Darling John,
I am trying to find out about the navy but I don’t think Sir B. will be much help. He is at Yarmouth sending trawlers to their death, I suppose. What about Piers Synnott [under-secretary at the Admiralty]? He ought to know about the right department but I think it is very difficult to get in unless you start in the usual way.
It was very enjoyable staying at Brighton & we saw Bosie* who talked a lot about you & hoped your new book of poems wouldn’t be all free verse & nasty modern stuff.
Do you know any oriental buildings anywhere? I can only think of the Pavilion, Sezincote, Pagoda at Kew at the moment but thought they might do for the Archie Rev. if I can find a lot more. Or has it been done a million times?
Best love to you & Penelope
from Joan (& John)5
Unaware of his own obvious unsuitability for such a role, Betjeman next tried to join the Royal Marines. This too proved fruitless. Instead he took a post offered to him by Kenneth Clark with the film division at the Ministry of Information, and then in the following year, 1941, he went to work as press attaché at the British embassy in Dublin.
In the spring of 1940, JR was still far from well. He caught flu. He was no better than at Brighton, he told his mother. His feet were aching, he could not walk, and his ears were singing. This was still the period of the ‘Phoney War’, while everyone was waiting for something to happen and when there had been no significant land operations in western Europe. It was still possible to visit the south of France with a permit, and so, in search of more sunshine and warmth than they could find in England, John and Joan went to Auribeau-sur-Siagne in the Alpes Maritimes for five weeks. Auribeau was a pretty little village close to Cannes, surrounded by hills forested with mimosa trees, with the River Siagne running in the valley below. On arrival at their auberge, JR had another bout of fever with sweats and shivering, but he was assured by a local doctor that this was not the typhoid returning. Joan and he were happy there, enjoying the good, plain food the auberge offered and playing chess while he slowly mended. And it was in Auribeau that Joan discovered that she was pregnant. She sent Driberg a postcard:
Darling Tom,
If you write to J.R. will you send it to me as I have already had a letter from my family, not that it is likely to shock our American host as he has spent the afternoon telling us of his hetero sex life including how he made money in a Paris hotel sleeping on Sat. nights with English women over the week-end to see how it’s done in France. Also if J.R.’s lawyer wants to communicate tell him to send to you to forward. H. Noailles is permanent address of J.R. who has grown beard & looks like Van Gogh self portrait. V. attractive, I find. We eat partridges & drink Château neuf Vieux Telegraphe 1929 v.v. good. Joan xxxxx
N.B. – followed by liqueur called Frigolet, efficacious for making boy babies (so they say locally). In fact, may all our troubles be little ones.6
John had now been absent from work for over seven months. He wrote to his editor, Arthur Christiansen, to explain why his convalescence had been so prolonged and announced his imminent return. Tom Driberg urged JR not to worry. Christiansen had broken his leg stepping out of a taxi in the blackout and would be away for two or three months. Another colleague was off work with a nervous collapse and Tom had sprained his ankle, also while getting out of a taxi in the blackout.
When Joan and John were still in France, she had a miscarriage. After everything that had happened, the realization that she was pregnant was a piece of good news at last. It must now have seemed cruelly depressing. that this good fortune had ended too suddenly – another disappointment. It was so early in the pregnancy that she did not feel the need to call a doctor, while John’s reaction was simply to go for a long walk. When he came back they had a row. Joan had grown up amidst a large family, not just her brother and two sisters, but uncles, aunts and many cousins, and she saw a lot of them. She was twenty-eight, she had a husband and for the first time in her life she had a home of her own. She wanted a family too. But, she could at least reflect, there was still time for children – and she looked back on this holiday with pleasure.7 She could not know how deep her desire for children would later be.
On their return to London, the couple moved from St James’s to a flat at Verulam Gardens on the Gray’s Inn Road, which was convenient for Fleet Street now that JR was back at work. They liked their flat very much. ‘We look out on to a green lawn and old green trees, jackdaws and pigeons and there is a little more room than in Blue Ball Yard,’ JR wrote. He invited his mother to come and view the flat but warned her that there were fifty-nine stairs to the top. The artist John Banting was asked to paint the piano. He also wanted to paint a ceiling, preferably over a bed, on the principle that one saw more lying in bed than at any other time. Banting was a fashionable decorative artist who had recently, in February, exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. His clients had included Diana Mitford, when she was married to her first husband Bryan Guinness, and Eddy Sackville-West, for his private rooms in the Gatehouse Tower at Knole in Kent. He was a rougher kind of bohemian – the way he shaved his head made him look like a rather glamorous criminal – although Nancy Mitford thought he was wonderful.8 In 1933 Banting had painted a portrait of Joan – the only portrait ever commissioned of her. The picture was both exaggerated in size and simplified, almost a reductio ad absurdum. Arched eyebrows, bright blue eyes, pink cheeks, red lips set in an oval face with wavy blonde hair and supported by a long neck: clean, precise, brightly coloured, modern, very Art Deco. Joan and JR also bought another of his works. In a characteristically self-deprecating fashion, Banting offered to exchange it for another if they did not like it: ‘It is possibly not a very good mixer amongst all and every varied sort of person and also it is one that one might easily get tired of after a time.’9 And he quoted Picasso as saying that ‘the way to kill a picture is to hang it on a nail’. Joan had her own fully developed artistic taste, very far from the family portraits, ships at sea, and green landscapes among which she had been raised.
A. J. A. Symons – AJ, the author of The Quest for Corvo – was also a friend. Symons was a dandy who modelled his flamboyant style upon Disraeli. He read books on etiquette, wore a monocle and a lavender-grey suit, and he spent hours practising calligraphy.10 Like JR, he was also a considerable bibliophile. Because of the blackout various friends who came to dine, including AJ, spent the night on their sofa. In a letter dated July 1940, he thanked Joan for ‘the best dish and some of the pleasantest hours I have enjoyed since peace left us. I suspected you of being a blue stocking; I had no idea you were a cordon bleu.’ AJ had evidently taken a great liking to her, and wrote that he had never known any woman so agreeably, unobtrusively, charmingly rule any roost. Joan was an excellent cook, and there were two things at which she excelled: soufflés, and the ability to produce partridges on JR’s birthday on 31 August, a day before the shooting season began.
Once war had started in earnest, weekends out of London became especially welcome. When AJ invited Joan and JR to stay at his home in rural Essex in August 1940, he instructed them to bring only their thinnest clothes, a croquet set and lightest spirits. Their fellow guest was Constant Lambert, whom JR liked greatly for his intelligence, rapidity of mind and sense of fun. Together they sat drinking some of the last bottles of treasured clarets and Sauternes in the blackout. They also went to Bradwell Lodge, where Tom’s visitors’ book records seven weekend visits when the Rayners were either on their own or in the company of A. J. Symons, Constant Lambert and Cyril Connolly, or with Sefton (‘Tom’) Delmer of the Express and his wife, the artist Isabel Nicholas. The atmosphere was not always as easy as they might have hoped. In her unpublished memoir, Isabel recorded that there was always a coolness between Tom Driberg and herself, while ‘no two Toms could have disliked each other more’ than Driberg and Delmer. But, she said, both Tom Driberg and JR had great affection for Joan and understood her perfectly. They called these times ‘Famous Last Weeke
nds’, as if they were living in the constant fear of some apocalyptic event. Eventually, there actually was a ‘last weekend’. In 1940, shortly after the Battle of Britain, Bradwell Lodge was requisitioned by the Air Ministry for use as the Officers’ Mess of Bradwell Bay.*
Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer was an Express foreign correspondent. He had been a contemporary of Osbert Lancaster at Lincoln College, Oxford, but he would never have been counted among the ‘aesthetes’ – in fact he had been most definitely a ‘hearty’. Born in Germany and German-speaking, he had seen the rise of Nazi Germany first-hand. He had even had friendly relations with Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Brownshirts, who he described as a ‘jovial little soldier of fortune’.11 This had, in turn, given Delmer access to Adolf Hitler; in 1932 he had walked through the burning embers of the Reichstag at Hitler’s side. After a year in France, Delmer spent two years in Spain reporting on the Civil War and was then in Poland when the Second World War broke out. Delmer was a large, Falstaffian figure – highly intelligent and shrewd. He claimed that he had first determined to marry Isabel after seeing a bust of her sculpted by Jacob Epstein in the Tate. After working with Epstein, Isabel had lived and studied in Paris among the left-bank avant-garde. André Derain and Pablo Picasso had both painted her, and Alberto Giacometti had also sculpted her. Isabel wrote in her unpublished autobiography:
Alberto worked all night, but at five every evening we drank at the Lipp. Picasso used to sit at the table opposite and one day, after staring at me particularly hard, he jumped up and said to Alberto: ‘Now I know how to do it.’ He dashed back to his studio to paint my portrait with little red eyes, wild hair and a vertical mouth – one of five he painted from memory.12
Isabel was still in Paris using Balthus’s studio when the Germans invaded France. She left in the company of the Jewish-Romanian poet Tristan Tzara. When they parted, he headed south while Isabel stayed in Bordeaux, awaiting departure. The then third secretary of the British embassy, Donald Maclean, told her not to leave until a British ship arrived. The ship that picked her up, the Madura, was the last one to leave and it took four days to reach Falmouth. ‘I remember taking a walk up a hill. When I reached that fine short grass I fell on my knees and kissed it,’ she wrote. Isabel – who was exuberant and pretty and could drink and swear as well as any man – became very close friends with Joan, and it was through Isabel that Joan later became friends with both Giacometti and Tzara. Isabel wrote:
I was delighted to see Joan again We met for a drink one day at the Café Royale. We both ordered martinis with a dash of absinthe. This was not the sort of drink either of us ever drank – tho’ I had grown fond of ordinary pernod. We had about three of these and not surprisingly took taxis home. However the effect was stunning. I fell into bed and had a kind of paralysis. I found I could not move my limbs. When Tom came home he sent for a doctor who shook his head and said this is the beginning of the end. Later Joan phoned to ask what had happened to me. We had had a shared experience. Too much order perhaps. Joan said we might have been arrested.13
The first major Luftwaffe attack on London came on the evening of Saturday 7 September 1940. Joan joined the Holborn Division of the British Red Cross, walking every night from Gray’s Inn Road through the most densely bombed part of London to Holborn tube station, to work as a volunteer nurse. JR told his mother, Gertrude, that Joan was nursing, washing dishes and spending her nights in the tube stations. ‘The Commandant of her division commended her for her good work and ventured to say she would do well in whatever sphere she found herself.’14 They were now having two or three raids every day, ‘but nothing like Sevenoaks where we were this weekend, parachutists slowly descending, bullets near, etc. Very exciting,’ JR wrote. Gertrude’s food parcels from Devon were greatly appreciated. For Christmas, she sent a duck – a ‘soft, delicious, sizzling and succulent bird’. She also sent barrels of cider, jam, geese and chickens. There was a steady demand from John to knit him socks, for which he provided the wool coupons. Shopping for even such everyday items as umbrellas or pens became difficult, because they were so scarce.
Joan was asleep in bed with JR in Verulam Gardens in early April 1941 when three bombs fell only ten yards away. The next time the Gardens was hit it caused great damage. Fortunately, neither Joan nor JR was at home, but the flat became uninhabitable. A month later, JR wrote to the treasurer of Gray’s Inn asking for a rebate on the rent of their flat: ‘I am sure you will understand it is financially difficult as well as personally distressing for us to move from Gray’s Inn though our own troubles hardly bear comparison with those of the rest of the Inn.’ The Delmers, who lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were also bombed. At the time, they were holding a dinner party where their guests included Ian Fleming and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Joan and JR lived temporarily at the Athenaeum in Piccadilly before taking a flat at Palace Gate, a block designed by the modernist architect Wells Coates. John wrote that he was sorry to leave ‘the nicest flat in the world’, at smouldering Gray’s Inn, whereas Palace Gate – all glass, steel and concrete – had much less appeal. The flats were very small, but they had their own bomb shelter. The Rayners’ flat was next to that of Peter Watson, who was by now an important collector and patron of the arts. It was here where John Craxton and Lucian Freud first encountered one another and formed their early creative partnership, and it was also where Joan first met the two young artists. Joan’s friendship with John, or Johnny, Craxton was to last until the end of her life. When she first met him Craxton was a very tall, very thin young man who had just failed his army medical. He arrived looking skeletal – he had had pleurisy at school – and clutching a volume of William Blake’s Poetry and Prose only to be dismissed by a sergeant who told him he would be as much use to the war effort as a three-legged horse.15 With the encouragement of the Official War Artist Eric Kennington, together with Peter Watson and Joan, Craxton returned to painting. Joan also bought a picture by John Piper. JR wrote to Piper’s wife Myfanwy that the sight of the picture made it worth getting up in the morning to see it in the flat.16
The bombs continued to fall, but London life went on. ‘The destruction in the West End is incredible,’ wrote Robert Colquhoun, another of Watson’s artists. ‘Whole tracts of streets flattened out into a mass of rubble and bent iron. There is a miniature pyramid in Hyde Park not far from us built up of masonry and wreckage taken from bombed buildings. These heaps are all over London.’17 The raids provided work for Joan, however. Cyril Connolly published Joan’s picture of Chelsea Old Church with its bombed rafters jutting upwards like the prow of a ship. The National Buildings Record also commissioned some of her excellent Blitz pictures. In July 1941, the Architectural Review published ‘The End of Last Time, First Instalment of a Survey of Bomb Damage to Buildings of Architectural Importance’: ‘To provide obituary records of such buildings is a task THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW feels an obligation to undertake and one that can appropriately be started in issues raised by the war.’ Whether any of these were by Joan it is impossible to say, but on one page there is a picture of Gray’s Inn: two men and a woman in a fur coat stand and look at the smoking ruin; to one side, in front of the building, a little pile of chairs and boxes sits, waiting to be rescued. This was how it must have been for Joan.
The October 1942 edition of the Architectural Review included an article called ‘Victorian Necropolis, the Cemeteries of London’ by R. P. Ross Williamson. While most photographs were published anonymously, on the copy of the Review which she kept Joan wrote that these pictures – the cemeteries at Kensal Green, South Norwood and Abney Park, South Kensington – were hers. The final photograph showed fragments of a gravestone at Norwood, destroyed in the Blitz. It was where JR’s father was buried.
The war also meant a new role for JR. He had left the Daily Express in November 1940 and started working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) in Berkeley Square. He told Gertrude that he was working harder and for longer hours than at the Express and reading
so many documents marked ‘secret’ that it was lucky that he was naturally uncommunicative. From his office window he could see the effects of the German bombing on the leafless garden below, where the sun showed up the bomb craters in the grass. The following year, JR was posted to the PWE – the Political Warfare Executive. The PWE, which operated from Woburn in Bedfordshire (the workers were billeted on the estate), was responsible for producing ‘black and white’ propaganda for use against Germany, Italy and the occupied countries. White propaganda was open and obvious, while black propaganda sought to give the impression that the PWE were actually operating inside Germany or elsewhere in Europe, and its impact depended on being able to identify completely with their German targets. In September 1940, Sefton Delmer had also been recruited from the Express by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was based at Apsley Guise in Bedfordshire, to organize black propaganda broadcasts to Germany. There could have been no job better suited to his talents. He invented a Prussian character called ‘Der Chef’ who, as a right-wing German patriot opposed to the Nazis, apparently broadcast nightly within Germany. To attract audiences, he would include salacious material condemning the depravity of the Nazis – the broadcasts were often a mixture of pornography and patriotism. The German High Command condemned their ‘quite unusually wicked hate propaganda’. In the summer of 1942, a particularly graphic broadcast about a supposed orgy involving a Kriegsmarine admiral was picked up in Moscow, and elicited a strong Foreign Office protest from Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to the Soviet Union. Delmer’s own chief replied that he didn’t consider the broadcast to have been depraved, and ‘in this case moral indignation does not seem called for’.18
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