Falling in Love Again . . .

On 22 August 1939, just a few hours after Adolf Hitler had delivered a speech to his Wehrmacht commanders laying out his plans to invade Poland, the 17-year-old Joan Wyndham, staying at her grandmother’s chilly Victorian country house in Wiltshire, was throwing herself into that night’s parlour game. Guests had to say what each person reminded them of in several different categories. In her diary, Joan recorded: ‘I ended up as a cross between Burne-Jones, Vivaldi, apricot soufflé and Just William. V. flattering but not quite how I see myself, apart from William – I’ve always wished I was a boy.’

Joan Wyndham was not about to let such a disagreeable thing as a world war get in the way of having a jolly time. It is not that she didn’t take the war seriously – after art school she volunteered as an auxiliary nurse and then served as a WAAF officer – just that she was determined to get on with the things she enjoyed: shopping, dancing, learning to sculpt, curling her hair in pipe cleaners, swimming in the Serpentine and lying in bed all morning in a silk kimono with her feet on a hot-water bottle. She was certainly not going to let anything interfere with the important business of falling in love. Over the course of the war, recorded in two volumes of diaries published when Joan was in her sixties as Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), she falls in love – madly, passionately, all-consumingly, but often for not much more than a week – with a succession of ever more unsuitable men. There is Macrae who looks after her grandmother’s horses, smells of wet ferns and hasn’t had a bath in years. Gerhardt, a long-haired sculptor in corduroy trousers. Jo, who visits her Chelsea studio, steals all her paints, eats her sausages and tries to take her virginity. Rupert, who looks like a Greek God and tells her that he has never met a girl who wears such unattractive undergarments. Petya, a Slav, who insists on alarmingly aerobic love-making and takes her for goulash and dumplings the morning after. Hector, who is six-foot-something and admires his own naked reflection – ‘rather a good bodah’, he drawls – in the bedroom mirror. Kit, who was badly burnt flying Spitfires. And Hans, a Norwegian naval officer, who has only one hair on his chest. Very occasionally she remembers there is a war on. I was first introduced to Joan last summer walking through Green Park in London. It was my day off and I was on my way to the London Library, reaching into my bag every few minutes to check – in the nervous way I do on a day off – my Blackberry. An email pinged. It was from a colleague at the Daily Mail. The week before, I had written a piece for the paper on the poet Laurie Lee and a love affair he had during the war with his muse Lorna Wishart. The message said, very succinctly: ‘If you liked Laurie and Lorna, you’ll love Joan Wyndham.’ I was supposed to be collecting a biography of a Victorian railway engineer, but I thought I might take Joan home for later that afternoon. Standing in the stacks – Biog. Wyndham, Joan – I started reading. I went on reading in the lift and down the stairs to the issue hall. I stopped just long enough for the fly-leaf to be stamped and continued reading on the bus back to Paddington. That was that for the rest of the day. I read Joan’s diaries with a mixture of envy and open-mouthed incredulity. Her teenage years and early twenties were so utterly unlike mine. At one New Year’s Eve party, attended by the 1st Suffolk Regiment, she is kissed by twenty men. Twenty! She never attends a party without seeing the dawn and she drinks a quite astonishing amount. On one, regrettable, occasion she takes a handful of Benzedrine and Hypheural pills, and washes them down with whisky, gin, crème de menthe and rum. On another she has a tumbler of Marsala, a gin and lime, a glass of Cypriot wine, a pint of beer and is drunker than she’s ever been before. Despite not being a great beauty (her father tells her she could be presentable without her specs) she is irresistible to the louche artists of bohemian Chelsea and the officers of the RAF and Royal Navy. She has to keep her trousers fastened with a line of safety pins to deter the men who throw themselves at her. Though I may envy Joan her effect on the opposite sex, I cannot covet her suitors. They are as rotten and selfish a bunch as you could find. Even her own father, a roué divorcé, gets so drunk he tries to kiss her in the back of a taxi. ‘It was terribly embarrassing,’ she writes the next day with British understatement. Though that is nothing compared to what the poet Dylan Thomas subjects her to in the back of a cab. ‘Dylan smothered me in wet beery kisses, his blubbery tongue forcing my lips apart. It was rather like being embraced by an intoxicated octopus.’ She is enormously unimpressed with sex – ‘Gosh, I thought, is it all over? Is that all it is? I didn’t even know it had happened’ – and wonders if there is something the matter with her. As a reader, you are absolutely certain that there is something very much the matter with the men she chooses. They are either suffering from a fetish for black mackintoshes or frightened about using French ‘thingummies’. After losing her virginity to Rupert, he turns to her and says: ‘Disappointed, eh? Well most girls don’t like it the first time – cheer up, Joanie. Let’s have some tea.’ For her part, she is convinced that it all might have gone rather better if she had had an ‘indecent pink gauze nightdress, the kind you can see through’. When the war does intrude on the diaries, it pulls you up short. ‘The posters say “HITLER INVADES POLAND.” Everything tilted at a slightly grotesque angle, like a Surrealist film,’ Joan writes on Friday, 1 September 1939. Chelsea is badly Blitzed and Joan sits all night in the air-raid shelter trying to keep her mind off the howling and smashing bombs by reciting Rupert Brooke. ‘If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of the Fulham Road . . .’ Still, she survives both the Luftwaffe and the relay of heartbreak caused by Gerhardt, Rupert, Hamish, Hans et al. On VE Day she races along Piccadilly, drunk on Pernod, and returns home with her stockings in ribbons. But Peace does not bring contentment. ‘I thought things over and came to the conclusion that what was wrong with me was TOO MANY MEN,’ she writes. ‘I still pine for Hans, hanker after Hamish, have a crush on Dizzy, find Vlad vaguely attractive, and now I think I am falling in love with Kit!’ By this stage the reader is ready to agree that the TOO MANY MEN diagnosis is probably the right one. Her resolution to forgo boyfriends and lovers doesn’t last long, however, and within a week she has fallen on to a pile of old sacks in a horse box at a country fair with Spitfire Kit. This time things go rather better than usual. ‘Should I tell him this was the first time I’d enjoyed it, or would that make him big-headed?’ wonders Joan. ‘In the end I decided not to.’ A few nights later she whispers something in Kit’s ear. He responds with enormous enthusiasm. ‘Good god! D’you mean to say you’ve never done it? You and I are going to have fun!’ The reader is left blushingly agog about what on earth they might be referring to and relieved that Joan, whose writing is as sweet and light as apricot soufflé and whose behaviour would give Just William a run for his money, has found someone with a capacity for fun to match her own.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Laura Freeman 2015