14

Friendship and Loss

Joan’s father, Viscount Monsell, died in March 1969, aged eighty-eight. His ashes were scattered at sea from a warship. In accordance with his explicit wish there was no memorial service, but in 1974 a window was installed in his memory in the south aisle of St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, a church with many naval connections. The window displayed the Eyres Monsell arms; three woolpacks in the top right-hand quartering represent the source of the family’s prosperity. At the base of the window the text reads, ‘So much one man can do that doth both act and know.’ Graham now inherited his father’s title and became the 2nd Viscount Monsell, but he never took any active role in public life, nor did he take his seat in the House of Lords. He had already inherited the Dumbleton estate of some 5,000 acres from his mother’s trustees, and over the coming years he sold off the odd cottage and building site to provide himself with an income. In the early 1950s, the Corporation of Leicester had already acquired land that the estate also owned in the southern suburbs of the city by compulsory purchase, in order to build a greener and more attractive council estate. The family name which was created on the marriage of Sybil Eyres and Bolton Monsell is still carried by the city’s Eyres Monsell estate council ward.

Throughout his life, Graham could be quite intimidating; if one said the wrong thing one would be made to feel a fool. He was kindly, but it was difficult to be intimate with him. While Paddy was outgoing and friendly, Graham was always fastidious and fussy. He was wary of Paddy, and it took a long time before he believed that his motives towards his beloved Joan were more than mercenary. His reserve eventually broke down, and there came to be more mutual regard and affection: Paddy was not just an adventurer and Joan was not letting the side down by marrying outside her class. Paddy described Joan’s brother as a ‘very intelligent, very retiring, literary-musical hermit’.1 But Graham was no hermit; he was loyal to his small number of very close friendships – including Joan’s first boyfriend, Alan Pryce-Jones, to whom he wrote in November 1961 after Alan’s recent move to the USA:

It is angelic of you to ask me to come for a visit . . . [but] my dancing days are over, old rocking chair has got me and I must say I love it. I emerge each summer to plunge into the Mediterranean, hear a little music in Germany or Austria, eat some delicious food in France, and then come home to prepare, like an ageing bear, for winter hibernation.2

One man very much outside that circle was his old school and university contemporary Jim Lees-Milne. When they encountered each other at a theatre having not spoken in years, Graham made an overture of friendship, but it was rebuffed. Lees-Milne was unforgiving, and he recorded in his diary how his feelings of resentment had not lessened over the decades:

He held my hand and said how delighted he was to see me and would so much like us to meet and talk over old times. Old times, my foot! I was terrified of Graham as a boy [. . .] At Oxford he was considered extremely dashing, the ‘fastest’ man in the university, wore a black polo sweater and allegedly took drugs. Was exceptionally supercilious, rich and disdainful. Now he is bent, blind, sallow, dusty and diffident. How the late worm changes places with the early birds.’3

In fact, Graham continued to lead a full life. The estate was well run and he was both active and conscientious in his duties towards his tenants; at harvest he would help out by driving a tractor. He also continued to travel a great deal. On a visit to Bali Graham wrote to Joan to tell her that he had encountered the Balinese queen in her palace at Solo. Graham bowed low, only to then feel self-conscious about the holes in his socks. Another time, Joan and Paddy went with him. On her return to Kardamyli, Joan wrote: ‘We are still in a daze with all the glories we have seen – Taiwan, Angkor even better than I imagined, Bangkok, Bali, the dancers wildly exciting & not spoilt yet with tourists, Java, Singapore, India, Nepal. Such beauty all the time, especially of people. One felt ashamed of being huge pinkoes.’4

For most of the time Graham lived in Dumbleton, but on Wednesdays and Thursdays he came up to 9 South Eaton Place in Belgravia, his London home (the old family house in Belgrave Square had been bombed during the war). The house was theatrically decorated with dark paintwork. On the hall landing there was a golden table held up by a golden cherub, a couple of exquisite chairs, and a huge bunch of flowers standing on top, silhouetted against a window which was swathed in rich velvet curtains. The drawing room was murky red, so dark you could hardly see, and the walls were packed with pictures by Robin Ironside, including a painting called The Flaying of Marsyas, which had the god Apollo preening himself in the background.

Ironside himself was a sort of fin-de-siècle figure. He painted two pictures of Graham: in one, the more conventional, he is lying on a sofa, a music score laid out before him; the second, en grisaille, mimics a Roman tombstone. He also drew decorations and a map of the imaginary island for the endpapers of Paddy’s 1953 novella The Violins of St Jacques.

Eventually Joan, who inherited Robin’s pictures, gave them to the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, but the gravestone portrait always hung in her bedroom at Kardamyli.

From 1967 onwards there were hundreds of entries in the calfbound Kardamyli visitors’ book; it reads as both a catalogue of the owners’ rich lives and a who’s who of mid-twentieth-century society. The first name to appear is that of Magouche Phillips. Magouche was born Agnes Magruder, and was the daughter of an American naval officer. Her first husband was the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, and it was he who called her Magouche, an Armenian term of endearment. After his death she married Jack Phillips, an American painter who came from a family of Boston Brahmins. She had two daughters with each husband. When her second marriage failed she came to live in Europe with her children. She was very beautiful and had thick dark hair, a low, rich voice, a warm smile and large eyes. ‘Quelle belle invention!’ said the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, when she was introduced to him in Paris by Alexander Calder. Soon, this beautiful invention became very much part of Paddy and Joan’s innermost circle.

Both the company and the location doubtless made invitations hard to refuse. On 1 September 1968, Freya Stark wrote to Gerald Brenan from Kardamyli:

Here I have been for three days, & three days more, just breathing air & sea. The mountains are dove-grey in the sky & red like foxes as they run along the shore. They push & shoulder one another till the sea wraps them in light & here, among the cypresses & olives, Paddy & Joan have built themselves a house of the hillside stone, quite unimaginably solid & beautiful. Arcades & a great roomful of books & steps down to their little pebbly bay. They are very happy & theirs is a lovely atmosphere of leisure with space & sunlight running all through it.5

The very last signatures of all were written in the summer of 2011, just after Paddy’s death. Across the intervening decades, visitors had included: Niko and Barbara Ghika; Nancy Mitford; Diana Cooper; Tom Driberg (who forgot to sign his name, so John Betjeman was asked to forge it); George Seferis; John Betjeman and Elizabeth Cavendish; Cyril Connolly; Ann Fleming; Bruce Chatwin; Janetta Jackson and her new husband, the Spanish decorator Jaime Parladé; Xan and Daphne Fielding; Gerald Brenan; Isabel Rawsthorne (Isabel had married Constant Lambert’s friend, Alan Rawsthorne, in 1954); John Craxton (who had a beautiful signature but whose spelling was appalling – he boasted that he had never passed an exam in his life); Jock and Diana Murray; Frances Partridge; ‘Billa’ Harrod and Dorothy ‘Coote’ Lygon, who usually travelled together; Stephen and Natasha Spender; Roy and Jennifer Jenkins; Steven Runciman; Deborah Devonshire; Joan’s sister Diana Casey (who Paddy described as ‘very nice, but has not a single interest in common with Joan or Graham, and is v. unlike: shy, tall, correct and well dressed in a not very imaginative Knightsbridge way and stitching away at gros-point. I think Joan finds her heavier going than I do!’6); and very many others.

Annie Fleming visited Kardamyli in the summer of 1969. She wrote to the diplomat and writer Nicholas Henderson from Greece about dining on the terrace, ‘where Paddy’s experiments with lighting coincide with peasants bearing food, and we are all suddenly plunged in Stygian dark,’ while Joan shrieks ‘Oh, Paddy’. On her return to England, she also wrote to Aline Berlin, the wife of Sir Isaiah Berlin. ‘The Leigh Fermors’ house is a triumph. Paddy is a much better architect than writer. The stone, the wood, the water, and the marble come from vast distances and a mini Xanadu constructed. It includes stone tables under shady olives designed to inspire a spate of writing but Paddy is only inspired to further visits and fountains, and Joan wails at approaching bankruptcy.’7

Despite his early visits during the building work, Sir Maurice Bowra never saw the house once it was finished. He claimed that he refused to go back to Greece so long as the Colonels of the junta were in charge but, as Ann Fleming continued in her letter to Aline Berlin, he no longer had the physical health for so arduous a journey. Buses and taxis served Kardamyli – the first private car in the village belonged to Paddy and Joan – but from then on one had to walk through olive groves, scrub, and along a narrow cliff path; ‘the descent to the beach [is] 24 uneven stone steps and though the bathing is perfect I suspect he prefers a table where he can shout “Vino subito”.’ And there were problems with the water; Peter Quennell complained that there was hot water only once a week. Paddy suggested to Jim Lees-Milne that he might like to stay but admitted: ‘It’s not very inviting at the moment as there is a water shortage, and Joan, Graham and I pour cupfuls of water over ourselves, then leave them standing in the bath for later use. Pretty disgusting.’8

Xan and Daphne Fielding were always welcome. One August in the early 1970s when Paddy and she had gone home to Dumbleton, Joan wrote to welcome them to Kardamyli. They were using the house in Joan and Paddy’s absence:

Darling Daphne & Xan,

I’m not going on apologising for not being there as it’s always as nice staying in houses when the owners are away & I feel we are the real sufferers being deprived of you. I do hope everything is all right & that they have finished whitewashing the rooms, usually left until the last moment & nothing ready when one gets back. As you will have realised from the first moment Lela is a wonder & will order you better chickens etc from Kalamata, fish etc & I hope look after you marvellously. Let her have an evening off occasionally if Daphne can cook some eggs or something or go to the tavern run by great friend Pavos Poneireas & nice family, the son Nico was our sort of foreman; or the new smart restaurant, quite good food, Belgian wife. There is a glorious beach with icy fresh water springs in the sand & sea about 4 or 5 miles on, just before Stoupa (nice tavern for lunch). There are roads everywhere now.

Paddy & party are back from the dangerous mountain peaks, all very successful & exciting. I’ve just had a wonderful 19 page letter from him. He should be here just before I leave. Li-lows [sic] are in the cupboard in the bathroom, & goggles. Whisky & vodka in the cellar. Don’t play the gramophone as it needs a new needle which I’m bringing out. There’s a wireless in my room but needs new batteries. Be kind to the forty cats. Do please manage to stay on your way back. Surely you could leave a few days earlier. I do so long to see you.

Very much love

Joan9

Joan always apologized in advance to visitors about her cats, in case guests did not appreciate her passion. Wherever one went on the premises a cat or kitten would suddenly appear, all of them descended from a single Abyssinian which had mated freely with the village toms. Joan wrote to John Banting in 1971: ‘Cats multiply, a beautiful mixture of Abyssinian and Maniote, but too many now. Graham says they’re like having crabs.’10

Although there were fewer in later years, at one time, when Janetta Parladé was staying, she counted seventy-three of them living in warring families. Since local veterinary services were lacking, if Joan had to put them down she used strong sleeping pills.11 Sometimes, although not often, they annoyed her: ‘The cats have killed the red rump swallows just as they had finished building the enormous miraculous nest just inside the front door. You can imagine my rage and despair.’12 However, the ‘down-holsterers’, as Paddy called them because of the harm they caused to the furniture, were part of Kardamyli life: ‘It’s been wet and cold and if my writing is worse than usual it’s because I’m sitting in the sun with eight cats on top of me. Paddy has been and is working like a demon, all day & a lot of the night. He is very pleased with himself, for that & keeping thinner, & it makes me very happy.’13 Photographs of the cats were turned into postcards. One showed a cat asleep on the open pages of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a favourite book which Paddy and Joan read in alternate years. ‘Overleaf is a little cat, which I’m sure you knew (“Tiny Tim”), great favourite of Joan and mine, now, alas, mousing above the clouds . . .’14

Joan herself was not always the perfect hostess. She admitted as much to Patrick Kinross:

I loved your letter & the eavesdropping remarks about my behaviour. It was a trial & I’m afraid I was often impatient & irritated with everyone. Thank goodness you were here but it was rather bad luck for you & I longed for you to be here too with Dadie [Rylands] and Raymond [Mortimer]. That restored one’s faith again in conversation. Paddy was upset about it especially as he had been looking forward to it tremendously. They were so nice but I am afraid they will tell Balasha I am even more cold and aloof than Bridget Parsons.15

And there were sometimes guests who could begin to outstay their welcome, or prove trying in other ways, none more so than her old friend Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. Eddie’s selfishness was phenomenal, although, as Heywood Hill wrote to Nancy Mitford, ‘Joan . . . said that she likes having him because he is so selfish that there is no doubt what he wants. A point of view, I suppose, though charitable.’16 After working for the British Council in Athens, Cyprus and Cairo, Eddie had retired to Athens, but was in the habit of making extended visits to his friends and family, whom he treated like members of his personal staff. Even Joan’s charity could be exhausted.

Eddie is here and driving me mad with his continual banter about food: ‘I suppose, my dear, you are giving us pheasant to-night, my dear. Oct 1st, my dear, I have to have a pheasant my dear.’ ‘I don’t think this is any good, my dear, without at least a pint of cream in it, my dear.’ ‘I hope you have stuffed the chicken with foie gras, my dear.’ On and on and on, after a week one really doesn’t know how to answer.17

Not that Eddie was completely unfeeling. When Bowra died in 1972, he wrote to Joan with his sympathy – and then told her about his own medical problems.

Eddie’s sister Anne was married to the bookseller Heywood Hill. In the Leigh Fermor archive there is a letter from Heywood Hill to Robin Fedden:

Dearest Robin,

Pardon for using my Jumbo Economy Scribbling Pad upon you. It’s a bad sign when one starts to stinge on writing paper. But I have not yet got to my late father’s stage of counting the sheets in a toilet roll. I suppose these days Andrex would win – according to telly adverts of Bonzo getting mixed up in it and rushing downstairs and out onto the patio (all anathema to you, I guess).

If I sound in cheery spirits, it’s because Eddie has been safely got away. I had an awful fear that he might be stuck here. If he had I think Anne would have gone round all the bends. He became more violently demanding as time progressed. Two days before he left he shouted at her I WANT YOU AT MY DISPOSAL THE WHOLE OF TOMORROW. ‘But Eddie I can’t,’ said Anne, ‘it’ll take me 3 hours to cook the pheasant which I’ve been keeping for you – deeply frozen – as a treat for your last day.’ FUCK THE PHEASANT, he shouted, I WANT YOU TO PACK. Jonny came down for the last two nights & cheered us up. Then on Friday morning he drove Eddie off among a welter of pee bottles, syringes & Andrex. Jonny* told us when we rang him up that evening that only the bottles had been needed. When throwing the contents of one out the window, it all blew back in Jonny’s face. Sister Anne’s sisterly love was fairly dried up by the end though absence is making the heart grow fonder . . .

With love from us both

Heywood18

When Eddie died in 1978, Paddy wrote a typically generous, unpublished obituary:

Time gradually changed [Eddie] into a Peacockian figure – for bookish analogies are inevitable – a sitter for the Dilettanti portraits with a dash of great Whiggery, a sceptic Voltairean aristocrat but not a stoic for tedium, humbug, bad scholarship, and, indeed the recent handicap of ill-health, could set the air crackling all around him with oaths and groans. He demanded much of his friends and got it, by cutting through their quandaries by never doing anything he didn’t want but repaying their troubles many times over by the charms and surprises of his company.19

At Kardamyli there were thousands of books: in the library, the studio, in all the bedrooms (one of which had a set of unbound copies of Horizon – the defining magazine of its time – on its shelves), and on the shelves fitted into the largest bathroom. There were cookery books in the kitchen, and, because there was no room for them anywhere else, there were more piles of books in the basement. Joan kept her copies of Paddy’s books in her bedroom. He decorated their inside front covers and flyleaves with drawings of seascapes and seagulls. But it was the library, the great or the big room, which was at the centre of Paddy and Joan’s lives. The seating was arranged so that they could gather with guests in little groups to talk, or sit by themselves and read or write letters at the desk, or retreat to the hayáti – a seating area at the end of the room – in order to play chess. Joan loved chess, and spent hours over the board, either with an opponent or just playing against herself. She bought a small computer with chess programs when they were introduced. She also loved Call My Bluff. After dinner, the Oxford English Dictionary was taken from the shelves and the players would take it in turn to find a word no one knew; everyone had to guess which concocted definition was true, for a point, then it was the turn of the winner, if there was one, who would choose another word. When players lacked inspiration, they suggested ‘A small Mediterranean fish’ as a definition and so ‘A small Mediterranean fish’ became a kind of family joke. But, as Paddy wrote in his entry in a book of essays and photographs entitled The Englishman’s Room, books were the raison d’être of his house:

Where a man’s Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also; and, of course, Lemprière, Fowler, Brewer, Liddell and Scott, Dr Smith, Harrap and Larousse and a battery of atlases, bibles, concordances, Loeb classics, Pléiade editions, Oxford Companions and Cambridge histories; anthologies and books on painting, sculpture, architecture, birds, beasts, reptiles, fishes and trees; for if one is settling in the wilds, a dozen reference shelves is the minimum, and they must be near the dinner table where arguments spring up which have to be settled then or never.20

Many of the books on the shelves had been given to Paddy and Joan as gifts. Among the poets were two books by Tristan Tzara (who composed a poem for her) and six by John Betjeman. No two poets could be more different. After his first visit to Kardamyli, in September 1969, Betjeman thanked Joan and Paddy individually, writing to Paddy:

What is time for? To make things as beautiful as possible as you have. I suppose that big room – the big room is one of the rooms of the world. What is marvellous about it is the arc of light – daylight or evening light. It charms and is perfect in each. It is something to do with proportion or you have an instinct . . . I doubt it comes from books.21

And to Joan:

Darling Joanie,

Oh I did enjoy myself at Kardamyli. Of course that big room, as I’ve written to Paddy, is one of the rooms in the world. It is the thought in everything you ever look at which delights me about the house(s). In that way Paddy is like Butterfield.* In proportion and use the garden is part of the architecture, he is less Lutyens and Jekyll – all the time he is himself. I’ve never seen you so beautiful, not even when with eyes as big as your cheeks and downy soft and straight, you stood in the Ritz. I’ve written to Jock [Murray] a long letter giving him news of George [Seferis] and telling him also about the house – how it is really a book of Paddy’s and more lasting.22

But on his return to England Betjeman also wrote to Wayland Kennet:

Greece was enchanting as scenery and as siting for temples, but the atmosphere of not being able to speak freely was markedly noticeable. Even I noticed it. I don’t think it could ever be like that in Italy. I don’t think it was even like that under Mussolini . . . The nastiest man I ever met in my life was the Chief Reception Clerk at the Grande Hotel in Athens, never go there.23

When Brian Howard died from a drugs overdose in January 1958 Cyril Connolly gave Joan a copy of Wheels, an anthology of poems edited by Edith Sitwell and published in 1921 when he was still at Eton, young and full of promise. The anthology was dedicated to ‘Joan with love from Cyril in memory of Charles Orange’. Wheels included a poem by ‘Charles Orange’, Howard’s pseudonym which he used because he feared he might get in trouble with the Eton authorities. Howard’s great talent was later dissipated in drink, drugs and idleness but his name runs like a thread through the memoirs of so many of his generation. John Banting wrote to Joan about his death, which he said was an accident: ‘He wanted to die in my arms and he did – held tightly encircled – with no murmur – and then I reached desperately for the heart beat which had stopped [. . .] He told his mother “If John can’t come – then Joan must”. He loved and admired you steadily.’24 Cyril Connolly also gave Joan his own books, as well as volumes by others. A Study of Charles Baudelaire by Arthur Symons was dedicated to Joan from Cyril ‘with love, love & love, 1964 June’. Tennyson’s Maud, and Other Poems was inscribed ‘Joan’s Book – O, why should Love, like men in drinking songs/Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?’ Cyril’s last book, a collection of essays called The Evening Colonnade, appeared in 1973, when he was seventy. By then his health was failing. In November 1974, Joan received a telegram in Greece saying that Cyril had had a heart attack and was seriously ill. She flew to England immediately with Graham, who happened to be staying at Kardamyli. Paddy wrote to Balasha: ‘I drove them in, J. very upset and anxious, and saw them off at the aerodrome. I do hope he’ll be all right, but there’s not much hope it seems.’ As Cyril would have expected, and as he would have done himself, his friends kept an account of the following days in their letters and diaries. On Saturday 3 November, soon after she had arrived, Joan wrote to Paddy:

[Cyril] is getting weaker and weaker & it can’t last long now, though he is still completely lucid at times. I tried to telephone you today but the international operators this end could only say loive dint . . . & had so much trouble spelling Teddington I gave up & will try from London. I go back to-morrow as though there’s little one can do but hold C’s hand & be an extra nurse I feel so anxious away for more than a day.25

Joan organized the traffic around Cyril’s bed in the Harley Street Clinic. His complicated emotional life meant that a lot of friends and lovers came to see him but did not necessarily want to meet one another. John Betjeman wrote to Penelope:

Cyril is dying very fast. I went to see him today. Liver and no hope. Joanie and his new girl called Sheila, and Deirdre, take it in turns to watch by his bed. He sent you his love: ‘Give my love to Penelope.’ I am very proud of how much you are loved by our friends.26

Connolly’s then wife, Deirdre Craig, was in love with Peter Levi, a writer and former priest. Cyril’s own last affair, which not all his friends were aware of, was with a woman called Shelagh Levita. Barbara Skelton came over from Grimaud in the south of France, where she lived:

When I first visited the Harley Street Clinic, the first thing that struck me was the dust and the array of dead flowers, cluttering the room. Why had no-one bothered to throw them away? My visits could not coincide with Deirdre, Sonia [Orwell], Joan or Janetta’s. But Shelagh was always there until my last visit, when C. was alone. He was studying a medical encyclopaedia, when two doctors entered who were doing their rounds. Cyril addressed them querulously, ‘Why is it I’m not getting any better?’ The doctors seemed to be baffled as to what was the actual cause of his illness. ‘Was it a heart or liver complaint?’ ‘Have you ever lived in the tropics?’ one of them said. Cyril was pitifully thin but could be persuaded to drink a little glucose . . . I left the clinic crying and soon after returned to Grimaud.27

Cyril died on 26 November. His funeral took place a few days later at Berwick Church in East Sussex, a small twelfth-century church famous for its wall paintings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Grant, who lived at Charleston nearby, came to the service and was seated at the back of the church together with his daughter. Anthony Hobson, a bibliophile and head of Sotheby’s book division, read one of the lessons. Stephen Spender wrote in his diary that it somehow did not seem to suit Cyril that both the lesson and psalm should be about the resurrection of the body – he was so famously dissatisfied with how he looked.

The vicar who had a stick, without which he can’t stand up, talked very briefly and understandingly about Cyril and his work. We stood around the flower-covered grave, in the wet and windy cold weather, just a tarpaulin of some kind over the coffin. The person who seems most stricken is Joan Leigh Fermor. I held her arm a moment but didn’t dare speak to her. She looks 20 years older.28

Joan was named as an executrix, and Deirdre his legatee; Coutts Bank were fellow executors but, aside from his library and his papers, Cyril had nothing to leave, except his considerable debts. At four in the morning on 27 December, a month after Cyril’s death, Paddy awoke from a dream which he recorded in his notebook:

The decor of the room was very elaborate and among charming details were two enormous pink and grey poppies, in and on each of which, by an old Chinese process had been recorded a poem, and also a review by Cyril Connolly so that people sitting near the table and the vase containing them could hear snatches of both: ‘The moths turning alone on ears of rye . . .’; ‘a misplaced adjective here and there’; ‘transparent skiffs . . .’; ‘imprint limited to five copies . . .’; ‘stalks disappearing swamp . . .’; ‘Sir A. Douglas-Home’ . . . ‘each eighth pearl being black’. Unfortunately both flowers were thrown away next day by mistake, the petals of one of them were already coming loose. Saw them with the crinkly chocolate papers so their contents are now lost to us. Off to sleep now.29

In May 1971, two days before his sixty-ninth birthday, John Banting wrote to Joan from his home in Hastings: ‘Darling Joan, I often think of you in your (I hope) glorious reclusiveness. You once said to me “I know enough people”. I too treasure my six or seven chosen ones but I do sometimes meet some good new ones – usually much younger and far more intelligent.’30 Banting had long since ceased to be the dangerous, shaven-headed young artist of his bohemian youth, and his political views were no longer so violently left-wing as they had been in the 1930s, although he still counted Tom Driberg, another ex-communist, among his friends. ‘I saw Tom D. last year in the House and his false eye was unnoticeable and he looked very well and handsome.’ In her diaries, Frances Partridge calls Banting ‘a genial slow old duck’.31 His letters to Joan are meandering and written with a shaky hand – he was frequently drunk. Joan wrote inviting him to Greece – ‘It’s blissful here & we live on our own eggs, garlic, veg. salads, bread, oil & fish straight from the sea’ and suggesting how he might get a cheap flight, but Banting pleaded ill-health and the fact that because of his youthful political affiliations his name might yet be on some list which would prevent him from ever travelling again. Less than a year later, Banting – another of Joan’s friends from the 1930s, the painter who had once offered to decorate her bedroom ceiling – was dead.

Time continued to take its toll on Joan’s friends throughout the 1970s. In January 1976, Tom Driberg was made a life peer. His introduction to the House of Lords was a grand affair; John Rayner called it his apotheosis. In August, however, Tom died of a heart attack while in a taxi on the way to the Barbican from Paddington station – taxis played a large part in his life to the very end. The following day his obituary in The Times described him as ‘a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual [. . .] an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. He looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the Bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances.’32 He was the first man The Times ever outed in its obituary columns, although it would have been dishonest to write about him without mentioning the fact. The obituary writer also mentioned his wife, Ena, whom Tom had married for the sake of respectability. Joan wrote to Rayner asking him for any press cuttings about the memorial service and the funeral: ‘I wish I could be there & that I could write something about Tom, but not being a writer I find it impossible to say anything about one’s greatest friends.’33

John Rayner administered Tom’s will, and it took him several years to settle his old friend’s affairs: his duties included the publication of Tom’s autobiography, which made no mention of Ena. (Future royalties from Tom’s books were divided between JR and the anti-apartheid movement.)

Tom had sold Bradwell Lodge in 1971, on account of his considerable debts, and moved to the Barbican. Joan and John Betjeman were among twelve friends who were each left £50, two pictures and a dozen books. They went together with John Rayner to collect the books and pictures. ‘I did not often go to that flat of his,’ Betjeman wrote to Ena. ‘Only someone as eccentric and individual as Thomas Edward Neil would choose to live in such a frightful, lonely, hideous bit of housing. I always told him how awful it was but he didn’t seem to notice it. I collected an Edward Lear of an Italian tree, a drawing of the old portico at Euston and a Nonsuch Milton. I find Milton heavy-going and thought he might be easier in that beautiful edition.’34 Joan lost her two pictures, along with much else, almost immediately, as Paddy and she drove back to Greece via Italy together with Coote Lygon, who was then also living in Greece.

At Brindisi Coote’s car was stolen, just before we got on the boat [?] found unharmed next morning on a vast rubbish dump outside the town (so like the beginning of Italian films) with all our cases bust open & everything new or of any value gone. We picked up some old clothes, hairbrushes, pills, papers, books, etc. out from the refuse, watched by jeering children, but the miraculous loudspeakers & amplifier, the Graham Sutherland drawing & Toulouse Lautrec lithograph, silver spoons & forks, all Paddy’s suits and shirts & new suits, all mine too & leather coats, jerseys, all those presents bought after hours of silent screams at Marks & Spencers, rugs, sheets, lamps, everything in fact that she wanted & was bringing back at last for the house disappeared for ever I’m afraid. I only have now the oldest shirt & skirt I was wearing at the time & can’t even go to Athens. Think of the hours of ghastly shopping ahead of one, I feel I shall stay here for the rest of my life.35

As some sort of recompense, John Rayner wrote back to Joan to tell her that while emptying the Barbican flat he had found a portrait of Tom when young by John Banting, ‘in the style tho’ not so good as his portrait of Eddy Sackville-West. You will have it.’ The £50 Tom had also left her Joan spent on the complete ten-volume Mahabarata; JR also sent her, as gifts, Darcy Thompson’s Greek Birds and Fountains in the Sand by Norman Douglas. He himself bought a mourning ring. Joan wrote to thank him for the books:

It is very kind of you to bother. I feel in a selfish rage about not seeing Tom when I came to England. He never signed our visitors book when he was here, a space was waiting. Have you a signature of his anywhere I could stick in? Otherwise Betj is very good at forging them.36

Although Joan might claim to have ‘enough’ friends, every death was a break in the circle.