12

At War with the World (1940–45)

“Pressed flat against the cellar wall, they listened to the inexorable throbbing of the planes. And above them, the house waited . . .”

—Jean Rhys, “A Solid House”¹

AGED FIFTY-FIVE IN 1940, Leslie Tilden Smith was too old to fly combat aircraft as he had done in the first war. Gallantly determined to do his bit for England, he volunteered and was commissioned as a pilot officer, a modest desk job ranking just above a midshipman in the naval equivalent. Evelyn Scott’s middle-aged English husband followed the same patriotic route: it’s possible that the Tilden Smiths met up with John Metcalfe after their move in February 1940 to Bircham Newton, an RAF base in the flatlands of north Norfolk. It was there, three months later, that Jean Rhys learned of the fate of the Netherlands.

Rhys had remained in touch with her daughter and Jean Lenglet for some months after Maryvonne’s return to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1939. Lenglet’s regretful letter about his failure to secure a French publisher for Good Morning, Midnight reached his former wife early in 1940; probably, he added a copy of an article written the previous summer in which “Edouard de Néve” (Lenglet’s pseudonym) had praised Rhys as a shamefully unrecognised novelist, one who regarded isolation as essential to her work: “cette solitude imposée à elle-même.”²

Lenglet had approved of Maryvonne’s return from England shortly after war was declared, believing that his own country was safe. On 10 May 1940, Hitler invaded the Netherlands. By the end of the month, the German occupation of the country was complete and all lines of communication were abruptly severed. Jean Rhys now daily faced the possibility that both her adored first husband and her only child were dead.

The first sign that Rhys was under stress emerged at Bircham Newton shortly after news of the German occupation of Holland. Laura, the protagonist in one of Rhys’s wartime stories, “I Spy a Stranger,” violently rounds on an officious male visitor for claiming that the WAAFS up at the station smelled. Rhys’s fiery real-life response to such an offensive comment may have been what proved her undoing.

No details survive, but while Leslie remained at the base, Rhys was hastily banished to West Beckham, a pretty little north Norfolk village situated close to woodlands and the coast—and also to a bomber-detecting radar station. Three village houses had been requisitioned for military use; Rhys was consigned to the former home of the housemaster at a local school. She was living there alone in the summer of 1940 when the first German bombers streamed overhead, targeting Norwich. Gazing upwards, how could Rhys not think of the bombs that Hitler had already dropped on Holland? Watching her—as wartime villagers would have watched the solitary, book-reading woman who now lived at the schoolmaster’s house—how could they not become suspicious?

Rhys had lived within the comforting anonymity of cities for all of her adult life. Even at Bircham Newton, however out of place she had felt there, she occupied the protected role of a spouse attached to the glowingly patriotic world of the Royal Air Force until—for whatever reason—she had disgraced herself. At West Beckham, Rhys felt more under scrutiny than Sasha Jansen had ever sardonically perceived herself to be in the Parisian bars of Good Morning, Midnight. Laura, spoken of as “that crazy foreigner” in “I Spy a Stranger,” suspects passing strangers of stopping to “gape” at her house and peer into her room (“or I think they can”). At West Beckham, Rhys shut herself in, closing the window curtains and—more practically—draping blankets over the doors: even in summer, Norfolk’s east wind carries the sting of a salted whip. She could not rid herself of the sense that the villagers, and even the house itself, were watching her—“seeing me as I really am.”³

The growing darkness of Rhys’s mood in 1940 emerges from the jungle of angry notes which she jotted to herself while living at the village house she renamed “Rolvenden” in the story “Temps Perdi.” One furious outburst was triggered by a cleaning woman’s failure to return Rhys’s greeting: “servants are much the worst, I always think,” snapped the thin-skinned colonial outsider, adding that “90% of the English have the souls of servants and the manners too.” Elsewhere, Rhys cursed the entire nation of England—“rot its mean soul of shit”—before trying to obliterate words that, if discovered, might incriminate her as the enemy. In three disjointed pages, headed: “The Kingdoms of the Human Ants, part of a lecture delivered when I was drunk from sadness,” she bitterly compared the innocence of young women (“beautiful & eager with a touching humility and charm”) to the harridans they must become: “drab spiteful cruel . . . you think how can I let these girls grow into these women.” Confiding her thoughts to these same private pages, Rhys noted her consciousness of being disliked and added a final prayer: “Let me not be like my father and mother do let me not they were so unhappy so dead. I want to be happy.”⁴

Later, reworking these thoughts into stories that were among the best she ever wrote, Rhys would acknowledge that most of her suspicions were groundless. “They don’t think or say anything that I would imagine they think or say,” she admitted of her West Beckham neighbours in the finished version of “Temps Perdi.” But the hostility that she sensed was real. On 1 August 1940, a Norwich newspaper published a tasty snippet about a woman who had pleaded guilty to the charge of behaving in a drunk and disorderly fashion on a public highway. Rhys’s married name was given in full; so was the location. So was the fact that an upstanding member of the West Beckham community had doused the obstreperous female with a bucket of cold water.⁵

Looking down at the soberly dressed woman in the dock, the magistrate heard that Mrs. Tilden Smith, prior to her arrest, had proclaimed herself a proud West Indian and denounced the English as “a b——mean and dirty lot.” A compassionate man, the justice gathered that she was distraught about the fate of her daughter, out in Nazi-occupied Holland. He imposed no fine. Rhys’s punishment was bad enough: she must continue to live among the villagers who had witnessed her arrest—and who noted that Mrs. Smith’s husband seemed in no hurry to join his wife.

In February 1941, following a modest promotion to the deskbound rank of flying officer, Leslie was relocated to work with the radar-detection unit near West Beckham. By March, for undisclosed reasons, Rhys had moved to lodgings in the Chapelfield area of Norwich. It was to escape her seemingly self-imposed isolation that she impulsively travelled south to the Colchester home of her old friend Peggy Kirkaldy.

The visit was not a success. Some friend of Peggy’s let slip a malicious comment about the Jamaican-born Eliot Bliss as exuding a certain odour. Eliot was a friend of Peggy’s, but it was Rhys who took loyal offence at a blatant ethnic sneer about her Caribbean compatriot. Evidently, there was a heated exchange with her hostess; certainly, by the time Rhys wrote to plead for understanding, and to lament her “hideous” life in Norfolk, Peggy felt no duty to respond. The result would be four years of silence.

Rhys returned to Norwich from Colchester on 20 March. Reading The Times a few days later, she came across a respectful obituary of one of the country’s leading financial figures. Lancey had played no part in Rhys’s life in Norfolk, where he himself lived in old-fashioned splendour at Garboldisham Hall, but she was still in possession of his friendly notes to her in Paris. She kept a couple of them, along with a flowing, high-waisted and prettily flowered robe to which she had granted a brief appearance in Voyage in the Dark, as Anna Morgan’s dinner-gown at the hotel in Savernake Forest. The dress, still in her wardrobe when Rhys reached her eighties, was a last reminder of the days when young Ella had imagined herself becoming Mrs. Hugh Smith: a genuine English lady; the cherished spouse of a rich and generous English gentleman: his petted kitten. Another time; another world.

Rhys would always maintain discretion about her periods of mental crisis. Some partly destroyed letters, drafted into the back of a diary that she kept after the war, suggest that she held her younger sibling Brenda responsible for despatching her to an asylum on the outskirts of Norwich.⁶ It’s conceivable that Rhys—like Laura in “I Spy a Stranger” and Teresa in “A Solid House”—had deteriorated enough by April 1941 to have been briefly committed by Leslie, with the consent of Rhys’s sister, to the gloomy mental hospital of St. Andrew’s in Thorpe, although the hospital had largely been handed over for the care of injured soldiers. No records survive from this period of the hospital’s history to allow Rhys’s claim to be checked.^*

Rhys was either due for release from St. Andrew’s, or was lodging elsewhere in Thorpe, when she begged her practical and well-connected friend Phyllis Shand Allfrey to find her some quiet sanctuary, away from a city under siege from the air. Phyllis gave the request careful thought before recommending an unusually literate Norfolk vicar, whose family were already housing several evacuees. His name was Willis Feast and his abiding interest was in modernist poetry. An informal drawing of Feast in 1940 by Wyndham Lewis (held in the Norwich Gallery Archive) shows a quizzical, intelligent-looking young man with slanting eyes set above high cheekbones and a narrow-lipped, appealing smile.

Phyllis had probably warned the Feasts that her friend was in need of a rest. It’s unclear whether she herself knew about the gravity of Rhys’s breakdown, but the Feasts went out of their way to make their visitor feel welcome. Rhys was housed in the best bedroom at Booton rectory, its long windows overlooking an old-fashioned garden shaded by the tall green trees that always reminded her of Dominica. Meals were brought to her room on a tray so that she could work in solitude. Later, in the afternoons, the visitor lounged under the low boughs of a garden elm (according to the recollection of Barbara, the vicar’s thirteen-year-old daughter), slowly leafing through For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s newly published novel about the Spanish Civil War. A cake was baked at the rectory to honour a birthday which the age-conscious and still girlish-looking Rhys is unlikely to have admitted was her fifty-first. Young Barbara Feast thought that a real lady would have buttoned her dress a little higher when visitors dropped by. She wondered, as all the household did, how anybody should be so astonishingly languid.⁷

Rhys’s indolence was not the only cause for concern at the rectory. Mr. Feast’s gentle enquiry about her real reason for going into the garden one day provoked a burst of rage that escalated to hysteria until the vicar’s wife, acting with imaginable satisfaction, gave their unapologetically contrary guest a hard slap across the face.⁸ By the middle of September, Rhys was back in Norwich, where a vicar from one of Willis Feast’s neighbouring parishes was taken to visit her. Although “hellishly angry” when the two priests arrived, a shared bottle of gin had apparently worked wonders. Rhys, after a drink or two, proved to be irresistible. Departing in a spirit of genuine regret, Eric Griffiths felt that he understood why Willis had been looking so dreamy of late: he had been hosting an enchantress.⁹

Rhys remained alone in Norwich throughout the autumn of 1941, dependent on the goodwill of hard-pressed and sharp-tongued wartime landladies, a breed whom she detested in part because she always felt that they were judging her. Teresa, in Rhys’s story “A Solid House,” is transfixed by “the hard bright glitter” of her landlady’s eyes; the English can seem friendly, Teresa reflects after a conversation with her fellow lodger, Captain Roper: “but hidden away, what continents of distrust, what icy seas of silence. Voyage to the Arctic regions. . . .”¹⁰ Teresa is said to be recovering from an attempt to kill herself; of Rhys, we know only that she was being seen by a doctor during her last months in Norwich. Louis Rose had trained as a doctor, but by 1940, he was living in Norwich while working as honorary psychiatrist to the Lowestoft and North Suffolk Hospital.¹¹ Rhys’s striking description of the twin spirits, one passive and meek, the other discordant and angry, who wrestle within two of the women in her wartime stories, Audrey in “The Insect World,” and Inez in “Outside the Machine,” suggests that a professionally trained view of her personality may have influenced the writer’s view of herself for a time. If so, it didn’t last.

In February 1942, Leslie and Rhys were reunited at West Beckham just long enough for Rhys to get her husband into serious trouble by shouting “Heil Hitler” while drinking in a country pub. Her outburst, especially shocking for emerging from such a reserved, softly spoken woman, was reported. Leslie’s superiors promptly removed him from Norfolk, packing him off to Bristol and then to picturesque Ludlow, once the capital of Wales. It seems that he was asked to leave the RAF; nevertheless, spending a summer holiday together at Oxwich Bay on the Gower Peninsula, Leslie and Rhys enjoyed a rare period of untroubled serenity. This particular part of Wales could always cast a spell: straying one summer afternoon into a field thick with golden cowslips, Rhys felt that she never wanted to leave.¹² A month later, the Tilden Smiths moved back to London.

FROM THE AUTUMN of 1942, Leslie and Rhys occupied (Leslie’s loyal sister, Muriel, paid their rent) an airy top-floor flat on Steele’s Road, a broad and pretty street near Primrose Hill in north-west London. Leslie resumed his old freelance job as a publisher’s reader for Jamie Hamilton. Rhys was still drinking heavily; while nervously discouraging his married daughter from paying visits, Leslie represented himself to an impressed Antoinette as “working for the Air Ministry.”

Primrose Hill wasn’t a reassuring area of London to inhabit during wartime. Long-barrelled defence guns, mounted on top of the ancient hill, offered scant protection from the bombs that regularly fell on neighbouring streets. Rhys was evidently recalling one of these devastated locations when she described Audrey in “The Insect World” as walking home past a ghostly street of “skeleton houses,” where front doorsteps “looked as though they were hanging by a thread.”¹³ At night, blackout curtains kept out the light, but not the sound, of a besieged city under fire.

It was during the two years that the Tilden Smiths spent together at Steele’s Road that Rhys resumed her writing. Work continued on “The Revenant,” but her chief preoccupation was with an autobiographical group of stories, each of which examines the fate of a vulnerable woman—always alone; always adrift—trapped within a wartime world where anything less than noisy patriotism will be perceived as treachery; it’s a world in which they have no place and can find no refuge.

Rich in black humour, Rhys’s wartime stories focus on the experience of exclusion. While “A Solid House,” “Temps Perdi,” “The Insect World” and “I Spy a Stranger” are the most well known of the group, the behaviour of Inez Best in “Outside the Machine,” which takes place in the women’s ward of a hospital near Versailles, suggests that this story, although set in an earlier time, was also written or intensively revised at Steele’s Road. Inez exhibits all the resentment and barely contained fury of Rhys’s wartime women. Like them—and like Rhys herself—she exults in every chance to speak her mind. “Don’t underrate me,” Inez thinks as she listens to two of her condescending fellow patients calling for another member of the ward to be hanged (for the crime of trying to kill herself): suddenly, Best lets fly, calling them out as “a pair of bitches”:

“Who was speaking to you?” Pat said.

Inez heard words coming round and full and satisfying out of her mouth—exactly what she thought about them, exactly what they were . . .

“Disgusting,” said Mrs. Wilson. “I told you so,” she added triumphantly. “I knew it. I knew the sort she was from the first.”¹⁴

A simmering rage bubbles through these stories, boiling into eruption when least expected. “Damn you don’t call me that,” shrieks twenty-nine-year-old Audrey when innocently addressed by her cheery flatmate as “Old Girl” in “The Insect World.” “Damn your soul to everlasting hell don’t call me that. . . .” In “I Spy a Stranger,” Laura—the most akin to Rhys herself of all the author’s wartime women characters—explodes with more justification when her cousin’s husband tries to hustle her out of their house and off to an asylum:

“Come along, old girl,” Ricky said. “It’s moving day.” He put his hand on her arm and gave her a tug. That was a mistake . . . It was when he touched her that she started to scream at the top of her voice. And swear—oh my dear, it was awful. He got nasty, too. He dragged her along and she clung to the banisters and shrieked and cursed. He hit her and kicked her, and she kept on cursing—oh, I’ve never heard such curses.¹⁵

Truths were being told and Rhys went out of her way to signal her own connection to the wilful, violent-minded women she described. Packing her cherished possessions to leave her cousin’s home, Laura even provides the reader with an italicised inventory of Rhys’s most sacred personal treasures (“the bracelet bought in Florence . . . the old flowered workbox with coloured reels of cotton and silk”). Having mentioned a jewellery box with a golden key, Laura/Rhys adds a blatant pun on the Lockharts’ family name: “I’m going to lock my heart and throw away the key.” Nothing here is accidental; every connection is intended. Here I am, the author seems to say. Make of me what you will. It’s all in view, but on my terms, reader, never on yours.

SOMETIME IN 1944, Leslie and Rhys walked up Primrose Hill together and said a prayer—although neither of them was conventionally religious—for the safety of Maryvonne Lenglet.

And sometime in the spring of 1945, Leslie felt confident enough about his wife’s improved behaviour to permit his married daughter to pay a first visit to the flat in Steele’s Road. (No mention is ever made either by Leslie or Rhys of the son, Anthony, who had taken his mother’s side in the Tilden Smiths’ divorce.) To Antoinette’s relief, Rhys greeted her cheerfully before showing off a room which she had been painting—she intended it to become Leslie’s study—in a blaze of vibrant colours.

What was going on?

A plausible guess might be that Leslie had decided it was safe enough for his daughter to visit after his wife’s dark mood had been lifted by unexpected and joyful news from the Netherlands: a letter had arrived explaining that Maryvonne was safe, well—and a married woman with a husband she adored.

The fuller story which reached Rhys later—direct communication with the Netherlands remained difficult throughout 1945 and Maryvonne was slow to reveal all the details—filled her with wonder and pride. In 1941, aged nineteen, Maryvonne had gone to work for the country’s resistance movement, contributing to Vrij Nederland, an underground paper, while her father, one of the best brains of the Dutch resistance, daringly helped at least thirteen RAF pilots to evade capture and return safely to England. Within five months, both of the Lenglets were arrested. Lenglet, due to the swift intervention of Henriëtte van Eyk’s brother, had been able to escape death by pleading insanity. His colleagues were shot. All that Maryvonne knew in 1945 was that her father, having escaped from an asylum and then a series of Dutch prisons, had eventually been deported—twice—to Sachsenhausen, one of Germany’s most brutal concentration camps. His son, Maryvonne’s older half-brother, had meanwhile fought on the side of the Nazis.

Lenglet’s ultimate fate was still unknown to his daughter when Maryvonne first managed to get a letter to London. It’s unclear when Rhys learned the fact that her first husband, having survived the camp’s notorious death march from Sachsenhausen to the north-west of Germany in the spring of 1945, had rescued a destitute Polish aristocrat who—following Lenglet’s swift divorce from Henriëtte van Eyk—became this remarkable man’s fifth and final wife. Reporting the brief fact of her recent marriage to Job Moerman (on Valentine’s Day), Maryvonne omitted to mention that the risk for two resistance workers of being recognised by a German registrar had been so great that the bride smuggled five grenades into the ceremony in her pocket, while Job carried a pistol under his jacket. Later, Rhys would learn that her heroic daughter, released shortly after her arrest in 1941 on account of her youth, had continued her father’s work of helping downed British pilots evade capture. She performed this task while sheltering with a beloved family friend, a woman who was shielding twenty-five Jews in her Amsterdam attic. (Henriëtte, who was also working with the resistance, but on a different basis, had been nervous of the consequences of taking Maryvonne back into her home.) It was during this period that Rhys’s intrepid daughter had met Job Moerman, an undercover expert in the gathering of intelligence about the enemy.¹⁶

What mattered most to Rhys in the final months of war was to learn that her lost daughter was safe. Peace was announced on 2 September. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Tilden Smiths were feeling happy, relieved and in need of a rest when they decided to spend the month of October at a rented property on Dartmoor.

THE COTTAGE, ALTHOUGH set in a beautiful landscape, close to one of Dartmoor’s many rivers, was remote and spartan. The journey had been long and the middle-aged Tilden Smiths were both in poor health. Rhys was recovering from a summer bout of flu; Leslie, now sixty, looked pale and gaunt. Writing to her husband’s daughter a short time later, Rhys said Leslie kept remembering his mother’s sudden and premature death; Rhys herself was full of unease. Fictionalising the Dartmoor visit in one of her most troubling tales, “The Sound of the River,” she made use of a brooding landscape, the wind, dark trees and a silent river which finally gushes free of its banks, to create a haunting sense of inevitability.

The end came with terrible swiftness on 2 October 1945, the first full day of their visit. Leslie had seemed fragile when they arrived; now, he complained of spasms and violent pain in his chest and arm. By the time Rhys had returned from her second anxious trek to the hostel where their landlord was staying nearby, having broken a glass pane in the front door in order to reach the telephone and summon medical assistance, Leslie was dead.

“Wake up,” she said and shook him. As soon as she touched him her heart swelled till it reached her throat. It swelled and grew jagged claws and the claws clutched her driving in deep. “Oh God,” she said . . . and knelt by the bed with his hand in her two hands and not speaking not thinking any longer.¹⁷

To some, such a sudden and isolated death from a heart attack (the cause given on the death certificate) did not look natural in a man of only sixty. Rumours buzzed. Leslie’s daughter told the doctor who had eventually visited the cottage that she believed Rhys might have killed her father; Rhys’s unsympathetic younger sibling imagined that her sister had calmly sat by, doing nothing, while Leslie died in the adjacent room. Writing to a shocked Antoinette to explain that she would not attend a London memorial service, Rhys was devastatingly candid. Yes, she had often treated Leslie badly when she was working on her books. “I did love him though,” Rhys wrote, adding wistfully that she thought her husband had “sometimes” been happy in her company. She was being honest—not intentionally cruel—when she told Antoinette that her chief sensation during the Devon cremation had been of empathy and even gratitude: “I had all the time the feeling that Leslie had escaped—from me, from everyone and was free at last.”¹⁸

But Rhys’s feelings ran deeper than this. “He was smiling as if he knew what she had been thinking,” she wrote (in “The Sound of the River”), when describing her husband’s last living look at his wife.¹⁹ Praising Leslie’s gentleness and patience to Peggy Kirkaldy—it was the first time Rhys had communicated with her friend since their falling-out in 1941—Rhys allowed her misery to show in a sudden outburst of candour: “Oh Peggy I’d give all my idiotic life for an hour to say goodbye to him.”²⁰ Years later, however, Rhys would use “The Joey Bagstock Smile” to portray Leslie, not as Dickens’s slyly lecherous Major Bagstock in Dombey & Son, but as Mr. Carker, the novel’s pallid-faced and perpetually smiling villain. The sense of a meditated payback is strong; the reason for Rhys’s grudge towards a man who had devoted himself unstintingly to the service of his wife and her fiction remains a mystery.

THE DEVON DOCTOR shared the dark suspicions of Leslie’s daughter. He may have insisted upon a post-mortem only because Rhys freely admitted to having tried to ease Leslie’s pain with her own prescription pills, but he had also heard gossip from the couple who lived in a neighbouring cottage. They stated that a quarrel had taken place on the first evening of the Tilden Smiths’ arrival; the noise had been loud enough to penetrate their own closed doors and thick stone walls. More telling, and in Rhys’s favour, is the fact that these same loquacious neighbours took Rhys in for the first night after Leslie’s death and—at her request—contacted Leslie’s devoted sister, Muriel, and Edward, Rhys’s eldest brother. The fact that they did so without hesitation hardly suggests that the couple saw their unhappy guest as a murderess.

Evidently, Rhys knew where her long-absent brother now lived; was Edward’s presence in Devon the reason that the Tilden Smiths had elected to take a holiday on nearby Dartmoor? Desperate for money, it’s entirely possible that Leslie and Rhys had hoped to obtain a loan; childless, retired from his career as an army medical officer and comfortably established in the family home of his well-off wife, Gertrude, at Budleigh Salterton, Rhys’s eldest brother might command resources upon which less well-heeled relatives could conceivably draw. (Rhys’s younger sister had made a similarly late and far more prosperous marriage during the war, but by 1945, Rhys was conscious that Brenda’s goodwill was no longer to be relied upon for further handouts.)

Colonel Edward Rees Williams was a man with a strong sense of duty. It was he who paid the outstanding month’s rent on the Dartmoor cottage, arranged for Leslie’s cremation, escorted Rhys to the ceremony and then drove her back to Knottsfield, Gertrude’s house in Budleigh Salterton.

Interviewing various members of the Rhys family in the 1980s, Carole Angier was offered a lurid account of Rhys’s short, unhappy stay at the home of a stiffly respectable sister-in-law determined, however reluctantly, to behave well in difficult circumstances. Leslie’s son, Anthony, had visited Knottsfield for just long enough to note that his (almost unknown) stepmother was lolling in bed, while Colonel Rees Williams meekly gathered up her dirty laundry for the wash. Rhys herself was desperate not to be sent away: “I’ve a horror of London,” she wailed to Peggy Kirkaldy. “I will go to pieces there.” Another family connection told Angier that—rather than leave—Rhys had actually used the bedsheets to fasten herself to the bed. Edward lost his temper; Rhys produced one of her terrifying screaming fits; the police were called in.²¹ True? The details are eerily close to Laura’s wild behaviour in the story “I Spy a Stranger,” when her cousin’s officious husband tries to bundle her out of the house. Rhys was never afraid to draw upon shaming episodes in her life if she saw a chance to make them serve her art.

Undoubtedly, Rhys’s sudden widowhood presented her family with a problem. Leslie’s will bestowed nothing but debts; Rhys had no money of her own. Usefully, Edward Rees Williams persuaded his sister Brenda’s rich and fair-minded husband, Robert Powell, to contribute to a small weekly allowance for his sister, while Muriel Tilden Smith volunteered to cover the rent on Steele’s Road for a few more months. Given the difficult circumstances—a coldly furious wife (Gertrude Rees Williams apparently refused ever again to have Rhys in her home), and the harsh austerity of postwar Britain—the long-suffering Edward must have felt that he had done his best by an errant sibling whom he had not set eyes on for forty years. And so he had: in later years, Jean Rhys would always praise her brother for his kindness.

EDWARD HAD NO knowledge as yet of his sister’s remarkable capacity for survival. Paying a short courtesy visit to an unknown mother-in-law during the summer of 1946 (Maryvonne had remained in the Netherlands), Job Moerman was intrigued to be greeted at the door of 3 Steele’s Road by a short, lively and sturdily built man. He said that he was helping Mrs. Tilden Smith to smarten up the flat. Rhys introduced this cheerful individual to Job as her late husband’s cousin and executor. His name was Max Hamer.

*Some of the diary’s torn pages were addressed to Edward Rees Williams. Evidently, Rhys intended to share her suspicions of Brenda with their older brother, following his return from service in India as an army medical officer.