Myrtle remained with Louis in Madrid for the rest of her life, as incapable of speaking Spanish as any other foreign language. Once they were together again, they set to work to get their money out of France, paying the cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paris “important sums” to smuggle it out in the diplomatic bag. It is impossible to track down exactly what monies these were, or how much Darquier extracted from the CGQ J. What evidence there is derives from a mass of allegations. It is even more impossible to know what they did with it, or exactly where it went, because no riches arrived for the couple in Madrid, and whatever Louis had amassed by the end of the war was anyway confiscated by the French state.
By the end of 1947 Louis had begun to earn his living at the Escuele Central de Idiomas (Central School of Languages), where he taught English under the name of Juan Estève, still living in one room in and around the avenida. His trial had opened in the Palais de Justice in Paris on 2 December 1947. He was tried in his absence, with Xavier Vallat, before the High Court of Justice.53 “In this double trial the martyrdom of all the Jews during the Occupation is brought back to life,” said Le Matin. Vallat attended, and called upon Catholic philosophy and precedents in his defence; he was sentenced to ten years (he served only two, some of it with Maurras as his prison companion).
Darquier's case was speedily dealt with. His character had already been thoroughly assassinated, in public and during his trial, so most of his prosecution was devoted to trying to work out what exactly could be placed at his door, granted that every secretary and official testified to his near-permanent absence from the CGQ J office. In a great many cases the conclusion was: “Antignac is wholly responsible.” What emerged chiefly from the investigation and trial, and from numerous witnesses, was that Louis Darquier was little more than a con man. Even his loyal secretary Paule Fichot declared, “I have heard him say, like everyone else, that money comes before principles.”54 The indignity of acknowledging that this manipulating scoundrel had reached such a position in a French government was one of many reasons why his extradition from Spain was never requested.
On 10 December “Darquier sans Pellepoix” was declared guilty of “collusion with agents of a foreign power” and was sentenced to death in absentia; his goods were confiscated and his French citizenship withdrawn.55 Eighteen Frenchmen were sentenced to death by the High Court of Justice, of whom only three were actually executed. Abel Bonnard was one of these condemned men who escaped his sentence.56 With Louis Darquier he would lunch after Mass on Sundays at the Church of St.-Louis des Français in Madrid.
Reports of Louis' condemnation appeared in all the newspapers in France, in The Times and in other British newspapers; Hazel in Europe kept in constant touch with Tasmania. There, Lexie Jones took action. Just as the will of Henry Jones had been entirely concerned with Myrtle, so the will Lexie made within months of Louis' death sentence was entirely concerned with Anne. When Henry died in 1929 he had left Lexie a millionaire at today's values, just. In 1948 circumstances were not the same, but everything she had was put into trust for Anne. None of the Jones children could touch their shares until Lexie was satisfied that Anne had been educated. Myrtle was never to have more than a life share in hers, and every clause in the will was qualified by “other than my said daughter Myrtle Marion Ambrosine Baroness Darquier de Pellepoix.”57
With Lexie masterminding affairs from Tasmania, Myrtle's older brother Hector, a dentist in Toowoomba, Queensland, became Anne's guardian, and Hazel arranged matters in England. Hazel felt she was “on excellent terms” with Anne and Elsie.58 This was only one of the sad and strenuous delusions of the Jones family, who in the words of the youngest daughter Heather viewed Louis' post-war circumstances as the Jews wreaking revenge. Lexie, who never met Anne, and never saw Myrtle again after 1929, seems to have been the only one to have some idea of the truth. Myrtle's siblings continued to view her as a glittering European baroness whose grandeur and style illuminated the salons of cosmopolitan society.
Either Lexie or Louis paid for Anne to go to Madrid sometime in 1948 or 1949. She seems not to have known about her father's deeds or death sentence before she went; or rather, the violent shock she received in Madrid implies such ignorance, for when Anne met the man she believed to be her aristocratic French father, for a little time she thought she had struck gold. How long her visit was remains unknown, nor do I know why she did not mention seeing her mother again in Madrid—it may well be that Louis had once again sent Myrtle somewhere for treatment, for he “took her to many many doctors for her alcoholism.”59
In the years after the war, Louise took good care to speak about Louis only to those she trusted—usually these were women who worked for her. She excused her son by saying, “He saved those he could; if he hadn't been there, the Germans would have taken everyone.”60 Such comforting messages from her grandmother were comprehensively destroyed once Anne got to Madrid.
Louis Darquier never kept himself to himself for one moment, and he had only one subject: Jews, about whom he talked continuously, out loud, to his dying day. Jews were “encrusted onto his persona.”61 He remained combative and extravagant to the end, and the deranged words he had borrowed from the Protocols never changed.
In Madrid everything would have become apparent to Anne. Where were the accoutrements of baronial life? Why was Baron Darquier de Pellepoix living in a rented room? How could the loudmouth barfly and bruiser she met be related to the heroic count of her imagination? He could not. In 1949 Anne of Great Tew and Kidlington, raised on austerity, the Home Front and Churchill, and Anne of the Jesuits and Heythrop Hall, discovered exactly who she was, and what her father was responsible for. On her way to an education now, she had the skills to find out more, to find out exactly what she needed to know.
Anne mentioned not a word about this visit to her friend Beryl when she came to stay in Kidlington; all she talked about was Oxford and her arrangements to begin her medical studies. She did not talk of her parents, nor of her Tasmanian family, and Beryl felt there was some secret she was keeping: “Anne only let you know what she wanted you to know.” If she had to contact her father at all he was no longer “Dear Daddy,” but “Dear Louis,” and from 1949 she refused, savagely, to acknowledge or forgive either of her parents. Louis never threw out the letter of bitter reproach she sent him.62 The silence Elsie had taught her during the war years now became Anne's way of life. Dominique Jamet, a French writer, son of a journalist collabo, is only one of the many children who have written and spoken about what it is like to “carry the crimes of their fathers in silence and solitude,” coated in an “invisible and ignominious stain.”63
For Anne, the loss of her father was not the same as her dismissal of Myrtle; Louis the baron had been her hope and her idol, and while she said nothing about Myrtle to her closest friends or those she trusted, over the coming years she would speak about her father: she hated him. Although she did not habitually blame people, she always talked of him without forgiveness, and of “the burden of living with a father who was a devil… sending Jews out of France.”64
Anne came back with “a deep hatred for her father,” “hatred, contempt and shame.” Talking to her half sister Teresa today about their father, you hear the same force as Anne used when she told me: “There are some things and some people you can never forgive.” After her visit to Madrid Anne became another of those children who tremble, and “not only from cold in the night.”65
21
The Cricket Team
THE FINANCIAL GENEROSITY OF Lexie Jones towards her granddaughter was exceptional, but careful. Anne had to get a scholarship, and she did—“Lord Nuffield's gift to the college of a medical Scholarship of the value of £100 per annum,” an open scholarship for sciences provided by the Morris motorcar millionaire. Thus fortified, in October 1949 Anne entered St. Hilda's College, Oxford, to study medicine, one of the 970 women permitted to study at Oxford that year. To those initiated in the mysteries of college hierarc
hies St. Hilda's was less illustrious than its rival women's colleges—Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville—but its rank and accommodation were more than acceptable to someone used to the Falkland Arms and Hazel Crescent.
Founded by Dorothea Beale, the famous educator of women and principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College, St. Hilda's was full of Cheltenham girls, a class apart from Anne, who had not even managed a grammar school. In 1949 clothing rationing ended: this changed little, but you could now spot the difference between grammar school and Cheltenham girls, and they hardly mixed socially. Anne was a “scholarship girl” who had told white lies about her previous education.
The Oxford University Anne entered in 1949 was still a masculine establishment. Articles in its magazine Isis complained that “Oxford women were pimply, wore shapeless tweeds, pedalled furiously from lecture to lecture, drank Nescafé in their silly little chintz-curtained rooms, and became French mistresses eventually in Birmingham.”1 There were courses women could not study, places they could not go, societies they could not join. In addition, Anne had entered a profession in which women were still a rarity.
Post-war Oxford was vigorously uncomfortable. There was no central heating—St. Hilda's was “like a refrigerator”—and clothes were so rationed that it was not so much a problem of having coupons for shoes as of finding shoes to buy. Men (in demob suits) were rationed by St. Hilda's, and food by the government, to such a degree that contemporary accounts of life at the college in Anne's time seem to concentrate entirely on butter. Everything was shabby but cheerful, although Anne's gaiety seems to have evaporated within the confines of St. Hilda's. Very few from her year remember her well, mostly because the science and humanities students did not mix, but also because memories of the war were still vivid in 1949, and Anne had to be careful. Her fellow students remember her as “slight in build, quiet and rather withdrawn,” “charming,” “highly intelligent” and “scholarly,” “a slender, slightly stooping girl with an exceptionally sweet smile.”2 All noted that she was kind but reserved, and she was known for not going to lectures, working in laboratories and libraries all day and studying all night, and for having a permanent boyfriend.
Immediately after the war Catholicism in Oxford burst into life, and Anne always went round with a Catholic foursome, of whom her boyfriend John Varley was one. Anne could afford the fines St. Hilda's charged if she came back to college after 11:15 p.m. Varley, a fellow medical student, was a dour and sardonic Scot, clever in the sense that Anne, with her difficult education, could never be. His father had a cinema in Stranraer; he was not poor. Students with steady boyfriends were almost unknown at the time, so Anne and John were remembered, also for their notorious quarrels—they were often vile to each other, but for years were never seen apart.
Varley and his friends were fond of drink—very fond—and Anne's Catholic coterie had riotous times together. Anne could be waspish about Oxford—she was particularly envious of the shooting star of her years there, Shirley Catlin, daughter of Vera Brittain, now Shirley Williams— but she had a good time. St. Hilda's had its own punts and canoes. When Beryl came to visit Anne in Oxford, they went to see Swan Lake at the New Theatre, and punted on the river.
On her Oxford registration in October 1949, Anne stated that she was her father's only child, but then, Myrtle knew nothing about the existence of Teresa for many years. But Hazel Jones knew, and always saw Teresa on her annual visit to Myrtle in Madrid; Teresa called her “Aunty Hazel” years before she met Myrtle. It is probable that Anne learned about her half sister from Hazel; how the news affected her can only be deduced from the fact that she resolutely refused to see or speak to Teresa throughout her life.
In the midst of her years at Oxford, Anne abandoned her Catholicism and became a communist—of an intellectual, carpet-slipper and non-conspiratorial kind, and only temporarily. Communism and Catholicism were much in the air at Oxford, and often interchangeable. Anne's abandonment of Catholicism came after Pope Pius XII's proclamation, in 1950, that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin was now Catholic dogma. Also in Oxford, libraries, which had always been the source of Anne's self-education, presented all the opportunities she needed to learn about her father's activities during the war. By the end of her final year she could tell the student who roomed next to her that she had “a Nazi father,” to whom, of course, communists were the Devil's Own.
While she was a medical student little changed in Anne's family life. After Anne left home, Elsie took on some of Myrtle's attributes. She lied about her age, making herself younger by some years, and, never seen without a hat, went back to work again as a “nurse” in the children's homes of the City of Oxford. “She liked having many jobs and names and being above herself.”3 She took to calling herself Eva Victoria—this was her upmarket name—or Lucy Lightfoot, while the children called her Aunty Lucy. “All the children loved her… she had a wicked sense of humour, she was like a godmother to the kids.” But when Anne was on vacation, Elsie would leave work to look after her at Hazel Crescent. “When she talked about her, there was no one else on earth like Anne. She was the centre of Elsie's universe.”4
Anne often went back to Great Tew, and was godmother to May's baby Alistair, christened at St. Michael and All Angels in 1950. 5 Iris Prissian, one of Elsie's evacuees from the early days of the war, enrolled at St. Hilda's in 1950. There was also Anne's grandmother Louise and the family in Paris; she became particularly close to her aunt the doctor, Janot Darquier; but then, except for Louise, everyone was fascinated by Janot, she was an original. In those years Anne was very fond of clothes, and Janot, who practised as a gynaecologist, had some connection to Paris couturiers; Anne came back from France with the unheard-of luxury of a dress made of handkerchief point lace.
After the war the Jones family set sail from Tasmania, making many trips “Home” in the coming years. All of them came to see Anne—in 1959 Aunt Olive took her on one of her travels—and then went on to Madrid to see the Baron and Baroness, none of them happy about Anne's attitude to her parents. Hazel loved Anne, but was furious with her for this—she was virulent against anyone who attacked Louis. Other matters seem to have displeased them too, because Lexie, who was always adding codicils to her will, temporarily disinherited Anne at the end of 1951 and returned her portion to Myrtle. The Jones view of Louis as a fervent French patriot assailed by communism and international Jewry perhaps explains this, for in 1951 a Liberal (conservative) government tried—and failed—to ban communism in Australia.
By this time Anne knew she could not be a neurosurgeon—she disliked, and had once fainted at, the sight of blood—and she knew she was no academic. And so she turned to neurology's twin discipline, psychiatry, which attempts to explain the mysteries of the human psyche, and heal damaged souls. She told the Jones family that she wanted to become a psychiatrist because she had had such a difficult life; this decision too was viewed unhappily in Tasmania. No money or support, so generously offered by them, could give Anne anything in common with her mother's family, so enthralled by the “aristocratic” Darquiers. Anne saw her mother as an alcoholic and worse, and her father as a war criminal. The Jones family did not find Anne easy to deal with.
Anne managed only a Third Class degree when she graduated in 1952. Her career was unaffected: she had learned that she was not going in the natural direction for her talents, and remained “ambitious and single-minded” about her new plans. When she moved to London, where she chose to complete her training, she took a room in Nevern Square in Earl's Court, and began three years as a clinical undergraduate at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in east London.
The British medical world of the early 1950s was a strange and inbred one, overwhelmingly masculine, imbued with venerable stratifications and customs as yet little changed by the National Health Service, introduced in July 1948. Doctors had fought a vicious campaign against the provision of free medical care for the British public, which they lost, and the acrimony which had greeted this “socia
list tyranny” was still very much in the air when Anne began at Bart's.
Known as “The Mother Hospital of the Empire,” Bart's is one of London's most ancient medical establishments, a teaching hospital, although women had only been permitted as students since 1947. Anne went to Bart's in 1952 accompanied by some of her Oxford coterie, but women were sparse there in these early years under its Dean, Sir “Slasher” Tuckwell, and she was seen as a “mousy oddity” by some of her pipe-smoking and tweedy fellow students. Photographs of Anne's year at Bart's are all of men in rugger scrums, or naked in the communal bath after a game, forty or so young men with Brylcreemed hair and side partings, peering studiously through microscopes or clustered around a skeleton. Within its often brutal and fixed culture, the pecking order of consultant physician or surgeon, registrar, house officer and lowly student was rigorously maintained, but by the end of her years there Anne had walked the wards and delivered babies, and had a grounding in medicine and surgery.
On all her student registrations Anne listed Hector Jones as her guardian. For Bart's, next to his name someone added “Father in Spain, never sees,” and next to her name, Anne Darquier de Pellepoix, is added “known as Darquier for personal reasons.” Students at Bart's prayed for a house job at the end of their training: they would be the lowest of the low, but they would be residents. The captaincy of the Bart's cricket team automatically ensured a coveted house job, but this possibility not being open to Anne, when she graduated in December 1955—she was now Dr. Anne Darquier, BA, BM, B.Ch Oxon.—she took a bedsit in Belsize Park Gardens in north London. She was twenty-five.
Anne told her childhood friend Beryl that John Varley wanted to marry her, but that she was too obsessed with her medical studies for marriage. She also said, “I wish I could be happy with the things other folks have, instead of this burning ambition.”6 After two years of medical practice, including a year of neurology, she turned her attention to the world of Freud and Jung, and by the 1960s her relationship with Varley was over.
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