My darling wretch, you are as nearly perfect as can be...
BIOGRAPHY
JOAN: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF JOAN LEIGH FERMOR
by Simon Fenwick (Macmillan £25)
WHICH rather lucky woman managed to catch and keep hold of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the dashing travel writer who, while in Crete during World War II, famously managed to kidnap a Nazi general and was awarded an OBE for his heroism?
It was a woman called Joan. Not the most exotic of first names, but Joan Eyres Monsell, born in 1912, the daughter of Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell of Dumbleton Hall, Worcestershire, was not only stunningly pretty — ‘a beautiful ideal, with the perfect bathing dress, the most lovely face, the most elaborate evening dress’, as one suitor described her — she also stood out from the upper-class beauties of her day in that she supplemented her mean rich father’s allowance by earning her living.
She, like Leigh Fermor, was a roaming spirit, and the two beautiful people were, this book shows us, made for each other.
The smart boarding school Joan attended, St James’s Malvern, mainly taught her how to curtsy, but did have the redeeming feature of a photographic studio — and it was here that Joan acquired the skill in architectural photography that would become her means of liberation.
As a talkative, funny, clearminded girl about town, she became friends with many of the top non- sporty men of her generation: Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh — and John Betjeman, for whom she provided photographs for his Architectural Review.
Literary critic Connolly was more than half in love with Joan all his life and made many passes at her, to which she occasionally succumbed.
Reading this chatty, charmingly digressive and gossipy biography feels like spending an evening with that very crowd — everyone talking about who’s currently going to bed with whom, and it’s as often men with men as men with women.
Considering that active homosexual activity was a criminal offence, it’s impressive how much of it was merrily going on in the Thirties and Forties.
Joan’s brother, Graham, was known to be ‘a pansy’, much to the horror of their square father.
Sir Bolton does not come out of this book with great credit: he and Lady Eyres Monsell warmly invited Ribbentrop to Dumbleton for the shooting in 1936.
Ribbentrop presented them with a pair of dark-blue curtains embroidered with a swastika, and invited them to the Berlin Olympics later that year, where they met Hitler.
Joan first had to go through a wrong marriage before meeting Mr Right. Her first husband, John Rayner, was a journalist; they shared a love of ‘places, nature, music, art, reading, wine, good food . . . and cats’.
What could go wrong? Well, straight after the honeymoon, John became gravely ill with typhoid, and Joan had a miscarriage, which didn’t help. But mainly, the war broke out. Joan trained in encryption and worked at the embassy in Madrid. She and John drifted apart. It was in Cairo in October 1944 that Joan met ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor; he was then in a relationship with a French woman called Denise, who was pregnant with his child, which she aborted. She was insanely jealous, suggesting that Paddy needed to be kept on a leash like a Dachshund and accusing him of being so unfaithful that he didn’t just need a cinq à sept (a room for brief sexual encounters), but also a sept à neuf, neuf à minuit and another for midnight till dawn.
The attraction between Paddy and Joan was instant. So many love affairs in this book seem about as brief as the flame from a burning envelope and you expect this one to be — but somehow, miraculously, it lasts. The two were apart a great deal, but in their case, absence did make the heart grow fonder.
While Paddy was staying in a monastery in Normandy, supposed to be thinking monklike thoughts that he would eventually put into his masterpiece A Time To Keep Silence, he was also writing sexy letters to Joan: ‘At this distance you seem about as nearly perfect a human being as can be, my darling little wretch, so it’s about time I was brought to my senses.’
And: ‘ Don’t run away with anyone or I’ll come and cut your bloody throat.’
She tantalised him with descriptions of Cyril Connolly making passes at her; but she, like Denise, sounded a rather desperate note when she wrote: ‘I got the curse so late this month I began to hope I was having a baby and that you would have to make it a legitimate little Fermor. All hopes ruined this morning.’
It would be another 20 years until Paddy and Joan eventually married in a register office in 1968, and they never had a child. Joan had to satisfy her maternal cravings by being a devoted and attentive aunt.
In her commonplace book, Joan quoted Rilke: ‘The good marriage is one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude.’
There was always part of Paddy and Joan that shied away from crowding the other out.
During their long relationship, he did have one or two affairs, notably one with John Huston’s wife Ricki, who was killed in a car crash in 1969.
But fundamentally, Paddy and Joan depended on each other, in spite of occasional terrible rows.
PADDy
wrote in his diary when they were staying in Xanthi in Greece in the early Sixties: ‘Terrible row with Joan, like a storm breaking after an oppressive day. Now I’m alone in the square, she in tears in her room, both utterly miserable.’
It’s slightly shocking to see the way in which aesthetic types of those days thought it fine to sponge off their wives.
Being a published author, Paddy did not totally sponge off Joan, but when it came to their great dream of building a house in Greece, the money came from her. It was a stunning house overlooking its own little bay.
It had a beautiful library and countless cats — Paddy called them ‘ the down- holsterers’ because of the harm they did to the furniture.
‘What is time for?’ Betjeman wrote to them in a letter. ‘ To make things as beautiful as possible, as you have.’
In 2003, aged 91, Joan said to her friend Olivia Stewart, who was visiting: ‘I really would like to die but who’d look after Paddy?’ Olivia said that she would.
A few minutes later, Joan fell, hit her head — and died instantly of a brain haemorrhage.