9
From Curzon Street to the Caribbean
At the beginning of 1947, Joan and Paddy came back to an England in the midst of a harsh winter. It was bitterly cold. By the end of January, roads and railways were blocked by drifts of snow, power stations began to close for lack of coal and the electricity supply was restricted to nineteen hours a day. Bread, which had always been available during the war, was rationed for the first time because of a disastrous harvest the year before. For adults, there was a weekly allowance of a shilling’s worth of meat and one egg. Should the meat turn out to be tough, the ‘Advice for the Housewife’ column in the Listener recommended adding a tablespoonful of vinegar to the water before boiling. There were endless variations on how to use dried egg to make savoury sandwiches. The machines for dispensing sweets on station platforms had all rusted up from disuse. It was almost impossible to find suitable accommodation, and it was more than two years before Paddy and Joan were offered anywhere satisfactory. In the meantime, together with Xan, they took what Joan called ‘a hideous, furnished, tart’s flat’ at 11a Curzon Street, directly over Heywood Hill’s bookshop.1
‘Have you seen Joan? How is she?’2 John Rayner wrote to Tom Driberg at the very end of March 1947. Two days later the divorce nisi was granted on the grounds of his adultery with Isabel Delmer. The suit was not contested, but the solicitor had been negligent, hence the delay. Rayner was now living in Australia, ‘a land of milk, butter, honey, steaks, oysters, peaches, tweeds, woollens, books, sun, sea, kindness, geniality, the well-fed & well organised communist brake on industry’.3 He had been anxious for the divorce to come through as soon as possible, for he was both arranging marriage to a new wife and booking her into hospital for their first baby. John had met Miranda Lampson in Singapore, where her uncle, Lord Killearn, was high commissioner. Killearn had been British ambassador to Egypt in his previous posting, and Joan already knew Miranda, who was slightly older than her. Joan’s divorce from JR was just one of over 47,000 that year – it was a peak year for post-war divorces.4 She wanted it to happen, but when it actually came through she was unsettled by it. For Miranda, it was a great relief, and on 7 May she and John were married in Sydney. Their first son was born legitimately a week later. ‘Now grunting beside me is Mr. John Peregrine Rayner, a very nice little boy,’ John wrote to his mother, who regretted that his parting from Joan had caused ‘talk’.
Now that they were no longer soldiers in uniform, Paddy and Xan were keen to get started as writers, and they pulled all the strings they could. Xan, who lacked the anchor of Joan, was wondering what to do with his life, and wrote to Maurice Bowra. Bowra replied, regretting that he was unable to help.
I was extremely sorry to hear of the failure of your plans, especially after everything here had been fixed. I saw Birley* the other day and told him about it, and he was clearly most eager to help and will talk to the Ministry of Education people about you. But I have no great hopes of these bureaucrats. Anyhow do nothing in a hurry about going to Peru or Annam in case something turns up.
Joan and Paddy came here on a royal visit, Paddy wearing a most eccentric cloak – a priest’s or a goatherd’s I can’t remember which, and carrying a bottle of whisky. They were both in very fine form and fitted well into our academic atmosphere but then Joan was always very high-brow, and I am sure Paddy won scripture prizes before he was sacked for fucking the matron or whatever it was that led to his downfall. Glad you have met Pauline – one of the most eccentric girls I know, and I know a good many. Indeed sanity seems hardly to exist in the other sex.5
Paddy had bought his cloak from a shepherd in the Pindus mountains of Greece the previous year and it was typical of him to wear it. Bowra could never resist the temptation to be waspish. Joan and Paddy frequently kept different friends, and as far as Bowra was concerned, Paddy had intruded on his intimacy with his beloved Joan. Despite having much in common – a love of all things Greek, talking, war, medals and royalty – relations between Paddy and Bowra never really warmed. Across the road from Bowra’s Wadham College, however, Richard Dawkins, the eccentric professor of Byzantine studies and modern Greek, an honorary fellow of Exeter College and a man with an ‘inexhaustible liking for the young’,6 hero-worshipped Paddy and sent him innumerable badly typed fan letters.
In the September 1946 edition of Horizon, Cyril Connolly had published ‘The Cost of Letters’,7 the results of a questionnaire he had carried out among twenty-one contemporary writers. Questions included how much a writer needed to live on and, if he could not earn this sum by writing, what did he think was the most suitable second occupation for him? Inevitably, the answers varied greatly and frequently contradicted one another. Most estimates for living expenses were up to about £1,000 (£37,000 in 2016), with Elizabeth Bowen’s suggestion of £3,500 the most ambitious by far. Connolly gave his reasons: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and privacy, marry, buy books, travel and entertain his friends, a writer needs upwards of five pounds a day net.’ Graham’s ever-indigent friend, the artist Robin Ironside, was less hopeful: ‘As an aspiring critic, mainly of painting, I require, for the satisfaction of my aspirations and having due regard to the present cost of living, a net income of £15 a week, an amount I have never possessed and am never likely to possess. Because I am too poor, I have never been to Greece or to America.’ On contemplating a second career, John Betjeman wrote, ‘I can only speak for myself. I would like to be a station-master on a small country branch line (single track).’ Connolly’s own response was frank: ‘A rich wife.’
Paddy had no money of his own and when Joan and he first met he had published little. Joan may have believed in Paddy’s talent as a writer but others in her family were fearful that his motives were as much financial as romantic. Joan drew an income from the estate which was supplemented by photographic assignments. The Dumbleton estate had survived the depredations of war in reasonable health but she was not wealthy. Formerly Joan had had a husband with a well-paid position, but she was now providing financial assistance for a lover with considerable charm and good looks but few clear prospects. Although Paddy succeeded in selling magazine and newspaper articles and reviews, which helped get his name into print, the rewards were small, and in the early years of their relationship Joan was forever giving him cheques for £5 or £10 (£185–£370). To her family, their lives together seemed eccentric and rackety (‘my mother keeps asking me why I haven’t got any clothes and making suggestions about how to get them,’8 she wrote). When Joan went home to Dumbleton, she had to go to the estate office to collect the fare for her journey back to London, and this only changed when she came into an inheritance on the death of her brother Graham in 1993. As well as being a skilful avoider of responsibility, Paddy was always clueless about money. There were arguments and Joan’s patience was clearly tried, yet eventually she decided to be as liberal as she could be. In 1950 she wrote to Paddy from Dumbleton:
I propose to pay into your bank account £30 a month from June for the rest of the year & an extra £50 to start you off & then you need not have all this bother & hell of asking me. It sounds terribly little darling but I do think you ought to try & make some money for yourself – I can’t think why really but it would be much better for you from every point of view. Also it’s about half of what I really must try to live on. Please don’t think I’m doing this so that we can see less of each other but only so that we needn’t be so much bothered by it all.9
Paddy and Joan would have to live on £720 a year, plus whatever else they might earn from writing and photography – money was going to be tight.
All this made the idea of returning overseas seem more desirable. ‘Pudding Island’, as Lawrence Durrell called England with contempt, was grey, dreary and bomb-damaged. He wrote to Xan: ‘I had no idea you were back in England [. . .] I didn’t expect you’d reconcile easy to slow London. It’s an old man’s country – the island for contemplatives and quietists. I’ve no doubt you’ll find your way out to the Me
diterranean again.’10
The notion of ‘abroad’ represented liberation from all manner of British class conventions and inhibitions, as well as more definable things like warmth, sunlight, good food and good wine. It was also considerably cheaper.
The Betjemans invited Joan and Paddy to stay at their new home in Farnborough near Wantage. The Old Rectory was a large Georgian house with twelve acres of garden. John had insisted on buying the house because he was ‘potty’ about it. Situated amidst downland, ancient tracks and rolling cornfields, Farnborough had a population of just over a hundred and was the highest village in Berkshire. The water had to be fetched from a communal village pump and at night they used paraffin lamps. In the winter months the whole family huddled in the huge inner hall, which had once been a village schoolroom. But despite the lack of amenities and telephone there was ‘corking’ scenery across Watership Down, and there was also a library for Betjeman’s considerable collection of antiquarian books. Immediately after their visit, Joan and Paddy went to the Camargue for the Easter of 1947. Joan wrote to Penelope from her hotel in Les Baux, thanking her: ‘I did love staying with you so much & thank you a million times. I envy you your house & family so much, & you & John are just the wrong people to see before travelling – I feel like the Flying Dutchman.’ The Camargue turned out to be a disappointment – ‘pointless unless one rode about all day on a delicious white horse.’ The gypsies all lived in motor caravans with Aga cookers and maple furniture. The local wine was not good but it was a more lucrative source of income than bull breeding. Bulls were still bred for sport, but those that were left were for eating:
They were a special Camargue breed but Spanish bulls have been mixed with them a lot, until a fascinating old queer, The Marquis de Baroncelli de Javon, practically took over the whole Camargue. (Alas, he died aged about 75 a few years ago of a broken heart as the Germans had destroyed all his farm and house.) He stopped the mixed breeding & started again from the few remaining pure stock, and the same with the pure Camargue horses which were being interbred with Arabs . . . He must have had a wonderful life, dressed up in the cowboy clothes the guardians all wear, surrounded by the handsomest, worshipped by everyone in the Camargue but now he is dead. I suppose the ‘progress’ which he fought all his life will completely swamp what still remains of the real Camargue. It is lovely being in the south again & this place is perfect. Delicious food & masses of it for modest pension prices but nearly everywhere else is very expensive & bad. I far prefer a horse to a bicycle.11
In the summer of 1947, the publisher Lindsay Drummond Ltd engaged Costa Achillopoulos, a Greek photographer, to produce a book of pictures of the Caribbean. Costa, who had been brought up in Paris and England, was completely cosmopolitan. Tanned, with hair which had turned white overnight when he was twenty and green eyes, he seemed to have been everywhere and know everyone. In an age before mass travel he managed to sell his pictures without difficulty to magazines and newspapers, and together with his Rolleiflex camera, he was forever on the move. He was also amusing, self-deprecating and immensely good company. Paddy, who was a friend, was invited by Costa to go with him – he even offered Paddy his advance in order to make the voyage possible. Joan decided to accompany them, and in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands, the account he subsequently wrote of their travels, Paddy acknowledged Joan as the Egeria – or spiritual guide – of the journey, and Costa as ‘not only its photographer and painter, but our motive force that launched it, its only begetter’.12
Paddy, Joan and Costa set sail at the beginning of October on the Colombie, a French ship which had recently been refitted after wartime use, and for the next six months they wandered by boat and by plane through French, Dutch, British and American islands of the West Indies – Guadaloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, St Lucia, Antigua, St Kitts, St Eustatius, Saba, St Martin, St Thomas, Haiti and Cuba – to the point of exhaustion. Joan had her camera everywhere they went. When the photographs had been developed, she cut up the contact sheets and pasted the individual pictures into albums which Paddy used as aides-mémoires when he was working on The Traveller’s Tree. There are few references to Joan in his book, but Paddy includes a description as Costa and she wandered around the great cemetery in Guadaloupe. Joan had an enthusiasm for tombs and cemeteries which Paddy completely failed to share – especially when he was obliged to follow them in the baking heat.
Not even a dog was to be seen. But behind a tall crucifix stood a cemetery of such dimensions – Père Lachaise and Campo Santo gone mad – that, opening their cameras, Joan and Costa slid from their seats with sharp gasps of delight. For hours I trudged behind them round this blazing necropolis, down avenues of stucco vaults and tombs, Parthenons, temples of Vesta, and Chartres cathedrals, past urns and weeping angels, mournful marble Lucreces hung with brown wreaths and even shaded sometimes by evergreens white with dust, till they had seen and photographed their fill. These acres inhabited by the dead, these miniature halls and palaces and opera houses, were, it occurred to me, the real town, and the houses falling to ruins outside the railings were in the nature of a negligible suburb.13
By the time Joan had finished her third film with her last photograph – ‘an ochreous Aztec pyramid built round the faded photograph of a very old Negro in postman’s uniform’ – they left this city of mausoleums like ‘three pillars of fire’. ‘The dust that settled on our steaming faces turned us into zombies. It penetrated every orifice of the head and temporarily robbed us of all our faculties.’
Their feelings towards each of the Caribbean islands varied from one to the next, but the British island of Dominica with its pretty little capital of Roseau – ‘an Antillean Cranford’ – was one of the best. Little Union Jacks fluttered from the gables of the houses and ‘the brass plate of Barclays Bank gleamed in the morning air’. They visited the Free Library where ‘two young Negroes sat in the reading room, deep in the Bystander and Horse and Hound’, and Paddy wandered into the High Court, which was in full session. The Puisne Judge of the Windward Islands sat in his scarlet robe and wig under the Royal Arms, two ancient drums and a panoply of banners. An old peasant woman was being tried for murdering her husband with a hoe, and as Paddy entered the court an official was holding the weapon out for the inspection of the jury. It was like a scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland drawn by Tenniel.
The happiest part of their long odyssey through the islands was undoubtedly a prolonged stay at Pointe Baptiste, a house at the northern end of Dominica. They arrived one evening when it was growing dark and, turning downhill into a wooded hollow, they saw the windows of the house gleam through the tree trunks. After walking across the grass, they came to a large airy room and found drinks standing on a table amidst vast sofas and chairs and great quantities of books – ‘exactly the sort of library one sighs for anywhere’. They stayed at Pointe Baptiste with their hostess, Mrs Napier,* who was a member of the Dominican House of Representatives, many more days than was necessary, painting and reading and writing. When at last they left, they began to move back south for a journey into Carib country to visit a community of some of the original inhabitants of the islands, who had lived there before the Europeans arrived. The guide and head of the retinue was René, a lean and gentle young man who had studied divinity, and he was followed by three enormous porters who carried the luggage on their heads as they wound their way through the foothills of the volcanic mountain of Morne Diablotin.
From my position in the rear it was an impressive sight: René led the way, then came the porters, as slender and graceful as caryatids under their globular loads. Joan’s horse ambled after them, bearing a figure that looked as purposeful in its dark glasses and great straw hat as a mid-Victorian lady heading for the mission-field in Uganda. She was followed by Costa riding dreamily through the shadows in his sky-blue shirt and shorts, or alternatively, at pleasanter moments clambering up the glutinous pathway on foot.
The path grew level at last, and through a gap in the trees we could gaze from our lofty headland into a deep gorge downy with tree-tops. The sea reached inland between the steep sides of the canyon to meet the emerging sea.14
At length they came to a Carib settlement: a meeting with the last survivors of an almost extinct race of conquerors, which was as impressive in its way as if the encounter had been with Etruscans or Hittites. A young Carib threw down a dozen coconuts from a palm tree before sliding down the trunk with his cutlass in his hand. The king of the Caribs opened the nuts and offered his guests the milk. He regretted that Mrs Napier had not accompanied them because, as her chief constituent, he wanted to have a serious chat about island affairs. When at last Paddy, Joan and Costa got back to Roseau they found that the old woman arraigned for murder had been acquitted that very afternoon – to general satisfaction – condemned instead to a year’s imprisonment, and they were just in time to hear the fine summing-up of the Puisne Judge of the Windward Islands.
‘We have been to practically every West Indian Island, British, French, Dutch and American & my mind is, alas, not broadened, but battered out flat with travel,’ Joan wrote to John Rayner as she neared the end of the journey. ‘They are all very beautiful & all different, but a bit woolly and green to travel about in. All very well to stay beachcombing in one spot drinking rum and eating avocados under coconut palms by a phosphorescent sea. Haiti, of course, was far the most interesting. All the Voodoo Gods have great charm but I especially liked the chiefs of the Kingdom of the Dead – Le Baron Samedi, Le Général Criminel and le Capitaine Zombie.’15 Haiti – unfortunately for Paddy – also had a picturesque cemetery, as well as an undertaker’s with an assortment of headstones, crosses and coffins. Its signboard advertised the identity of the owner; at the top he had painted a little white tortoise, and at the bottom a death’s head. The burials were provided by a Monsieur E. La Tortue, L’Ami des Morts. All of this was once again enthusiastically photographed by Joan.
Joan Page 16