Love Lessons and Love Is Blue: Diaries of the War Years

Wartime Diaries #1-2

by Joan Wyndham

These war diaries record the youthful Joan Wyndham's colourful adolescent initiation into the ways of sex, love and life among Chelsea's bohemian community at the start of World War II. They also cover her subsequent experiences in the WAAF both in London and on postings across the country.

448 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 1995

About the author

Joan Olivia Wyndham was a British writer and memoirist who rose to literary prominence late in life through the diaries she had kept more than 40 years earlier, which were an account of her romantic adventures during the Second World War, when she was an attractive teenager who had strayed into London's Bohemian set. Her literary reputation rests on Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), two selections from her diaries which led one critic to call her “a latterday Pepys in camiknickers”.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons is one of my all-time favourite wartime diaries, her style reminds me of a more candid, lyrical Monica Dickens crossed with an arty, bohemian version of Jessica Mitford. So, I was pleased to find a second-hand edition that also includes her sequel Love is Blue which I’ve never read before. Wyndham’s diaries open just before WW2’s announced, Wyndham’s a posh, strangely endearing young woman studying acting at RADA. She lives in Fulham with her divorced, devout Catholic mother and her mother’s companion the enigmatic sculptor Sid (Sidonie aka Caryll) Houselander. Wyndham dutifully volunteers for wartime duties, has a series of, what she calls, ‘emotional’ lesbian crushes on women she encounters, and spends her leisure time reading Baudelaire and Voltaire while pining for the theatre - closing because of the war. She’s also desperate to become a worldly-wise sophisticate part of which requires finally losing her virginity. A quest which leads her to art school and the attentions of some extremely annoying, Joyce-reading, corduroy-wearing, narcissistic male artists – the appalling gender politics of this circle reminded me of Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and her experiences with Kerouac and the Beats.

In the first instalment Wyndham writes with immense verve, she somehow manages to be naïve yet acutely observant, her diaries combining gossip and richly-detailed, witty accounts of wartime London’s counterculture with cameo appearances from Henry Moore, Freud, Peggy Guggenheim, Madam Arcana (artist, author and former lover of Aleister Crowley). There are even more glimpses of famous figures and English eccentrics in Love is Blue including artist’s model Nina Hamnett, Quentin Crisp, Julian MacLaren-Ross, and Dylan Thomas who kisses like ”an intoxicated octopus." It’s now the early 1940s and Wyndham’s a fully-fledged WAAF, periodically managing to escape into London for more raffish exploits and unsatisfying love affairs. Although there are still plenty of entertaining episodes, and some fascinating accounts of life as a service woman, for me there’s a little too much about her difficult love life and awkward relationships. Part of this probably stems from the book’s origins, Love Lessons is composed of diary entries from the time whereas the follow-up is a recreation put together from letters and notes so it’s far less vivid and a lot more sketchy and fragmented.

Rating: 3.5

[Peter Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two volumes of diary in one volume.I was in two minds when I began as to whether I would get into this, but eventually she won me over.Artless and genuine, frank and fun, she gives a picture of life in WW II as lived by well connected bohemians.I found the second volume more interesting than the first as she is now in uniform as one of the girls who relay the information about flights onto the large flat boards so officers can see how battles are going.Such a different age, pre pill with many girls totally ignorant of sex but learning as they go along.Quite funny in places and touching too as she wonders honestly about her feelings.I ended up wishing I knew what happened to her and all her friends after the war and felt sad to leave her in 1945.So overall an interesting account of young life in WW II