Joan Read online

  During the 1920s Joan grew up from a girl to a young woman. In the family photograph albums there are pictures of Joan picking lavender and paddling in streams with her family or with horses. In September 1923 she received a mention in the Gloucestershire Echo as runner-up as a skilful rider on a child’s pony in the gymkhana at Winchcombe Carnival – the local hunt met frequently at Dumbleton for, in so many ways, hunting was at the heart of local society. Nearly seven years later, in February 1930, Joan celebrated her eighteenth birthday. In April her photograph appeared in the Bystander, a weekly society magazine: ‘The Beautiful Second Daughter of Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell’. Joan had moved on from the pony club. She was ready to be presented to society.

  3

  Romance

  After his ignominious departure from Oxford in 1929, Graham returned home to Dumbleton in disgrace. Following the fiasco of his brief time in the army, this second disaster was a humiliation. Graham was twenty-four and in need of a proper career, but his next plan – to go to Paris and study to become a concert pianist – was regarded by his father with distaste. In June, just as his son and heir was shamed, he had been knighted. Sir Bolton was a worldly man with regard for his position in society and the social order. He liked women and the ‘smart set’ and had little time for any inferiority; he did not regard being a musician as either an appropriate or a sufficiently manly profession for a gentleman.

  Two of Graham’s closest friends, John Betjeman and Alan Pryce-Jones, suffered similar embarrassments. Betjeman left Oxford under a cloud at Christmas 1928, when it became obvious that he was incapable of passing his forthcoming exams. C. S. Lewis, his tutor, refused to give him a good reference and he was only rescued from his lowly teaching post when Maurice Bowra and other influential friends pulled strings for him. Subsequently, he was appointed assistant editor at the Architectural Review, a job to which Betjeman brought a genuine interest and enthusiasm, and which paid him a salary of £300 a year. Pryce-Jones’s career at Oxford was even briefer than Graham’s. (Alan’s mother had asked Betjeman to look after him at Oxford; Osbert Lancaster said it was like asking Satan to chaperone sin.1) After two terms, during which time he neither worked nor paid his bills, Pryce-Jones was sent home for breaking college regulations. His father was furious, his outrage made worse because Peter Watson had delivered Alan home in his Rolls-Royce, and greeted the Pryce-Joneses with hearty geniality before the storm broke. Alan’s father told him that he was unfit even to serve in the colonies, and he would certainly not be returning to Oxford. The following morning Alan had the good luck to encounter a friend who told him that Sir John Squire, the editor of a literary monthly, the London Mercury, was having his hair cut in the National Liberal Club. Alan introduced himself and was taken on as an unpaid assistant editor at the magazine.

  Despite a recent encounter with a French girl – which he had found disappointing – Alan was largely homosexual; he was, however, self-aware enough to know that for a charming young man, both his sexual ambivalence and his attractiveness could be a passport into social and literary success at what was to be the beginning of a lifelong literary career.

  Graham, who wrote to Alan regularly, started his studies in Paris with the best of intentions: ‘I work very hard: my newest piece is the 1st Intermezzo in the Brahms Op. 118, which I think is heaven, do you know these six pieces?’2 However, while Graham may have been, as Betjeman said, a ‘lovely and mad and kind old thing’,3 he was also very easily distracted, and had as little self-discipline as ever. Paris was more tolerant of homosexuality than London; men such as Proust, Gide, Cocteau and Diaghilev lived openly, without any of the fear of arrest which was a constant danger in England. The bars, nightclubs, parks and Turkish baths all offered opportunities for pick-ups. Graham wrote to Alan, who had very recently returned from South America.

  44 rue du Bac, Paris VII

  Alan dear,

  I hear from Arthur to-day that you are back in London: what joy!

  I had a charming letter from you a few days ago, but from somewhere so remote & improbable that it had little essence of reality. Come quickly to Paris & convince me you are still a fact.

  It is incredibly late & I should be in bed, but I have had a slight misunderstanding with my boy-friend (who is divine & who is, I hope – or perhaps I don’t, – asleep next door). It has set my nerves a-jangle and sleep seems out of the question just yet, so I have sat down to write to you now that you are once more accessible.

  Why does one have these tiresome malentendus when probably a few words would explain everything, yet neither will commit himself to an explanation? Why, indeed, does one have these affairs at all? Just as I thought I had finished with them for always, this creature came down my reach of the river; I got out my mildewed rod & line & chose the brightest of flies, – for, after all, it was spring – and proved myself not so inexpert as I should have thought I had become.

  That was a month ago, but alas, I feel it is one of those fishes which, even fried and filleted on the plate, will suddenly reconstitute itself & slip back into the cool of the river. A little further down one will find the next fly thrown & taken.

  La, countess, how I do prattle & to be sure! I was delighted to hear about the nimble little alpacas: they must be a constant source of delight to the earnest student of nature.

  When does your book come out? and who is publishing it? for I must begin at once to collect your first editions: I hope it will be a limited edition; one day they will say, ‘Really, a Jones first edition’ or ‘By Jove, a 1931.’

  I am getting light-headed from too many cigarettes & too many aspirins. Write to me soon, my dear, or better come in person.

  Very much love, Graham.4

  Joan wanted to visit her brother but could not think of a way without her parents knowing. She had now left school and returned home to Dumbleton. From her eighteenth birthday in February 1930 and over the following months Joan came out in society. Her name began to appear regularly in small print in the long, dense columns of the Court Circular in The Times and in the society pages. As was expected of upper-class young women, she attended the balls and social events, which were regarded as a means of introduction to suitable and marriageable bachelors. She went to Buckingham Palace to make one of the deep curtseys she claimed were her sole legacy from her years at St James’s: it was as if her whole life had been leading up to that moment. In early June, Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell gave a dance in their London home for Joan, her sister Diana and a cousin. The garden was walled in with trellis work and rambling roses to provide extra space and its roof covered with blue material and electric lights to simulate the sky and stars. ‘A realistic moon “obliged”, and Chinese lanterns added to the gaiety of this pleasant supper room,’5 prattled the Cheltenham Chronicle. A studio photograph was taken of Joan in her three-tiered dress, of a very virginal white and silver, holding an ostrich-feather fan in her hands. It is difficult to discern much enthusiasm in her expression for the role she was having to play. Although she was on the verge of becoming a professional photographer, she claimed that she always hated being photographed. Remarkably few pictures exist from her later years but in the 1930s she was to find it hard to resist the camera. Often she seems guarded and even awkward, but when she was at ease – animated and smiling warmly – the pictures are irresistible.

  Joan found such social occasions tedious. At one ball she attended, Edward, Prince of Wales was also present. It was a time when all of the future king’s clothes, social engagements and dance partners were endlessly discussed, and he was supposedly the centre of every debutante’s desires. Joan just walked away. The balls were uncomfortable for at least one other reason. Joan had inherited her mother’s myopia, and was so short-sighted it was difficult for her to recognize people across a crowded room – of course no young society woman of that time would be seen dead in glasses, let alone be photographed wearing them. After Joan’s father was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in November
1931 the family moved to Admiralty House. Joan used to escape by its underground passages and slip out to the parties in Bloomsbury, which were much more fun. Taking part in the London season did, however, allow Joan to meet two girls, Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Cresswell and Dorothy ‘Coote’ Lygon, who were to remain friends for the rest of her life. Billa was the daughter of an officer in a Norfolk regiment who had been killed in action at Mons in 1914, when she was only three. Her mother’s remarriage to another officer, General Sir Peter Strickland, meant that Billa’s early years had been peripatetic, because of her stepfather’s postings. Billa, who was plump, dark-haired, bossy and very funny, was educated privately then briefly at the Sorbonne; afterwards she became a wardrobe mistress at various London film studios. Coote Lygon was the sixth of the seven children of Earl and Lady Beauchamp of Madresfield in Worcestershire. Her father had a distinguished political career; he was made Governor of New South Wales at the age of twenty-six, before serving as Lord President of the Council in Asquith’s Liberal government of 1910. He was appointed Knight of the Garter and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports four years later, and from 1924 he had been leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. While all her brothers and sisters were good-looking, Coote was plain, with a round face and thick glasses. Her dim, unmaternal mother had left her unprepared for life, and Coote was hopelessly unsophisticated. But she was sweet-natured, caring and intelligent. Her natural discretion was responsible for her nickname – her family said that she reminded them of the hymn ‘God moves in mysterious ways’, which they believed, wrongly, had been written by a ‘Mrs Coote’.

  Not every society ball turned out to be tedious however, and in the winter of 1931 Joan met Alan Pryce-Jones. A party of sixteen had gathered over a long, champagne-filled weekend for a hunt ball at the Lygon Arms in Broadway, Worcestershire. They had originally intended to stay at Dumbleton Hall, but there had been a change of plan. After dancing till five in the morning, the party were still wearing their dressing gowns when they breakfasted the following afternoon. Alan’s sexuality was not wholly unambiguous. Although he quite possibly had been Graham’s lover, he could be swayed – and that weekend he only had eyes for Graham’s sister, Joan. Joan and he fell in love. Many years later he would write about her:

  She was very fair with huge, myopic eyes. Her voice had a delicious quaver – no, not quite a quaver, an undulation rather, in it; her talk was unexpected, funny, clear-minded. She had no time for inessentials; though she was a natural enjoyer, she was also a perfectionist whom experience had already taught to be wary. I was twenty-three when we met; she barely twenty. For the next two years we spent as much time together as we could, hampered only by family disapproval.6

  Alan, in retrospect, saw himself as ‘a very young man, full of affectation . . . too poor, too unsporting, too non-political, too unambitious except in the single realm of literature, and even then laziness and a natural triviality stood between me and fulfilment’.7 Such diffidence was also typical. He was good-looking, dapper, and he had perfect, if affected, manners. He enjoyed gossip, and he was funny and intelligent – all of which was of interest to Joan. Alan lived in a very small flat off the King’s Road which he had decorated in the bohemian fashion of the day – silver oilcloth curtains, unpainted wood furniture. On the walls, he had hung drawings by Duncan Grant and dry-points by Picasso. Everything was bought on a shoestring; he had very little money, although now that he was earning his father had at last relented and given him a small allowance. By 1931 he had started to make a literary career for himself. That year he published The Spring Journey, an account of his travels in Egypt and the Middle East with Bobbie Pratt Barlow, an old friend of his parents. People in the South, Alan’s next book, was a collection of three novellas based on his trip to South America, again with Barlow, and was published the following year, albeit to lukewarm reviews from the press. Alan would leave Joan just after he met her, having already arranged to sail with Barlow to Africa.

  Alan had a considerable talent for friendship. He brought John Betjeman into Joan’s world, who became one of her most intimate friends. John loved nicknames: he was ‘Betj’, Joan was ‘Dotty’, Alan was ‘Boggins’ and Graham, as he had been at Eton, ‘Groundsel’. Betjeman and Pryce-Jones first met at Magdalen when, as they passed one another going to and from the bathroom, John praised Alan’s unusual, cape-like dressing gown. Ever afterwards Alan entered into Betjeman’s private world, his love of literature, architecture, and the absurd: ‘He did not trouble to brush his teeth or change his shirt, yet he knew very well how to cast a spell. He was all response, like a piece of litmus-paper; and to people he responded brilliantly.’8 John was forever falling in love. In 1931, he had met Penelope Chetwode, who had just returned from India. Having written an article on cave temples in the Deccan, she took it to the Architectural Review for consideration, and John, although not remotely interested in Indian art, found Penelope intriguing – he was always excited by dominant women – and he agreed to publish the piece. Penelope, finding herself unexpectedly attracted to John, determined to meet him again. Penelope’s parents were not impressed by her journalist suitor – they were expecting at the very least ‘somebody with a pheasant shoot’. ‘My daughter’s got entangled with a little middle-class Dutchman,’ Lady Chetwode told her friends.9 Penelope soon found herself packed off back to India.

  On Alan’s return from Africa, Joan and he resumed their affair. He wrote in his diary:

  Am I in love with Joan? I suppose that question means that I am not. Or only in love with a beautiful ideal, with the perfect bathing dress, the most lovely face, the most elaborate evening-dress. She could not be more lovely; yet, could we be happy if she was as foolish as I fear she is?10

  As First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Bolton was now in the Cabinet. The country was in the midst of the Depression, and his expectations were similar to the Chetwodes’; he thought his daughter should marry a Tory with a future in deciding the affairs of the nation – or at the very least an understanding of it. His children were turning out to be a disappointment. His eldest daughter had so far failed to find a partner, his son was a pansy apparently unfitted for any manly profession and his second daughter also surrounded herself with bohemian types. Pryce-Jones was just another bad influence. Patricia, his last hope, was still at school. But the children had begun to feature in the press and were now public property:

  Graham Eyres Monsell . . . is paying a short visit to London from Paris, where he is studying music. I hear he has greatly impressed the last year. His debutante sister is most attractive and also amusing. Mr Eyres Monsell is noted for his wit and his hatred of conventional country life.11

  Meanwhile, Lady Eyres Monsell continued with her good works. In November 1932, just after making a radio appeal on behalf of the Disabled Men’s Handicrafts, she went to Devonport to launch a cruiser; having already launched two battleships this was her third boat of the year. Graham was on holiday in Boulogne. He wrote to Alan about his make-up and his sun tan. In the 1930s a decent sun tan was all the rage.

  It’s so long since I’ve seen you that I scarcely know where to begin. Perhaps with a piece of very important news: I have discovered the ultimate slap. Haggard & green I was, from – I regret to tell – having seen too much of Jeanette;* in desperation I rushed into a shop where they sold me some oil called Huile de Bronze of Molinard, after three days application of which, one’s face takes on such a South-of-France-tan as you can’t believe – entirely natural & doesn’t come off as the skin is stained! What do you think of that? All one needs is a little darkish powder to dust over one’s face, as one puts it on at night & washes off in the morning. Keep this to yourself, it is too good to give away [. . .]

  Do restrain Joan – it will all come back to me if she gets into trouble with my mother & it is not really worth it for those queens.12

  Joan and Alan were about to be separated again for two months since he was intending to stay abroad and write and so, despite G
raham’s cautionary note, he proposed. A couple of days before Christmas when Joan and her parents were to sail to Gibraltar for three weeks, the couple met for an evening out:

  We left the Café Royal in a taxi, and I suddenly asked her. She said ‘yes’. We drove to Admiralty House: then I said ‘St. Margaret’s, Westminster’ and the taxi took us there, while I could not mention the subject for fear she thought I was drunk when I asked her, or was joking: but in the evening at a party at Rosa Lewis’s, I dared speak of it and she was enchanting again [. . .] Since then I’ve alternated between rapture and despair – despair at losing my own freedom, rapture at the thought of her. Is she stupid? Am I perverted? Are we poor? Graham, to whom I called, and who is now in England, is not too pleased.13

  From Government House Joan wrote to Alan that she could not feel more miserable and depressed. She wished she loved him only a quarter as much as she did, as then the separation would not seem like years and years. Alan felt himself unable to stay away from her. He followed the Eyres Monsells a short time afterwards and they eventually met in Algeciras. His diary continues:

  Suddenly, while dressing for dinner, Joan appeared. ‘Darling!’ in at the door. I hurried down and asked her mother to a cocktail, terrified (but Joan had told her, I now knew and was not angry, but only apprehensive of what Sir B. might say). The cocktail was a success and we dined together, successfully too. Lady E.M. couldn’t be more charming, and with a hardness, or rather directness, behind the charm which I like. She is shy, and like all her children quite blind. I wished I could have cut my hair before she arrived.14