Priscilla (53 page)

SPB had been a paternal figure to Alec Waugh after his expulsion from Sherborne, and a visitor to his home in North London during a period when Waugh was ‘lonely and without a friend'. SPB had no son. Waugh came closest to filling this role. ‘My good ox,' SPB called him. ‘I say and I say again that you have it in you not to be merely clever but a genius.'

Their close relationship alarmed Alec's supersensitive father, who happened to be SPB's publisher at the time. If ever Arthur Waugh had a rival for his favourite son's attention it was SPB during 1916 and 1917. Arthur made a wounded observation to this effect in January 1917, after SPB went to stay with Priscilla at ‘Underhill'. Waugh moved swiftly to reassure his father. ‘Please don't think I put Mais before my family. I don't. He has no standards, often his opinions infuriate me, but he has the most wonderful personality. No one can understand him who has not come directly under it.'

Alec Waugh remained loyal to his old teacher, and to the end of his life appreciated SPB's central part in making
The Loom of Youth
a success. Furthermore, Waugh knew what it was to scrape professional and financial rock-bottom. He had faced exactly this situation in the early 1950s. The person who had guided Waugh from his ‘all-time low' back to the surface, if inadvertently, was, for a second time, my grandfather.

Waugh's son Peter told me the background. ‘In January 1953, Alec had the pills lined up. He was looking at the packet and thinking, “Do I do it now?”' But just when Waugh saw no option other than to swallow a mouthful of barbiturates, he recalled a story that SPB had told him years before at Sherborne: how SPB's great-great grandfather, a sugar merchant in Bristol, had eloped to Jamaica and raised a black family in Kingston. The vivid image of Harry Mais spawned the Fleury family and a novel,
Island in the Sun
, for which Waugh received what was then one of the largest movie advances ever. Within four weeks, Waugh had earned a quarter of a million dollars [several million in today's money]. A film was made starring Harry Belafonte and Joan Collins; the title song topped the charts and gave birth to the reggae label, Island Studios. Alec Waugh's life was not merely saved, but overturned. ‘I had become overnight a different person.'

For these obvious reasons, Waugh was more than willing to help when, soon after the film came out, SPB approached him for financial assistance to cure Winnie of her depression. Winnie had lived with SPB for thirty years and her guilt at not being married, exacerbated by their constant lack of money, threatened to make her ‘dangerously ill'. It appears from what happened next that Waugh's contribution was not enough, forcing SPB to reach out elsewhere.

He had already approached my mother. She told me: ‘When I was seventeen, he said “We're desperate for money. Can we have your savings?” It was not more than £100, but it was all my savings since I was a child. I didn't ask what it was for.' Now that she was married to a
Times
journalist who earned only £500 a year, and had a baby, she had no spare pennies.

On a cloudless day in May 1958, SPB and Winnie joined my parents and Priscilla at Church Farm. My grandfather, in shorts, spent his time cutting
wood, collecting compost and playing with his one-year-old grandson, Slogger, as he had decided that I was to be nicknamed. But SPB was ‘worn to a frazzle' by Winnie's continued depression. ‘She kept on saying “I want to die.”' On 7 May 1958, SPB wrote in his diary: ‘She thinks she is going mad. We walked to the sea. I rolled the lawn; borrowed £3 from Priscilla to get home.' The loan was an ominous prelude.

Back in Oxford, Winnie's doctors insisted that she undergo immediate electric therapy treatment. SPB could not meet the bills. In late November, he turned to the one person whom common sense ought to have warned him to spare.

I have their letters in front of me, three from Priscilla and one from Winnie. Together, they dramatise the proverb: ‘When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.'

‘29/11/58, Church Farm, Wittering

‘Darling Winnie,

‘Send me your bills and I will settle them by postal order, providing they don't exceed £20 as that is all I possess in the world and I
was
saving it for Christmas.

‘Priscilla'

‘29/11/58 Church Farm, Wittering

‘Darling Daddy,

‘I've written to Winnie about the money as this seems to be her main domain.

‘In return for my help you can answer me a few questions (although I don't suppose you will).

‘Why do you expect
me
to help
you
? What have you ever done for me except give me the “gift of life”? This can't have been too difficult for you – it was more troublesome for Mama, surely?

‘The one time I turned to you for help in 1937 you utterly failed me. Although you were famous and presumably well off you allowed me to go to France with £5 in my pocket
borrowed from a friend
! The sum of £50 then
meant more to me than any money can mean to you now. In fact it was my life at stake and you didn't give a damn. You had no pity and as far as I can see you have never cared about anyone but yourself.

‘As for Winnie, why the hell should I worry about her? She broke up my home when I was 9 without hesitation, causing me great unhappiness and now she has the nerve to moan about her fate to
me
.

‘You are both utterly selfish and irresponsible,

‘Love, Priscilla'

‘1st Dec 1958, 116 Woodstock Road, Oxford

‘Priscilla (why do you hate me darling),
‘The sting of your letter is very bitter and I wish I could talk, rather than write, this to you.

‘You seem to have got the details in your life so mixed up that there is scarcely any truth left.

‘1. You accuse me of breaking up your home when you were nine. The fact is that Doris and Daddy never got on, not even during their honeymoon, and by the time I met Daddy, Doris was living with, and planning to go to Paris with Bevan Lewis. Also Vivien was 5 or 4, the child of Neville Brownrigg and Doris, who incidentally left him, as indeed all her men have done, for another woman.

‘2. In 1937, I believe that was the year you were pregnant by one of your many young men, and I vividly remember both Daddy and I imploring you to have the child and we would look after you. But Doris had already persuaded you to have an abortion and given you an address in Paris where it could be done.

‘3. You accuse us both of irresponsibility. Daddy paid handsomely for your and Vivien's education and ballet dancing in Paris and we have always been delighted to have you stay, as a child, adolescent, & adult during which visits (as a child) I suffered considerably because your mind had from the start been poisoned against Daddy and me.

‘As for the accusation of selfishness, may I say that I have remained faithful to Daddy since the day I met him, have given him two daughters and have slaved to give them a good education and a stable background.

‘For years now I have worked in the house without help and taken a job outside and even the money I earned from that has had to go into housekeeping.

‘I met Daddy with an overdraft and he has never been able to get free. Now in his old age he is still working for a pittance and I am still looking after him as well as I can, but I am also getting old and it is not easy to get jobs in competition with youth.

‘Think again, Priscilla, for you have got such a cock-eyed idea of what has happened.

‘Recriminations are not good and I am sorry you have had such a rotten home life as a child but remember it broke up long before I met Daddy.

‘My love, Winnie'

‘22/12/58, Church Farm, Wittering

‘Darling Daddy,
‘Your letter with enclosures arrived as I was leaving England. I had thought that you had found some other way round your problems, owing to your long silence. Meanwhile, naturally I had spent my ‘worldly possessions' on Christmas presents. Therefore I had to ask Raymond if he could help and he agreed reluctantly to write a cheque for the smaller bill (the other one is out of the question – I told you that £20 was the limit). You put me in a very difficult position where Ray is concerned. He has enough responsibilities of his own without my adding to them.

‘With regard to Winnie I would merely like to say that I consider her last letter to me (did you see it?)
unforgivable
, and I have no intention of ever seeing her again or mentioning her name. As far as I am concerned she no longer exists and that is final.

‘As regards your wonderful kindness in paying for my education, thank you so much. Who else was supposed to do it? You can't just put children into this world and then forget about them . . . or can you?

‘Love, Priscilla'

Upset, unable to see straight, Priscilla had reached for the strongest word she could find: unforgivable. But her father was the one she could not forgive, not her stepmother; and by proxy it was herself she could not forgive, for the mess she had made of her life.

Priscilla's savage disappointment in herself was the background to the bloodcurdling row which erupted in May 1964, causing her to fall, as she wrote, ‘off the straight and narrow'.

It was raining hard on the day, six years later, when Priscilla met SPB and Winnie at Chichester station and drove them to Church Farm. She never disclosed what made her relent to invite Winnie for the weekend, after vowing never to see her again. Winnie, though, has left an account of the tirade to which Priscilla subjected them.

Ever since Winnie arrived in Hove and usurped the nine-year-old Priscilla, there had been a Greek element to their relationship. Both competing for the same unpredictable man, the two women were never likely to get on. Winnie resented Priscilla for being the legitimate daughter; Priscilla resented Winnie for replacing her as a pseudo-daughter – most hurtfully when SPB was invited in 1933 to make his ground-breaking broadcasts from America. According to Winnie, he and Winnie decided to risk travelling as father and daughter. It worked. President Roosevelt remained unaware that the attractive blonde introduced to him as SPB's daughter-cum-secretary was actually his interviewer's common-law wife.

Forty years on, each woman continued to feel an unbridled aggression. Their distress was compounded by a joint sense of exclusion that they were ‘living in sin': Priscilla because she had remarried, Winnie because she was unable to marry and have the respectable life that she longed for.

The bloodcurdling row at Church Farm sprang from the usual conversation about money. Winnie and SPB had left Oxford four years earlier and were renting a flat in Hove. Before lunch, SPB revealed that he and Winnie were now going to have to move into the charitable home in Lindfield. He worried about what prospects he had at his age of ever earning enough to live on. His financial irresponsibility, on top of flashbacks to her Hove childhood, was the cue for Priscilla to bring up a subject which she considered one of the two misfortunes in her life.

Raymond served the meal that he had cooked, while Priscilla fatally broke her pledge and poured drink after drink for herself and guests and, according to Winnie, grew ever more aggressive and irrational. ‘All her pent-up venom showed in her abuse of her father through life and in the fact that she was unable to have children after her abortion and consequent hysterectomy because we had not stopped her going to Paris for the abortion.' Winnie protested, reminding Priscilla how in March 1937 they had begged her not to go to Paris.

This was too much for Priscilla. She stood up over Winnie ‘like an avenging angel', in belligerent fury blaming first her father and then Winnie for her unhappiness. Her ferocity was terrible. She was shaking like a piece of paper. What aggravated Priscilla's unreasonable hurt was to see Winnie's name flagged alongside her father's on his travel books, including the account of their journey through the Vosges,
Continental Coach Tour Holiday
, which they had dedicated to Priscilla – an unbearable taunt, given her repeated failure to find a publisher.

Winnie, unable to stand more abuse, burst into tears, collected her coat and suitcase, and with SPB walked out in the rain to wait for a bus to take them into Chichester.

This disastrous weekend was one of the last times that Priscilla saw her father and it pitched her back into despair. Soon afterwards came terrible
news of her favourite AA member. ‘22 June 1964, Nina found dead in her flat – suicide. End of saga. AA.' Priscilla never attended another meeting.

‘For the next 12 months I thrived on gin, vodka, brandy, Pernod, and I remember little of what occurred.' Each new stage of Priscilla's decline was inexorable. She was in an appalling state, drinking to the point of vomiting. She made a strenuous effort for three months to survive on wine alone, and failed. ‘She was hooked,' wrote Gillian. ‘She told me that unless she stopped drinking Raymond would end the marriage.'