After “the most terrible Nöel imaginable,” in 1932 they were back in Paris for New Year, on the scrounge again. In these quick flits to Paris in search of funds, Louis would visit Anatole de Monzie. Always in awe of de Monzie himself, or wanting his good opinion too much to ask him for help, Louis often mentioned applying to Ramy, de Monzie's amanuensis, for this and that.22 De Monzie, his eyes “glittering with malice” in his bald, round head, was not an easy man to face up to; Louis never could do so.
“We have experienced the greatest difficulty in ‘hanging on, ’ ” wrote Myrtle to René. “Louis has written his book in record time”—this one took him three months—as well as some short stories about French soldiers in the trenches and his film script. Now, she added, “comes the difficult part—we cannot possibly go three days longer without help.” Le tout London “prophesy a success”—but Louis could not pay to get his work typed, they had nothing to eat, and Baby had to have “a high chair, blankets, coverlet, warm woolies [sic], pram and now she requires a new bed.” Myrtle had the wit to add, “You must be thoroughly sick and tired of the sight of our handwriting.”23
René paid again, but this time the money for Anne went directly to Elsie, and the authorised loan was increased by fifteen thousand francs; it now totalled ninety-six thousand francs in all—the equivalent of almost £40,000 today. Both Louis and Myrtle had to sign for it legally, Myrtle promising repayment within ten years at the latest, against her future inheritance. She hesitated a week before signing—further trips to Paris were necessary. Despite Louis' insistence to René that “I use, as you know, the full name Darquier de Pellepoix which I intend to legalise as soon as possible,” the loan was signed without any pseudonyms or false baronetcies.24
On receipt of René's money, Louis' book was typed, Myrtle was sent back to London; further help from the Darquier family would be forthcoming only on condition that she accepted a fare back to Australia. Louis let fly. This was his mother's doing, he knew; he raged that for many years they had helped Jean become a doctor, but for him, nothing. “When you speak to me of idleness, you make me want to laugh. To write in these conditions, within a year, two books, one of which was three hundred pages long, twenty-five short stories without counting many other things…is a small tour de force, when you do not know if you will eat the next day or if the hotel manager is going to throw you out.”25
Louis to and fro-ed between London and Paris until August 1932, when they upped their legal debt to René by a further thirty thousand francs and he returned to London to start again.26 De Monzie's office promised free crossing tickets—Louis was infuriated to be obliged to travel third class—but otherwise his cup was full: “I cannot tell you how happy we are…I have come back to London with profound pleasure— the kindness of the people is a habit you cannot give up after experiencing it.”27
They had not seen Anne for twelve months, and Louis was “excited as a child at the thought of seeing her again.” This visit in the summer of 1932 seems to have been the last time Louis saw Anne as a child. It is hard to say accurately how often Myrtle managed it, if she did at all. Anne's medical contemporaries report that she met her mother only a few times in her life. No one who knew Elsie and Anne in any of the Oxfordshire villages in which they lived before the Second World War ever saw Myrtle or Louis. In her letters Myrtle occasionally writes as though she has actually seen her daughter: “Anne France is well and just trying to walk”; “she is a pretty girl with deep blue eyes and a wonderful head of red hair!”; “she has such a lot of red gold wavy hair and is really very pretty…and knows some French.” As she also describes Anne as luxuriating on a farm with horses—“She lives in the fresh air—such a healthy life for her on the farm”—whereas she was actually living in a tiny village house in Duns Tew with Elsie, May and often Maud—and is mistaken about Anne's hair, which was neither red nor luxuriant, it seems probable that Anne's version of events is the truthful one.28
The Tasmanians continued to send the little they could afford to Myrtle, and to Anne they sent blankets, coats and bonnets; Myrtle made use of their generosity in letters of complaint to France. Elsie was required to get photographs taken of Anne, and Myrtle posted them off with requests for funds. Anne was a pretty baby, blonde and pale, and as time passes, in Elsie's photos for Myrtle she turns into a charming little girl, with a podgy tummy, stringy legs and a sweet smile. One photo followed another—on the beach at Bournemouth with Maud, Elsie and May; grinning toothlessly at the camera surrounded by dolls; cuddling the Light-foot dog of the day—Patch, Ruby, Spot, Rover; posing outside a rented caravan smiling like a good little girl for Mummy and Daddy.
The acute financial antennae of the Darquier family meant that they had seen through Myrtle, as had Elsie. It was only the Jones family in Tasmania who maintained that Elsie turned Anne against her mother. Everyone else became aware of Myrtle's “sentimental blackmail,” that she wrote words of love from afar, but that she was never with her “Baby,” and rarely paid Elsie.
From her weeks with them in Old Windsor, Elsie knew how the Baron and Baroness lived; she knew about the alcohol and she knew what it led to. She used to threaten to put Anne into care if Louis and Myrtle did not pay up, but she soon realised that her only hope was the hapless René. She now had to master the despatch of international dunning telegrams and correspondence, signed “Yours respectfully,” to René in Strasbourg.
Elsie was nobody's fool. While the Schusters called their cook Maud “Waddy,” Elsie was always “Miss Lightfoot” or “Nanny Lightfoot,” and she had carefully replaced her Oxfordshire country burr with the accent of her betters. Both Maud and Elsie were small of stature but had large personalities. Elsie was bony and sharp, with a stoop—which Anne was to copy—and wore tweeds and sensible skirts and brogues. As she got older she dyed her hair ginger, that particular shade of red so poisonously available during the war. Maud was quite different, big-busted and jolly, a friend to everyone.
“The most courageous and most profitable thing I will have done will have been this change of countries, customs and principles,” Louis assured his family as he left France, forever, in 1932. He did not want to return to his own country “at any price”: “it is only in England that I can find my way.”29
By 1932 there were three million unemployed in Britain, with hunger marches to London and demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. The Baron and Baroness lived amidst this in blindfolded hope. Within months, however, their money had gone again. Their chosen aristocrat for this year was Sir James Erskine, who had been Conservative MP for the St. George's Division of Westminster from 1921 to 1929, and who wrote a “warm letter” to Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express, on Louis' behalf, and also put him in touch with the Daily Mail. 30 Louis went to see the foreign editor at the Express twice in an attempt to work as a journalist on the paper. Nothing came of his visits.
Within three months he finished another novel, “considerably superior” to his previous work, and had become “intimately acquainted” with Lady Kathleen Skinner, whose son Edgar was managing director of Allen & Unwin, “one of the best English publishers.” But, but, but… nothing seemed to work, and in December Louis had to write to René: “I am reduced to asking you for help again…I am going to take my book to the typist this afternoon—that will cost me 6 or 7 pounds—at the moment I owe my hotel about 2000 francs and their faces are beginning to get longer…There are so many writers here (and of all nationalities) who earn a great deal but are worth nothing.”31
Louis' literary competition ranged from Evelyn Waugh, whose Vile Bodies was published in 1930, to Shaw, Woolf, Maugham, Aldous Huxley, Rosamond Lehmann, T. S. Eliot, Auden and Isherwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Henry Green. As for best sellers, Wells, Galsworthy and Buchan were still going strong.
Thanking René for money in early 1933, Myrtle made the mistake of telling him that their months in London had not been spent entirely toiling over a hot typewriter, but had included “a
trip down to Italy,” where “Louis had a month's swimming and it did him the world of good.” But now that was over, and “sometimes for days he will not speak a decent word to me and he often hits me unmercifully—violent blows to my head… sneers at my family and my virtue—there have been several times when people have had to intervene to stop him…In Paris two workpeople came to my aid when he knocked me down and when remonstrated with that no Frenchman ever hit a woman Louis said ‘She's been used to it for the last five years. ’ ” Louis thrashed Myrtle repeatedly when she was pregnant with Baby: three weeks after her birth Elsie had to intervene and stop him. “On July 16 last year there was not one place on my back or arms you could put a pin on—it was all black with bruises.” Every time Louis wrote a begging letter to René he took it out on Myrtle: “everything I say is wrong, if I don't speak that is wrong—Waiters, servants or people nothing stops him—two days ago he was shouting at the top of his voice ‘Rotten dirty prostitute—come from low bitches’ etc then he flings me from the room.”
Alcohol is never mentioned in this extraordinary epistle, but every word reeks of it, as do Louis' rants: “Dirty prostitute go and find another man to keep you—you have separated me from my people.” Louis would put Myrtle in a corner and bang her about, then send her out in the streets black and blue, saying, “My mother would never have stayed where she was not wanted.”32 Myrtle's vivid catalogue raises the question as to how Louis could have found time to write amidst such unrelieved physical activity. It also finally closed the door in France; silence fell from Strasbourg and Paris.
In Germany, on 30 January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. “I am less mad than ever,” Louis sometimes told René. By madness he was referring not to anything clinical, but to the habits he had exhibited since infancy, the incoherent rages of a thwarted child. He and Myrtle were now holed up in their hotel room “without any money, the bills have to be paid weekly,”33 with no clothes, no food, rowing and drinking. Louis, unaware of the tale Myrtle had told, wrote and cabled for money to pay to get his book typed, but nothing came. Worse, he had to register as an alien again, and with no visible means of support he was terrified—he had already had two police encounters, and they had recently warned him again.
Myrtle was beside herself: a German had been deported the previous week for becoming a public charge, and “the newspaper publicity was terrible.” The hotel was about to throw them out, she was terrified of the scandal, and the manuscript, now typed, could not be collected without payment. Louis had an appointment to show Edgar Skinner the new novel on Tuesday at 11 a.m., so if René would send the cheque for £5.16s.9d directly to Prompt Service, Conduit Street, London…? Prompt Service received no money. “We have waited all week to hear from you,”34 Myrtle wailed; the appointment with Mr. Skinner had passed. Using a scratchy pen at American Express she beseeched, she begged, implored. In London Louis broke his last monocle and could not afford to replace it. It became obvious to him that René had called a halt to paying for monocles or anything else.
In March Louis went back to Paris and knocked on the family door. They took him in and Myrtle was left in London, darting in and out of the Piccadilly Hotel, stealing their writing paper: “the hotel has stopped credit and that means I cannot get anything to eat—I have 2/9 left and I must wire Louis—I am literally on the street and I am really ill …” She drifts away at the end of this agonised appeal:
I would be glad of anything
You cannot see what misery I am in
Give us one more chance please…
It is easy to be hard when one is sure of a living
She wrote this on 23 March 1933, as Hitler was granted sweeping powers by the Reichstag, the beginning of his dictatorship of Germany, two weeks after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president of the United States, and as The Times was publishing one of its first reports of attacks on Jews in Berlin. Meanwhile the world was spinning away from Myrtle, who was left sitting in “churches and railway stations until both closed” for three days and nights in the cold and rain. Interviewed by the hotel manager and detectives, she was threatened with gaol and deportation: “even my passport is wrong.” “I cannot have scandal— I will be branded thief.” She met every train hoping Louis would return to save her. She did not know where Louis was, but he sent her a telegram: “Can do nothing miserable love.”35
In Paris, Louis was with Jean and Janot Darquier in their apartment at 92, rue Jouffroy. One of the reasons for René's silence had been the birth of his son in March; René thus having other things to do, Louise and Janot took Louis over. They extracted him from his hotel room in Paris, paid the bill, fed him, gave him bed and board, but nothing else. Louis knew his credit was exhausted. Jean was never one to lend Louis and Myrtle money, though he was a well-considered neurologist, head of the Neurology Clinic at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris. But they were fond of Louis, and Janot maintained contact with him throughout his life.
Myrtle on the streets in London, 1933
They took Louis in, and it was Janot who wrote to René with the family instructions as to what they were now going to do with him, but most of all with Myrtle. It was all her fault. No Frenchwoman would have behaved as Myrtle had done, purloining for herself—for her addictions?—money that was meant for Baby. Louis was trying to extricate himself from her, but he was weak, and Myrtle was a blackmailer. “When one is Sandra on a bench in Piccadilly without a sou, one's feet in the water, one does not give up.”
The Darquier contacts were now put into action to get Louis a job, to get his book published, place his stories in Le Petit Parisien and generally set him on his feet again. But René must “not send a sou to Sandra…we have vast expenses here and we cannot manage to maintain the two of them… And I think, very sincerely, that she is bad for Louis.” Janot was without question the most intelligent woman in the Darquier family.
The Darquiers in Paris knew what they were up against: “Sandra… represents for him the opposite of all that his family tried to teach him. Today, exhausted with their terrible adventures, he is trying to re-establish himself and to extricate himself from the situations in which his wife has placed him—this is not easy.” Louis was “perfectly capable of saying one day ‘she must stay in London’ and the next day running off to find her again.”36
René had sent Myrtle £5 before Janot's letter arrived, but after that he obeyed instructions. On 27 March, sitting in the restaurant of Swan and Edgar, crying, Myrtle scrawled a note of thanks; her feet were bleeding, she was ill, she was grateful, but where was Louis?
By April 1933 she and Louis were in touch again, but secretly. Louis, forbidden by his family, could do nothing for her. Sir James Erskine, who built and owned the Eccleston Hotel in Victoria, tried to help again. Myrtle, very shaky on her feet, longing for her impounded suitcases, wrote and wrote and wrote to René. “It is not for myself I ask it is for Baby… Surely you will not let her starve…I will promise to stay away from Louis…I am unable to understand why you do not answer?”37
Elsie had not been paid. After the disappearance of René, Maud helped out for as long as she could, but when she went to work full-time as the Schusters' housekeeper, Elsie was “threatened with being turned out of her cottage as she cannot pay her rent, and the grocer and the milkman will not give her any further credit.”38 “At the extremity of her means,” she moved to meaner quarters in Kidlington, a much larger village than Duns Tew, on the doorstep of Oxford itself. The Baron and Baroness owed her £30 by now, more than six months in arrears.
In the following years Myrtle rarely raised her head above the parapet. The early months of 1933 seem to have been a watershed for her, just as they were for Louis. “Elsie never talked about Anne's mother, but she talked about her father,”39 and Anne followed suit. As she grew up, Anne would often say to her friend Beryl Clifton that she was the daughter of a count. About her mother she said nothing, and she seems never to have written to her, after the odd litt
le notes of a very young child, enclosed with photographs of “Baby” before she was four.
Louis' time with Jean and Janot was to change his life, and to provide his final transformation. In his new incarnation, the man who had insisted that he must be a writer and must live in England dismissed his literary career, such as it was. His novels and short stories were never mentioned, and were replaced by mythical years in Australia running sheep farms and battling with Marxism. He managed this so well that even the French security services, who kept a permanent eye on him after 1934, believed his assertion that he had spent the years between 1929 and 1933 living at number 5, cité du Retiro, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
In his years in England, Louis often mentioned his hatred of France, the land of his father: France to him was “the straitjacket of family autocracy.” But to France he returned, while Myrtle descended into a sea of silence and, presumably, alcohol. “One thing is certain,” Myrtle mourned, “I will never bring Baby to see this misery.”40
III
HITLER'S PARROT
7
The Street
IN 1933, LIKE MANY OF the European powers scarred by the First World War, France was moving towards civil war. Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany had already overcome such opposition as existed in those countries, but France and Spain were a different matter. One of the key figures in the Franco-French confrontation was Charles Maurras, a potent influence in Louis' political conversion.
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