Joan

by Simon Fenwick

  Poor Paddy

  Ton Hispano Mauresque

  Consolation P.S. I know the conclusions you draw from rude attacks. You may be right.25

  Ines Walter, an habitué of Tara as well as a confidante of Denise, was described by Stanley Moss as ‘enormously décolletée, happy in the role of a Hungarian peasant’.26 She was also engaged to Bernard Burroughs, a diplomat.

  By February 1945, when Paddy had returned to England for extended leave, Denise had accepted that Joan was a rival. However, he had sent her a pair of earrings (‘an enormous success . . . I practically sleep in them’):

  Yesterday Joan and Eddie came to lunch, & Xan and Inez [sic]. I thought it was a good lunch, and it certainly was a very gay one, as nobody thought of leaving before 4.15. I retract all I ever said about Joan, she is a very charming girl, I regret to say I will always be slightly jealous of any serious rival, however charming she may be. I do really like her a lot, and have made plans to see more of her.27

  Joan made only intermittent entries in her new pocket diary. On 6 January 1945, her first entry for the year, she wrote, ‘Grumbling & disappointed of small things = treats arranged for oneself to compensate for unhappiness.’ However much she was attracted by Paddy, this was still wartime, and all relationships seemed up in the air. There was little certainty of any future for them; Paddy was hoping to go to the Far East – as Xan was to do – where the war was far from finished. And Joan had yet to extricate herself from her own unsatisfactory marriage to a man for whom she still had lingering affection. On the pages of her diary she jotted down notes on ‘differences between Jung and Freud’ and details of a trip to Beirut in February. She frequently arranged to lunch and dine with Patrick Kinross. She also mentioned Denise and, on one occasion, the Aga Khan. The names of Robin Fedden and his wife Renée and Amy Smart appeared often, and they became friends with whom she remained on close terms for many years after the war. Robin Fedden was both a Quaker ambulance driver and a magazine editor. Amy Smart was a painter – her paintings inspired by Sufism – born into a Syrian–Lebanese Christian family. Amy’s mind, Kinross said, was at once masculine, oriental and feminine,28 and she and her husband Walter surrounded themselves with artists and writers.

  At the end of April, Denise wrote again to Paddy.

  I had a long letter from Joan – she says she’s written to you post haste. Her plans are still very vague, as both Aly [?]* and her in laws are going to Kenya, and she’ll decide afterwards. She disapproved of your idea of going to the Far E. because, she says, of your health. Also rather depressed me by saying that the only commodity left in England was sex with a big S so I suppose my darling you won’t be finding life too difficult.29

  Joan went on leave, travelling by train from Beirut to Damascus, and from there she went to Baghdad, where she attended a party before taking another train to Kirkuk. In Kirkuk, she visited the museum. She was now in Iraqi Kurdistan. Over the following week she took photographs and made notes in her diary, which she used for writing a long account of her journey into the mountains of Rowanduz, with the apparent intention of publication.

  The railway ends in Kirkuk, a Kurdish town in N.E. Iraq, and there among the Iraqis in uniform or Arab Dress, one sees groups of Kurds dressed in their baggy trousers, long coloured sashes and fringed turbans. The young dandies often with a pink rose in their mouths [. . .]

  The food was Turkish and delicious, rice and meat dishes, eggs, chickens, once a large fish shot in the river with a revolver, flat pancake-like bread, combs of wild honey, and to drink – mastaw, fresh curds mixed with water and snow and between meals innumerable cups of coffee or tea from a samovar.

  The next five days were spent travelling in the road-less mountains with our host, his three brothers and a bodyguard of Kurds which grew as we went along, riding or running in front of us, always charming and gay, singing or dancing when we rested and rolling about with laughter at the slightest cause. We rode all day over very mountainous country, fording (once swimming) rivers or crossing ravines by perilous bridges that seemed to be made only of twigs and mud; twice we rose in pitch dark (the oriental lack of punctuality made us start hours late every morning), along the edge of precipices, torrents roaring somewhere below and enormous ferocious sheepdogs rushing howling at us from the few habitations we passed. At the end of the day we came to some relation’s house, vast meals were produced from nowhere and the Kurds slept on the floor in their cloaks, their rifles beside them.

  The country was always superb; meadows of long green grass and flowers, irises, hyacinths, tiger lilies, rivers of every sort, walnut and cherry trees growing round the villages huddled in deep valleys, oak forests full of wild boar, rocky gorges and steep bare mountains and always, as a background, the huge snow capped mountains on the Turkish frontier. And the Kurds were always singing of fighting or love, or discussing their independence.

  By the time Joan returned from Kurdistan a week later, the war in Europe was at an end.

  Paddy was still away. After two months in England, during which time he was awarded an OBE at Buckingham Palace, he was deployed briefly in Germany and Denmark. His VE Day was spent in London, however, far away from Joan. No letters between the two remain from that time but clearly they were still in touch. Xan was now in the Far East. Paddy applied to join him but was rejected – perhaps because of his health; there was no lack of unemployed ex-servicemen looking for work and Paddy, demobbed, was one of them. Joan took him home that summer to meet her family but they must have wondered about his prospects. Joan herself of course was still a married woman, if in name only.

  John had returned home to England for convalescent leave and treatment on his back shortly after the accident in November 1944. At Christmastime he was well enough to go to Paris with Isabel, and he skated along the banks of the Seine in his plaster cast. On New Year’s Day 1945, he flew back to Italy. Isabel took a job in Paris working for the BBC and Radiodiffusion française, and visited her friends from pre-war Paris: Balthus, Picasso and Braque. She was now divorced from Sefton Delmer, and she wrote to John suggesting marriage. They could live abroad but retain a ‘niche’ in England. ‘There is a great deal to be said for legality [. . .] I was thinking how odd it will be when we are officially encouraged to be together rather than, as at present, frustrated whenever possible.’30 John, however, had been offered a post in Ceylon with the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia which, despite Isabel’s anxieties about his fitness, he was determined to take. In July, he sent a telegram suggesting she come to London for a few days. By then, however, Isabel felt that the relationship was over. She seemed to believe that he lacked the will to continue with it. In her memoir she wrote:

  Time to go and a time for tears. Saying goodbye to John was extremely painful: I suffered more than he did. The future was a large hole, once inside what would I find as the ship slowly drew away from the quay. I looked down between a large eel curving its way beside us: amazing creature born in the Sargasso Sea now here.31

  John would have flown to Egypt, so the image is a metaphor. Isabel stayed on in Paris, waiting for Giacometti. One evening eight years beforehand, when she had last modelled for him, he had seen her from afar standing in boulevard Saint-Michel – a distant figure surrounded by space. For the whole of the war, even in her absence, in his mind she had remained his muse. She had received a letter from him written in Geneva and dated 14 May 1945. It was their first correspondence in five years, and she quickly replied. He immediately noticed how Isabel’s handwriting had been altered by John’s lessons in Elizabethan calligraphy.

  On his way to Ceylon, John stopped off in Cairo, perhaps to see whether there was hope of rescuing his marriage to Joan. However, as she had already told him when she was in Madrid, she was not ready to return to England. She had made plans of her own: in September she was going to Athens to work as a secretary to their old friend Osbert Lancaster, who was now the press attaché at the British embassy. No doubt, if she had not already
made it clear, she must have told him about the place Paddy had in her life. And so Joan and JR agreed to divorce. He carried on to Ceylon to join Lord Mountbatten’s staff in their headquarters, which were in huts ranged across the botanical gardens in Kandy. He barely had time to settle into his job as head of psychological warfare before the Japanese forces in South East Asia surrendered on 12 September. Mountbatten then transferred to Singapore taking many of his staff, including John, with him.

  8

  Athenian Adventures

  As the Germans started their retreat from Greece in October 1944, rival leftist and pro-monarchist parties within the country began their descent into civil war. Before long, much of Greece came under the sway of the Communist National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing, the National Popular Liberation Front (ELAS); together they threatened the weak, newly installed provisional government with their long-term intention of transforming Greece into a Soviet-style state. The first shots in the Battle of Athens were fired on 3 December 1944, during a huge demonstration in Syntagma Square outside the Greek Houses of Parliament, where demonstrators waved flags and chanted EAM slogans. More than twenty people were killed, and many more wounded. Although at the time there was a small British military presence to maintain order and oversee much-needed relief supplies, nothing could have stopped the communists from taking over the territory they controlled, even though Stalin seemed happy to respect Churchill’s romantic care for Greece, so long as he had free rein in eastern Europe and the Balkans. There was much hostility towards the British presence in Greece in both the British and American press. Unfortunately, the British ambassador, Rex Leeper, had made matters worse through his tactlessness and by berating the correspondents for the way they had reported the events.

  As a consequence, the Foreign Office decided to send out an official press attaché, and the man they chose was Osbert Lancaster. There could have been no better choice. Osbert had spent the war at the Ministry of Information – a department he described as ‘a Home of Rest for Intellectuals in war time’1 – monitoring German news bulletins and briefing journalists for the Foreign Office. He had also continued to work as a cartoonist. His pocket cartoons featuring Maudie Littlehampton, which John Rayner had encouraged him to draw for the Daily Express, as well as other propaganda drawings had captured the mood of the nation.

  Primrose Leeper, the ambassador’s wife, feared the worst on being told that Osbert was coming to Athens. She had heard the name, but expected someone highbrow and precious. In fact, he fitted in wonderfully even if, with his bulging eyes, handlebar moustache and loud, checked tweed jackets of the sort worn by bookies, he cut an extraordinary and incongruous figure at the embassy. Although Osbert’s job was actually to muzzle the press, his briefings, his frankness, his idiosyncratic manner and sense of humour so baffled and charmed the correspondents that they went out of their way to attend. Despite the Americans often finding his British accent incomprehensible, after Osbert’s arrival press relations improved markedly. His experience gave him a rare ability to talk on equal terms with the embassy, the Foreign Office and the military as well as with the press, for, at heart, he was one of their number.

  On Boxing Day 1944, after four weeks of chaos, Churchill flew into Athens and arrived at the embassy still wearing his air force overalls. He stayed three days. A conference of warring parties, including ELAS, was hastily summoned and a truce agreed.

  As a gesture to show their growing confidence in the Greek government, the Athens branch of the British Council was reopened. The British Council had been set up in 1934 – as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries – in order to promote the English language and an interest in British culture across the world, as well as a sympathetic appreciation of British foreign policy. Athens was one of its early branches, and it was also the last to close during the war, having been evacuated only in 1941, when local staff destroyed its office records to protect themselves from persecution. In the spring of 1945, Maurice Cardiff, an ex-SOE officer who had spent the last months of the war working with the communist resistance in the Aegean Islands, was summoned to the British military headquarters. Here he found Colonel Kenneth Johnston, whom he had known in Cairo, busy stuffing files into a briefcase. To his considerable surprise, Cardiff found himself being asked to take over the running of the Council, an organization of which he had scarcely heard and which had nothing to do with the army.

  Johnston had been recalled to London, and was due to leave by plane within the hour. As he talked he went on filling his briefcase, and when he finally snapped it shut, he led Cardiff down the corridor, still talking, to the lift. In the entrance hall, he at last stopped and asked Cardiff if he would accept. Smiling encouragement and with an assurance that everything would be all right, Johnston ran down the steps and dived into the car which was waiting to take him to the airport.2

  Another of Colonel Johnston’s last-minute instructions to Maurice Cardiff had been to find accommodation in the centre of Athens suitable for use as an Institute of Higher English Studies, and after considerable searching he found an appropriate building. He drew £14,000 sterling in gold sovereigns from the bank and took it to the lawyer’s office in a small suitcase, completing the deal over cups of Turkish coffee as they counted the gold and arranged it in little piles on the lawyer’s desk.3 As Cardiff settled in to his daily work at the British Council office, he found himself bombarded by letters from London advising him of the imminent arrival of additions to the staff, either to assist him in Athens or to set up outposts in Salonica, Patras or elsewhere,

  The new institute’s director was Rex Warner, a powerfully built man of, in Cecil Day-Lewis’s words, ‘Homeric boisterousness’. A classicist and a writer of acclaimed modernist novels, he added a certain prestige and gravitas to the institute and the Council that funded it. The staff found him genial and popular and apparently ‘rock-like’. Back in London, Paddy Leigh Fermor was looking for a job which would take him to Greece in order to be with Joan, who was already in Athens. When Colonel Johnston set about recruiting a deputy director to work with Warner, Paddy immediately applied and was accepted; he might have lacked a university education or office experience but he had other assets – not least his knowledge of Greek and the fact that he was a hero of the Greek Resistance. In many ways, Paddy was the exact opposite of Warner. There was nothing rock-like about him, rather what Cardiff perceived as ‘a restless vitality’, and ‘a readiness to take on anything mentally or physically, which left no doubt of his being able to prove, if needed, a sterling champion’.

  In early November, Joan wrote to Patrick Kinross, telling him how much she already felt at home in Athens.

  Darling Patrick,

  Thank you so much for your letter and I adored reading Penelope [Betjeman]’s which I herewith return. What an extraordinary person she is and how I long to see her again. She certainly seems to have solved the almost impossible problem of how to be happy but I’m not sure how you and I together would have appreciated domestic life in a vicarage.

  I am furious that I missed Tom [Driberg]. Has he still got that delicious moustache on top of his head?

  I can’t complain as I’m having a gay time here and I do think Greece comes up to all my expectations. There is also a delicious pagan atmosphere of NO GUILT, which I appreciate very much, having suffered too much of it on account of my up-bringing.

  I am seriously setting about getting a flat now, as the Grande Bretagne has turned into a terrible totalitarian military barracks, and Military Controllers burst into my room whenever I am in bed for a day saying; ‘This is a military billet and not a private hotel and you will get up for dinner or go straight to hospital.’ Needless to say, with a little judicious bribery, meals are brought to me all day long but I am beginning to suffer from persecution mania. You must come and stay in the spring, when I hope to have a yacht too. (This is the most bloody typewriter I have just been lent and you must not judge my secretarial powers
by this.)

  Osbert sends you his love. He is very nice to work for but I hardly know him socially, on account of my lowly position I suppose. However I can’t say I am sorry as I don’t find Embassy or Brit. Council sets particularly amusing. Paddy arrived last week which adds to the general exhaustion of taverna life, and Francis Noel Baker* is here again, but he is surrounded by Ambassadors, ministers and sinister agents the whole time.

  I haven’t forgotten your retsina, but it is impossible to send it by bag and I am waiting for an accommodating friend to bring you some. Up to now it has been difficult to send as all the new wine is starting and one drinks it still fomenting and it is no good for travelling. I hope your ibis is well. I feel very nostalgic about your delicious Sunday lunches in the garden. All descriptions of England sound too gloomy, except from a Betjeman point of view. Poor Graham had a cold, guilt, indigestion and melancholia the whole time he was there. I feel like staying on here if I could get some land somewhere, as I am getting very tired of work. I can’t think of a more beautiful place to live. Tell Eddie [Gathorne-Hardy] this too and give him my best love and say I am writing again.