The PWE was also charged with the production of forged documents, leaflets and publications – all designed to disrupt German morale and their power to continue fighting. Isabel, as an artist, also found herself employed to produce pornography, such as a painstakingly realistic picture of a foreign worker with a bright blonde girl. This was distributed in Greece where, she discovered later, Paddy Leigh Fermor had seen it. She was also pleased with her production of a Göring menu card – Hermann Göring being considered a particularly decadent Nazi. The menu included an apparently standard typological frieze, which on inspection turned out to be a chain of men, women and boys in sexual experimentation.
Joan, meanwhile, sought distraction from her photography and volunteer work. The war was experienced by many as a period of intense living, and the disruptions it caused put many marriages under strain. Joan considered that her marriage was sufficiently modern to encompass her taking lovers, and she was not the only one to think that way. If her husband was away from home or working late and Joan wanted to go to a nightclub – many blackout hours were spent in wartime nightclubs – then she felt free to take the young John Craxton along with her:
She was a dazzling beauty and I, an awkward 20-year old, was utterly stage-struck when she invited me to dance with her one evening at the very smart Boeuf sur le Toit night club.* The manager tried to remove me as I was wearing sandals, but was promptly reprimanded by Joan.19
Going to a nightclub was one thing, but sleeping with other men was another, and Joan slept with Cyril Connolly. This was particularly galling for JR, who had always been jealous of Connolly’s success with women, and also resented his writing talent. As the editor of the magazine Horizon, Connolly was in a reserved occupation. At his Bedford Square office he was invariably attended by female acolytes he had both taught to sub-edit and instructed in the art of cooking. Peter Quennell remembered him slouched in a massive chair: ‘it suited Cyril, who preferred a semi-reclining pose to sitting upright at a table; and having placed a board across the arms which carried papers, books and pens, he strengthened the stout defensive enclosure – at a distance only the crown of his head was visible – that protected him against intrusion.’20
Joan slept not only with Cyril; she also slept with Alan Pryce-Jones. Alan had returned to England from Austria in 1937 because Poppy was Jewish, and had then stood for parliament in Louth in Lincolnshire as a Liberal; the party was the only one that believed in rearmament. He joined the officers’ reserve and, as a German-speaker, served in the Intelligence Corps after war broke out. He also worked on the battle order of the German Army at Bletchley Park, and was in France at the time of Dunkirk. While Alan’s family moved out of London to Kent for safety, he took advantage of their absence for casual encounters with both sexes, as he wrote in a poem:
Suddenly a diamond shone in the roots of his hair
And live love, the expensive and successful, burst like a next-door
Neighbour in the room, calling us names and shocking for
The reckless, the impossible, the huge catastrophe,
Bullying us with the size of the moment. But we
Lay fascinated, spilled and blown, shiftily.21
John found it impossible to cope with Joan’s attitude, and became unhappy and aggrieved. There were rows which put too much of a strain upon their marriage. To escape the situation, Joan thought it best to go abroad, and so she took classes to train as a cipher clerk. In the meantime, and for the sake of convenience, Joan and JR continued to live together quite amicably under the same roof. Neither wanted their parents to suspect that their marriage was in difficulty. In September 1942, JR wrote to tell his mother that Joan and he were spending a week in Zennor in Cornwall, on the farm where they had stayed when he was convalescing from typhoid. On Christmas Eve, they dined with Cyril, Mamaine Paget and a girl called Barbara Skelton. A week later, John spent New Year’s Eve at the Ritz with ministry people. The dinner was quite good but the waiters were clumsy and kept spilling soup down his neck.
Dumbleton itself was now a part of the war effort. John had already divided his considerable collection of books between the Hall and his mother’s house in Devon. It was to be some years before he saw them again. At the outbreak of war many landowners were quick to offer up their mansions, there being a feeling that being able to choose one’s tenant gave a degree of control.22 In 1941, a lease was drafted to let the whole of the top floor and half of the ground and first floors of Dumbleton Hall to the BBC. A clause was included: ‘To lease the premises for housing white British or other nationals only, for not more than 50 persons.’ Instead, the Women’s Land Army took over. The girls were all field workers, who every day were sent out wearing fawn Aertex shirts and corduroy breeches to thresh, hoe, and pull beets and potatoes on neighbouring farms. Often they found themselves working with Italian – or even German – POWs. The Italians were particularly keen on scented soap, which they asked for in exchange for the little wooden toys they made. Lord Monsell himself was absent for much of the time, but Lady Monsell continued to preside over Dumbleton Women’s Institute and enjoyed the company of the Land Army girls. In January 1943, Joan and JR were allowed a few days’ compassionate leave at the Hall – Joan would shortly be leaving for Algiers, her first posting as a cipher clerk. They never lived together again.
7
Encounter in Cairo
By 1942, JR’s role in the PWE was to work as a rapporteur for a committee which met weekly to examine the propaganda rumours – known as ‘sibs’ – suggested by various government departments. He became known as the ‘Sibster’. Sibs were rumours disseminated in the UK and abroad for the purpose of misleading the enemy on a wide range of subjects. Collecting material for weekly meetings and then getting those around the table to agree lines of action required much time and diplomacy on John’s part. After a few months, he found that trying to reconcile the conflicting interests of all the departments concerned was unrewarding and he lost patience, the situation doubtless exacerbated by the strains of his home life with Joan. When he learned of a possible job in Algiers after the Allies landed in November 1942, he requested a posting. Although he did not achieve his escape, he was soon occupied with more congenial work. Isabel’s marriage was also in trouble too, and she and John began an affair. JR was often at Apsley Guise, so he and Isabel came in frequent contact and were able to conduct a clandestine relationship. Sefton Delmer’s account of the break-up of his marriage ignores the affair, however, and is almost as colourful as his propaganda.
In the evening I listened at intervals to the [radio] programme as it went out, suggesting improvements here and there, sub-edited and ‘angled’ fresh items of news as they broke on the Hellschreiber [a facsimile-based teleprinter] or our British or American agency tapes [. . .] Never did I get to bed before one a.m.
Let no-one, however, imagine that my sleep was uninterrupted. For at three a.m. the door of my bedroom would softly open, a hand switched on the lamp on my bedside table, and a girl’s voice spoke.
‘Mr. Delmer,’ it said sweetly through my dreams, ‘Major Clarke’s compliments.’
Standing beside my bed, solicitously offering me a large buff envelope containing a dispatch, I saw a blonde angel, blue uniformed, breeched and high-booted. From under a crash helmet peeped corn-coloured curls. Her slender waist was tightly strapped in a leather corset. There she stood awaiting my command, her crimson lips slightly parted – the dream vision of a James Bond fetishist. But this was no dream.1
According to Delmer, the dispatch-rider with the page proofs of Nachrichten für die Truppe did not leave until several hours later.
All this soon became too much for Isabel. First she insisted on separate rooms, so that she would not be disturbed by my dawn visitor. Then she got herself a job as an artist designer for one of the department’s productions in London. She went off to live there and only visited us at R.A.G. [Apsley Guise] at remote intervals. That was the beginning of the end of my fir
st marriage.
The account is every bit as fanciful as it sounds: at the time Delmer blamed JR for the break-up of his marriage, and felt considerable animosity towards him thereafter.
Once she was back in London, Isabel went to work at Bush House for a magazine called Il Mondo Libero, under the direction of the journalist Victor Cunard. The magazine, which was about life in England, was intended for distribution in Italy. Although her life was now much more relaxed after the exhausting hours of PWE, anxiety over the failure of her marriage – and the feeling that the affair was a betrayal of a close friendship – was making her ill. ‘You look awful,’ Delmer told her one day when she met him. ‘I don’t want to be married to an old woman. A magazine isn’t worth it.’ Joan, however, wrote to Isabel to say that if she was having an affair with John, she was quite ready to accept it. As far as she was concerned their friendship was unaffected – and yet Joan herself still wondered if her own marriage could be saved.
Graham had returned to Europe in uniform, not in a Guards regiment but in the Intelligence Corps of the US Army. In August 1942 he was stationed at Matlock in Derbyshire. After a visit to John Betjeman in Dublin he had gone back to Dumbleton, where he had spent a few lazy days with Joan and his mother. He wrote to Betjeman, telling him he was reading his second volume of poetry, Continual Dew: A Little Bit of Bourgeois Verse, ‘which I hadn’t seen for a long time: it brings some sanity into one’s unreal life’.2
Soon, though, Graham left England once again, this time for North Africa, where Operation Torch had successfully driven out the Axis powers in late 1942. The region was to be the base for the Allied invasion of southern Europe in 1943. Its strategic importance had also led to Joan’s posting there in January of that year. Graham’s ‘unreal life’ continued, although he and the others entertained one another with their letters, and Graham remained the aesthete.
In April 1943 he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones from Algeria.
My dear Alan,
I can’t remember if I have written to you or not since being out here. I know I wrote on the ship but that letter went to the bottom with everything else.
There’s a good deal one could say if it were not for the censor & pretty funny some of it is. Life on the whole though is rather a bore here: work is copious and enjoyable, relaxation and fun non-existent. Patrick Kinross arrived for a few days from Cairo about a month ago with the most unsettling tales of gay life there, great apartments, parties & fun, with Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Rommy [Romilly] Summers et al [. . .]
Joan was here for a short time, as you probably know, but left for Madrid which she says is full of grand tarts and spies. I wonder how she will enjoy Lady Hoare’s knitting parties for the female personnel?
There is no-one of fundamental interest & one goes drearily to bed at about 8.30 on those nights when there is no work to bring one back to the office.
Write me a word about yourself – let me know if you know anyone new coming out.
Bless you, Graham3
After Algiers Joan was redeployed to the British embassy in Madrid, a city which was a hotbed of intelligence and counter-intelligence. She probably already knew the ambassador and his wife. In 1936, Sir Samuel Hoare, a cool, rather prim man had succeeded Joan’s father as First Lord of the Admiralty; his ambitious wife, Lady Maud, was Coote Lygon’s aunt. Spain under General Franco was ideologically aligned with the Axis powers, which had supplied both soldiers and material to the Nationalists in the Civil War. When Hoare arrived in Spain in 1940 Italian and German fascists were deeply entrenched in every walk of life. The embassy staff were overworked and overcrowded. Three years later, when Joan came to Madrid, the political tide had begun to turn. After the defeat of Stalingrad early that year and the fall of Mussolini in July, Franco had begun to realize that an easy German victory was much less likely.
Madrid gave Joan time to think and to reflect on her marriage. She was aware that John was still trying to go abroad – he was even trying to learn a little Italian. He no doubt had in mind the planned Allied landings in Italy, and the likelihood of his being posted there the following year. In October, she wrote to him from the city.
Darling – it is really appalling how quickly the time goes here & it is with horror I realize that I have been away nine months now – I am filled with the guilt at the easiness of my life here & at the thought of starting another winter coping with flats and rations by yourself. I do hope Is is staying with you. Anyway I really am about to make great decisions and changes (if situation allows) as much as Madrid grows on me it is a great waste of time being here & doing the work I do – There are two things I want to know first –
(a) how much chance is there of your leaving London in the future? (I know I keep asking you this but as I haven’t heard what you are doing for so long I thought you might have more plans.) There is nothing I should hate more than to arrive in London to find you leaving for Rome.
(b) a much more difficult question & I promise you that this isn’t the first & preparatory letter of a long series on the same subject – Do you really want to start our same old life again? I know this sounds as if I’m making you take all responsibility and decisions, but I’ve tried and can’t and I think it is you who would benefit more by a change than me, as I shall have the same difficulties and disagreeable habits such as putting the blame on other people, whatever I do. It is hard to write like this and not let absence influence me and I am sure I am always nicer away, but I’m afraid when I come back everything will be the same and I shall be as bad-tempered as ever. Another point is I shall never like living in England. I am trying to put all the difficulties & everything in its worst light & it is torture not being able to see you to discuss everything altho’ I’m sure we should never arrive at a decision.
Do please write to me. You must be off your head with work. I have been in bed with sinusitis but better now. I’ve taken to bull-fights. English names going back on hotels & shops & English photographs & ads in papers. Falange crowd on F.’s birthday still shouting Franco-Hitler.
I’ve hated writing this letter & now feel most miserable.
My Love JR4
Joan uses John’s own ‘JR’ monogram as her signature; it was as if she was demonstrating that she still felt tied to him, and even in love. In her most intimate letters – to JR and later to Paddy – Joan made two complaints about herself: her bad temper and her indecisiveness. This letter still reflects the thoughts about herself that she had turned into doggerel in her 1936 pocket diary:
Can you pull the plug?
on the bed? Or neath the rug?
at the keyhole? Crowds? Alone?
‘I don’t know’ cries Schizo Joan.
Many years later, looking back on the failure of her first marriage, she wrote simply that, in one another’s absence, ‘we gradually drifted apart.’5
Patrick Kinross found the outbreak of war unexpectedly liberating. He had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1940, when he was thirty-six. Writing to James Lees-Milne he seemed carefree. The pilots at RAF Bomber Command were:
not at all the hoary toughs I had expected, but sensitive, pink-faced striplings, very affable and impressed by one’s superior intellect [. . .] Now I am back in the Air Ministry in the Middle Eastern Department, which is quite interesting. I don’t know where I shall sail, but it may not be for another few weeks, I may go to Fighter Command for a week in the meantime. So I am getting a fairly comprehensive picture of Air Force matters. Tonight I am going to see Lord Lloyd [of Dolobran] again, & I am hoping he will do something for me in Egypt.
But, as with Joan and JR, Kinross’s marriage to Angela Culme-Seymour had also failed. Angela was incorrigibly promiscuous. On the death of her father-in-law she had travelled up to Scotland for the funeral sharing a sleeper with a painter called ‘David something’. Patrick had been hopelessly naive ever to think about marrying her. His letters continued:
Meanwhile, Jim, my private life is at an end. I have discovered
a whole host of infidelities by Angela over the past year or more, and I don’t really see that it is any good going on with it. It seems she is incorrigible & perhaps a little mad. I thought that I was going to be able to make some sort of a job of her, but I see that I have failed, & that perhaps I could never have succeeded. It is time for somebody else to take it on – if she can find it on . . ., I suddenly found – or at least thought I didn’t love her any more. I don’t know what will become of her. I shall divorce her if I can get the evidence, but may have to wait until after the war [. . .] Thank God I am going to Egypt & a new life & interests. What a life. What a war. But I regret nothing. It is all experience.6
When Patrick wrote again to Lees-Milne it was as Pilot Officer the Lord Kinross, c/o RAF HQ Middle East, Cairo. He told him he sometimes still felt waves of resentment against Angela but he was far more detached than he had been a few months beforehand. ‘She was like a cat who basked there for a bit enjoying the cat’s prerogative, serenity without responsibility, and then slipped out.’
Patrick also wrote about Robert Byron, who had drowned a couple of days before his thirty-sixth birthday when his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat off Cape Wrath in Scotland on its way to Egypt. ‘I wonder if he would have achieved anything, with all his dynamic qualities, or if his lack of judgment & balance would always have frustrated him. One will miss him tremendously after the war. Of all one’s friends, he was the strongest personality.’ And he had seen Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s son. ‘He was nice, much improved by military discipline. Obviously like Tom Mitford and so many others, he should always have been in the Army, and in any other generation would have gone into it as a matter of course.’7 But only weeks before the war ended, Tom Mitford died too, of injuries sustained in Burma. He was thirty-six. ‘It is almost unbearable,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Jessica, ‘if you knew how sweet & nice & gay he has been of late & on his last leave.’8
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