 trees into planks, some of which went to Cherbourg and Speer's Organisation Todt to make pill boxes and railway sleepers for the Atlantic Wall; the rest of the timber was burned into charcoal. Carer said: ‘I helped cut the trees and load them into wagons, and also the charcoal that was sent to Paris for gasogenes. And that was the beginning of the problem for poor
Georges Doynel. It cost him dear.' Communists in the FFI accused Robert's brother of ‘having participated in the war effort' and for sucking up to the Germans during their residence at Boisgrimot. After the war, Georges sold the gutted chateau in panic-stricken haste and was rumoured, inaccurately, to have fled to Bolivia. The last time Jacqueline Hodey saw him was during the 1960s, in the village square. Georges had turned up at the café run by her parents, to seek their support in his denial that he had been a collaborator. Reluctant to talk in front of others in the bar, he tried to persuade Jacqueline to go outside in private, using the over-familiar ‘tu' instead of ‘vous'. She said: ‘He came to the café and knocked at the door. “Jacqueline, je veux te voir, I want to see you, come here,” and I didn't go. Times had changed. He left without saying anything.'

In Priscilla's nursing home on that hot day in August 1944 Daniel Vernier turned on his heels, walked away.

Soon afterwards, a nurse came into the room with a letter. Kikki Johanet had dropped it off. Priscilla's guardian angel and carrier pigeon had lacked the wings to give her Pierre's message in person.

‘My love, my love, my love. Blessed is he who has never known love. That's the state I'm in after fifteen hours of agony and having returned home. You wrote to me a while ago, “I'm frightened of loving you because I know it will make me suffer.” I confess I didn't believe you, because, just like you, I felt that our love was so passionate a thing that it would be impossible for us to cause each other the slightest pain. But I'm feeling close to madness and intensely depressed. You, Pris, who knows the deepest part of me – you will know what it costs me to write this word of farewell. You took my heart. One only loves once in one's life. My heart has loved you above anything that you can possibly imagine. So I offer it as a parting gift – it's yours . . .' Pierre's letter trails off at this point, not even signed.

Nothing could be more awful than the fact he was not coming back. She sat erect and did not hear the nurse take away her tray and did not say anything. She just read it and closed her eyes and felt something inside her tear apart.

Priscilla abandoned the nursing-home and entered a clinic in Rue Mirosmenil. To protect herself from marauding FFI she sent out a nurse to bring an Allied officer to see her. ‘I wanted an Englishman, but they were few and far between and I had to be content with an American' – a swaggering Texan pilot called Jimmy Richardson. ‘I asked him about England as he had come from there and that was my first news of home for four long years.'

Paris continued to fill with Allied soldiers and diplomats. Early in October, Priscilla moved back into her garçonnière in Place Saint-Augustin. She shared it with Pierre's canary and Paco Diez, her companion on the harrowing bicycle ride from Le Havre. Graebener's associate in looted masterpieces now masqueraded as an art student at the Académie Julian. There was no fuel for the stove and the one electric heater worked on a reduced current. Priscilla was sitting in her coat reading beside the single bar, when there was a knock on the door. A tall officer introduced himself in a sing-song English voice as Harold Acton, a friend of Gillian's and best man at her wedding.

Acton was staying with the Sutros in London when the BBC announced that Paris had been liberated and he was ordered to the French capital with the SHAEF censorship unit. He asked Gillian if he might leave behind a suitcase containing his airforce uniform. Gillian sought a favour in return. She had no address for Priscilla, but she had – at last – a lead: Joseph Kessel had managed to get hold of a telephone number. Gillian begged Acton to use
this to track Priscilla down and gave him a letter to deliver in the event that he was successful.

On 5 October, Acton flew to Paris. He observed in his memoirs: ‘Externally Paris had changed far less than London during these tragic years. Externally . . . What of the heart?' From his billet in the Hôtel Chatham, he dialled the number that Kessel had supplied. Priscilla's laconic voice answered.

Over ‘a big tin of caviar and champagne consumed in a freezing room', Acton told Priscilla of Gillian's concern for her during the last four and a half years, and produced the letter in which, Gillian wrote, ‘I had offered to harbour her while she sorted herself out.'

The war was still raging. To leave Paris was very difficult. Acton passed on the message that if Priscilla needed assistance, she was to contact Gillian's sister, Jacqueline Hammond, at the British Embassy, now reopened in Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

Jacqueline had joined the Free French in April 1943, in Guildford, and was one of the earliest British diplomats posted back to Paris, after Duff Cooper arrived as Ambassador on 13 September. The last time Jacqueline had seen Priscilla was at Prunier's in May 1940, to celebrate her engagement to Max Ruppé. Jacqueline was still adjusting to the shock of bumping into Ruppé, wearing the same teddy-bear coat, at the Invalides Métro, and discovering he was married: friends had told him that she had died during an air raid. Almost her first task was to sort out Priscilla's expired English passport and ‘get her an “exit visa”'.

Priscilla was among a group of 100 former internees, mostly men released from Saint-Denis prison, who were anxious to return to England as swiftly as possible. She owed her delay to RAF Transport Command at Le Bourget which had specific instructions ‘not to transport female ex-internees'. On 25 September, the Permanent Secretary Sir Arthur Street wrote asking the Air Ministry to remove its objection to the carriage of women. ‘Mr Eden considers that it is in the national interest that the British subjects concerned should be repatriated without delay . . . These people have for the most part endured incarceration by the enemy for several years and can rightly expect that HM
representative will do everything he can to return them at the earliest possible moment to this country on their release. Some public outcry and parliamentary criticism may indeed be anticipated if this is not done.'

On 13 October, the Foreign Office sent a letter to Priscilla's father. ‘Sir, I am directed by Mr Secretary Eden to inform you that he has received a report stating that Priscilla Doynel de la Sausserie may shortly be expected to arrive in this country. Arrangements have been made for the reception and assistance of persons repatriated from liberated territory, but it is regretted that in no circumstances can any further information be given as to date and place of arrival.'

One week later, on Saturday 21 October, Priscilla was driven out in an uncomfortable Jeep over a bomb-damaged road to Le Bourget. At 4 p.m., carrying a single suitcase (she had been forbidden to bring Pierre's canary), she boarded the King's Messenger's plane for Hendon. The service being a military one, she was not charged a fare. The plane was full and there were no seats. She sat on the floor.

Priscilla had packed Pierre's letters into her ochre suitcase, along with clothes which Graebener had given her, plus the intimate correspondence and photographs of the men she had known in the Occupation. She was obeying her father: not merely his private injunction when she was nine years old for her to keep a journal, but also in a series of broadcasts during the war – this time made to the world. On the radio at Boisgrimot, she had listened to SPB saying that one must never destroy letters and diaries because, though they may be just genial gossip and tittle-tattle, ‘they can also be priceless, imperishable monuments to man's courage in the face of the worst that life can offer'.