Aunt’s WWII story not so heroic
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What did you do in the war, Auntie?
Actually, Priscilla Thompson was long dead when her nephew Nicholas Shakespeare was moved to find an answer to that question. He knew she had lived in France during the German occupation, and family lore even had her jailed by the Gestapo for work in the Resistance. But, like many people who experienced the horrors of this conflict, she chose not to talk. Her novelist nephew set out to learn more.
The result makes for gripping reading, not least because his findings on how his blonde, blue-eyed relative survived four years of Nazi rule were not what he expected. When Priscilla returned to England in October 1944, two months after the liberation of Paris, she told her best friend, Gillian, “I got out just in time.” In “Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France,” what she meant becomes much clearer.
Born in the summer of 1916, she was just eight when her mother ran off with a lover to Paris, prompting her father, a film and drama critic who later became a popular radio broadcaster, to take up with a younger woman, Nicholas Shakespeare’s maternal grandmother. When domestic warfare followed, Priscilla was shipped off to Paris, where she became fluent in French.
After spending her late teens in England, Priscilla returned to France in 1937, this time for an abortion. On her way to Paris, she met Robert, a Norman aristocrat 17 years her senior. Only on their honeymoon, in December 1938, did Priscilla discover he was impotent.
Their marriage did not survive the German takeover 18 months later. With Robert’s family in Normandy fearing reprisals for sheltering an enemy alien, Priscilla was bundled off to Paris. More than ever, she needed new protectors. Her beauty ensured they were not long in coming.
Shakespeare was lucky to locate a trove of love letters and photographs and a draft of his aunt’s unpublished memoir. Some of Priscilla’s lovers were innocent enough: married, although not collaborators. But one, Emile Cornet, a Belgian racecar driver, perhaps the first man to satisfy her physically, was involved in the black market and connected to darker figures. Not the least of them was Henri Chamberlin, aka Henri Lafont, whose infamous Bonny-Lafont gang became known as the French Gestapo.
How much was Priscilla aware of? “It is inconceivable that Priscilla and Chamberlin did not know each other,” the author notes. Her own memoir verges on confession: “I was slightly startled as I had never known any shady characters before and there now appeared in my life quite a number of them.”
After the liberation of Paris, women who had engaged in collaboration horizontale were paraded half-naked through angry crowds, often with their heads shaved bare. Priscilla, who was ill at the time, kept a low profile and survived this, too. “All I know is that Priscilla, the little cork, made it through the occupation,” Shakespeare writes. Having done so, though, she was haunted by its trauma for the rest of her life. In the end, after long bouts with alcoholism, only religion brought her solace.
That said, her nephew takes care not to judge her: “I wanted her to be an exception. But she was not an exception, she was an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances.”
And, as he puts it, if this “meant that she had to use her body for survival,” so be it.
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