A Different Blitz Memoir

 Joan Wyndham, Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary

On Monday, 27^th May 1940, 17-year-old Joan Wyndham confided to her diary:

The Germans are in Calais.  I don’t seem to be able to react or to feel anything.  I don’t know what’s real any more.  I don’t think I’m real or that this life is real.  Before this last winter everything seemed real, but since then I seem to have been dreaming.  I wanted to mix with artists so I rented a studio, and because of the studio I’m pretending to be an artist, when I don’t even know what painting means.  Ever since then I’ve been listening to people talking a new language, filth and blasphemy, and heard myself talking it too.  I see myself acting like a tart, and men hurting me and sponging on me and trying to make love, and asking if they can pee in my sink, and telling me to take my clothes off and I really don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep.

The bombs, which I know must come, hardly enter my fringe of consciousness.  Bombs and death are real, and I and all the other artists around here are only concerned with unreality.  We live in a dream, and it may be desperate but it’s not dull.

Or did she?  Both The Captive Reader and Reading the End note that the diary shows signs of having been edited, so perhaps this unusually insightful and reflective passage is a later interpolation.  Most of this frank book is the record of an ordinary teenager, obsessed with relationships and sex, in an extraordinary time.

At the beginning of the war, her indulgent, divorced mother, gives her £2 a week, which she uses to rent a top-floor studio and paint.  She sporadically attends classes and paints with friends who are only too happy to use her studio and her supplies.  She realizes she’s only pretending, and soon finds herself in a dissolute society of other pretenders in London’s artsy Chelsea district.  Her innocence (she is both a virgin and a practicing Catholic) make her something of a celebrity.

In the manner of 17-year-old girls everywhere, she has one crush after another, but these are with rather creepy older men.  The most honorable of them, a German national who is eventually interned, gives her some avuncular advice: find a 20-something that she really likes to surrender her maidenhead to.  But for a year, while there’s a fair amount of snogging and frank sex talk meant to shock her, there’s no shagging.  She participates in the social life of London, going to plays, movies, nightclubs, and the occasional wild Chelsea party.  All of which she confesses every week.

It’s all great fun until about a year into the war, when the Blitz begins.  It only takes a week or two of being bombed for her to decide it’s time to take her interned friend’s advice.  She selects her latest crush, 23-year-old Rupert, to do the deed.  But then, one by one, her hang-outs and her friends’ residences are bombed, friends die or are called up for service, and her life gets more and more schizophrenic.  Eventually, Wyndham signs up with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).  There are some witty descriptions of her basic training.  The book ends as she reports for specialized training in May, 1941.

Wyndham’s prose can be quite good.  Her descriptions of being bombed and of bombed-out streets are first rate.  She’s also a sharp observer of people; the characters of her set are delineated by her descriptions of their appearance and wry accounts of their doings.

I came to this book because it was a source for Erik Larsen’s excellent The Splendid and the Vile and because I enjoyed Eileen Alexander’s Love in the Blitz.  However, this is a very different book than Alexander’s collection of letters to her lover.  Further, I suspect Love Lessons would be much less well-received today than it was when originally published in 1985.  We’re a lot more sensitive to the power imbalance implicit in 30-something men pawing a 17-year-old young woman now.  And all of the men treat her horribly.  Fore example, as Claire put it in The Captive Reader, “[Rupert] talks down to Wyndham, continues sleeping with other women while he’s seeing and sleeping with her, is unspeakably awful when one of their friends – and one of Joan’s old admirers – is killed during the war, and hits her.”

Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the book is that signing up for the WAAF is an indication that she’s growing up.  But at the very end, as she reflects that she will probably find some man who is faithful and nice, she’s still yearning for bad boy Rupert.

So, should you read it?  On the one hand, it is a useful addition to Blitz memoir and there is the guilty pleasure of her humorous accounts of her sex education.  On the other hand, there are the disgusting, cringe-worthy, manipulative men she has her adventures with; I kept hoping she’d grow up and leave them behind.  On balance, I guess I would recommend it as a historical document that reminds us that not everybody could be Eileen Alexander, nor that every Brit maturely kept a stiff upper lip while muddling through.

 

Little Brown, 1985, 204 pp.