Priscilla Read Free Page B

was and that the reason for subsequently making a false declaration was ‘the idea gained from my previous experiences that the only thing to do was to stick to my original story and avoid any prolonged interrogation.’
    As a result of her plea, reduced fines were imposed. But her appearance in court had rattled Priscilla. When she faced the magistrate, she felt that he was sitting in judgement on her years in Occupied France.

4.
TRUCK DRIVER
    My father did not pretend to know what made Priscilla tick, but he was familiar with her reticence. His own father, an army doctor in the First World War, had not elaborated at any time on his three years’ service in France. ‘I came to realise that what he’d seen in Ypres was incommunicable. The gap was so great between him and his listeners, he didn’t feel he could bridge it.’
    Priscilla was like many of those my father befriended in Paris in the 1950s, who, having survived the war, protected their memories of it; her years in France fell into the category of what the French call ‘les non-dits’.
    I was just too young to question Priscilla’s father – he died when I was eighteen – but I read what he had written about her in Buffets and Rewards , one of his three volumes of autobiography.
    â€˜Priscilla, born in 1916, is lovely. She contracted a disease of the leg when she was training to be a dancer in the Russian ballet in Paris.
    â€˜She married just before the war a Frenchman of whom I know little beyond the fact that he was a count and drank port in the morning.
    â€˜On 12 May 1940 she was in Amiens. So were the Germans. Apparently they treated her reasonably in her first concentration camp. Indeed, she prevailed upon the sentimental German camp doctor to release her on the grounds that she was about to have a baby. She was not, of course, about to have ababy. She was indiscreet about this. When they caught her, they put her into another concentration camp in the Vosges where life was much less pleasant. When I next saw her she had divorced her husband. She remarried, an Englishman this time who grows strawberries and tomatoes on the Sussex coast. He too had already been married and had two small children.’ That was all.
    I wondered what more Raymond, who died in 1988, might have added. He had worked in Air Force Intelligence before he met Priscilla, during the war bicycling every day from Bosham to Hayling Island; in his long absences, his first wife was left free to nurse, and then fall for, his best man, who had come to stay with them on being released from a POW camp. But not even Raymond was able to extract further information from Priscilla during the thirty-four years of their marriage. I know this because after Priscilla died he told his daughter-in-law that Priscilla could never discuss with him what had happened in her previous life.
    Carleton and Tracey confessed to growing up with ‘a total lack of curiosity’ about Priscilla’s past because, they said, ‘she didn’t build it up in any way’. And so for every one of us – sisters, husbands, brothers-in-law, stepchildren, nephews – it became easy to read nothing unusual in Priscilla’s reluctance to speak about the war. Her choice to bury herself in silence seemed part of a normal omertà , consistent with my paternal grandfather’s clamp-down.
    Annette Howard, whose much-decorated father had been a POW of the Japanese at Kwai Bridge, was Priscilla’s god-daughter. ‘I was used to people not talking about things, so it didn’t surprise me that Pris didn’t want to talk.’ And yet from conversations with Annette and others, an idea formed about what Priscilla had got up to – in part because of what Priscilla omitted to say, but also because of details that emerged and were given interpretations which she did not strain herself to deny.
    Her god-daughter was raised on a story that Priscilla