If Joe did marry Count Jacques de Pret to appease her mother, it was an appeasement laced with spite: Joe believed that he and Evelyn were lovers. Jacques readily agreed to Joe’s suggestion that they marry and split the $10,000 dowry. After the wedding they parted immediately and amicably. Even in old age Joe was at pains to point out that the marriage was never consummated. Jacques de Pret, who was known as something of a ladies’ man, used his share of the money to foot the bills he ran up on women; Joe went straight out to buy two resplendent uniforms in khaki barathea, a fabric of wool and silk. She recalled these outfits vividly: the collars could be taken off and turned when dirty, and the whole was cleaned by immersion in gasoline. ‘I really thought I was something,’ Joe said. ‘I really thought I was something unbelievable.’ The question of quite what she was never seemed to concern Joe: she knew that she was something else, and that delighted her.
The story Joe told about her father went like this: When the war in France ended in November 1918 Joe Carstairs left Paris for London. Perhaps dressed in her new finery, she went to an officers’ club in Pall Mall; there, she said, Albert Carstairs was pointed out to her across the bar. She approached him.
‘Well, young man?’ he asked. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m your daughter, sir,’ Joe replied.
Colonel Carstairs bought her a drink and gave her a cigar. She told him of her suspicions that her mother had been murdered by Voronoff and he told her, ‘Don’t touch it. You’ll get in trouble.’ This was the last time she saw him. Joe was under the impression that he ended his days in India, having contracted a strange disease. (He may have died the next year, since by 1920 his name no longer appeared in the Reserve of Officers list.)
Their brief encounter smacks of fiction – it resembles a scene from a sentimental film, rendered slightly strange by the moment of mistaken sexual identity. Perhaps the passage of time drained the occasion of its feeling, reduced it to its bare bones and transformed it from drama to ritual. The blurring effects of time might also account for the story’s minor inaccuracies (Albert Carstairs was not a colonel but a major) and oddities (how did Joe pass for a man in 1918, when all her uniforms had skirts and she had a great mass of hair?). But the story, like the one about Joe’s mother, contains an impossibility. Evelyn did not die until 1921, so Joe cannot have discussed her death with Albert Carstairs in 1918. This element at least is fantasy.
But true, half-true or imagined, the story was precious to Joe Carstairs and she recounted it often. Having broken with her mother, she was blessed by her father. It was another would-be deathbed scene, in which Joe’s father passed to her his cigar and she, in her splendid new costume, replaced him. Sometimes when she referred to him she made slips to effect this replacement. ‘My father was divorced at the age of four,’ Joe said, substituting herself for him in mid-sentence. ‘My mother was married four times,’ she said, ‘and I was the first.’
These last meetings were the talismanic scenes by which Carstairs at once remembered and dispensed with her parents.
Chapter Four
What do you Want With Eggs and Ham?
With the Great War over, Joe Carstairs looked around for a fresh battlefield. She found one in Ireland, where Sinn Fein was waging a sporadic guerrilla war against the British. Joe enlisted with the Women’s Legion Mechanical Transport Section, Dublin, a band of forty young women serving as drivers to British officers.
In Dublin she struck up a firm friendship with Barbara and Molly Coleclough, aged twenty-one and twenty-two, who had joined the Legion soon after its formation two years earlier; they had ‘succumbed’, in Molly’s words, ‘to the motor fever and the urge to do one’s bit’. Molly and Bardie had been educated at a convent and then a finishing school but both were adventurous, unconventional young women. Bardie in particular was feisty and rebellious; years later, her niece reflected that ‘she should have been a boy’. She was nicknamed ‘Miss Know-All’ by Joe: ‘She knew everything, she did everything.’
The girls referred to Joe Carstairs as Tuffy de Pret. ‘Our first meeting was typical of her,’ Molly wrote in her memoirs. ‘She handed me a cigarette case of platinum and gold, which proved to be empty. So we smoked my cigarettes!’ Joe was not inclined to hollow pretension or to meanness with money; the ‘typical’ quality of this gesture lay rather in its combination of swagger and self-deprecation. She loved to show off but she loved also to put others at their ease.
Molly and Bardie put Joe up in their digs. She slept on a campbed and used the other girls’ overcoats as blankets. Joe was always running late for roll-call at the barracks, and was often to be seen tearing along the streets of Dublin with her boots unlaced, clutching her breakfast in her hands and finishing the last lap by springing on to a ‘jaunting car’, or horse-drawn trap. Her long tangle of hair was pulled into a bun, Molly noted, ‘like a hedgehog or pin cushion, simply stuffed with pins which stuck out in every direction’. Joe soon got rid of her cumbersome hair, and for the rest of her life wore it in a close crew-cut. A few of the girls in Dublin were already sporting short styles. Bardie had bobbed her hair almost as soon as she joined the Legion, for which she came close to being sacked by the colonel whose car she drove. ‘She also,’ wrote Molly, ‘took to wearing men’s boots and puttees for some reason which I have never fathomed.’
Joe and the Coleclough sisters were in Ireland during the uneasy lull between two storms – the Easter Rising in 1916 and Bloody Sunday in 1920. In the intervening years anti-British feeling was coming to a boil. The Volunteers, subsequently the IRA, gathered their strength, and secured arms by laying ambushes, raiding police stations and making lightning attacks on patrols. In January 1919 the Volunteers killed two constables and made off with their gelignite; the raid marked the start of the Troubles.
The women drivers’ work could be dangerous – the republicans ambushed officers’ cars, and pelted them with hot tar – but Joe’s recollections were breezy. She spoke only of poker games and high-spirited japes: one night the girls slipped out of their barracks after curfew to steal a Sinn Fein flag. In their free time they took to the hills in a battered old car and visited lakes and country houses. In the barracks they ate from a vending machine – you put sixpence in, and mashed potato and sausage were spewed out. They sang joshing songs about the food: ‘What do you want with eggs and ham/When you’ve got drainpipes in your lamb?’
In early 1919 a dozen of the Dublin girls, including Joe, Molly and Bardie, volunteered to relieve male drivers in northern France. There was much work to be done clearing battlefields, supervising prisoners-of-war, administering hospitals, burying the dead and reconstructing towns. A belt of land 500 miles long was waste as a desert: orchards, forests, canals, farms had vanished and in places the earth itself had to be remade – some hills had lost ten yards in height.
The first batch of women drivers went over on 18 June; by the end of July there were 250 in northern France. Molly and Bardie sailed to Boulogne and went on to a camp at Wimereux. ‘An advance party had already arrived,’ wrote Molly, ‘amongst them de Pret, who had been told she was too young to drive in France. She was happy as a sandboy, helping everyone to mouldy bread, margarine, powdered milk and jam that tasted of paraffin!’ Like girl guides embarked on a great adventure, they relished the hardship and camaraderie ahead. Joan Mackern, who became friends with Joe and the Colecloughs in France, recalled in her unpublished memoirs that when she arrived at Wimereux she was boarded in a hotel which had served as a hospital. ‘Before our evening meal we all had to get down on our knees and scrub the very dirty floors where there had been large patches of stale blood. The next day we went on to the lovely sands and bathed and basked in the sun.’ In 1917 Joan had delivered a dispatch to the Ministry of Munitions during a bombing raid, and was appointed OBE ‘for courage and devotion to duty while in grave personal danger’; in the back of her car was a shell-shocked soldier, who shook and cried with fear. It was, she said, the first time she had seen a
man weep.
From Wimereux the British drivers were sent to camps at Béthune (where they slept in marquees), at Hersin-Coupigny (where they stayed in log bungalows in the woods), and at Valenciennes (where they were put up in Nissen huts). At the Béthune camp, a former aerodrome, they parked their ambulances in hangars which had housed bomber aircraft. The ‘Chinks’, as the Chinese labourers in the camps were called, used hot tools to beat out patterns on spent shell cases which they found in the fields, and sold their curious jewels to the English girls. The women too made use of the cast-offs of war: Joe wore an overcoat which had belonged to a friend’s brother, a soldier who had been killed.
In their ambulances Joe and her friends drove wounded soldiers from casualty clearing stations to large hospitals. They sold British army huts to the French made homeless by the war. They ferried the Chinese labour battalions and German prisoners-of-war to and from work. And they acted as chauffeurs to officers organising the clearance of ammunition dumps and the reburial of the dead in Imperial War Graves cemeteries – most of the millions of victims had been shallowly buried just beneath the surface of the soil. Wherever they turned the English women saw men dead, crippled, enslaved, so weakened that they depended now on women even to move.
Driving required strength as well as skill. Steering was difficult, the cars’ metal frames were heavy, their brakes sluggish; the engines whirred like threshing machines, and a car could tip over if it took a corner too quickly. The roads were sunk with craters, and passed through devastated land – churned-up fields of mud, sunken artillery, blasted trees, barbed wire, shell-holes, dug-outs, trenches. The debris of war was everywhere. The girls drove through the ruins of Ypres, of Lens, of Douai. The driving conditions were so poor that tyres frequently punctured, brakes gave out and springs broke. The women carried out their own repairs.
Joe, Bardie, Molly and Joan chopped wood for their stoves and baths, and in the evenings, dressed in boiler suits and blue berets, worked on their cars in the docks. Joe donned the uniform with gusto, and continued to wear a beret through the 1920s. She did not think twice about adopting a masculine identity: she put on men’s clothes for practical reasons, and she kept them on. If anything, Joe delighted in a degree of notoriety. In France she came to be known as ‘Klep’, because she purloined whatever took her fancy. On one occasion she wrote ‘Kleptomaniac’ on a hut wall and was reported to the camp supervisor by another girl, who did not know the meaning of the word but assumed it was ‘something disgusting’.
Though much of their work was strenuous and grim, the girls also swam in the river, organised picnics, watched the officers’ polo-matches, went on clandestine trips to Paris, listened to records, and sat up late playing poker and drinking Balsac. They took the cars out against Army regulations, making runs into the local town for meals. They went also to the patisserie in Arras, the first shop in the ruined city to reopen after the war – 80 per cent of its buildings had been razed. ‘Madame would put us in their little room behind the shop to hide us,’ wrote Joan Mackern, ‘and she would bring us steaming cups of coffee or chocolate and plates of delicious cakes and cherry tarts.’ These were golden, liberating days: the old world had been wiped out and the women were building a new world, and new selves, as they pleased.
Joe’s private endeavour, her attempt to bury the past and make herself afresh, chimed with the post-war project of burial and reconstruction. The slaughter of the previous four years is barely referred to either in her recollections or the memoirs of her friends. But though they did not mention the carnage, the girls did remember their fear of the Chinese labourers.
One night Molly, Bardie and Joe set out to explore the caverns beneath Arras, against the orders of their commanding officer. During the war 20,000 Allied troops had sheltered in the network of tunnels and caves in the chalky underbelly of the town, while Arras was shelled to pieces above them. The caves were dark, dank, slippery, a maze of passages. ‘Our adventure was short-lived,’ wrote Molly. ‘We got to the bottom and were feeling our way along, when we saw lights showing in the distance and coming towards us, we turned tail and ran hell for leather back up the shaft. When we had nearly reached the top we turned round, to see several “Chinks” at the bottom with torches, staring up at us. We never suggested exploring caverns again, but I do still wonder what nefarious deeds took place in those subterranean passages.’
The women touched upon and recoiled from the Chinks, fascinated and terrified by their ‘nefarious deeds’. Like the French fields, the Chinks were pockmarked and scarred, and they seemed to have a dangerous subterranean life. The girls’ foray into the shaft was a journey to the underworld, beneath the land and into the graves of the soldiers they were helping to bury.
The Chinese working alongside the girls had, unlike them, been witness to the bloodshed in the French fields. Between 1917 and the beginning of 1918 the British had shipped 100,000 men from Shantung to labour behind the lines, and now the Chinese were assigned to the roughest of the clearing-up work – dismantling barbed wire, filling shell-holes, collecting the remains of dead soldiers. Molly recalled that the girls were ‘generally rather scared’ of the Chinese labourers. ‘They were a motley crew, and all appeared to have had small-pox at some time, poor things . . . They were a funny lot too; it was nothing to see them wearing six or eight hats one on top of the other, all different shapes and colours.’ Joan Mackern claimed, rather more brutally, that ‘on the whole they were lazy and useless’, adding that ‘almost a murder took place’ when a girl paid one Chinese worker more than another for a decorated bullet case. Molly had a similar experience: ‘I remember one said he would knife me because I had ordered an engraved shell case from him, and he had spoiled it by making it black and I refused to have it. One was always hearing tales of them being found murdered.’ When a French family refused to open the door to Molly, stranded in the countryside on a freezing night, she surmised that it was due to their fear of ‘marauding Chinks’. The Arras archives do record nine Chinese men proceeded against for murder in 1920, but the Chinese labourers in France were hardly ‘marauding’: they had gained a reputation for great stoicism and industry. If the English women found them ugly and horrifying, it may be because they served as symbols, or repositories, of an ugly and horrifying war.
The girls were demobilised on 23 April 1920. They crossed the Channel and took the train to Victoria, where they were met by charabancs. That night Joe treated the Colecloughs and Joan Mackern to the theatre – they saw the American musical comedy Irene at the Empire – and put them all up at the Jermyn Hotel.
Joe paid Bardie Coleclough an income for the rest of her life, and they corresponded regularly. Even when both women were in their eighties Bardie continued to refer to the journey into the caves. ‘Klep! Remember our adventure at Arras into the tunnel where we went down . . . and pushed open a door to find a room lighted by flaming torches full of Chink murderers – we turned and ran fast up that tunnel . . . We might never have been heard of again.’
They had come home from France hungry for men’s work. ‘War virilised them,’ wrote Colette of her fellow Frenchwomen, ‘clothed them with the brief tunic of Eliacin, cropped their hair like the knob of a banister, plastered it down like Argentine dancers.’ If the men who had served in the Great War were exhausted and depleted, these women returned replenished, brimming with vigour and ambition.
Chapter Five
An Unknown Quantity
Joe’s grandmother Nellie Bostwick survived five strokes, but on 27 April 1920, four days after Joe was demobilised, she suffered a heart attack and died in New York aged seventy-seven. She was worth some $30 million. Nellie had been Joe’s protector and, pending the execution of her will, Joe claimed that she found herself almost penniless. The sudden hardship did not ruffle her: ‘I was supremely happy,’ said Joe, ‘I really was.’ She took jobs as a bartender in Margate and as a demonstrator at the Bugatti showroom in London. She worked with Molly and Bardie Coleclough at th
eir brother’s chicken farm at Hummersea, near Bournemouth, and sold the eggs to the Cunard line at Southampton. Joe lived in a caravan and in cold, gaslit digs from which she drove a motorcycle to work. On occasion she was so hungry that she stole food from shops, living up to her nickname Klep – ‘I found that it was necessary,’ she said, ‘and I didn’t consider it wrong.’ Joe made her own laws, set her own limits, with a breezy disregard for the rights of others.
In fact, Joe was never short of money. Before her death Nellie had created two trust funds for Joe – the first, in 1918, may have been prompted by Evelyn’s rejection of her daughter. Joe’s income in 1921 was almost $145,000 and it rose to more than $200,000 the next year. Her poverty was a fantasy, designed to prolong the invigorating privations of the war. To recreate those golden days Joe hatched a plan: she, Molly, Bardie and Joan Mackern would pool their resources, which included stipends from the Army, and set up a chauffeuring business in London.
The X Garage – ‘X’, Joe explained, to indicate that it was ‘an unknown quantity’ – was based off Cornwall Gardens, Kensington. The girls lived in a flat above the garage, a converted stable in a cobbled cul-de-sac sunk behind the main square. They bought a handful of six-seater Daimler landaulettes, luxurious cars with staid, sumptuous carriages. The brochure they produced to advertise the business pictured a girl at the wheel of one of the cars, dressed in jacket, cap and tie; over the illustration was a commendation issued at their demobilisation by Sir Ernest Birch KCMG. ‘I have always admired in all of you your pluck,’ wrote Sir Ernest, ‘your enterprise, your hard work, your excellent driving and your cheeriness.’
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 4