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| "As fresh, exuberant and funny as its predecessor, Love is Blue is an utterly irresistible account of wartime youth. All her readers will want is volume three" |
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| The alluring young Joan... "men mistook my short-sighted squinty eyes for an alluring come to bed look" |
She joined the WAAF (Women's Auxilliary Air Force) aged 19 in 1941 and her wartime diaries chart her spectacular progress through the ranks of playboy pilots and Polish Squadron Leaders with a string of affairs and officer's mess parties...
"The war stopped us all thinking too much about the future. I joined the WAAF and was posted to Inverness. Sir Hugh Fraser, the brother of my best friend, Veronica, was in the castle next door. We had the most marvellous affair; I’d have married him had he asked. I had another affair with a Norwegian sea captain, then there were the pilots. You couldn’t say no to a pilot - he could have been dead the next day."
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| Joan in the 1940's and below as a WAAF officer |
A posting to RAF Watnall - After working as a plotter at Inverness where she was disappointed not be among pilots, Joan was next sent to Watnall. Despite being appraised as "a very peculiar type of officer, not amenable to discipline and a bad example to other ranks", she was promoted to flight officer, and in January 1945 was posted to Watnall's Filter Room. It was, she complained, "ugly and squalid - but it has one great advantage, a mixed Mess!" In the military context a "mess" is your dining and recreation area used for socialising. There were usually separate messes for men and women as well as different ranks so a mixed mess would be a real treat.
Even better for Joan, next door to RAF Watnall was RAF Hucknall's Polish training squadron, full of young pilots. At one point she was taken up for a spin by the youngest squadron leader in the Polish Air Force, and recorded that it was "the first time I've ever had my bottom pinched at 3,000 feet".
Gone to the Dogs - Nearby Nottingham "White City" greyhound track was a popular if unlikely destination for Joan and her WAAF pals. She had a sure fire system of gambling on the dogs called "Ekers and Spreaders" which she used to win favour with the senior officers by placing bets on their behalf.
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| Joan was a whizz at spread betting on the dog racing. The greyhounds and the speedway shared the White City venue in Colwick but during the war speedway was cancelled. |
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| Lady Maud Rolleston lived at Watnall Hall while the WAAFs were billeted there during the war. Her thoughts on their parties were not recorded for posterity. |
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| Medical Officer and pill dispenser |
Sex on the Perimeter - At a Victory Dance in the mess at RAF Watnall in May 1945 Joan began a passionate affair with Kit Latimer, a Spitfire pilot whose face had been badly burned after his aircraft was forced to make a crash-landing. On first meeting, Wyndham registered the distorting effect Latimer's burns had on his features, but nevertheless concluded that he was "very good-looking in spite of it". When, on their second date at Nottingham's Goose Fair, the free-spirited Wyndham took the initiative and kissed him. Latimer tells her that he had been too frightened to kiss her, on account of his "face being so funny". Wyndham replied that he had a "beautiful face" and she kissed him again before dragging him off to an empty tent on the fairground perimeter, where they made love.
Attempting to remain alluring - while engaged in demanding and stressful work was inevitably a double burden for many WAAFs. Cosmetics were in short supply, as was "Evening in Paris", the fragrance of choice among WAAFs. The wearing of silk stockings by servicewomen was prohibited, and WAAF uniforms had been designed to meet the requirements of function rather than fashion.
Joan Wyndham reported in her diary in 1941 that... "There is not much you can do to make a WAAFs uniform look sexy (apart from pulling your belt in till you can hardly breathe), but jumping up and down on your cap to loosen the brim does help to give it a rakish air."
The dashing foreign pilots from RAF Hucknall - Neighbouring RAF Hucknall was home to a squadron of trainee Polish pilots who were regular invitees to RAF Watnall's WAAF parties. Joan Wyndham dated several Polish airmen, finding their 'ice-cold green eyes and wolf-like charms' difficult to resist.
Polish flyers' obsession with the fairer sex was widely attested to. Rom Landau was born in Poland but became a British citizen when he served as a volunteer in the RAF during WW2. He worked as a RAF liaison officer with Polish pilots, noted that they discussed women at great length, openly, seriously, both lyrically and descriptively, as a connoisseur might talk of wine or beautiful statues.
Polish airmen were certainly seen by British women as exotic and romantic, especially after the release of the feature film "Dangerous Moonlight" (AKA "Suicide Squadron"), in which Anton Walbrook played a handsome pianist from Warsaw who joins the RAF. Many British women welcomed the attentions of Polish airmen, who were famous for their courtly manner, and seemed much less inhibited about expressing their feelings in regard to love and sex. One WAAF recalled that, with Polish flyers... 'you knew that the fellow saw you as a woman and wanted you', a refreshing quality when contrasted with the more furtive and embarrassed approach to sex offered by many of their British equivalents. If things went too far though WAAFs were obliged to use their handy hat-pins to deal with unwanted advances.
There are plenty more tales from RAF Watnall and its secret bunker girls sweating over the air raid plotting tables while trying to remain demure and alluring here at the Tales From Watnall Hall website...
Wartime Watnall - a "secret bunker girl" explains what they did down there
Wartime Watnall - Mary Harrison's wartime cartoons & ditties about life at RAF Watnall
Wartime Watnall - when the young heiress of Watnall Hall served at RAF Watnall
and for all the other tales tagged "Wartime Watnall" series click here... https://watnallhall.blogspot.com/search/label/wartime%20watnall
Don't forget too that the Hucknall Flight Test Museum is well worth a visit to learn about RAF Hucknall and Rolls Royce's amazing history... https://huftm.com/
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Postscript - by Joan - what she did post war...
"In London after the war I embarked on an affair with Lucian Freud, who even then hated being talked about. When it ended I hitchhiked to the Isles of Scilly to escape him, then headed to Oxford. There I met Maurice Rowdon, an intelligent, good-looking scholar. We fell in love, married and had a daughter, Clare. Then he got a teaching job in Baghdad. I rented our flat to a young Russian couple and travelled with him. I had to return a few months later, by which time the girl had gone away but her boyfriend wanted to stay. One night he poured me a vodka and sang gypsy songs. Before I knew it, I was being bent backwards over the ironing board and kissed passionately. Maurice arrived unexpectedly after three months and saw instantly what was happening. Our marriage had had everything going for it apart from sex. With Shura (the Russian abbreviation for Alexander) there was no such problem, which is why we are still together 52 years later.
Good sex is essential for a good marriage. If you are repelled physically by your spouse, it will never work. But another reason Shura and I have survived for so long is that we both tolerate infidelity. There was a period after my second daughter, Camilla, was born when he was having affairs and I was finding out about them. Rather than walk out, I picked up a handsome boy in a pub and embarked on an affair of my own. John was gorgeous and bisexual. We saw each other for five years, on and off. After that, my marriage was better.
To me, it has always seemed normal that men will be unfaithful. Having had a father who was incapable of fidelity, I think I almost expected it. I knew Shura loved me and the occasional jaunt wouldn’t stop that, so I took it in my stride.
We still share a bed, but no longer have sex — we can’t be bothered. We have a cuddle, share a joke, read the same books, enjoy the companionship. My trust was never diminished by his dalliances. He has seen me through cancer, strokes and breakdowns. I know that if I am in trouble, he will look after me. That is very reassuring."
from Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham.
Wyndham was no snob. In old age she adored Blind Date, Chelsea football club and Diana, Princess of Wales. And she loved the fact that her childhood home, Clouds, became a rehab centre. Garrulous, frank and very naughty, she epitomised a generation who survived nightly bombing, determined to live to the full. She died in 2007, aged 85. From her Telegraph obit dated 14 Apr 2007...
"Joan Wyndham, who died on Easter Sunday aged 85, came from an eccentric upper-class family and as a young woman led a disreputable life which she unflinchingly chronicled in four volumes of memoirs.
An aspiring actress, heroic drinker, jitterbugger and Benzedrine-fuelled bohemian, she enjoyed an outrageous reputation; later she held court in "Swinging London", where her circle included jobbing rent boys, April Ashley, Michael Foot, Christine Keeler ("rabbity teeth"), assorted acid-trippers and Jeremy Beadle.
To social historians she was gold-dust, being one of the few women happy to go on the record - and on camera - to discuss sex in general and her virginity in particular, which she shed early in the war after renting an artist's studio in Redcliffe Road, Chelsea. "One night there was a really bad raid and the whole shelter was shaking, and I thought: 'Ah well! The opposite of death is life so I might as well go and get myself devirginised!' " she explained on television last year.
In the 1970s Joan became the restaurant critic for the French guide GaultMillau, jetting between London and New York; later she was a cook at the Royal Court Theatre. Defying social conventions all her life, she once unexpectedly defied medical convention too: after years suffering from painful gallstones, and submitting to the divided opinions of expensive doctors, she found herself cured in an instant when she was hit by a lorry in the Fulham Road.
Only in her sixties did Joan Wyndham turn to writing. Her younger daughter came across her diaries in a trunk in the attic and convinced her mother that she should publish them. They chronicled the adventures of a young woman on the loose in war-time London, living it up with the likes of Quentin Crisp ("hair down to his shoulders"), Philip Toynbee ("sick on the sofa"), Dylan Thomas, Julian MacLaren-Ross and David Tennant, her cousin who owned the Gargoyle Club.
When she was 21 she had an affair with the "so unbearably attractive" 17th Lord Lovat, commando leader, hero of the Dieppe beaches and 25th chief of the Clan Fraser, whom she had met during a mess party at his house, Beaufort Castle. [Was it not his brother Sir Hugh Fraser?? Or perhaps both!] In describing their assignation over partridge at the Ritz, she not only kissed but told all, unsparingly, in another memoir, Love Is Blue (1986).
In July 1943, in a taxi in Soho, Dylan Thomas, who had pinched her bottom in a pub, "smothered me in wet beery kisses"; later she had to bolt and bar her bedroom as the poet repeatedly hurled himself against the door. Only at war's end did she come to the conclusion that the black depression she felt - "an unidentifiable cafard lying in wait for me like a vast cloud of poisonous blue gas" - was the result of "too many men".
She sought remedy in an early night, a mug of Ovaltine and a resolution to renounce her life of sin. Joan Wyndham had occasionally sported a strong pair of wartime lock-knit directoire knickers to repel the advances of unwelcome suitors, and surprised herself when she totted up her wartime lovers and found she had slept with only four.
After the war, she decided against going up to Oxford. "Five years of regimentation," she explained, "have left me with a lust for liberty that has to be satisfied." Later she came to regret that decision.
Joan Olivia Wyndham was born on October 11 1921 at Clouds, the Victorian sandstone house in Wiltshire built by her great-grandfather, the dandy Percy Wyndham. She spent her first three years there, hazily remembering that it had 40 bedrooms and a kitchen so far from the dining room that food was transported on a miniature railway track.
The house, rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1888, had passed to Percy's son George Wyndham, reputedly the handsomest man in Edwardian England who, following a failed political career as Balfour's chief secretary to Ireland, had been found dead in a Parisian brothel. His nephew Richard, known as "Dirty Dick", who had inherited Clouds during the First World War, was Joan's father; her mother, Iris, was the daughter of a diplomat.
Joan's parents divorced when she was two, and she was taken by her mother to live in London, at a house in Evelyn Gardens off the Fulham Road. Her mother having converted to Roman Catholicism, Joan was a religious child, and was sent at the age of seven to be a weekly boarder at the nearby Convent of the Assumption; from there she went to another convent at St Leonards-on-Sea, where she played the piano in the school orchestra.
Aged 15 she fell in love with the young John Gielgud; having seen him in Hamlet, she "sometimes followed him home so that I could kiss his doorknob". She later transferred her affections to "the totally gorgeous" Laurence Olivier and the dancer Robert Helpmann ("gosh, what a bottom!"). In 1937 Joan went to Rada, but left after a year. Nearly 70 years later she published a witty account of her time at Rada in her memoir Dawn Chorus (2004).
As a teenage Catholic virgin, Joan Wyndham spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive. Huddled in the air-raid shelter, she wrote secretly and obsessively about the strange yet exhilarating times she was living through, sure that this was ' the happiest time of my life.'
Coming of age just as Hitler's Blitz hit London, Joan was blown off-balance... "I never know if I'm going to be bombed or seduced from one moment to the next."
Her wartime diaries, Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), described her service with the WAAFs, which started at 9 Group Fighter Command near Preston, where she was a filter room plotter.
After being commissioned Joan Wyndham was posted to Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, which she described as "living in some wonderful dream" compared with the dreariness of Lancashire. She spent her first week's leave with a bearded Czech artist who had picked her up in Wigmore Street, and who had rented a room in a former brothel in Oakley Street, lived in by Dylan Thomas and owned by a woman with the telegraphic address Chastity, London.
During another drunken fling in London en route to a new posting in Inverness, Joan Wyndham woke up fully-clothed to find a man, naked beneath a black mackintosh, standing at the foot of her bed; he told her he was a reporter with the Sunday Graphic. Their subsequent amorous encounter did not please Joan's new paramour, a Hungarian called Zoltan, whom she abandoned on learning that he had a wife. At Inverness she fell for a handsome Norwegian naval first lieutenant, marooned in port during a refit, who cut notches on her bedpost with an enormous commando knife, and from whom she caught fleas.
Despite being appraised as "a very peculiar type of officer, not amenable to discipline and a bad example to other ranks", Joan Wyndham was promoted to flight officer, and in January 1945 was posted to Watnall, near Nottingham. It was, she complained, "ugly and squalid - but it has one great advantage, a mixed Mess!" At one point she was taken up for a spin by the youngest squadron leader in the Polish Air Force, and recorded that it was "the first time I've ever had my bottom pinched at 3,000 feet".
After the war she met and married her first husband, Maurice Rowdon, the son of a docker who admired his new daughter-in-law turning up for the wedding "all dolled up like a tallyman's ink bottle". Joan and her new-born daughter Clare followed Rowdon to Baghdad, where he had landed a teaching job; but the marriage was dissolved on their return to England.
Meanwhile, Joan's father had been shot dead by a sniper while covering the Arab-Israeli war for The Sunday Times, and she used her legacy to buy a small cottage in Kent. She was startled to learn from Cyril Connolly that Dick Wyndham had been "one of Europe's great flagellists", and had been known as "Whips" Wyndham.
Joan's affair with her Russian lodger, Shura Shivarg, produced another daughter, Camilla. After spells as a horoscope writer, working in a theatre and as a publisher's reader, Joan moved to Oxford to open the city's first espresso coffee bar, complete with jukebox.
In 1957 she divorced Rowdon and married Shivarg, buying a scruffy five-storey Georgian house in Wellington Square, off the King's Road, and landing a job on Housewife magazine. She stuck this for a couple of years before becoming a prominent figure in the King's Road set in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s she and Shura visited Russia and the United States, where she met Andy Warhol and looked up her aunt Olivia, who lived with a black actress in Harlem.
By the time she turned to writing in the 1980s, Joan Wyndham had moved back to the Fulham Road. In later life she came to dislike cooking, but nursed passions for whisky, cigarettes, the television programme Blind Date and Diana, Princess of Wales. An operation to remove a tumour in 1989 robbed her of her sense of taste, and although her memory faltered in old age, she managed to produce a further two volumes of memoirs: Anything Once (1992) and Dawn Chorus (2004).
Joan and Shura Shivarg, were renowned for their parties; Shura ran several popular Chelsea restaurants, including Nikita's and the Golden Duck. She submitted an autobiographical novel to her agent shortly before her death.
Joan Wyndham is survived by both her husbands and by both her daughters."
Sources and Notes
https://archive.org/details/isbn_0749321768/page/376/mode/thumb?q=kit
https://web.archive.org/web/20090530153700/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548532/Joan-Wyndham.html
The Flyer : British culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 by Francis, Martin
https://masterbombercraig.wordpress.com/avro-lancaster-bomber/lancaster-crews/wakey-wakey-pills/
https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/love-etc-kh7wt55qzpn
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/love-lessons-from-my-aunt-6788356.html
https://grokipedia.com/page/joan_wyndham
Picture credits - cartoons by Watnall WAAF Mary Harrison, IWM
Joan Wyndham interview by Paul Willets
https://web.archive.org/web/20180119130858/https://www.paulwilletts.com/2511767-joan-wyndham
Book and Magazine Collector, April 2004
Joan Wyndham’s reputation as a witty and observant diarist was established by Love Lessons, her belated 1985 hardcover debut. Recently serialised on Radio 4 and reissued as a Virago Modern Classic, it chronicles her antics as a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old amid London’s bohemian set during the Second World War. Fans of her first book and its two successors, Love Is Blue and Anything Once, will be delighted to know that she has lost none of the joie de vivre that makes her work so irresistible. On being asked to sign my battered paperback edition of Love Lessons, she writes “D’you need any?” on the title-page.
Sitting in the sunny upstairs lounge of her house in Fulham, surrounded by paintings, photos and other memorabilia, she breaks into recurrent, contagious laughter as she describes her colourful background.
I was born in Wiltshire in a very big Victorian house called Clouds. My parents were virgins when they married. They didn’t know what to do on the wedding night, so they had to go to a doctor the next morning. My mother was put off sex for life. My father subsequently met the Marchioness of Queensbury, an older woman, sexy as hell, and after his first orgasm he thought he was in love with her. My mother made the great mistake of asking the Marchioness for Christmas one year. In the middle of the night my mother went downstairs to make sure the candles on the Christmas tree had been put out, and there was my father, making love to the Marchioness behind the tree, so divorce followed.
In those days you weren’t allowed to mention the person involved. You went to see Rosa Lewis, who ran the Cavendish Hotel and she supplied you with a whore, whom you took to the Metropole in Brighton. There it was arranged for a man to bring your breakfast and catch you in bed with the whore.
After my parents divorced, my mother took me to London, where we lived on the Fulham Road. Was your mother a keen reader? Oh, yes, she left me a cottage containing a large library, mostly first editions. There were also some rather strange books, including one about Rasputin. On the flyleaf there was an inscription to my mother from the man who apparently murdered him — Prince Yussopoff, who was obviously a friend of my mother’s. Apart from that, it was mainly plants, animals and Agatha Christie.
Tell me about your early literary experiences…
At the age of six, I started to learn to read. I was given a Victorian book called Reading Without Tears, in which all the letters were made out of people dressed in top-hats and crinolines. Once I’d learned how to read, I began with fairy-tales. Most of my days were spent lying on the sofa, reading and sucking oranges. My favourites were the usual things: Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Later on, I read E.E. Nesbitt, not to mention a rather beautiful book by Oscar Wilde called The Little Prince, and Just William whom, I suppose, I identified with because he was so naughty. I couldn’t help but notice that the fairy-tales were usually very cruel. Children were sentenced to dance themselves to death in red-hot clogs, things like that, and I began to get rather a penchant for nasty things myself.
One day I was taken to stay with my uncle Tim, who had a wonderful library, where I spent most of my time. When I left, he said, “Would you like to choose a book, Joan, darling?” My mother thought I’d pick something nice about animals or flowers. Then I emerged, tottering under the weight of an enormous illustrated book of Chinese tortures. Everybody went white and I was sent straight back to get something different. I chose Gulliver’s Travels which, I thought, was safe enough. Unfortunately my mother opened it, and there was an illustration of Gulliver in Brobdignag, the giants’ country, climbing an enormous woman’s breast and investigating a huge nipple — so that was taken away, too, and I ended up with yet another copy of Alice in Wonderland.
Not long after that, I was sent to a convent boarding-school. There I fell madly in love with another girl, as one always did. It was the only interest we had in life. I was mad about a sixth-form girl called Rosemary Dwyer. I wonder if she’s still alive. We had a very open-minded head nun, who used to talk to me in her study about my crushes. “Are you still in love with Rosemary Dwyer?” she’d ask. “Didn’t I notice you giving rather strange looks to Jane Drummond in dancing class the other night?”
We were so innocent, and everything we did was innocent. While I was at school, I drew up a plan in my exercise-book, detailing all the books I’d like to have in my library. The majority of these were run-of-the-mill things like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women, A Tale of Two Cities, The Four Feathers, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Tanglewood Tales, Sherlock Holmes, and some poetry, but not much. I particularly liked Coleridge. And, of course, there was also the whole of Shakespeare in my library. I was in love with John Gielgud, whom I had seen for the first time in Hamlet. I watched it five times, always ogling him from the front row.
As a result of reading Hamlet, I moved on to the rest of Shakespeare and that’s how I got to know and love him. The most unexpected corner of this imaginary library was devoted to Freud. When I was very young, I used to have a bath at six o’clock each evening. Next-door to the bathroom was my mother’s companion’s library. I looked in there one day and spotted something called The Interpretation of Dreams. I took it into the bathroom and started to read it. To my amazement, I noticed that everything from a screwdriver to a banana was a significant symbol of “you-know-what”. And I knew what because I’d seen photos of Grecian statues. Instead of washing, I used to sit by the bath, burrowing into Freud whilst making splashing noises with my hand to fool my mother.
As a schoolgirl, were you introduced to the nineteenth-century English classics?
Yes, I was a terrible literary snob. I used to read all the classics. Nobody else in my class was doing that, so they used to bully me because I was regarded as “brainy”. Finally, they discovered a way they could like me. I had to leave all my exercise-books after study at night on a little shelf so that they could copy them. Once they could copy my work, they approved of me being brainy.
When did you start keeping a diary?
When I was at school. I’d write about my various infatuations. Most of my diary writing, though, was done during the war because the war was the first exciting thing that had ever happened to me. That and having a boyfriend. One never knew which one was going to lose first — one’s life or one’s virginity. I decided to keep a diary so as not to forget a single minute of it.What sort of life were you leading during that period? I was living with my mother and her companion, who were both deeply religious. I had to go to Mass every day, confession once-a-week, and the priest came to tea on Fridays. In between all that, we worked in a First Aid Post, bandaging wounds, running errands and answering the phone. I also had a boyfriend who finally persuaded me to go to bed with him. It didn’t work out, of course. And afterwards I thought, “Gosh, is that all it is? What’s all the fuss about?” I wrote in my diary that I’d much rather have a good smoke and go to the pictures any day. But I was told by my friends that it’s always a disappointment first time round.
Were you ever conscious of the possibility that your diary might one day be published?
No, goodness, no. I never for one moment thought that anybody would read it. That would have been too embarrassing. I used to hide it under the mattress at night so that nobody would see it. How did it come to be published, then? My daughter discovered it in a trunk in the attic. First of all, I found her in tears. “Oh, mummy, I’m furious,” she said. “You had a much better time than I did when you were that age.” And then she said, “But you’ve got to do something with your diaries. Why don’t you publish them?” That was when I first decided to do it.
Did you feel obliged to edit them?
Yes. There was an enormous quantity of material. About twenty hardback books, I think. I cut lots and lots of bits I found boring. I don’t mind offending people. I just don’t want to bore anybody. And then I put together a second book, Love Is Blue, about life in the W.A.A.F. While I was in uniform, I’d write long letters to my mother, saying exactly the opposite of what really happened. “Darling, mummy,” I’d write, “I went to a terribly respectable party at the Officers’ Mess . Everybody was stone-cold sober and so was I”, which meant we were really dancing on the tables, singing rude songs. Another letter, which she kept, described how I was “seen home in the blackout by that dreadful Sergeant Barker, who leapt on me.” In brackets I put: “Thank God for regulation knickers!”
Are you keen on reading other people’s diaries and memoirs?
Not terribly, though I think Pepys is wonderful. I bought the Claire Tomalin biography of him, but after the first chapter I thought, “Why don’t I just read Pepys?” After reading the real thing, I didn’t find the Tomalin book necessary.
During the period described in Love Lessons and Love Is Blue, were you aware of Horizon and the other literary magazines that were flourishing at the time?
Oh, God, yes. The editor of Horizon, Cyril Connolly, was a great friend of mine. I met him through my father, a writer and journalist who was very much part of the literary scene. He used to invite me to Cyril’s parties, which were terrifying. Everybody there seemed to be a famous writer of some sort. I was absolutely petrified by it all. I sat down to dinner once and stuck my fork into a quail which shot off the table and was eaten by a dog. I was so embarrassed.
In the diaries you mention coming across Dylan Thomas…
I was in a Soho pub known as “the Burglar’s Alms”, wearing my officer’s uniform, when someone pinched by bottom. I looked round and saw a small, tubby man with curly hair and lips like Michelin tyres. “Pretty Waffy,” he breathed lasciviously, “what’s your name?” “Joan,” I said. “What’s yours?” “I’m Dylan Thomas and I’m fuckin’ skint. Be a nice Waffy and buy me a Special Ale.” So I bought him one and we went back by taxi to Ruthven Todd’s studio where he was staying.
As soon as I’d sunk into my seat he smothered me in wet, heavy kisses. It was like being embraced by an intoxicated octopus. I tried to tell myself I was being kissed by a great poet, but it was a relief when the taxi stopped. I was given a little cupboard to sleep in, and had just curled up on the floor when an air-raid started. At that point I heard footsteps on the stairs and someone thumping on the door. “I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you!” screamed Dylan.
I locked the door and lay down, wrapped in my great-coat, but was far too frightened to sleep. Next morning, a totally different Dylan turned up: cool, quiet and intelligent. He took me to breakfast in Soho and we talked about his work and I said, “You know, I don’t understand an awful lot of what you write.” And he said, “To hell with poetry. My work is like a circular city full of secret rooms and all round it there are different doors. It doesn’t matter a damn which door you open. You’ll always find something interesting.” I thought, “That’s rather nice.”
By that time I realised that I was going to have to pay for the breakfast because he didn’t have enough pennies. Then he said, “You know I’d much rather be soaking in a nice hot bath, sucking acid-drops and reading Agatha Christie than writing bloody old poetry…” I liked Dylan very much, but understood what his friends meant by “Not safe after six”.
Were there other people in his circle whom you met?
Yes, Tambimuttu, Ruthven Todd, Maclaren-Ross and Nina Hamnett. Tambimuttu was awful. He was always after me. He once lured me to his bedroom, but there were bedbugs crawling all over the sheets, so I quickly escaped. Then there was Bobby Newton, the actor, who was always in the pub. He once sent me a telegram saying, “Marry me, darling, and I’ll only drink one bottle a day.”
What did you do after the war ended and you left the W.A.A.F.?
Well, I opened the first espresso bar in Oxford. I was the cook, specialising in “spag’ bol’”. Then I ran a hippy café in Portobello Road. Our customers ate loads of brown rice and brought their own chopsticks. Later I worked on Housewife magazine, luckily in charge of the men’s page, so I could hire gorgeous male models. My best job was cooking lunch for the actors at the Royal Court Theatre, where I watched all the rehearsals for free. As for the actors, I got to know more about how they liked their sausages cooked than about their acting. Ian McKellen, for instance, told me, “I don’t want mine just well done — I want them totally destroyed.”
Apart from all these goings on, I managed to acquire two husbands, two daughters, two cats and write four books. For a couple of years, my first husband and I lived in Baghdad, where he got a job at the university. I loved it there, though we had a series of awful nannies. My daughter, who was three at the time, ran around with street arabs, from whom she learned to speak perfect Iraqi of the rudest kind. Once her nanny was washing out the bath and got soap in her eyes, to which Camilla said very firmly in Iraqi, “Eat shit thou daughter of a pimp.”
Anyone who has read your books will be aware of your enviable ear for dialogue. Have you ever tried your hand at fiction-writing?
Yes, in the early 1960s I did write a book called Behaving Badly. I never published it, but I’ve still got it. You know, I might do something with it, though it seems so out of date now.
What sort of thing do you read these days?
The Harry Potter books are my favourite books of the minute. I’ve only just finished the last one. And it’s wonderful. The final chapter had me on the edge of my seat practically screaming with terror. I’m also reading Pompei by Robert Harris, which is riveting, and I’m re-reading The Abomination by my friend, Paul Golding. Friends always give me their books and I have to read them. Luckily Paul’s book is brilliant. As a rule, the three classes of book that I most enjoy are historical romances, science fiction like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and American crime novels. I adore Elmore Leonard. I’ve read all his books. Recently, I considered buying the Beckham autobiography, only because he’s the most gorgeous creature on the face of the earth. But it’s probably a lousy book, so I didn’t buy it.
You’ve spoken about your current favourites.
Do you have any literary pet-hates? There’s one writer whom I loathe — Wyndham Lewis, who introduced my father to the bohemian life. Along with a few other aristocrats, my father supported him. And, if the allowance was late, Wyndham Lewis would send a telegram saying, “Where’s my fucking stipend, Dick?” After the Wall Street Crash, my father could no longer afford to continue paying the stipend. Out of revenge, Lewis wrote a book called The Apes of God. One of the worst apes was my father, whom he described in a monstrous fashion: walking in a funny way and farting and generally trying to be an artist when, in Lewis’s opinion, he wasn’t one.
Lastly, have you got another book in the pipeline?
It’s called Dawn Chorus and it starts with a description of life at Clouds, the house where I was born. It was enormous, with forty bedrooms and peacocks on the lawn. Now it’s a home for alcoholics and drug addicts. “Watch out, or you’ll end up in your old nursery!” my husband says if I have one whisky too many. The book continues with my father’s letters from the trenches at the battle of the Somme, and my mother’s diaries as a deb. I also include my school diaries and the lead up to Chamberlain and “Peace in Our Time”, with me at the age of sixteen looking forward to a wonderful future.
Reproduced by kind permission of Warners Group Publications.
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Love etc
What does life tell us about love?
Interview by Catherine O’Brien
Wednesday September 08 2004, 1.00am, The Times
JOAN WYNDHAM
Joan Wyndham, 82, a former restaurateur and food critic,
lives in London with her second husband, Alexander Shivarg.
My parents’ marriage was a disaster, mainly because, unlike
most newlyweds today, they were virgins. My mother told me her wedding night
was hell on earth. It put her off sex for life.
I was their only child and a huge disappointment to my
father, an aristocrat who wanted a son and heir for Clouds, the family mansion
in Wiltshire. Soon after I was born he left my mother for the Marchioness of
Queensberry. I hardly saw him until I reached my late teens and he began taking
me to parties given by his intellectual friends. He would get terribly drunk.
Once, in a taxi, he mistook me for another woman and began kissing me and
unbuttoning my shirt. Thank goodness it was a short journey home.
My mother adored me rather too much; she practically had a breakdown if I caught a cold. We lived in Fulham, southwest London, with her female companion (not a euphemism for lesbian friend, they were just desperately religious). I was sent to Catholic boarding schools, where I proved to be the worst thing: brainy. Mine was a lonely childhood.
I was studying at Chelsea School of Art when I met my first
love, Walter. He had a studio near mine and we’d get together every day for
lunch and to play chess. When the Blitz started I was determined not to die a
virgin, so I let him seduce me. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to make love.
Afterwards I felt I would rather have had a smoke and gone to the pictures.
The war stopped us all thinking too much about the future. I
joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and was posted to Inverness,
where we lived in a mixed mess with a pool. Sir Hugh Fraser, the brother of my
best friend, Veronica, was in the castle next door. We had the most marvellous
affair; I’d have married him had he asked. I had another affair with a
Norwegian sea captain, then there were the pilots. You couldn’t say no to a
pilot — he could have been dead the next day.
In London after the war I embarked on an affair with Lucian
Freud, who even then hated being talked about. When it ended I hitchhiked to
the Isles of Scilly to escape him, then headed to Oxford. There I met Maurice
Rowdon, an intelligent, good-looking scholar. We fell in love, married and had
a daughter, Clare. Then he got a teaching job in Baghdad. I rented our flat to
a young Russian couple and travelled with him. I had to return a few months
later, by which time the girl had gone away but her boyfriend wanted to stay.
One night he poured me a vodka and sang gypsy songs. Before I knew it, I was
being bent backwards over the ironing board and kissed passionately. Maurice
arrived unexpectedly after three months and saw instantly what was happening.
Our marriage had had everything going for it apart from sex. With Shura (the
Russian abbreviation for Alexander) there was no such problem, which is why we
are still together 52 years later.
Good sex is essential for a good marriage. If you are
repelled physically by your spouse, it will never work. But another reason
Shura and I have survived for so long is that we both tolerate infidelity.
There was a period after my second daughter, Camilla, was born when he was
having affairs and I was finding out about them. Rather than walk out, I picked
up a handsome boy in a pub and embarked on an affair of my own. John was
gorgeous and bisexual. We saw each other for five years, on and off. After that,
my marriage was better.
To me, it has always seemed normal that men will be
unfaithful. Having had a father who was incapable of fidelity, I think I almost
expected it. I knew Shura loved me and the occasional jaunt wouldn’t stop that,
so I took it in my stride.
We still share a bed, but no longer have sex — we can’t be
bothered. We have a cuddle, share a joke, read the same books, enjoy the
companionship. My trust was never diminished by his dalliances. He has seen me
through cancer, strokes and breakdowns. I know that if I am in trouble, he will
look after me. That is very reassuring.
Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham, Virago, £16.99
- Capacity: These tanks varied significantly in size based on the airfield, ranging from 20,000-gallon concrete banked pits to massive 60,000-gallon standard designs. [1, 2]
- Construction: They were typically large, open-air, circular or rectangular concrete reservoirs built into the ground near technical sites, hangars, and bombing ranges. [1, 2, 3, 4]
- Tactical Use: They ensured that the airfield's fire service had enough pressure and volume to combat fires caused by incendiary bombs or aircraft crashes without relying on damaged civilian mains. [1, 2]
While most of the static water tanks situated in populated towns and cities were filled in immediately after the war for safety and public health reasons, many examples still survive today on rural, disused, or partially converted WW2 airfields across the UK. In some cases—such as at the former RAF Eye in Suffolk or RAF Llandow in Wales—the overgrown or repurposed tanks are still visible. [1, 2, 3, 4]
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| RAF Eye static water pool |
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| Static water tank (or fire pool) used for fire fighting, Thorpe Camp Visitor Centre, a WWII Royal Air Force barracks, Lincolnshire |
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