Mum swans around in her pounds 1,200 dress while I can't afford

FARMER'S daughter Jackie Shaw is just 16, but has the air of someone much older. Still at school, she should be thinking about boys and exams.

Instead, she is worrying why her mum is waging a bitter campaign for a massive divorce pay-out from her father- when she is living in luxury as a "designer divorcee" with her new millionaire boyfriend.

"Mum has told me she is out to destroy my dad," says Jackie, who lives with her father Philip and her two sisters. "I have told her that all she is doing is destroying the rest of the family - but it doesn't make any difference."

It's certainly no ordinary divorce. The Appeal Court was told this week of the extraordinary champagne lifestyle Jayne has led since walking out on Philip and starting a new life with wealthy divorce John Martin-Hoyes.

Thanks to him, she now shops in Harvey Nichols and Harrods, drives an pounds 86,000 car, wears pounds 6,000 Cartier earrings and has been on a string of exotic holidays.

The family she has left behind after 11 years of marriage live rather more modestly, victims of a crisis which has seen farm incomes slashed country-wide.

Yet still Jayne, 45, is demanding a pounds 300,000 settlement from Philip on the basis that she has been struggling to survive since divorcing in 1996.

Jayne moved out of the family home and with an early part of her settlement bought a pounds 150,000 house.

Now she wants Philip, 48, to sell off their former home and 86 acres of his 500-acre Lincolnshire farm and give her the proceeds.

She says he can well afford it. He says he can't and asks how she can be hard up when she is living so lavishly.

So far, the only winners have been the lawyers. Jackie says she and her sisters Penny, 14, and Harriet, 12, have been the losers, along with their dad.

Sitting glumly at the table in the kitchen at Grange Farm, Jackie says: "I can't believe my mum is doing this to us. It is us, the children, who are going to suffer for all this - it is our lives that are being ruined, but Mum won't be happy until Dad has been annihilated.

"I asked her the other night why she was doing this and begged her to stop it now - but she just said, 'I can't give up now I have come this far'."

Jackie was 12 when her parents divorced and is still surprised with the new lifestyle of her mum, who is the daughter of a plumber.

It includes the run of a Georgian property - in Harmston, Lincs - fitted with Jacuzzi, sauna and a hi-fi, which pipes music throughout the house.

Aside from a Mercedes with a personalised number plate, she has another Merc, a BMW and a Range Rover at her disposal.

Jackie and her sisters see their mother's new life every time they visit her and John Martin-Hoyes, when they are ferried round in luxury cars.

Jayne has access to the children three times a week - but Philip claims the children are free to visit their mother whenever they wish.

Jackie says: "Mum doesn't need this money - but we do to survive. The other night when I went to visit, her boyfriend was bragging and showing me the new dress he had bought her.

"He showed me the price label which said pounds 1,200. But here we are and we can't afford a pounds 20 pair of trainers. Things aren't very easy for farmers at the moment and Dad has got three girls to support." Jayne insists that Philip's farm in the village of Covenham St Mary, near Louth, was worth pounds 3million when the couple spilt.

Philip disputes that and says, the value is now a third of that and falling thanks to tumbling wheat and oilseed rape prices.

The house stands at the end of a courtyard surrounded by uncompleted outbuildings that give the impression of a building site. A large sheet of black PVC covers one section of the roof.

The four-bedroom house bulges slightly from subsidence and Philip confesses that the property is in need of a new roof and the bathroom has just had a flood.

The contrast with Jayne's new life could hardly be more stark. "In the past five years she has been on at least 17 holidays, from the Caribbean and Seychelles to Portugal and Mauritius," says Philip. "Yet she says she is suffering 'financial hardship'."

Philip adds: "If I sold everything tomorrow including the house we live in I would be lucky to get pounds 1million."

By the time he has paid off various loans he says he would have little left.

"I'm a typical farmer - I have got a few assets but I am not what you would call cash rich. I know pounds 1 million might sound like a lot - but this land isn't supposed to be sold. It was left to me by my father on the basis that it would stay in the family and keep us farming for generations to come."

The split has always been messy. When Jayne left the family home Philip began hearing rumours about her new spending habits. He hired a private detective but failed to get enough evidence to present in court. Then he struck up a friendship with Martin-Hoyes ex-wife Gillian, who was engaged in a financial dispute of her own.

She passed Martin-Hoyes' bank statements to Philip. "The information was dynamite," he says.

"It was all there in black and white - the money he had lavished on her. Had Gillian not done that I think I might have shot myself by now. I was so down by that stage I had no fight left in me."

It meant Philip could go back to court and get the divorce settlement, originally set at pounds 400,000, cut to pounds 195,000.

By then, Jayne had bought a comfortable property of her own, to supplement her stays at Martin-Hoyes' home. With the case still rumbling on, Jackie says: "It has been hard for all the kids because we are stuck in the middle. The fact they were divorcing did not come as a great shock, but the fact that it has been dragging on so long makes it very hard for Harriet, Penny and me."

IN hindsight, Jayne and Philip's match was clearly not made in heaven. "I met her at a disco when I was 17 and she was quite a looker. We started going out and then we parted company," says Philip.

"We started going out again and before I knew it she was pregnant with Jackie. I was staggered because she was on the Pill. I was angry but I felt I should do the right thing, so we got married. Becoming a father was wonderful and I wouldn't have changed it for the world, but I didn't think Jayne had been very honest with me. I had a Lotus sports car and had begun to build up the business. She considered me a catch.

"After the wedding, she got out of the car and started waving the marriage certificate in the air shouting, 'I've got him now'. At the time every one thought it was a joke, but I couldn't help wondering what I had let myself in for."

Philip says he did his best to make the marriage work but it soon became clear that Jackie had high expectations. "She gave up her bank teller's job but she never took the least bit of interest in the farm and started to go out shopping for expensive clothes. She would go out in the evenings with her friends while I was left to put the children to bed after a hard slog all day on the farm."

Meanwhile, Jackie was spending like there was no tomorrow. "I started noticing credit card bills coming in for more than pounds 1,000 - the spending on them was much more than normal," says Philip. "I asked her about it and she just flipped and went into a rage and started smashing up the ornaments and furniture."

Her behaviour became increasingly erratic - to the extent that Philip was the last person to know when Jane became pregnant with their third daughter Harriet.

"We were out with friends one night when one of them mentioned about Jayne being pregnant - it was the first I had heard about it," he says. When Jane asked for a divorce in December 1995 Philip was relieved.

"I was glad it was all over really," he says, but his troubles were only beginning. Jayne asked for pounds 400,000 then she sent in bailiffs to seize farm machinery. A judge ordered a pounds 300,000 settlement, which is what Jayne is now demanding should be reinstated.

"I don't dispute her the right to something by way of settlement," Philip says. "But why should I bleed myself dry when she is living in the lap of luxury?

"She is a money-grabber who seems hell-bent on destroying my family. I wish I had never met her. I feel awful that the girls are having to live through all this but what can I do - I can't just turn round and say, 'OK, have my livelihood'." Judgment will be given in the case later this month. Philip says: "If I lose and have to pay pounds 300,000 plus costs then it will ruin me."

Jackie adds: "It has been harder for Harriet and Penny than it has for me because they are younger. They have not had a mum to be there with them all their teenage years.

"I have had to take on the role of my mum, which is hard when you are still growing up yourself. We just hope that Dad wins the case and we can all get on with our lives again."

Last night Jayne Shaw refused to discuss her divorce settlement claim. But she said: "As regards my lifestyle - well we can all have a lifestyle, can't we?"

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