Priscilla Read Free

aristocratic Frenchman who never ceased to love her.
    Most incredible to me, given Raymond’s possessive nature, was that Priscilla travelled every year with Raymond to Paris where the couple met up with the Vicomte, her ex-husband. Being a Catholic, the Vicomte still considered Priscilla to be his wife. (In order to marry him, my mother said, Priscilla had to convert to Catholicism.) I loved his nickname for her: ‘my little cork’ – although why he called her this was not explained.
    My mother also told me that Priscilla was at one time engaged to the actor Robert Donat, whom I had seen in The 39 Steps , and yet this interested me less than her life in France, even if I did wonder why she had chosen Raymond over Donat.
    Priscilla died in 1982, but her fate obscurely moved me. What had gone on in France? What had she done during the war? Why did she not return to England after getting out of the concentration camp(s)? Why did her father – by then a well-known author and broadcaster – never mention on the airwaves or to my mother the fact that his eldest daughter was isolated throughout the war in Occupied France? I pictured her crouched before an illegal radio-set in a Paris atelier, listening to my grandfather’s voice on the BBC, speaking to the troops. Did he ever transmit to Priscilla a personal message that only she could interpret, like one of those mystifying coded messages to the Resistance, such as Venus has a pretty navel or The hippo is not carnivorous ? Could Priscilla have been in the Resistance?
    And what was the bond that existed between Priscilla and her first husband which compelled her to keep bobbing back to see him, despite the fact that she had remarried?
    Raymond’s first wife could not be mentioned. She had run off with his best man at the end of the Second World War, leaving Raymond to bring up their two small children. Raymond never forgave her and he never saw her again.
    Priscilla was thirty-one when she married Raymond, and a nervous stepmother to Tracey and Carleton, who were six and four at the time. I knew from my mother how sorely Priscilla had wanted her own children, and how the lack of them was a disappointment. When in my forties, having children of my own, I tried to find out more about her, Tracey let me have Priscilla’s haphazardly filled scrapbook. I did not suspect that even more intimate details were to come my way and that the scrapbook was but the first in a trail of unexpected discoveries which would give insight into Priscilla’s thoughts and feelings at crucial moments in her life.
    On the scrapbook’s opening page, scissored out of the Nursing Times , was a studio portrait of myself at eighteen months. I had always felt a bond with Priscilla (and the times we sat together watching her television served to deepen it), but not until I saw this photograph did I appreciate how she musthave taken an interest in me from early on. Turning the stiff grey pages, I smelled her scent again.

    The scrapbook contained articles which intensified Priscilla’s mystique. She had ‘danced for Anna Pavlova’ in the words of an obituary of her. In another cutting, from a pre-war fashion magazine, Priscilla was picturedstanding on fake snow, modelling Mainbocher’s green gaberdine plus-fours. The most electrifying discovery was a report from the Chichester Observer that was pasted on the reverse page with Bassano’s photograph of me, and referred to an incident that took place in 1950, seven years before I was born.
    A woman who won 50,000 francs – about £50 – by backing a 50-1 outsider at a French race meeting and who bought a crocodile-skin handbag with the winnings was fined £35 with £2 costs at Lewes today for customs offences .
    Mrs Priscilla Rosemary Thompson of Church Farm, East Wittering admitted trying to smuggle the bag through Newhaven Customs and making a false declaration to Customs officers. She was