CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Home is where the cat is.

Gordon Barton

Geoffrey had been running his London-based mail redistribution business with Nick Street for a few years. Street recalls Barton as being very excited at his son’s business venture. He had excellent senior contacts internationally through his father’s work with IECC and worked them to advantage. Geoffrey and Nick’s concept had been to form joint ventures, charging a royalty to each partner to use an international network they would establish through the UK, Germany and Spain. Their business would facilitate the movement of bulk mail across borders, negotiating all necessary transport. They already had a sizeable UK and New Zealand business.

Over dinner in London, Barton and his son cast aside their Russian ambitions and hatched another plan. Although Geoffrey’s London business was growing steadily, he had never quite organised himself to obtain a British passport. To do so would mean spending three months outside the UK. Italy remained without any mail redistributors, so if they could establish themselves there, there could be significant opportunities. Barton had a few friends in the Italian transport industry who might be convinced to back them. Italy was also a place where they could operate without proper work visas.

Father and son would base themselves on Lombardy’s Lake Como, within easy reach of Milan. Nearly 50 years earlier, Winston Churchill, stunned by the loss of his prime ministership at the end of World War II, and his home life strained, had escaped to this same lake. With a dreamy sense of unreality, Lake Como had long been a refuge for artists, writers and aristocrats. For over a decade Barton and Mary Ellen had intermittently visited the lakeside village of Torno, and their favourite room on the top terrace of the charming but simple Hotel Belvedere just across the water from Villa D’Este.

Barton spent the night of 30 April 1992—one of his last in England— getting drunk on red wine. At two in the morning he faxed his friend Francis James, ‘I feel like the radio operator leaving the sinking ship’. It would be five years before Kate and Mary Ellen saw him again. Geoffrey Barton would later confess to Kate, ‘It was like the Titanic went down. It was all any of us could do just to survive.’

Shortly after, he visited Hurlingham Lodge for the last time to pick up his mail, including the previous quarter’s phone bill. Barton paled to see it was over £12,000. The itemised account showed most of the long-distance calls had been to Mary Ellen’s lover, Eugene, in New York. (Mary Ellen insists the telephone bill was a mistake on the part of the telephone company and was later adjusted.) Barton would write to her five years later, ‘That was the end of my illusions. I was not really surprised. In every respect that I could think of, he had more to offer you than I did . . . I was now indeed only . . . “baggage from your past” . . . the best thing I could do for you was to leave you two to it.’

Early one morning at the beginning of May, father and son loaded up Geoffrey’s old hatchback Citroën (‘the lemon’ as Barton called it) and, farewelled by Mary Ellen for what was expected to be three months, set off for Italy.

They were an unlikely duo in a country where the postal system was entirely dysfunctional. Geoffrey knew no Italian and his deaf father hoped he could get by with his schoolboy Latin. Barton’s idea of market research was to read a biography of Garibaldi. All they had with them was their clothes, a computer and Barton’s diary of connections.

They imagined it might take six weeks to start up an Italian arm of Geoffrey’s mail redistribution company—IMX. By then, Geoffrey’s British residency would have been processed and they might return to the UK with a new profitable business. Both recognised working with Italian bureaucracy would be a challenge, but they underestimated just how difficult it would be. It took, in fact, over nine months before their IMX Italy operation had an office, staff, the necessary equipment and, most importantly, clients.

Geoffrey never got around to applying for his British residency. In fact, neither of the Bartons obtained residency or work permits for Italy. Without even an Italian car or boat licence, Gordon Barton and his son became illegal immigrants.

Money was extremely tight. Without Mary Ellen to organise them, bills were forgotten. They were in arrears by months at a time, and sometimes even the electricity was cut. They managed to import Barton’s sixteen-year-old Mercedes, squeezing it down the narrow lanes which abutted the lake.

‘The one thing that kept us going,’ Geoffrey admitted at his father’s memorial service many years later, ‘was his indomitable belief that we couldn’t fail’. Together they would discover loopholes to exploit. Given the vagaries of the Italian postal system, it was cheaper to send domestic mail in bulk to the UK, then mail it back to Italy via the UK Post Office. They also discovered it was cheaper to register their cars in neighbouring Switzerland.

At first the pair rented a two-bedroom flat on the first floor of a small block in Tavernola on Lake Como. They began their mornings at a nearby café, reading the Herald Tribune and drinking cappuccinos before driving to their one-room office near the city of Como.

Cindie visited early in 1993. Horrified at the mess her father and brother were living in, as well as their lack of cooking skills, she offered to stay on a few months to help sort them out. She would stay three years. It was not long before she was running the office for them. Their London lifestyle was now well beyond their means. A year passed. Their dreams of returning to the UK faded.

The Lake Como real estate market was a far cry from that of Sydney or London. On this, the deepest and most beautiful lake in Europe, villas were tightly held. Inheritance laws which required family estates to be shared equally amongst all offspring (rather than being passed on to the eldest son as was generally the case in the UK) meant stunning lakeside villas would lie vacant and unmaintained for years as families squabbled over who would buy whom out. Many of the villas belonged to old rural families who simply did not have the funds to maintain or renovate these grand mansions, yet there was little interest in selling. To advertise a sale suggested a fall in fortunes. Instead families would simply hold on to property. Alhough prices were far less than for a Sydney waterfront, renting was really the only viable option for expatriates, even if they could afford to buy.

A year after their arrival, a modest three-storey medieval townhouse came up for rent in the charming town of Cernobbio, at the southern end of the lake. Barton and his children moved in. It faced out over a tiny square, a stone’s throw from the shore of the lake. Planter boxes filled with flowers hung from each window sill. On the ground floor there was a pretty internal garden courtyard in which to dine, from which wisteria, jasmine, tulips, geraniums and catnip fought for space as the summer months approached. The townhouse was also close to Barton’s favourite restaurant Il Gatto Nero (The Black Cat), on the hill above the town, where they would take lunch on Sundays. It had a beautiful view over the lake and the lights of Como in the distance.

On some days the lake would bathe in a warm sun and clear blue skies. On others, the surrounding mountains might be shrouded in mist, the lake grey and the promenade deserted. The village would host an annual procession of the Guilds. Drums and trumpets would sound as townspeople turned out in spectacular medieval costume dressed as banner-men, dignitaries, monks and knights on horseback. All would congregate at the ancient Como cathedral.

Cernobbio would be Barton’s modest home for the next decade. Geoffrey recalled: ‘. . . it was just us, father, son and, for many years, daughter in a strange, beautiful country, building a business, generally quite happy to forget the rest of the world . . . Occasionally, some old friend would wander through, Jimmy Staples, John Crew, Marion Manton and others, to remind him and us of our roots, and of course they all wanted to know when he was coming back. I think he missed the old country but, as he would have put it, “home is where the cat is” ’. Mary Ellen visited from time to time, flying in from London, as did Kate Ayrton from New York.

Despite the frugal lifestyle and financial headaches, life in this quiet Italian town with Cindie, Geoffrey and their ageing cat Mugwumps was satisfying. Barton even found Italian politics enthralling. He was happier than he could remember being for a long time. Working with his son and daughter on IMX was a welcome distraction. All three of them were kept busy twelve-hours a day, six-days a week. Barton wrote to Mary Ellen, ‘Busy people are happy people, and usually healthy people too. Or in any case they don’t have time to complain.’

Barton now seldom travelled out of Europe. There were occasional excursions to London to see a specialist and catch up with Mary Ellen and friends. Geoffrey recalls waiting at Milan airport after one of these short trips. Barton’s flight had landed but there was no sign of him. Eventually the Italian authorities emerged to ask Geoffrey if he was waiting for a Mr Barton. At once Geoffrey guessed the Italians had finally caught up with his father’s lack of proper documentation. Barton and Geoffrey were ushered into an interrogation room, to wait their turn behind a gaggle of illegal third-world arrivals. The group in front were told they would be shipped back to their country of origin. To father and son, the prospects did not look good.

In fact, it was Barton’s Australian passport that was at issue. In his absent-minded way he had put it through the washing machine and the photograph had come away from its page. Unconcerned, Barton had stuck it back, reapplying it incorrectly. An immigration official had detected the anomaly. Tampering with a passport was considered forgery—an indictable offence. With Geoffrey’s improving Italian, they were able to convince the official it was simply a laundry mishap.

Mary Ellen had by now closed all her bank accounts to prevent the creditors making a claim. When a mutual friend looking after her interests wrote to Barton in November 1993, concerned at Mary Ellen’s welfare and state of health, he replied: ‘What M.E. needs is a man who can afford her . . . or a job . . . or a more frugal lifestyle, certainly not with a 12 cylinder car and a penthouse in Chelsea, and probably not in London than which, except for Tokyo, there can be few more expensive places to live’. Barton was surprised how his estranged partner could afford such luxury, as well as her frequent travel abroad. He assumed WorldPaper was paying her well or that she had a rich admirer.

Geoffrey’s Italian remail business, like every ambitious business Barton had run, was losing serious amounts in its early years. Profits seemed a distant hope. Long hours at the office and lack of funds meant both Cindie and Geoffrey became resentful at the expensive lifestyle Mary Ellen continued to enjoy in London.

Barton suggested Mary Ellen sell her V12 Jaguar while it was still valuable and come to live with the family in Cernobbio. Even New York (where her daughter Kate lived) or Sydney, near her parents Barton pointed out, were less expensive given their financial insufficiency. He also suggested Mary Ellen might help IMX UK, at least for a time.

As 1994 progressed, Barton would repeatedly remind Mary Ellen of the offer of accommodation ‘for a while at least’ to give them all some respite from her expensive lifestyle. Unhappily, his pleas fell on deaf ears. Still, he understood theirs was not the sort of life Mary Ellen would enjoy permanently. In his letters Barton reflected that their family had ‘all once lived in an unreal world where money grew on trees, and had become used to it. We are now back in reality and learning to cope with it. Uncomfortable, but good for us.’

April 1994 dawned and on a family holiday to the Caribbean, which Barton would describe as ‘like having died and gone to one’s final reward’, he continued to record stories of his life, mostly anecdotes about the eccentric people he had come to know. He rather fancied Gregory Peck or Robert Redford playing him in the film version. On the last page of his reflections he wrote: ‘Australia seems far away, as the Shire did to Frodo, and I feel very sentimental about it. But whereas Frodo fought his battles abroad, I fought many of mine at home and, so it seems, lost most of them. That is sad, as memories often are, but unimportant. I was not always successful, but I don’t think it can be said that I didn’t try.’

Revived after his Caribbean sojourn with the family, by May 1994 Barton had a new scheme afoot. In Australia, IPEC Transport was now in the hands of corporate giant Mayne Nickless. Barton had heard the business was in a mess and that Mayne Nickless was apparently desperate to sell. Optimistic as ever, Barton had plans to don his shining armour once more and revive his neglected business.

John Konstas (now based in Southeast Asia) was keen and believed his Singapore employer could be a willing investor so long as Barton could find the right management team and provide some sensible business forecasts. Barton’s vision to rescue IPEC Transport would involve Fred Gardiner, Bob Bass and Mick Egan, a ‘Dad’s Army’ team of the retired IPEC executives.

Fred Gardiner quickly brought Barton down to earth, pointing out that the company’s inefficiencies and poor productivity had no chance of being turned around under Australia’s labour laws, ‘which virtually prohibit anyone being sacked’. The country’s industrial relations laws and award pay structure were crippling profitability for all large unionised organisations. Barton’s long-lost business was a basket case.

Back in London, Mary Ellen’s close friends were increasingly worried about her desperate financial situation. Without the wealth she was used to drawing on and her relationship with Eugene in New York at an end, she would plead for help from Barton to pay her more expensive bills. Every month or two, he scraped together what he could to send her, dipping into Geoffrey’s IMX business.

Mary Ellen was finding it difficult to find the peace of mind to focus on obtaining work and would instead occasionally sell a valuable piece of furniture to pay bills for the month. Ultimately it was the WorldPaper’s Crocker Snow who offered her a more permanent role in Boston organising and hosting international conferences and developing advertising and sponsorships arrangements with corporate partners. Apart from the distance from London, it was perfect. She took the job, which would be followed by work in New York City.

By 1996 Geoffrey Barton’s IMX Italy business had finally come good. It had won a bevy of large clients—Condé Nast, British Airways, Christies, the Milan stock exchange, trade fair organisations and publishers. In the chilly winter months, the Bartons could at last afford to be less frugal with their stone townhouse’s gas heating. The family shared a dream to one day rent a house with a view of the lake. ‘The good life in Italy now at last seems to be a real possibility’, Barton wrote ‘and we are looking forward to it’.

Geoffrey purchased a motorboat, which his father, once an alarming skin cancer had been discovered and excised from his leg, acerbically christened Melanoma. The boat allowed Barton to take Australian visitors to another favourite restaurant on the island of Comacina. En route, he might look across at a distant pass through the mountains and remark, ‘That’s the route that Charlemagne took’.

Cindie Barton was now able to move on with her own life, relocating to Spain. There was talk of one day being able to afford a small flat in London or, better still, in the Caribbean.

By the beginning of 1997, having returned to London, Mary Ellen was pleading for substantial and regular alimony to maintain her lifestyle. Despite his children’s objections, Barton was unwilling to let her down. With no assets or income of his own, Barton instead negotiated an agreement with Geoffrey that £1000 per month would be found for Mary Ellen from the IMX business. This was only enough for the rent on her Chelsea apartment. Geoffrey’s IMX finances sailed so close to the wind that finding the money each month would become a constant juggling act. Cindie’s objections were only overcome by an agreement that Mary Ellen would surrender quarantined Loch Maree and London furniture.

However, to Mary Ellen, the furniture was her only asset. She was loath to surrender it. As the months passed and there was no change of heart, relations between Barton, Cindie and Mary Ellen sank to a new low. Terse faxes rattled back and forth. Barton demanded back ‘the Madonna which used to grace my office in Bligh St’.

With his own children turning against the woman he had loved so passionately, Barton became ‘very, very exasperated and depressed’. He could see ‘how unhelpful to her own interests’ Mary Ellen’s stubbornness was in maintaining her continued financial dependence. Barton dug in, insisting that if her allowance was to continue, as well as payment of dental bills and medical bills, she must surrender the furniture.

Mary Ellen’s Hurlingham debt to Coutts bank remained, causing ongoing anxiety as the bank continued to harass her. Surviving in London with her dignity intact was an ongoing challenge.

Barton’s Henry Morgan profit-share agreement with TNT had never been finalised, given his dissatisfaction with the offer in 1992. The express freight carrier with whom he had made the original agreement bore little resemblance to its current incarnation. In 1996 TNT had been sold to Dutch Post. Its expansion into airfreight had produced huge losses. Separating them from Barton’s original profit-share calculation had become next to impossible. Around 1998 Mary Ellen urged: ‘If you don’t settle this . . . nobody else can do it. You have to do it, just for the principle as well as the fact that the money is needed . . . You have to make the move.’

She was right. Barton’s health was deteriorating. If he did not go into battle now, it would be too late. In June 1998 he began threatening legal action against TNT’s new owners unless the matter was resolved. Nearly all of the senior executives Barton knew at TNT had moved on. Only Colin Green had stayed on to help unscramble the group for the new owners. Soon he would be the only TNT executive who knew of the Henry Morgan agreement. He was Barton’s only hope of extracting a final legacy for his family.

Green felt sorry for Barton. It would be he who would inform the new Dutch owners that this relationship had ‘slipped through the cracks’ of their acquisition. Mary Ellen would act as go-between and interpreter at subsequent meetings with lawyers and QCs.

Barton had by then re-engaged the Sydney commercial advisory firm he had used six years earlier. Grant Meares would be the partner Barton worked with to calculate and argue the agreement’s value. Meares had little idea that the saga would drag on for four years.

Due to Barton’s deafness, the pair were to exchange faxes and letters on a regular basis. Barton loved to throw red herrings into the pot, so Meares would receive a multitude of creative ‘suggestions’, none of which was particularly helpful. Nonetheless, Meares was struck by Barton’s determination. Some weeks Meares received replies that had nothing to do with the issue he had contacted Barton on. Instead Barton might write about a letter he had sent to The Times on the Balkan conflict, or the ineffectual position of the UN in Bosnia or his antagonism towards Saddam Hussein. The next communication to his frustrated buy-out adviser might advise that his old friend Mr Crew had visited. At other times Barton’s muddled requests for updates were so cryptic that it was hard to know if he had simply lost the document Meares had already sent, forgotten its contents or was deliberately ignoring it.

At one stage, after not hearing from Barton for several months, Meares received a fax explaining that his client had broken his leg jogging. It seemed to be a wry bit of humour, as even Meares knew Barton was not one to exercise. Barton had, in fact, broken his leg walking across the Swiss border to buy a newspaper. He was forced to use a walking stick from then on.

As the negotiations dragged out for so long, Meares issued a number of progressive invoices over the years. Only a few were paid. For the bulk of his fees, Meares had to just hope the matter settled. (Several meetings between TNT and Meares took place, at which neither could agree given the estimates of future earnings were so rubbery.)

By 2000, IMX UK was in serious trouble. Finances were again scarce for Barton and his son. They took to eating at home. Barton wrote, ‘There is more variety available in the supermarket, we have discovered, than in the local restaurants, and at a tenth of the cost. Fortunately wine is very cheap in Italy.’ For the time being, neither Barton nor IMX could not afford to fund Mary Ellen’s Chelsea rent. Barton wrote to her:

A longer term, and from my point of view more satisfactory solution would be for you to come to Italy . . . to stay until the financial crises pass, on the principle that 3 can live as cheaply as 2 . . . we have to live too. So does IMX . . . we would be happy to have you. You could acquire Italian and be no end useful as well as decorative, and perhaps make the odd visit to London to make sure that your chums do not forget you.

By 1999 Cindie Barton had married a Spanish lawyer and settled on the Mediterranean. Barton took to spending each winter with them to escape the cold of Northern Italy. In November 2000 she had a son. Barton was keen his first grandson be named Basil in memory of his lost brother. However, Cindie was not the sentimental type. No child of hers would be named after a herb.

In late 2000, Colin Green was preparing to leave TNT. If the Henry Morgan settlement was not resolved soon, Barton would never see his money. Neither TNT nor Barton wanted a court case. Mediation was the only alternative. Meares and Green finally came to a workable agreement but could go no further without discussing the detail with Barton. In his three years of communications, Barton’s reclusive status meant Grant Meares had never met his client.

Progress was delayed when in February 2001 Barton’s beloved cat, Mugwumps, died. Then in April, sitting on the lounge next to Cindie, Barton suddenly found himself babbling nonsense, and his hand unable to form words on a page. He had suffered a cerebral stroke. While a quick diagnosis meant he was able to be treated and recover by mid-May, his balance worsened. He continued to rely on a walking stick.

In September Grant Meares flew to London to meet his client. After days of discussions, with Mary Ellen interpreting for Barton, they laid the groundwork for a settlement. Grant Meares visited Barton one last time in Lake Como a year later. He had been the client from hell, but one Meares will never forget.

It was by luck that Geoffrey opened the local newspaper one day in mid-2002 to find an idyllic villa advertised for rent just a few miles up the lake. The hundred-year-old Villa Paradiso sat on a tiny flat plateau high above the road. It was a dream come true. Iron gates sandwiched between two stone pillars opened onto a gentle pathway heading further upwards with a stone balustrade on the lakeside and gardens on the right. Thirty-odd pebbled-cement steps up a straight gravel path led through a grove of seven ancient trees. To the left over a stone balustrade lay a breathtaking view of lake and mountains. Eighteen more deep steps wound upwards through even more trees before opening out onto another terrace that looked over the lake. This flowed into a lush, flat garden of wisteria and cherry blossom. Through a neglected trellis were glimpses of an ordered past—a classical framework let loose.

Under the three-storey Victorian villa’s portico, old wooden doors 5 metres high opened into an antechamber which led into a hallway, grand living room on the left and dining room on the right. In the living room, French doors opened out to the wild garden. There was a kitchen at the rear, two grand bedrooms upstairs, each with a separate walk-in wardrobe. Continuing up the winding staircase, an attic bedroom and laundry were revealed.

In August 2002, and close to his seventy-third birthday, Barton and his son Geoffrey moved in. The Henry Morgan payout was to be finalised that same month. For a man who had always defined himself as a provider, there was satisfaction in knowing he had something to leave to those he loved.

The magnificent vista of mountains and water were now a silent tableau for Barton. He and Geoffrey communicated via written notes. Worse, his memory was deteriorating. In the first stages of senile dementia, Barton’s physical self was crumbling. A house-boy was employed to help him up the three-dozen steep steps to the villa from the road below. Despite the precarious stairs, he looked on this new hurdle as a challenge.

Barton was disinclined to weigh his children down with his failing body. More importantly, he was not prepared to go on witnessing his own physical and mental deterioration. Without health insurance, neither did Barton want his family’s hard-won TNT monies eroded by hugely expensive medical bills. On 13 September, he wrote to Marion Manton: ‘. . . I have to have a solution. The best I can do and which is not messy is an OD of sleeping tabs. Could you send me some in a postal jiffy bag? Perhaps you could also tell me the appropriate amount to take plus, I assume, a lot of alcohol. I can hopefully do the rest and no-one will know who to point the finger at.’

To make sure his son did not intercept Marion’s package, Barton even suggested she address it ‘confidential’. ‘I am sorry to have to ask you to do this,’ Barton concluded, ‘but there is no-one with the qualifications and I am pretty desperate . . . Regrets are unnecessary. I have had a great life with many lovable people . . .’

The academic in Marion meant she was not going to act until she had gathered more information. She rang friends and family to see if they had received such a request. None had. She called Mary Ellen in London. Both felt suicidal thoughts were simply a sign of depression, and depression was a treatable condition. In fact, Mary Ellen assured Marion that Barton had suggested she join him on a trip to Thailand to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their meeting. The journey together sounded like the best possible medicine. It was not to be.

Three weeks later, having heard nothing from Marion, Barton wrote again: ‘. . . You may be able to help by telling me what I can expect as the disease slowly progresses . . . I am hopeful it will continue to be quick. Meantime I am hoping for solutions, like a few sleeping pills.’

A Push friend had recently contracted a rapid-onset form of Alzheimer’s and Barton could recognise her symptoms in himself. He quizzed Marion:

Can she still talk and walk and think and remember things, and express herself? I am at the cusp of all that . . .

The ideal solution is an early and comfortable demise. Meanwhile I have to put up with it, especially the boredom and malaise from having nothing to do and feeling terrible waiting for something to happen.

Longevity . . . is the very last thing I want. I have heard . . . death . . . can sometimes take decades.

What did they do to amuse Elwyn in the slowly passing days? What is the solution? . . . Inspired by Bobby Sands, I have tried starvation, but this troubles Tigger, as does all mention of a final solution. He remains an optimist and keeps me tolerably sane . . . Tigger . . . looks after me like a baby, but it is very hard on him.

Geoffrey Barton admits his father was profoundly depressed by his mental degeneration. He and his sister rationalised that such requests were a consequence of his depression and they told him so. Geoffrey recalled: ‘I have no doubt he was the sort of guy who would have preferred a dignified (premature) end . . . who could blame him? On my part, the operative word would probably be “self-denial”: a refusal to accept that there was only one outcome—or possibly I would have helped him out earlier.’

Marion never did send the pills, convinced by family that Barton’s plea was the result of depression. A doctor put him on anti-depressants, but his mental state only worsened.

As 2003 began, Marion Manton noticed her friend’s letters becoming less coherent. His dizzy spells became more frequent and troubling. He no longer left the house alone for fear of getting lost. He would write the same thing in three or four letters, mix up addressees, sending Marion one which started ‘Dear Freddie’.

Barton wrote to Freddie Gardiner, ‘The depression syndrome is still fouling up my brain’. Still he insisted on accompanying his son every day to the Milan office, where he would sit and read the papers. Each night during the bitter winter months, as the snow fell around the lake, Geoffrey could at least kindle a log fire at Villa Paradiso to warm his father. His children felt they were losing him, a little piece at a time.

When Freddie Van Gaever last visited Barton in about 2003, it was clear to him that his friend was neither happy nor well. ‘I felt so sorry knowing that all over Europe you have TNT trucks and TNT planes flying and basically he did it all . . . I was too ashamed to ask him, “Gordon do you still have a lot of money? Can you still do what you want?” . . . I thought it must be terrible for a guy who was once living in a castle, had four Mercedes and at the end of your life when you look at the menu you think it’s better to take the spaghetti than the lobster.’

Even in his last letter to Marion in March 2003, Barton was still talking of his and Geoffrey’s latest battle against the big guys. Over recent years, they had waged several court challenges against unfair competition by the Italian Post Office. ‘We don’t lose many of our encounters,’ Barton told Marion. Indeed, the Italian Post Office had just been heavily fined thanks to Barton.

Ever one for a clever scheme, Barton wrote in this last epistle that he and Geoffrey were about to use the remnants of TNT monies to join a syndicate to ‘sell slimming pills to fat ladies . . . It works on the Tupperware principle.’ His son talked him out of it.

The spring of 2003 would be the last Barton would spend at Lake Como. With Geoffrey and his Italian girlfriend struggling to care for him, Barton would shift permanently to his daughter’s home in Spain.

There, his erratic behaviour worsened. For Cindie, it was worse than looking after her two-year-old. Her father would cry out each night in terror, wander down to the house gate and beg passers-by to release him from his ‘prison’. He had to be watched constantly. At times the exhausted Cindie would be relieved by tradesmen in the house she and her husband were renovating while she shopped and did errands. At other times she would ring Geoffrey and he would clear his diary for a week, fly down to Marbella and take over while Cindie and her husband took a rest.

In August 2004, Cindie Barton, six months pregnant, put champagne on ice to celebrate the move into her newly renovated Marbella home. Instead, she spent the day in Marbella’s casualty department after her father had slipped and broke his hip. After two weeks in hospital, Barton was released in a wheelchair. While the physiotherapists and his family encouraged him to get back on his feet, he never did.

As his physical deterioration worsened, Cindie recalls at meal-times he would chew slack-jawed, his face just an inch from his plate. Unable to sit upright, he had to be strapped to the back of the wheelchair.

Given his condition, Barton had been unable to answer correspondence for some years now. Cindie’s relationship with Mary Ellen had iced over and she was forbidden access to Barton as he deteriorated.

Gordon Barton died on 4 April 2005 of kidney failure and respiratory problems. By the time Mary Ellen and his old friends heard the news a day later, his body had been cremated. He had never been one to believe in funerals.

Five months later family, friends, former employees and colleagues from around the world came together in the Great Hall of Sydney University, Barton’s alma mater, to pay tribute to an extraordinary man.