Love Lessons

Wartime Diaries #1

by Joan Wyndham

On my way to the studio there was an air-raid. I ran into the brick shelter in the middle of the road. There were poor little Leonard and Agnes sitting on their suitcases, having lost their all. Luckily Leonard had been wearing his best trousers at the time. Madame Arcana was there too wearing a gold brocade toque and a blanket. It was bloody cold and I wanted to pee badly, but couldn't. Leonard wouldn't give me his seat as he believes in the equality of the sexes, so I sat on the floor...'

August 1939. As a teenage Catholic virgin, Joan Wyndham spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive. Huddled in the air-raid shelter, she wrote secretly and obsessively about the strange yet exhilarating times she was living through, sure that this was ' the happiest time of my life'.

Genres: Memoir, World War II, Nonfiction, Biography, Diary, Autobiography, British Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 1985

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

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Lessons (1985) by Joan Wyndham is a teenage perspective on life in wartime London immediately before and during the Blitz. This is not a typical Blitz memoir, and Joan is not a typical teenager. She enjoys a sizeable weekly allowance from her mother and so wants for little, even when rationing kicks in, and she has her own artist's studio.

Apparently it was Joan's daughter who convinced her to publish her teenage diaries in the mid 1980s. The diaries give a real sense of immediacy and are full of great detail about life in London at the start of the war. The primary interest lies in the insights into the bohemian crowd Joan got to know and her gradual surrender to sexual desire as she drifts from her Catholic upbringing.

Unsurprisingly Love Lessons is very much of its time and so is awash with the era's casual sexism, racism and homophobia. Joan is also unabashed about her preference for "caddish men" who will "knock me around". It's also shocking how her suitors frequently threaten her with rape.

If you're interested in the era, London, or English social history, and can tolerate the diaries of a callow young woman and all that entails, then this is highly recommended. You'll be immersed in a world of teenage uncertainty, artists studios, bohemian parties, memorably pretentious characters, and London bars and cafes. If that gets your attention then dive in as soon as you can. You'll be glad you did.

4/5



August 1939. As a teenage Catholic virgin, Joan Wyndham spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive. Huddled in the air-raid shelter, she wrote secretly and obsessively about the strange yet exhilarating times she was living through, sure that this was 'the happiest time of my life'

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had had my eye on Joan Wyndham's Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary for quite some time, and borrowed a gloriously musty second edition copy from my local library. First published in 1985, at the urging of Wyndham's daughter, these diaries, which span the first two years of the Second World War, begin in August 1939. At this point, she is a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in the capital, but it closes down just as war is declared. Along with its sequel, Love Is Blue, Love Lessons recounts Wyndham's life during wartime.

At the outset of war, sixteen-year-old Wyndham lives with her mother and 'her religious companion, the enigmatic Sid'. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her father is a bristling, sometimes absent figure, in her life. Wyndham is described in the blurb as a 'teenage Catholic virgin... [who] spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive.' One critic rather memorably called its young author 'a latterday Pepys in camiknickers'.

Wyndham is open in that she falls for people incredibly quickly. When she visits her local first-aid post for the war effort, she makes a friend, and comments on the 4th of September 1939: 'At the moment, Laura and I are enjoying a gentle lesbianism of the mind, but I'm afraid it won't last and soon I shall be in love with her properly.' There are similar situations with various men, some of whom treat her very badly; many of them seem intent only upon taking her virginity.

Wyndham can be quite fickle, in the tradition of adolescents; she shifts admiration and adoration from one individual to another, and is often momentarily heartbroken between. She does impart wise comments upon her condition and position at times, though, and seems very aware of her own self. In April 1940, she writes: 'What an extraordinary thing this love is that comes and goes, making a completely different person of you while it lasts... You have to be terribly careful when you are young.'

Nothing about this journal is typical, particularly given the time in which it was written, and I feel as though this account would probably shock a lot of her contemporaries in its frankness. From the very first, Love Lessons is wonderfully evocative, rather amusing, and quite risqué. In the first entry, for instance, Wyndham remarks: 'Granny is a bit of a bore, always chasing me to wash my hands and wear a dress - but luckily she's in bed a lot of the time, wearing a chin-strap and a little circle of tin pressed into the middle of her forehead to keep the wrinkles at bay - it's hard work being an ageing beauty.' She has a lot of affection for her Aunt Bunch, of whom she comments: 'Mummy says she takes drugs and goes around with Negroes, but I don't care.'

I found Wyndham's entries immediately compelling, and her tone refreshing and quite modern. I was not expecting the explicit sexual content which crops up here from time to time, but it feels authentic to show just what a modern woman Wyndham was, and the shifting world in which she became an adult. She offers comments on everyone, and everything. I don't think I've ever read anything so frank from this period, and it certainly opened my eyes a little. As a teenager, she 'strayed into London's Bohemian set', meeting rather eccentric characters at every turn. One of her friends from drama school has a 'sugar daddy', and becomes 'the first of my friends to go over the edge' by losing her virginity. Another friend, Prudey, 'married a Greek don who seduced her in every field in Cambridge. He used to make noises like a wolf and got very enraged if she wouldn't bleat. When she was unfaithful to him he was so amazed he had her put into a lunatic asylum, but she ran away to Greece and got herself three lovers.'

She and her friends discuss taboo subjects with regularity, and she seems to recount each of these episodes. In May 1940, she writes, for instance, of a married male acquaintance, Leonard: 'I think he would have kissed me, but I gracefully freed myself and ran down the steps, because it's rather embarrassing to kiss a man smaller than yourself standing up. I think I'm becoming the most awful bitch.'

Of the war, which is of course all around her, Wyndham writes of her confusion in May 1940: '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.' When the air raids in London become too much, her mother has her 'evacuated' to the Kent town of Tunbridge Wells, to stay with her aunt. Although Wyndham is only here for a couple of weeks in the end, when she is first sent away, she recounts her discontent: 'This morning was zero hour - the place, the country, seemed unbearably remote, cut off from the warm stream of life.'

I had only read the first two weeks of entries in this book before requesting Love is Blue from the library. Throughout Love Lessons, Wyndham gives important commentary about being a young woman in the context of wartime London, whilst being really very funny about it. There are some serious moments here, of course, but her sense of humour really shines through. Wyndham is warm and witty, charming and candid, and readers are sure to have so much fun with her highly readable accounts of wartime life.

[Clare Harvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why have I only just discovered this? Brilliant!

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to go back to hospital! Luckily I got to go home this time but I spent 8 hours waiting for tests and results and I read all but the last few pages of this book while the clock ticked slowly. Then I stopped because there is some perverse thing in me that cannot finish things when it's time to finish them. This is why my pantry is full of things with just one more drop left in them.

This one was much, much sexier than I was expecting, even from the blurb. Most of the other diaries I've read have been written by much more morally conservative women. This one is full of frank discussions about sex, contraception, pregnancy scares, orgasms, lesbians, mistresses, unrequited lust and passion. Wyndham's very unconventional Catholic upbringing, her divorced mother taking a lady 'companion' and raising her daughter in an artistic and queer part of London with all kinds of curious friends, clearly had an impact.

Joan is 17 when war breaks out and manages to have a fascinating 18 months or so as an artist-ingenue, renting a studio and going to study at art school because her artist crush suggested it, and hanging out with all sorts of strange and smelly people, getting lessons on life and sex and love from most of them. Like almost all published war diarists, she enjoys her war, and apart from flashes of fear as bombs drop, existential horror at the state of the world, and occasional discussions of ration starvation, she notes at the end (in 1941) that 'I don't feel any different to what I did in peace time, only a little happier'.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous diary. Funny, vivid, occasionally filthy, and an evocative depiction of a teenager's life during the early stages of World War Two. The characters are described by Wyndham so completely that one can see them, smell them, hear them speak, and feel their presence. It's easy to imagine darting from an artist's studio to a nearby cafe amid rubble-strewn blitzed streets. Can't wait to start on Love is Blue, which picks up the story a few months on.

[Mary Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting account of a young girls diary in the war years.
A bit risqué for the time it was written.
August 1939, Joan is a teenage Catholic and we follow her antics in this coming of age novel.

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish that when I was 19 I was writing about my life with as much wit and energy as Joan Wyndham wrote about hers in 1939. "Love Lessons" is peripherally about the experience of living in London during the war - the rationing and air raids - and mostly about her experiences growing up, meeting men, concerns about birth control... and it's all written so marvellously.

I picked up this book after reading a review at Jenny's Books, and she excerpted a passage that I will steal and put here:

"The fact is, I prefer men to be slightly caddish and knock me around, and not to love me too much. I like men who think they are God.

Rupert, of course, has all the self-assurance in the world – never looks foolish or put out, is completely at ease with the universe and thinks himself a lord of it. He belongs to that class of person that is adored by shopkeepers and servants – “Dear master Rupert, such a fine lad he’s grown into!” – and Rupert smiles his gentle smile that means nothing, and strides on in glorious self-absorption, six feet of indolent golden manhood in a spotlessly white unbuttoned shirt, his trousers just a little too big for him. There is a kind of aura about him that suggests green cricket fields and white flannels, though God knows he detests all sports and exercise. He has that irresistible lazy charm that often goes with decadence and overbreeding – just like my father."

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always thought that if I were say, 17, and keeping a journal during apocalyptic times, it would probably have lengthy passages that bemoaned the fact that I got my period TWO DAYS EARLY and stained my best white jeans and oh, by the way, NYC was wiped off the map today. Well, Joan Wyndham really did keep that journal, bless her. Like this:

"After Jo had gone, I looked at my flushed face in the glass, and tidied my hair, thinking what an awful tart I am. There was a terrible love-bite on my cheek, so I got a pin and made a few scratches across it, and told Mummy a cat had scratched me, but I don't think she believed me. Later we listened to a very stirring speech by Churchill about "blood, toil, sweat, and tears."

YOU SEE? What's important when you're seventeen (or, probably, eighty) is what you did with the cute guy, not Churchill's undying oration. Joan's diary is absolutely charming, written with a self-deprecating wit and charm that belies her years.

Note: This book is very hard to find. If it's not in the library, I think you may have to order it online...Thanks, Jenny!

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Lord. This is like an entire book populated by Philip Boyes's friends from Strong Poison, only with (A LOT) more talking about sex, and the Blitz instead of a murder trial. I feel like a Victorian grandma confronted with Byron. o_0

[Cathy Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly funny but not for the prudish!

[Júlia · Rating 4 out of 5]

People have no taste. How come is this out of print? I had to resort to a scanned PDF, the really heavy, Internet archive type to read this. But it was totally worth it. Her sense of humor is wonderful, the characters were always amusing, if not always likeable, and i was never, ever bored. In some ways it did not age well (it deals a lot in prejudices, but they felt mostly like part of a period portrait than a structuring feature of the book), but so much is surprisingly modern! Her voice in general, and the way she discusses sex (i particularly enjoyed the passages about virginity). I saw this described as "real life chamomile lawn", which i haven't finished, but this felt even more modern, in spite of having been written before. Anyway, i get why virago may have chosen to not reprint it, but i think there's much more to be profited, and hope they do so in the future.

[Barbara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I reserved this book from the library after reading reviews that made me think I would be shown something of social history during WW2. It might be of interest to a young teenager who wants a bit of a thrill reading about pansies (the book's phrase, not mine), lesbians, and pre-marital sex from the viewpoint of a 17 year old convent educated girl, but it was of no interest to me. I don't think I could bear to read further books of this author's memoirs.

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful diary crammed full with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, relatively speaking! English teenager Joan Wyndham kept this diary throughout a tumultuous time both for the world and herself, 1939-1942. Highly enjoyable read though it is of its time and, therefore, shot through with casual sexism, racism and homophobia. It's the first of a trilogy of diaries. I've just started her final one this morning and am loving it!

[Katelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite wwii diary but very well written. Wyndham's diary covers two years of wwii and her introduction to a bohemian crowd, as well as her sexual awakening. These are the focus of the diary. It is followed by a second published diary, which should include more of the effects of living in London spring wwii. It was only in the last 1/4 of this diary that Wyndham starts feeling the effects of the war.

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leonard believes that any normally attractive man can get any woman in the end if he is patient and soft with her. I looked at Leonard's skinny legs and decided it wasn't true.

This is what got me to place the book on hold. Joan is hysterical! I love her self obsessed sex-capades.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

"given up hope of a lobster thermidor, so we had egg and chips at a small, dirty French cafe in Soho"

Mother immediately became embroiled on the sofa with an Antarctic whaler... Talking to her about seals

[Lisa of Hopewell]

I learned of this book here: https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2021/...

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but it does belabor the angst of young love (as you’d expect). Interesting insight into bohemian London in this period. I enjoyed it a lot more once it began to cover more of the war and the blitz.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account.

[Alison Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely wonderful!

[Duncan M Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wickedly funny diaries of a young woman growing up in London through the beginning of world war two and the blitz, less "their finest hour" and more her greatest fun.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Secret Diary of Joanie Wyndham, Aged 17¾.

[Nightwitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and easy read, this book (and its sequel) apparently caused quite a stir when it was first published in the UK, and it's easy to understand why: the diary of a teenager during World War II, it's extremely frank and presents a heroine who is far more concerned with boys than bombs. There may be a war going on, but Joan, with her own artist's studio and what seems to be a hefty weekly allowance, is more concerned with falling in love. And sex. Heroic Brit Battles Against the Blitz this is NOT.

That said, the book is interesting for what it is, but that is exactly what it is. Joan is a very teenager-y teenager, meaning that she's wildly self-obsessed and making poor decisions right, left, and sideways. Her narrative voice is appealing but shallow. And her view of sex is very much of its time, meaning that suitors cheerfully threaten her with rape more or less constantly which Joan takes as a compliment. It's unusual in terms of books about the Blitz because it really does seem like it was written at the time (there is very little sense that Joan is Living Through A Great And Momentous Time), but the reader's enjoyment will depend on how much tolerance he or she has for obnoxious teenagers.

[Lyndsy Spence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first Joan Wyndham book I'd read, although it's a diary and not a bio or memoir. I thought it was hysterically funny and quite sad in parts. It begins when Joan is in her teens and it carries on throughout the war. Some parts were quite graphic (I won't include any spoilers) and her choice of words (to describe certain events/things) were alarming. Today's modern reader will relate to her diary entries. Out of her 3 diaries (Love Lessons/ Love is Blue/ Anything Once) this is the most enjoyable because of its innocence. I'm surprised the BBC has not made a mini series of this.

[Candace Frates · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great fun book, London, true diaries of a somewhat impoverished and terribly naive young woman hell bent on a bohemian lifestyle.

[Sally Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know where I even heard about this book, but it was a delightful find. Sparkling, moving, amusing ... It may not be literature, but I highly recommend it.

[Genevieve Brassard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5: Background reading for essay about women and sex during World War Two: entertaining 😉