Priscilla Read Free Page A

said to have been formerly married to a Frenchman and to have escaped from a German concentration camp with papers provided by the Resistance movement .
    Then this: Until France was liberated she lived the life of a hunted animal .
    The handbag reminded her of Paris before the war. The inside was black-lined and smelled less of alligator than of stale Chesterfields. In it she kept her cigarettes, reading glasses, green Hermès diary and pencil (‘You’ll find a pencil more useful,’ the shop-lady had said, ‘you can rub it out’). She carried it all the time. One cutting showed Priscilla at the Goodwood Fashion Parade, in a grey flannel suit, white beanie cap; and the bag over her shoulder.
    Priscilla had bought it with Raymond’s winnings from a horse race in Deauville. It was a time of crippling restrictions. Exchange Control was at its most severe. On 1 September 1950, she and Raymond landed back in Newhaven when a customs inspector approached.
    She felt herself perspiring. He looked like a railway policeman, one of those who stopped her outside the Métro to check her identity papers.
    Raymond did not know this, but on visits to Paris she could still hear the march of synchronised boots, down the Champs Elysées, past the Traveller’s Club.
    Footsteps on the pavement or a dog yapping at her fur coat, and everything reassembled into the courtyard at Besançon, snow on the ground, her handbag open for inspection. On that occasion, she had gone through the contents with a German woman, keeping only her comb.
    Her upswell of dread at the sight of a uniform had never diminished. Once, when her five-year-old stepson was behaving in a particularly mulish fashion, she said ‘Carleton, I despair of you’ – and marched him to the police station in East Wittering, very nearly getting there.
    â€˜How much further?’ Carleton wanted to know, and she, despairing all the more because he was willing to go along with this, said: ‘No, no, I think we’ll have to go back.’
    Carleton observed that though she kept schnauzers, she passionately hated Alsatians. He wondered if she had been hounded by them.
    She had tried to obliterate another memory – of the bright light in her face and the SS man behind the desk who wanted details of her past four years, how she spent them, who with.
    The inspector, Mr Druitt, asked to see her handbag.

    Eleven days later, Priscilla stood up in the County Hall in Lewes and pleaded guilty to customs offences. But she wished to make a statement.
    â€˜I have spent a considerable part of my life in France having lived there from 1925 to 1932 and subsequently from 1937 onwards.
    â€˜I was married to a French citizen in 1938 and was living in France when the country was occupied by the Germans. In view of my original British nationality I was arrested and put in a concentration camp in December 1940, but in 1941 I was able to obtain my release on grounds of ill health and from then onwards until 1944 was living in France with false papers.
    â€˜As the result of this, I was on several occasions arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, once for more than 24 hours, and as the result of these experiences have been afflicted with a nervous horror of any sort of interrogation by any sort of official.’
    Repatriated to England in 1944, she married her present husband in 1948. She had returned to France on average twice a year. She was quite accustomed to customs formalities.
    â€˜On this particular occasion I was asked to show my handbag and asked where I had obtained it.
    â€˜I very foolishly stated that it was a present from my first husband and I did not know its value, but I gave him my first husband’s correct name and address.
    â€˜On my statement not being accepted, the recollection of previous interrogations in France came back to me and in somewhat of a panic I maintained my story.’
    She closed by saying how sorry she