Encounter in Cairo
By 1942, JR’s role in the PWE was to work as a rapporteur for a committee which met weekly to examine the propaganda rumours – known as ‘sibs’ – suggested by various government departments. He became known as the ‘Sibster’. Sibs were rumours disseminated in the UK and abroad for the purpose of misleading the enemy on a wide range of subjects. Collecting material for weekly meetings and then getting those around the table to agree lines of action required much time and diplomacy on John’s part. After a few months, he found that trying to reconcile the conflicting interests of all the departments concerned was unrewarding and he lost patience, the situation doubtless exacerbated by the strains of his home life with Joan. When he learned of a possible job in Algiers after the Allies landed in November 1942, he requested a posting. Although he did not achieve his escape, he was soon occupied with more congenial work. Isabel’s marriage was also in trouble too, and she and John began an affair. JR was often at Apsley Guise, so he and Isabel came in frequent contact and were able to conduct a clandestine relationship. Sefton Delmer’s account of the break-up of his marriage ignores the affair, however, and is almost as colourful as his propaganda.
In the evening I listened at intervals to the [radio] programme as it went out, suggesting improvements here and there, sub-edited and ‘angled’ fresh items of news as they broke on the Hellschreiber [a facsimile-based teleprinter] or our British or American agency tapes [. . .] Never did I get to bed before one a.m.
Let no-one, however, imagine that my sleep was uninterrupted. For at three a.m. the door of my bedroom would softly open, a hand switched on the lamp on my bedside table, and a girl’s voice spoke.
‘Mr. Delmer,’ it said sweetly through my dreams, ‘Major Clarke’s compliments.’
Standing beside my bed, solicitously offering me a large buff envelope containing a dispatch, I saw a blonde angel, blue uniformed, breeched and high-booted. From under a crash helmet peeped corn-coloured curls. Her slender waist was tightly strapped in a leather corset. There she stood awaiting my command, her crimson lips slightly parted – the dream vision of a James Bond fetishist. But this was no dream.1
According to Delmer, the dispatch-rider with the page proofs of Nachrichten für die Truppe did not leave until several hours later.
All this soon became too much for Isabel. First she insisted on separate rooms, so that she would not be disturbed by my dawn visitor. Then she got herself a job as an artist designer for one of the department’s productions in London. She went off to live there and only visited us at R.A.G. [Apsley Guise] at remote intervals. That was the beginning of the end of my first marriage.
The account is every bit as fanciful as it sounds: at the time Delmer blamed JR for the break-up of his marriage, and felt considerable animosity towards him thereafter.
Once she was back in London, Isabel went to work at Bush House for a magazine called Il Mondo Libero, under the direction of the journalist Victor Cunard. The magazine, which was about life in England, was intended for distribution in Italy. Although her life was now much more relaxed after the exhausting hours of PWE, anxiety over the failure of her marriage – and the feeling that the affair was a betrayal of a close friendship – was making her ill. ‘You look awful,’ Delmer told her one day when she met him. ‘I don’t want to be married to an old woman. A magazine isn’t worth it.’ Joan, however, wrote to Isabel to say that if she was having an affair with John, she was quite ready to accept it. As far as she was concerned their friendship was unaffected – and yet Joan herself still wondered if her own marriage could be saved.
Graham had returned to Europe in uniform, not in a Guards regiment but in the Intelligence Corps of the US Army. In August 1942 he was stationed at Matlock in Derbyshire. After a visit to John Betjeman in Dublin he had gone back to Dumbleton, where he had spent a few lazy days with Joan and his mother. He wrote to Betjeman, telling him he was reading his second volume of poetry, Continual Dew: A Little Bit of Bourgeois Verse, ‘which I hadn’t seen for a long time: it brings some sanity into one’s unreal life’.2
Soon, though, Graham left England once again, this time for North Africa, where Operation Torch had successfully driven out the Axis powers in late 1942. The region was to be the base for the Allied invasion of southern Europe in 1943. Its strategic importance had also led to Joan’s posting there in January of that year. Graham’s ‘unreal life’ continued, although he and the others entertained one another with their letters, and Graham remained the aesthete.
In April 1943 he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones from Algeria.
I can’t remember if I have written to you or not since being out here. I know I wrote on the ship but that letter went to the bottom with everything else.
There’s a good deal one could say if it were not for the censor & pretty funny some of it is. Life on the whole though is rather a bore here: work is copious and enjoyable, relaxation and fun non-existent. Patrick Kinross arrived for a few days from Cairo about a month ago with the most unsettling tales of gay life there, great apartments, parties & fun, with Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Rommy [Romilly] Summers et al [. . .]
Joan was here for a short time, as you probably know, but left for Madrid which she says is full of grand tarts and spies. I wonder how she will enjoy Lady Hoare’s knitting parties for the female personnel?
There is no-one of fundamental interest & one goes drearily to bed at about 8.30 on those nights when there is no work to bring one back to the office.
Write me a word about yourself – let me know if you know anyone new coming out.
Bless you, Graham3
After Algiers Joan was redeployed to the British embassy in Madrid, a city which was a hotbed of intelligence and counter-intelligence. She probably already knew the ambassador and his wife. In 1936, Sir Samuel Hoare, a cool, rather prim man had succeeded Joan’s father as First Lord of the Admiralty; his ambitious wife, Lady Maud, was Coote Lygon’s aunt. Spain under General Franco was ideologically aligned with the Axis powers, which had supplied both soldiers and material to the Nationalists in the Civil War. When Hoare arrived in Spain in 1940 Italian and German fascists were deeply entrenched in every walk of life. The embassy staff were overworked and overcrowded. Three years later, when Joan came to Madrid, the political tide had begun to turn. After the defeat of Stalingrad early that year and the fall of Mussolini in July, Franco had begun to realize that an easy German victory was much less likely.
Madrid gave Joan time to think and to reflect on her marriage. She was aware that John was still trying to go abroad – he was even trying to learn a little Italian. He no doubt had in mind the planned Allied landings in Italy, and the likelihood of his being posted there the following year. In October, she wrote to him from the city.
Darling – it is really appalling how quickly the time goes here & it is with horror I realize that I have been away nine months now – I am filled with the guilt at the easiness of my life here & at the thought of starting another winter coping with flats and rations by yourself. I do hope Is is staying with you. Anyway I really am about to make great decisions and changes (if situation allows) as much as Madrid grows on me it is a great waste of time being here & doing the work I do – There are two things I want to know first –
(a) how much chance is there of your leaving London in the future? (I know I keep asking you this but as I haven’t heard what you are doing for so long I thought you might have more plans.) There is nothing I should hate more than to arrive in London to find you leaving for Rome.
(b) a much more difficult question & I promise you that this isn’t the first & preparatory letter of a long series on the same subject – Do you really want to start our same old life again? I know this sounds as if I’m making you take all responsibility and decisions, but I’ve tried and can’t and I think it is you who would benefit more by a change than me, as I shall have the same difficulties and disagreeable habits such as putting the blame on other people, whatever I do. It is hard to write like this and not let absence influence me and I am sure I am always nicer away, but I’m afraid when I come back everything will be the same and I shall be as bad-tempered as ever. Another point is I shall never like living in England. I am trying to put all the difficulties & everything in its worst light & it is torture not being able to see you to discuss everything altho’ I’m sure we should never arrive at a decision.
Do please write to me. You must be off your head with work. I have been in bed with sinusitis but better now. I’ve taken to bull-fights. English names going back on hotels & shops & English photographs & ads in papers. Falange crowd on F.’s birthday still shouting Franco-Hitler.
I’ve hated writing this letter & now feel most miserable.
My Love JR4
Joan uses John’s own ‘JR’ monogram as her signature; it was as if she was demonstrating that she still felt tied to him, and even in love. In her most intimate letters – to JR and later to Paddy – Joan made two complaints about herself: her bad temper and her indecisiveness. This letter still reflects the thoughts about herself that she had turned into doggerel in her 1936 pocket diary:
Can you pull the plug?
on the bed? Or neath the rug?
at the keyhole? Crowds? Alone?
‘I don’t know’ cries Schizo Joan.
Many years later, looking back on the failure of her first marriage, she wrote simply that, in one another’s absence, ‘we gradually drifted apart.’5
Patrick Kinross found the outbreak of war unexpectedly liberating. He had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1940, when he was thirty-six. Writing to James Lees-Milne he seemed carefree. The pilots at RAF Bomber Command were:
not at all the hoary toughs I had expected, but sensitive, pink-faced striplings, very affable and impressed by one’s superior intellect [. . .] Now I am back in the Air Ministry in the Middle Eastern Department, which is quite interesting. I don’t know where I shall sail, but it may not be for another few weeks, I may go to Fighter Command for a week in the meantime. So I am getting a fairly comprehensive picture of Air Force matters. Tonight I am going to see Lord Lloyd [of Dolobran] again, & I am hoping he will do something for me in Egypt.
But, as with Joan and JR, Kinross’s marriage to Angela Culme-Seymour had also failed. Angela was incorrigibly promiscuous. On the death of her father-in-law she had travelled up to Scotland for the funeral sharing a sleeper with a painter called ‘David something’. Patrick had been hopelessly naive ever to think about marrying her. His letters continued:
Meanwhile, Jim, my private life is at an end. I have discovered a whole host of infidelities by Angela over the past year or more, and I don’t really see that it is any good going on with it. It seems she is incorrigible & perhaps a little mad. I thought that I was going to be able to make some sort of a job of her, but I see that I have failed, & that perhaps I could never have succeeded. It is time for somebody else to take it on – if she can find it on . . ., I suddenly found – or at least thought I didn’t love her any more. I don’t know what will become of her. I shall divorce her if I can get the evidence, but may have to wait until after the war [. . .] Thank God I am going to Egypt & a new life & interests. What a life. What a war. But I regret nothing. It is all experience.6
When Patrick wrote again to Lees-Milne it was as Pilot Officer the Lord Kinross, c/o RAF HQ Middle East, Cairo. He told him he sometimes still felt waves of resentment against Angela but he was far more detached than he had been a few months beforehand. ‘She was like a cat who basked there for a bit enjoying the cat’s prerogative, serenity without responsibility, and then slipped out.’
Patrick also wrote about Robert Byron, who had drowned a couple of days before his thirty-sixth birthday when his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat off Cape Wrath in Scotland on its way to Egypt. ‘I wonder if he would have achieved anything, with all his dynamic qualities, or if his lack of judgment & balance would always have frustrated him. One will miss him tremendously after the war. Of all one’s friends, he was the strongest personality.’ And he had seen Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s son. ‘He was nice, much improved by military discipline. Obviously like Tom Mitford and so many others, he should always have been in the Army, and in any other generation would have gone into it as a matter of course.’7 But only weeks before the war ended, Tom Mitford died too, of injuries sustained in Burma. He was thirty-six. ‘It is almost unbearable,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Jessica, ‘if you knew how sweet & nice & gay he has been of late & on his last leave.’8
War had brought dissolution and changed everything. It had destroyed lives and it had destroyed marriages. For Joan, however, the war was to bring about a new world altogether.
In December 1943, JR flew to Algiers to work with a joint US–British Psychological Warfare Branch, planning operations for when the Allies would confront German forces in Italy. Algiers was bursting with American, British and French personnel, but John found lodgings with Graham. The city was at its least attractive: convoys of shabby trams, jeeps and army trucks, cars and people crowded the streets. Food shortages had given rise to resentment against the Allies and the mood amongst the French and Arabs was sullen.
In early January JR flew to Palermo in Sicily, in order to begin broadcasting to mainland Italy, and soon moved on to Caserta, Bari and Naples, from where, at the end of the month, he was flown over Anzio harbour. He recorded seeing smoke pall, a burning tanker, petrol cans, a cruiser and the wounded. The main Allied landing had taken place ten days earlier. Put in charge of the Political Warfare Branch (PWB) 15th Army Group, John became responsible for all combat propaganda activities in the army area: from the coordination of news leaflets to front-line broadcasting by way of radio transmitters and loudspeakers. It took him six months to reach Rome. On 5 June, Liberation Day, JR and the British troops entered the city amid mass celebrations. Huge crowds took to the streets, cheering, waving and hurling bunches of flowers at the passing army vehicles, and the pope appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s to address the thousands of Italians gathered in the square beneath him. JR and his colleagues set about producing the first newspaper for the civilian population, only to have to scrap it the next morning to include news of the Normandy landings. Twenty-four hours after their arrival, they had Rome’s radio working; helping the Italian press return to pre-war, pre-fascist freedom became one of his major tasks. There was information to be disseminated and there were new ways of presenting it.
JR soon found a house to move into in the Via Gregoriana at the top of the Spanish Steps. He had a maid called Ana who kept pigeons for the table. If he came back late and unexpectedly with hungry guests she would hurry up to the roof to kill some of the birds, and provide a polenta in no time. In August, he was joined in his flat by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh recorded in his diaries that Mondi Howard, who was also attached to the PWB, had arranged for him to stay with John, whom he hardly knew, and that the flat was charming. On 22 August 1944, Waugh recorded:
A week of easy living, getting stronger and eating better. Rome short of water, light and transport. The few restaurants madly expensive. Ranieri open for luncheon only. Most of the hotels taken for various messes. My day, on the average, has been to wake at 7 to the bell of S. Andrea del Frate, tea with John Rayner in pyjamas, read the enemy broadcast news, dress slowly and go out, either by foot or in a borrowed car to see one of the churches [. . .] Usually dinner at Via Gregoriana, electric light every four days, on other days a single candle or a storm lantern. Often official guests of John.9
Although Rome had been liberated, the Germans had not been decisively defeated. Field Marshal Kesserling, the German commander, was under orders to contest every inch of Italy. His troops fell back as far north as Florence, held the city for three weeks and blew up the bridges over the River Arno. Working under continual German mortar and sniper fire, JR and his colleagues produced a daily newspaper on the south bank of the river, using a jeep engine as the power supply for their printing press. The paper was sent through the German lines to circulate to the Italians on the north bank. Fighting continued throughout the autumn and winter. Sometimes John found time to write to Isabel.
Have become v practised in the art of travelling light, sometimes sleeping under pines, sometimes in shell-shattered palaces, sometimes in the bedroom outside, which is a Baroque Borromini with an owl in it [. . .] As the jeep bounds on I think of the misty hanger; and you no doubt think of olive groves and cicadas & the intolerable burden of the midday sun. I believe the brain is sd by those who have investigated it to be suspended in the skull by the thinnest film of liquid. In such a bath the whole body passes the day & most of the night.10
At the beginning of October, he wrote, ‘No news of Joan’s alleged visit; vague talk in note of Sir B. getting her here or where you were offered, that’s all.’ And then a month later, on 12 November:
As to Joan, I have no word from her at all, no mention of her from any rare contact (e.g. Graham who stayed a few days). I think she must be pretty up to date you know, in principle any way, I shd have supposed, but one can’t send knives by letter, only nuances. In any case, don’t you worry.11
JR also told her that he was ‘v. cold, no hot water, haven’t had a bath for 6 months, am ageing, creased, balding, dictatorial’.
Sometimes, when he and his colleagues found themselves too close to the front line for safety, JR confessed that he was terrified. He found that the best way to cope when danger threatened was to curl up in the back of the jeep and fall sleep. Shortly after writing his last letter to Isabel, the jeep in which John was travelling crashed, and his back was broken.
Control of Egypt was of strategic importance throughout the war. Although the country was nominally independent under the rule of King Farouk, British influence was still dominant, and Cairo became a major hub of operations for Allied forces, despite the population being largely sympathetic to Germany. The city itself was a major base for Allied operations, and espionage and counterespionage on both sides, but remained relatively untouched by fighting. The fiercest battles were, of course, around El Alamein, to the west of Cairo, as the Germans fought in vain to reach the Suez Canal.
Cairo could not have been more different from life back home. There was no wartime austerity and rationing and all needs were provided for – a shop called ‘Old England’ advertised itself as selling ‘best British briar pipes, lighters, cutlery, camp beds, tables, leather goods, travelling articles, flashlights, batteries, photo frames, cameras, films, albums’. Museums were closed and there were no tourists as such, but everyone seemed to thrive. The Turf Club still provided gambling and polo and people met for tennis and squash at the Gezira Sporting Club. For the officers and troops there were clubs, hotels and restaurants. Coffee and rich pastries were widely available. Even the hordes of beggars holding out their bowls for baksheesh prospered, while the morale of the troops was said to depend mainly on the price, quality and availability of the prostitutes.
Most British residents, as distinct from troops on leave, kept to the relative shelter of Gezira Island, separated from the mainland by a number of bridges on either side. It was here that Paddy Leigh Fermor, an officer with the Special Operations Executive, and Billy Moss, a young officer in the Coldstream Guards, had found a large rambling house which they shared with suitable friends. The house was called Tara, after the legendary palace of the kings of Ireland, and it was presided over by a Polish countess called Sophie Tarnowska. ‘They were all in their twenties, with active times behind and ahead of them. The household quickly cohered in a private Bohemian world under Sophie’s kind reign – someone teasingly said she was a sort of Wendy surrounded by Lost Boys of riper years – and afterwards the memory of Tara proved a lasting bond,’ Leigh Fermor wrote later.12 It had many bedrooms, a ballroom with a parquet floor, and a piano borrowed from the Egyptian Officers’ Club, all of which made it ideal for parties.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, Paddy had returned to England from Romania, where he had been living with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene on her estate at Baleni. He had met Balasha, who was sixteen years older than him, near the end of his walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to the city he always called Constantinople. Back in England, he initially joined the Irish Guards, but during training, which he loathed – ‘my job is blacking the grates!’13 – he fell ill. When he recovered, he joined the Intelligence Corps. Once again he thought the training ‘idiotic’, and he wrote to Lord Lloyd of Dolobran, who had recently been made a government minister by Churchill, trying to get back to Romania.14 Instead, Paddy soon found himself attached as a liaison officer to the SOE, which had recently been formed to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage operations in Axis-occupied countries. The SOE – or Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare as it was sometimes known – was a better home for Paddy’s natural talents. As a Greek-speaker, he spent much of the war in German-occupied Crete, where he helped organize local acts of resistance.
Another of the inhabitants of Tara was Xan Fielding, the man Paddy loved most of all. Born in Ootacamund in India, Xan, like Paddy, was a son of the Empire, but had been brought up in a large house in the south of France. He did not learn until he was an adult that his mother had died in India when he was born. As a child he had been brought up by his grandparents who told him that they were his parents, and that his aunts were his sisters. After periods at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Freiburg, Xan went to Cyprus, but he detested the British colonial administrators, who distrusted him in turn because he had bothered to learn Greek. He was sacked from his post at the Cyprus Times. The same British administrators made his attempts to run a bar a failure, so he went to Greece, where he found refuge on St Nicholas, a small island in the Bay of Chalkis; an anthropologist friend, Francis ‘Fronny’ Turville-Petre, had turned the island into a kind of gay commune. In the summer of 1940, following the Battle of Britain, Xan joined the Cyprus regiment and then, after the invasion of Crete, he volunteered for service with the SOE. The first question at his interview was ‘Have you any personal objection to committing murder?’ And he had none. Paddy and he met in the village of Yerakari, in a green, fertile valley of the Amari. Together with Paddy, Xan helped build up military intelligence on the island. Xan was short, dark and wiry in build; physically he could pass himself off as a Cretan much better than Paddy ever could. Eventually, he grew discontented with his work on Crete and applied to be transferred to the French operations of the SOE. After parachuting into France, he was picked up almost immediately with false papers and sentenced to be shot. The next day, however, he was taken out of his prison cell only to discover that the Resistance had bribed his captors, and he was released.
Although it was Paddy and Billy Moss who were to take the credit – and Paddy always had a tendency to myth-making – the first references to kidnapping a general are in the SOE archives. In September 1942 Xan Fielding had a plan for landing on Crete with the order to make an abduction. At the time this proved impossible but twelve months later Tom Dunbabin suggested that two be taken at one fell swoop.15 On leave back in Cairo, Paddy and Billy Moss came up with new plans to kidnap the garrison commander on Crete, General Kreipe. On 26 April 1944, the general’s car was stopped in front of his house, the Villa Ariadne. With the help of partisans, Paddy and Moss, who were dressed as corporals in the German Feldgendarmerie, coshed the driver and bundled the general into the back of the car. With Moss driving, they progressed through Heraklion for an hour and a half, bluffing their way past twenty checkpoints. They abandoned the car, leaving behind documents in English to prove that the kidnap had been carried out by British commandos, and to minimize reprisals on the local population. Kreipe was taken up into the mountains and concealed in the caves. A fortnight later the general was spirited away by motorboat to Egypt. The Kreipe kidnap made Paddy a celebrity. A combination of psychological strain, exhaustion and the general harshness of mountain life made him ill, however, and on 19 May 1944 he was admitted to hospital with polyarthritis. He spent about three months in hospital, during which time Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander in Chief of the Middle East Command, pinned the Distinguished Service Order on Paddy’s battledress jacket, which he was wearing over his pyjamas.16
Paddy had a girlfriend at the time called Denise Menasce. Her family were upper-middle-class Sephardic Jewish bankers and businessmen, who had been made barons in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Denise was dark, pretty and intelligent, as well as bilingual in English and French. She had become mixed up with the military set and their friends at Tara. Paddy went back to Crete in October, leaving her pregnant and vulnerable.
Would you be very bored with me if I wrote a miserable and depressed letter. Please don’t be, Paddy darling, for I am feeling as low as low can be this evening and I just have to write to somebody – so you will just have to be my victim. I’d give anything to be in your arms and be cuddled, and made a fuss of, and be told I was quite nice and sweet. You’ve never really seen me in my black moods. They are as bad as yours only drink doesn’t help. I tried that all evening, but in vain. You’ve only seen your little imp behaving like a wild thing, and jumping around you in a surge of joy to have you back for an extra 24 hrs. But tonight I am rather a different person – somebody you haven’t yet met, and which I don’t think you like. A little woman of 24 who feels stupid, empty, and very much alone [. . .]
Paddy darling, this is such a revealing letter, I am rather ashamed. I usually am terribly reserved talking or writing about my real self – so please forgive and forget this – somehow you have walked so completely into my life, that I find myself telling you my most intimate thoughts.
That baby is also rather worrying me. Even though I am not a slave or in the least bit melodramatic. I suddenly feel full of importance at having it. No man can really understand what conception means to a woman. It becomes life, creation, it gives a tremendous sense of strength and power. Instead of having been possessed and destroyed, you realize that you carry in you the power of life – And yet . . . tomorrow morning Mrs. Boswell is going to see a doctor, and look rather shamefaced, and get into the most sordid explanations as to where, why, and how – and how much!! What an anticlimax.
Paddy my poppit, don’t please, please, think I am really minding about this. I am not like Sophie, and quite realize that this is normal and necessary. So please forgive my trying to embellish in my own eyes tonight, what is going to be rather hell tomorrow.
Am awfully sleepy so will stop now. Goodnight darling. Bless you and forgive this.17
For the next couple of months, Denise wrote to Paddy nearly every day or so about her feelings for him and what she was doing, making a kind of diary. Two days after her abortion she wrote, ‘A hasty note to say that all is well, so that my letter makes no sense at all.’ She hoped he did not get all her letters in a pile. ‘Tonight we are all eating caviar at Suzette’s and going dancing afterwards – it now makes me miserable to dance tangos with anyone else!!’
By the summer of 1944 the atmosphere in Spain had changed considerably since Joan’s arrival. After D-Day and the liberation of France the Franco regime had finally accepted that Germany was losing and that they should back the United States and Great Britain. They had blocked the export to Germany of tungsten, which was indispensable to the manufacture of aircraft and weapons, and the Spanish government now operated under terms of strict neutrality. In October 1944, after leaving Spain, Joan arrived in Cairo – a dusty, dirty, overcrowded city she came to love. The British embassy was a large colonial house with a columned veranda on two storeys and wrought-iron railings adorned with Queen Victoria’s imperial insignia. Inside, its high rooms were hung with silk damask and furnished with antique chairs and Persian rugs belonging to Sir Miles Lampson, the ambassador.18 The cipher room at the embassy was on the ground floor, with steel bars across the windows. The room was usually filled with over twenty people, and lipstick-marked cups of half-drunk tea were scattered amongst used carbons, dispatch books, partly chewed slabs of chocolate and countless cigarette butts.19
Joan was sharing a house with two old friends, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, who was still lecturing for the British Council, and Patrick Kinross, who was now the RAF press officer. The house, which Joan called ‘a white box with windows’20 and Paddy said was ‘a crumbling Mamaluke palace’,21 was joined to the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tûlûn in the old part of the city. Joan had certainly heard about Paddy – everyone had – and before long she had met Denise, befriended her and even consoled her in her troubles. Denise wrote to Paddy: ‘I am now going to write to Joan and pour out my sorrows to her.’22 A few days later she wrote again to the elusive major:
This afternoon I sat on Sophie’s bed and longed for you to come in a ‘coup du vent’, and yell for a brandy and ginger ale – look at yourself – that look I know so well in the glass – and dash off for some rendez-vous – reeking of Sophie’s eau-de-Cologne – Darling, when will you come back – do please soon.
Ps Am giving a party for my birthday at Tara, on Dec. 1st. Could I have the pleasure of Major Leigh Fermor’s company. R.S.V.P.23
Paddy had also already heard about Joan. After his illness he had gone to the Lebanon in order to convalesce and then he had spent a few days in Crete, where he received a letter from Billy Moss. It was dated 5 December 1944: ‘A good thing has turned up in the shape of Joan Rainer [sic], and we have seen quite a bit of her recently. She’s got a good brain and she talks a lot about bull-fights and Spanish poets. I think you would like her.24
When Joan at last met Paddy Leigh Fermor at a party, shortly after Christmas 1944, both were immediately attracted to one another. Joan, who would not have admitted to being attracted by his glamour or his fame, found him irresistible. For Paddy, who saw himself as a Byronic figure, loving to dress up and engage in acts of derring-do, Joan was yet another challenge. They could not keep their hands off one another – not that Paddy was immediately going to abandon all her competitors. It was not long before he received a typed letter from Denise Menasce (normally her letters were handwritten).
Paddy, you little double-crosser, trying to kill two birds with one stone! I should have thought your technique was more polished . . . It ought to be by now. That maybe explains the Greek love call (just heard it) ‘I desire Major Leigh Fermor’. For ‘Qui trop embrasse mal etreint.’ My sweet little independent dachshund, I think some charitable soul ought to buy you a lead . . . Though who will ever hold it is a difficult problem. Maybe you can organize it so as to have a cinq à sept, sept à neuf, neuf à minuit, and a sleepy cession de minuit au petit jour. Though I feel you might get your time table wrong which would lead to the most awful chaos. Also there might be a slight complication about names. As calling Ines Joan, and Joan Denise, might lead to trouble. My advice is: take a little notebook into your bathroom, and learn up what you are going to say; and to WHOM.
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.