The Baron and Baroness are said to have enjoyed a riotous time in Tasmania, but ten days in Launceston, housed in the grandiose Australian pub known as the Hotel Launceston, was all they could tolerate. Though divorce and remarriage—to a Catholic—were as unacceptable to Lexie and Harry Jones as they were to the French Darquiers, when Myrtle's family met Louis Darquier in 1928, her sisters Olive, Hazel and Heather all became besotted with him. Louis sat at the piano with his wife and entertained the family with English and French songs. With his enchanting French accent he was the stuff of dreams: “Louis was romantic, French, wore a monocle, was handsome. All the Jones sisters were in love with him.”12
After Launceston Myrtle and Louis stopped off in Melbourne— where Myrtle's sister Hazel was studying at Melbourne University and where Louis Dreyfus & Co. had substantial headquarters—then went on to Queensland, where her brother Hector was a dentist in Toowoomba, a visit remembered by a relative: “Louis was a very well-dressed, handsome man who impressed us with his European manners and travellers' tales. Aunty Myrt was a beautiful lady, always well dressed with a very outgoing personality.”13 Floating around the world in a first-class cabin was much more to the Darquiers' taste than driving along the unmade roads of the Darling Downs in Hector's little Austin. They visited Sydney in early 1929, when Louis renewed his passport at the French consulate.14
Louis noticed none of the joys Australia can offer. True, when he visited the country in 1928, before the influx of immigrants who have transformed the country into a gourmet's paradise, it had the worst cooking in the world. Overdone steak and overboiled cabbage, and several thousand different kinds of cake or sponge fingers, accompanied by strong tea, could not tempt a European palate. Louis and Myrtle were avid gamblers, but Australian pursuits—horse tracks and two-up—provided none of the glamour of European casinos. Louis hated hot weather, and he failed to notice the light in the vast skies of many blues, the miraculous calls and colours of the birds, the bush of such a particular and hypnotising green. What he did notice he used in another fantastical curriculum vitae in which he asserted: “In Australia, in particular, he learned, to his own cost, of the catastrophic effect of Marxist doctrine and the system of state control on large farming enterprises.”15 Harry Jones still owned three estates outside Launceston. There was a huge wheat surplus in 1928,a slump in prices and talk of re-establishing state control of the sale of Australian wheat—rejected by farmers as a socialist concept. Louis might have purloined Harry's opinions, or he might have seen for himself that 1920s Australia was as jittery and riven as any European country after the Great War and the birth of communism.
The Darquiers' arrival coincided with an extended “wharfies” (waterside workers) strike which, apart from inconveniencing them, would have been an eye-opener as to the suitability of Australia as a domicile. There were riots on the docks, and sympathy strikes in key industries. Particularly in Sydney, always a Labor stronghold, King-and-Empire Australians—the establishment—confronted the trade unions and the Communist Menace. Newspaper headlines such as “Police Fire on Strikers,” “Red Rule,” “Unionism Declares War” were daily fare.16 Then, having been governed by conservatives since the war, in October 1929 Australians voted the Labor Party into power.
Louis and Myrtle had left by then, but they sailed into the Great Depression, landing in the United States as the New York stock market was preparing to collapse, and in London just as the slump was to reach its worst there. As the first signs of recovery were appearing in Britain, they moved on to France when the world economic disaster had just begun to bite. Louis' reported words of farewell were to promise Harry Jones that he would always look after Myrtle, and in his own way he did. When Harry died on 10 February 1929, the terms of his will, revealed a month later, put paid to all Louis' hopes of immediate wealth. At his death Harry, whose assets would have made him a modest millionaire at today's values, left all his money to Lexie.17 A month later there were disastrous floods in northern Tasmania, and the land around Launceston was devastated, then, in October 1929, Wall Street crashed and so did the Jones fortune.
“The more I go on,” wrote Louis to René in 1927, “the more I think that one must stretch one's field of action as far as possible.” Now a citizen of the world, he later described his and Myrtle's “series of voyages in Australia, the United States and New Zealand” (in fact it is unlikely that they ever travelled in the United States or New Zealand—at the most the ship they travelled on from Australia called in at ports there on the way) as an invaluable opportunity to “study the constantly worsening state of the world economy.”
Money, preferably unearned, was a god to Myrtle and Louis; the gods did not reciprocate in kind. Within a few months of their taking up residence in Louis' favourite Mayfair hostelry, Brown's Hotel, in December 1929, the Great Slump had hit Australia, the price of wool and wheat fell and the value of the Australian mining shares in Broken Hill collapsed. Myrtle's £40 a week, a handsome sum in the 1920s, was whittled down to £10, and then £3. The disappearance of her crock of gold coincided with the news that she was pregnant.
But at first nothing changed for Myrtle and Louis. The part of London they inhabited—Piccadilly, Mayfair—was the centre of life for the bright young things of the day. Brown's has two entrances, one in Dover Street, the other in Albemarle Street, an excellent thing if one needed to avoid creditors, which was very soon to be the case, but in the meantime they were near every part of London they most loved. They fell in with the Jimmy Rutlands and other lesser Wodehousian honourables, with denizens of Buck's Club in Clifford Street and adventurers and adulterers on long golfing weekends at Le Touquet. Nightlife, gambling and music were at the door. Hutch, the black pianist and singer so beloved by Lady Edwina Mountbatten,18 sang and played exactly to Myrtle's taste—“Ain't Misbehavin,” “What Is this Thing Called Love?” The haunting songs of the time were played at the Café Royal in Regent Street, the Café de Paris and the Berkeley. Nearby were the theatres and cinemas of Shaftesbury Avenue and Covent Garden, Rosa Lewis's legendary haunt of Bohemia the Cavendish Hotel, and Fortnum and Mason for tea and goodies. The Baron and Baroness, dressed to the nines, could hear Noël Coward, Jessie Matthews and the Cochran revues, with songs Myrtle would have played in a trice had they been able to afford a piano. There were cabarets and nightclubs galore—the Gargoyle in Soho, haunt of the decadent upper crust, the Blue Train, the Silver Slipper, the Not.
By the middle of 1930 there were two million unemployed in Britain, despite all the promises of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government. Louis could not get a position. Very soon, despite his winnings at poker, there was no money left. Louis turned to René. It soon became his habit to telegraph René in Strasbourg first, letters of explanation following. All his telegrams are similarly breathless. In the spring of 1930 he cabled:
FOUND POSITION 1000 POUNDS PLUS SIX PERCENTAGE BASE LAST
BALANCE SHEET NEED TO HOLD ON TILL AFTER EASTER CAN YOU ADVANCE FIFTY TO A HUNDRED POUNDS VITAL URGENT AND
SECRET KISSES LOUIS THOS. COOKS BERKELEY STREET19
“I have been entirely ruined for a long time—I've lived any old how for some months and feel the end approaching,” he then explained by letter. The “cow of a hotelkeeper” at Brown's was threatening to throw them out. Would René buy his ex-fiancée Line's ring, his tiepin or “Sandra's diamond brooch” and send him £150 immediately so he could pay the bill? He was about to become the manager of a car sales company, “Automobiles, new and second hand, garage, accessories etc.,” in which, he assured René, his role would be “above all to talk to the distinguished people who do not like, in England, as you know, to do business with a professional mechanic.”20 He begged René, when he sent the money, to remember that he was now Darquier de Pellepoix.21 René never did remember.
Louis earned his keep by pursuing anyone with a title or a position: the 1930 candidate was “the manager” of Lloyds Bank, a Yorkshireman named Robinson, who promised him “3 or 4 c
onsultancies” worth “400 or 500 pounds a year.”22 Myrtle's family were dunned too, but unfortunately Hector, applied to for £100, was too far away to provide immediate relief. By the time Myrtle was five months pregnant, in April 1930, Brown's Hotel refused to accommodate them any longer, and the Baron and Baroness appeared in Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court, in company with the beggars and indigents of the time, because of Louis' failure to register as an alien. As such he was required to demonstrate, under clause 1a of the Aliens Act, that he was “in a position to support himself and his dependants,” so he scarcely had a leg to stand on. Preceded into court by Albert Gabb, aged fifty-six, accused of begging, Louis, “aged thirty-two…grain merchant,” “tall and distinguished-looking” in “a smart speckled-grey overcoat” was fined £100, not the usual £50. “What! A Baron and a Baroness?” remarked the magistrate. “I should be insulting if I were to suggest such a small sum to them.”
The Evening Standard of 17 April reported the case: “MONOCLED BARON CHARGED.”23 For her appearance at court Myrtle wore the uniform of her aspirations. “Baroness Darquier,” aged thirty-seven, was described as “aged twenty-eight…an attractive-looking woman” wearing “a dark blue coat with a fur collar and a close-fitting black hat.” By the time this account reached Tasmania, these events had been transformed into a glamorous peccadillo, a small misunderstanding which could in no way mar the image of the aristocratic Baron and his beautiful young wife. More realistically, Father Robert Steuart of Farm Street, London's most exclusive Catholic Church, “stood surety for each.”
After this Louis was entirely on his uppers. Their Mayfair life was quite over. Hotel managers, men whom Louis liked to describe as “taverners,” objected to not being paid. After their ejection by Brown's, Louis and Myrtle's descent was rapid: they flitted through the Curzon Hotel, followed by a swift descent to the Hotel Rubens in Buckingham Palace Road, a street less grand than its royal name might imply. Their energies were now devoted to extracting money from their respective families to pay the weekly bills. René and Lucienne were also expecting their first child, but this did not prevent Louis from ringing Strasbourg at midnight, or ticking his brother off if money did not arrive in time, or if René suggested investigating the reasons for Robinson's failure to come forth with anything sound. Louis' nerves became “frazzled,” while Myrtle grew “enormous.” She was due to give birth in August, and by June they moved out of London for her confinement.
It is likely that they chose Old Windsor because of its propinquity to the royal castle and Eton College—Louis hoped for a boy, and wanted him educated at Eton. In fact Old Windsor was not the Windsor of the British kings and queens but a more ancient nearby parish with some four hundred houses in 1930, none of them meaner than Treen Cottage, where the Darquiers lodged for £4 a week, “everything included,” in the summer of 1930. 24 In July Louis had a “violent discussion” with Robinson which ended all hopes of money from that quarter, and immediately car sales companies became a thing of the past. Louise Darquier was the daughter and granddaughter of printers and journalists; Louis decided to earn his living by becoming a writer.
The Jones family sent Louis and Myrtle £100 to pay for the birth of their child, and Louis found himself a literary agent and tossed off some travel articles and four short stories in a matter of weeks. “I hope he will sell them,” Louis told René, and every time he wrote asking for more money, he informed his brother that he hoped it would be his “last begging.” Louis wrote his fictions in English and sometimes in French, and Myrtle said they appeared “in the French papers at intervals.” Nothing is left to inform us of their quality or flavour, or even their existence, the records of his dealings with literary agents and putative publishers having been either lost in the mists of time, discarded as unimportant, or destroyed by bombing during the war. Louis could write a novel, in English, in a few months; this may be one reason they were never published.
Anne Darquier was born in Treen Cottage, Old Windsor, on 3 September 1930, the certificate recording this event being a fabrication from beginning to end, except for the date. Giving Anne the middle name of “France,” as was the habit of patriotic Frenchmen, Louis now officially signed himself as Baron Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Despite the fact that he and Myrtle were to live in hotel rooms of considerable seediness for most of their lives, he described himself as a “Landowner and French Baron.” Myrtle, as ferocious a fibber as Louis, gave her name as “Myrtle Marion Ambrosene Darquier de Pellepoix, formerly Lindsay-Jones.” A week later, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party was elected in sufficient numbers to make it the second-largest political party in Germany.
Myrtle, presumably because of her incoherent marital status, was always anguished by any demand to see her passport, or any other official documentation. Possibly for this reason, or perhaps because she and Louis were so often pursued by angry creditors, her use of aliases continued throughout her life. Sometimes she is Myrtle Darquier de Pellepoix, formerly Lindsay-Jones—later she changed the spelling to the more aristocratic Lyndsay; sometimes she is Morrison-Jones, sometimes Sandra Lyndsay-Darquier. On the run after the war she was Cynthia de Pelle Poix. Sometimes she is English, sometimes Irish, sometimes American; often she is a wealthy heiress, the proprietor of vast “ranches” in Australia. Always she liked people to address her as “Baroness,” “Baronne,” “Baronesa.”
Elsie Lightfoot of Duns Tew in Oxfordshire called herself a children's nurse. It is unlikely she had any training, but it seems certain that in 1930 she answered an advertisement placed by Myrtle in The Lady, the English weekly magazine which has matched nannies, maids and menials with those in need of them since 1885. In those days The Lady carried advertisements requesting “thoroughly experienced cake makers,” “companionhelps” and “strong, willing and early rising” persons of all kinds to come to the assistance of ladies and gentlewomen of the leisured classes.
Elsie was thirty-seven years old when she went to work for a couple whom she believed to be Baron and Baroness Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Anne always implied that Elsie was paid to take her in almost immediately after she was born. Six weeks later her parents registered her birth in Windsor; three months later they were gone, back to London, and then to Paris. These three months constitute more or less the entire time Myrtle, Louis and Anne Darquier were to spend together. Anne was given away for a fee of £1 a week.
In later life Louis explained this away as normal behaviour for the time; if he had indeed possessed the lands and estates he claimed, Anne would have lived apart from her parents with her nanny in the standard English upper-class mode. Louis and Myrtle called Elsie “Nurse” in the accepted way, and gave Anne to her to take away to live in Duns Tew. Neither Myrtle nor Louis ever referred to their daughter by her name: for Myrtle she was always “Baby,” for Louis “la gosse,” the kid.
There are three Tews in Oxfordshire: Duns Tew, Little Tew and Great Tew, nestling north of Oxford and bypassed by the road from Chipping Norton to Banbury. These were still Domesday feudal villages in the 1930s, with tied cottages, lords of the manor of the hunting, shooting, fishing and absentee kind, and ancient and charming parish churches. There was no sewerage, no gas, electricity or mains water, and only an occasional public telephone.
Elsie Lightfoot was born in the village of Cumnor, very near Oxford, on 4 July 1893—four months before Myrtle Jones. Her parents, Reuben and Emma Hall Lightfoot, were the class of person whose ancestral role was to serve as nannies, grooms and gardeners, or, as in Reuben's case, as a blacksmith. Oxfordshire, near the Cotswolds—described by Sylvia Plath as “a county on a nursery plate”—is wealthy, both because of its rich farming land and its proximity to London. But in the 1930s “everybody was poor.” “It wasn't all rising fields of poppies and blue skies. A large part of it was lashing rain; chaps walking round dressed in bits of soaking sacking, and children dying of quite ordinary diseases like whooping cough.”25 That is how Anne remembered her country childhood.
When they were not “working away,” as domestic service was called at the time, Elsie and her sisters lived with their mother Emma in Duns Tew. Anne always called Elsie “Nanny,” and her sisters became Aunty Violet, Aunty Maud and Aunty Annie. By 1930 John Brice, Annie's husband, had died, and her daughter May was living with her grandmother. Almost immediately Emma Lightfoot died, the tied cottage returned to the estate of the Dashwoods, owners of Duns Tew Manor, and Elsie and Maud rented a little thatched cottage, two-up two-down, next door to Daisy Pym, the village schoolmistress.
This cottage, much improved, is still there in the main street of Duns Tew, opposite the post office, next to the church. Anne was three months old, and Annie's daughter May, thirteen, was never taken back by her mother. Maud and Elsie, May and Anne were to live together, one way or another, for most of the next fifteen years. May became an older sister to Anne, sharing the particular bond of maternal rejection. One of her friends remembered: “May never forgave her mother—Anne didn't either.”26
Until she took Anne, Elsie was used to working away, but she could do so no longer, at least while Anne was a baby. If she had hoped to live on the money Louis and Myrtle had promised her for Anne's upkeep, she was soon severely disabused. Though she continued to believe that Anne's parents were the Baron and Baroness she liked them to be—Elsie was as partial to royalty and titles as Myrtle—she soon gave up any hope of noble behaviour from either of them.
The Darquier family had almost written Louis off by this time. For ten years he had failed at everything: everywhere he was well known for “his extravagances and his follies.” The birth of Baby, though, mended fences, so after they left Anne with Elsie, Louis took Myrtle to Paris to meet his family, probably for the first time. Myrtle's accounts, always chaotic, are not specific on this point, but they make it perfectly clear that the Darquiers made it obvious that she would not do. The visit was a disaster. Myrtle wrote to René: “You will never know how it hurt me to find you all hated me. I liked you too and somehow I fondly imagined you did me.”27
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