What energy was left to a hungry people was devoted to hating Laval: on 11 November 1943, Armistice Day—not a permitted celebration during the Occupation—public bile found relief in shouting “Mort à Laval! ” and reverting to the old national anthem, the forbidden “Marseillaise,” as anyone who has seen the film Casablanca knows.
Colonel von Behr and his ERR pillaged eight thousand pianos during the Occupation; in April 1943 over a thousand of them were still in storage in Paris, but Louis seems not to have troubled to allot one to Myrtle, who so loved to play. What Myrtle felt about mistresses like Madame Robin is not recorded, nor how she reacted to Louis' obsession with half-breeds and French blood.
Anne Darquier had only a half portion of this blood; this may account for Louis' unwillingness to send any of his newfound wealth to her. Since September 1942 the Foreign Office at Vichy had continued to receive letters from London complaining about the £50 Louis had sent for Anne, demanding the back pay he owed Elsie and the reimbursement of the Free French charities which had been supporting her. The consul insisted not only on repayment, but also an advance against future expenses. Further letters followed: Louis sent nothing. By 1943 he owed them all a great deal more, because the French charities continued to give Elsie £5 a month as well as paying for Anne's education—nine guineas a term. In an act of even more heroic generosity, the charity that paid Anne's school fees, the French Benevolent Society, described her as the daughter of an “Officer, Free French Forces” when she enrolled in Chipping Norton Grammar School in September 1943.
The Free French paid for Anne's education (courtesy of Mrs. Brenda Morris of Chipping Norton School).
In Kidlington, life had changed. Aunty Maud had remarried. As housekeeper at the Schusters' estate at Nether Worton she had met Arthur
Haynes, who worked there as a groom, or a gentleman's gentleman; reports vary. It was unanimously agreed that Arthur was a “nice country man” and a perfect match for the ebullient Maud.
By the summer of 1943, in England, the war had entered a different phase. The British were still hungry, but they were surviving austerity. London had withstood the Blitz, and East Ham Grammar, Anne's school at the zoo in Kidlington, went back to London. In September 1943 Maud's husband Arthur became landlord of the Falkland Arms pub in Great Tew, and Elsie and Anne moved there to live with them.29
At the time, Louis Darquier's propaganda department in Paris was churning out radio scripts like this:
A reporter visits a working-class suburb. He is standing in the court yard of one of the housing blocks. The text and the sound evoke the lack of light, the poverty and the dirty, miserable games which keep the children entertained.
He exhorts people to save the race and make this plague disappear.
Other sounds and words show that children need sunshine and fresh air.
The soundtrack evokes life in the country, open fields, campfires at night, singing, gymnastics and a balanced life. “That,” the reporter
concludes, “is youth enjoying life.”30
Today Great Tew, with its picture-postcard thatched cottages, its village green and pub, and its quaint names—“Bee Bole Cottage,” “Tulip Tree Cottage,” “Hangman's Hill”—wins prizes as “the most beautiful village in England.” Breathless journalists write articles about its preserved antique perfections, its village black magic and its ghost: a coach and horses which sporadically trots around the lanes. But until the death of the last owner of the village, in 1985, this tiny place, well off the beaten track, was almost medieval in its rural poverty and isolation. Great Tew was on the way to nowhere, and no one passed through it. There was a blacksmith, a church, a butcher and a post office and stores, the pub and a beautiful church, St. Michael and All Angels. Over the centuries the village had always belonged entirely to one owner in a sequence of aristocrats, industrialists, eccentrics and rogues whose estate office ran the village, the tenants and the lower orders on behalf of the inhabitants of the manor at Tew Park.
One of these was Viscount Falkland, Secretary of State to Charles I, whose family gave its name to the island outposts of the Empire in the South Atlantic which both Argentina and Britain claim as their own, and also to the village pub, drowned in roses and wisteria. But in 1943 even Great Tew had been affected by the war. Rationing was more severe by this time, and the tiny village, like the rest of England, now lived close to the poverty level. Memories of those who lived there then bear witness to the harshness of the times, but poverty, fierce cold, hard relentless work, one egg a week, weak tea, no petrol and few cigarettes were the common lot in the war years, as normal as the sound of combat in the skies above. Everyone was subject to the sense of loss, to the absence of fathers, the delivery of telegrams, the announcements of death.
Nearby, very often, was the heartening presence of the great man himself. Oxfordshire was the home county of Winston Churchill, and it was firmly believed by the country people that they could not be bombed, because when he conquered Britain Hitler was planning to live in Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born. Blenheim and Oxford, a stone's throw from Kidlington, were therefore quite safe, and much the same feeling was extended to Ditchley Park near Enstone, about three miles from Great Tew, where Churchill spent many weekends during the war.
When Anne went to live there, the winding lanes of Great Tew had turned into a civilian battleground. Most of the inhabitants of the village are called Clifton—each branch insisting that it is not related to the other—diluted with Keals and Paintins and many branches of Tustains. Now there were land girls and Italian prisoners of war, foreigners all, disabled children billeted in the Great House. Great Tew bulged with grumpy and unloved London families. The villagers loathed their streetwise ways, while the outsiders accused the natives of being standoffish and unwelcoming—and over-inquisitive at the same time. Anne remained a child apart, a quiet girl who kept herself to herself, mixing neither with the London children nor with the children of the village.
The Falkland Arms pub is often described as “unspoilt.” In 1943 being unspoilt meant that it was bitterly cold and gloomy, its oak beams and low ceilings darkened to the funereal by the blackout. The public bar was simple, with flagstone floor and straight-backed chairs, while the taproom next door, with inglenook fireplace and dartboard, was the smoking and drinking room for the men of the village. Elsie, Anne, Maud and Arthur lived and ate in the tiny family room next to the public bar, and here Anne studied in what light could reach through the stone-mullioned windows. All of them slept in the cramped bedrooms upstairs. The pub, like Great Tew, was “medieval”: the privy was out the back, and water came from the tap outside the post office. There was no electricity either: the blackout and the dark winter months were survived with lamps and candles and cigarettes glowing in the night. But the inhabitants of Great Tew were occasionally better off than most: farm produce and wild animals often provided goodies city folk could only dream of.
Arthur stood behind the bar, and Maud poured the beer. Maud was a marvellous bar lady: big-bosomed, big-hearted, she would start a singsong to cheer everyone up. In those days most major towns had their own brewery, and nearby Hook Norton or Flowers provided the barrels kept in the cellar of the Falkland Arms. There was no pump for the beer, and Anne's job—down the winding cellar stairs, up the winding cellar stairs— was to fill the jugs with “Hookie” every time someone wanted a beer.
Elsie continued to take no nonsense from anybody. Her forceful personality, her dyed ginger hair and bony presence, “very sharp and to the point,” did not prevent the people of Great Tew from sticking their beaks into her affairs. To this day they continue to believe that Anne was her illegitimate daughter: “We all thought Elsie was mixed up with some superior man.” “She was very well spoken,” and, to the country people, she seemed “posh, and Anne the same.” The unanimous conclusion was that Anne's bossy nanny guarded her from village life because of her secret aristocratic connections. Anne's respite from this came from M
aud and Arthur, who broadened her life and moderated Nanny Lightfoot's rigour: “they adored Anne.”
Maud made wthe pub the centre of village life, a happy place. Anne had to scrub the floors and pour the beer, but she was sent up to the Big House to join the Girl Guides, and climbed the big tree, still there, outside the pub window. Her childhood friend was Beryl Clifton, the daughter of Ada and Bert at the post office, a few doors down from the pub. Anne and Beryl played at dressing up—Anne made the perfect nun.
By this time Anne had made a habit of leaving schools. At thirteen she was already ambitious, and she could not tolerate the diet of home nursing, wartime cookery and handicrafts which interspersed the basic curriculum for girls at Chipping Norton Grammar School. She hated it, and managed only one term there. The school had accepted her at a reduced rate, but there were school-dinner fees and games fees, and a bottle-green school uniform that Elsie could not afford. She felt she did not fit in. As for Elsie, the fact that the Free French were paying for Anne's upkeep was something she kept to herself.31
January 1944 found Anne's father more—much more—at his desk, and in a filthy temper. Otto Abetz had been sent back to Paris and the embassy to get Vichy back on track, and Louis had been officially notified that he would soon be relieved of his functions. He knew that Antignac was manoeuvring to take his place. “I don't understand how a former officer like Antignac could let himself be led so much by the Germans,” spat Darquier. He would nag Antignac about his approach: “You don't have to suck up to them like that.”32
Louis could still pull some strings. De Monzie came to see him in Paris in January 1944. Pierre Combes—later the director of the Museum of the Resistance in Cahors—had been arrested together with a dozen or so other young Cadurcien résistants, found bearing guns, while Combes himself had thrown into the river a sack of post destined for the local STO office. A father and son from Cahors, Henri and Jean Gayet, went to see de Monzie in Paris. The next day de Monzie took them to Louis in his office. The Gayets sat facing Louis. “I noticed one thing,” said Jean Gayet: “there was one master of this story, and that was de Monzie…For four hours, he remained standing, he gave orders and instructions to Louis. He said, ‘You do this, you do that, you must get in touch with Y, you must telephone Z, and extracted large sums of mon and Louis obeyed like a little boy…it was flagrant, the servitude of Darquier in face of de Monzie.” By the time they left Louis' office, Pierre Combes and his fellows were not to be shot; instead they were to be sent to prison camp in Germany. Two of them did not return.33
Darquier found other experiences equally unpleasant. All the staff of the CGQ J, including Louis himself, were now required to submit baptismal certificates of their four grandparents. Even worse was the propaganda witch hunt the Germans whipped up for his departure: “In preparation for this, two public meetings were held on 22 January and 7 February 1944 during which the Commissariat was strongly criticised. Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner, was obliged to submit his resignation.” “Den of thieves,” “shameless plunder of Jewish businesses,” “scandal of the billion-franc fine” were only some of the accusations.
The story of Pierre Combes whistled through the corridors of anti-Semitic power. Jacques Lesdain of l'Illustration, whom the Germans favoured as Darquier's replacement (and who liked to urge Occult Forces Behind Roosevelt by Dr. von Leers as recommended reading), publicly attacked every aspect of Darquier's scandalous behaviour, and in particular the hold de Monzie had over him and the protection he thus provided for wealthy Jews.
Meanwhile the Paris collabos were in final pursuit of Pétain and Laval, castigating Vichy as “Jerusalem on the Allier.” Sézille and Galien had almost the last word: “As for Darquier de Pellepoix,” thundered Sézille, “he thinks only of his stomach, his women and his re-election. We helped him at the beginning, but he has betrayed us. He disgusts us. One day his punishment will come.” Two months later Sézille died, avoiding the fate of all his cronies.34
Newspapers began to report Darquier's arrest—“his improbity is notorious,” stated the Dépêche de France. 35 When Laval dismissed him officially, on 26 February, the reason was “irregularities over the administration of Aryanised assets.”36 Boué was sacked with him. Paris-soir reported that Darquier had been arrested for malpractice at the frontier on 21 January. If this was true, he was quickly freed. The police reported the private but universal pleasure of certain political personalities and senior officials at the Hôtel de Ville; otherwise Darquier's departure was greeted with silence from all sides. After a brief interim Antignac returned to lead the CGQ J, and his zeal in persecution remained exemplary, and vigorous, to the end.37
Louis Darquier proved to be one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War. Hotels like the Bristol and restaurants like Maxim's, under German favour, suffered no food restrictions. Photographs of him taken in 1944 reveal a plumper version of his 1930s self, buttons straining to cover a corpulent stomach, the round face bejowled, the hands pudgy. Anne, on the other hand was skinny, like all those children raised in poverty during the war years. She never became large, as Myrtle did after the war. Anne had enough of Louis and Pierre Darquier about her face to connect her with generations of citizens of Cahors and the Lot, but the cast of her face was her mother's; she had a Jones look about her, but nothing else of Australia at all. Her legs were slightly bowed, but her sweet face was always transformed by a charming smile. Nevertheless, like so many war children, she looked as though a large dose of vitamins at the right time could have made her taller, more robust. She was pale, with an air of indomitable fragility; she always lacked the substantial quality of her parents. For the rest, whereas her parents were noisy, years of Elsie's will had made Anne silent.
Neither Elsie nor Anne ever mentioned Myrtle, or receiving any letters from her, but about her father's family, in general terms, Anne knew a great deal more. She told her friend Beryl that she was the daughter of a French baron, and she knew that her grandfather had been, and that her uncle was, a doctor. By 1944 Elsie knew, as did everyone else in Great Tew, that Anne Darquier had a mind of her own, and that she had already determined to follow her French family and become a doctor herself.
Accounts of Anne's education after the age of thirteen are hazy, and Anne too was secretive about it: her lack of formal teaching was something else she always had to hide. What is known is that she completed what was left of her secondary education at the Green School in Chipping Norton, left as all such children did at the age of fourteen, and went to work in the Falkland Arms with Elsie, Maud and Arthur. She was now as tall as she would ever be: about the same height as her mother, five foot five, slim, with long brown hair. Although still shy, she astonished her peers with remarks such as “You're suffering from an inferiority complex.” Another of Anne's books from childhood is an exhaustively thumbed copy of Baker and Margerison's New Medical Dictionary (with an Air Raid Precautions Supplement), dated 1942. Candles were often rationed, and matches hard to come by, but when she had them Anne stayed up all night to study.
Great Tew admired her for it, but were baffled by her obsession: “We all knew women weren't doctors.” “I have never forgotten Anne,” said Beryl Clifton, “and to this day if I hear anyone say, ‘I can't, it can't be done, and extracted large sums of mon I tell them of a girl I once knew who through sheer guts, hard work and a refusal to give up and an undying ambition to be a doctor—and to be this doctor had to study at Oxford University (there could be no second best)—and succeeded.”38
The armed forces were always a substantial presence in wartime Oxfordshire: the county was near to London and its villages and towns housed men in training, or on rest and recuperation. There were many Canadians, some Australians, and, after 1942, American soldiers too. Great Tew was surrounded by military airfields, most of them training grounds. The biggest airfield was Moreton-in-Marsh, but its satellite airfield Enstone was on the doorstep of Great Tew and the bombing station of Upper Heyford not
far away. Negotiating the dark country lanes to the nearby towns of Banbury or Chipping Norton was dangerous in the blackout, and lack of petrol made public transport almost nonexistent. Though the beer was diluted, the gin tasted like ether, and the whisky was dubious, these pilots made their way to the Falkland Arms. “Every girl in the vicinity pursued the pilots,” a contemporary of Anne's remembered. Anne learned to drink with them, and gained her sexual initiation from one of these Canadian airmen.
Great Tew remained cut off, but by 1944 no one in southern England could be isolated from the troops and equipment which poured in as the United States and the Allies prepared for D-Day. American GIs and their tanks and jeeps occupied Cow Hill; they were supplied with electricity, the first time it reached the environs of Great Tew. The Oxfordshire skies buzzed with planes and gliders and with parachutists practising for the French landings. The county became a military dormitory and a vast armaments storehouse, with the grass verges on the road to Chipping Norton and Banbury stacked with bombs, shells and miscellaneous ammunition.
For Vichy, the months before D-Day were chaotic and savage. On Bousquet's departure, at German insistence Vichy appointed Joseph Dar-nand to the government as Secretary-General for the Maintenance of Order. Jacques Doriot's PPF fascists were fighting throughout France alongside Darnand's Milice and the Gestapo. The fanatical Catholic Philippe Henriot, de Monzie's enemy during the Stavisky affair, became Minister of Information and Propaganda in January 1944, and a few months later another fascist, Marcel Déat, became Minister of Labour and National Solidarity. As Vichy and the extremists in Paris moved together to fight the Resistance and the Allied landings they expected any day, France was alight with sabotage and hand-to-hand combat. The Nazis kept to the towns, surrounded by Maquis and résistants; the British were increasing their arms and supply drops all over France.
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