Free Priscilla by Nicholas Shakespeare

Priscilla in itchy black woollen stockings which French children never wore, causing Priscilla to feel self-conscious. Her only attractive clothes were a white broderie Anglaise party dress and a tweed suit which Doris had bought her – grudgingly – on Boo’s persuasion.
    Boo was another who appreciated how Priscilla had changed.
    Doris and Boo were not getting on. Their violent rows woke Priscilla in the night. The arguments had grown more acrimonious since it became clearthat SPB was most unlikely to sue Doris for divorce. Doris later explained to the divorce court judge: ‘He said it would ruin him and nothing was done.’
    On Boo’s part, the friction caused by his Catholic guilt over their unorthodox marital state was sharpened by Doris’s flirtations with Gillian’s father, and by her tendency to nag Boo about his drinking habits and short temper.
    On Doris’s part, Boo’s inability to earn a living from his writing was too reminiscent of her husband.
    SPB paid them a visit, leaving Winnie in a café while he called on Doris. It was the only time he came to see Priscilla in Paris. Looking around the apartment, he recognised the oak commode, the Persian carpet. Priscilla and Vivian ran up to give a welcoming kiss. Priscilla dragged him off to inspect the books in her bedroom.
    Boo said that he would not be joining them for lunch.
    â€˜He only takes his meals in liquid form,’ said Doris after he left.
    â€˜I hope he never comes back at all.’ Priscilla scowled.
    There was a reason for Priscilla’s vitriol. Years later, Vivien discovered that Boo had tried to molest her.
    Boo’s interest in Priscilla had started when she was back on her feet. He took her side in any argument with Doris and offered to help Priscilla with her homework or piano practice. Soon he was paying too much attention, said Vivien, ‘nothing beyond attempted caresses in unmentionable places, but naturally causing anger and upset’. Priscilla told Gillian: ‘Whenever I ask him to help me with my Latin he starts mauling me.’
    The tariff that Boo imposed for his Latin tuition was that she should kiss him and let him shove his hand under her skirt. Priscilla found this sinister, but was not frightened until one night, while Doris was away, Boo got drunk ‘and tried to rape me’. Priscilla revealed this to her mother only when, during one of his trips to London, Boo wrote to say that he would not be returning. Priscilla found it difficult to forgive her mother’s reaction: ‘She slapped me hard on the face. She blamed me, of course, for the break-up. Slowly, I was beginning to see her as she was: a selfish, vain, stupid woman entirely wrapped up in her own affairs.’
    The family packed their belongings and left for England. Priscilla was sixteen. They would never hear from Boo again. The next time Priscilla read his name she was sitting in a London cinema watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Man Who Knew Too Much – and saw Boo credited as the screenwriter, and remembered his exploring fingers.

9.
MARRIED ALIVE: 1936
    When Priscilla returned to London in 1932, her father already had one daughter with Winnie. Doris finally served divorce papers on SPB because she wanted to marry again. In 1934, after being abandoned by Wyndham-Lewis, and following a series of unhappy relationships, including one with the English cricket captain Wally Hammond, Doris was introduced to an adventurous young naval surgeon, Bertie Ommaney-Davis.
    Bertie was twenty-nine and had recently received a congratulatory telegram from George V for sailing a 54-foot ketch without an engine from Hong Kong to Dartmouth. Practically the first woman he met on stepping ashore after a year at sea, with only four naval officers for company, was forty-two-year-old Doris. ‘He fell like a ton of bricks,’ said Vivien. ‘He was out of his mind with love. I couldn’t think what