She is one of the heroines of modern English poetry. Anyone who has ever heard of John Betjeman has also heard of Joan Hunter Dunn, paragon of all that was desirable about English suburban girls in those distant days of wartime, warm beer and innate sexual reserve.

She really existed, and her death at 92 in a London nursing home last Friday closes the last chapter in an intriguing story of unrequited love.

Betjeman first set eyes on her by chance in the corridor of the wartime Ministry of Information 70 years ago, when he was in the films division and she was on the catering staff.

In fiction she became his fantasy, furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, a clean-limbed tennis player with whom he sat in the Hillman in the car park after the dance until twenty to one.

The man who would become Poet Laureate wrote his paean in 1941 to a very English beauty in an age when propriety between the sexes served only to heighten imagination and fuel desire. Taking her to the golf club dance resulted in their engagement; that’s how it was in the 1940s.

In real life they knew each other but not, apparently, as well as that. Joan, daughter of a GP from Farnborough, Hampshire, married a civil servant named Jackson and went to live abroad. When he died and she returned with her three sons to England in 1963, Betjeman made contact with her again. But their relationship appears to have been entirely platonic.

Edward Jackson, her youngest son, said yesterday: “When we came back to England her overriding concern was to make sure that we boys were all right. She dismissed talk of an affair, always saying, ‘I was in love with Dad.’

“She never said she was proud to be his muse, but she did not consider it a joke. She just said that John was a nice man.”

Betjeman was invited to Joan’s wedding in 1945, and was an occasional lunch guest at the couple’s house before they emigrated to Singapore, and subsequently to Rhodesia.

Bevis Hillier, Betjeman’s biographer and president of the Betjeman Society, interviewed Joan Jackson several years ago.

“She told me that John Betjeman had been so kind to her when her husband died, taking her sons out to lunch and helping to find schools for them in England. She said he was such a gentleman, and there was never any question of him making a pass at her.”

Betjeman was regarded as a shrewd judge of women, knowing which to make advances to and which not. Despite his gently lustful thoughts towards her in 1941, the real Joan Hunter Dunn fell into the latter category. During her life she tended to ignore the fuss about the poem. Yet in an interview she gave in 1965 she spoke glowingly of the moment that Betjeman told her he had written a poem about her, and how the knowledge brightened the drab wartime days.

She was an unnoticed figure at Sir John’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 1984. The tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice live on in a poem of enduring appeal.

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