Most people thought that Joan Hunter Dunn, who died earlier this month, was a
product of John Betjeman’s vivid poetic imagination. Then, in 1965, The
Sunday Times Magazine revealed that she was real and had lived exactly the
kind of home counties life Betjeman fantasised about in his famous poem A
Subaltern’s Love Song.
I was able to tell the real story of her life because Godfrey Smith, the
inspirational editor of this paper’s magazine in the 1960s, came up with an
idea for a whole issue entitled Where Are They Now? and all of us on the
staff were asked to find well known people who had dropped out of sight.
Hunter Dunn was the most famous heroine of popular poetry at the time and
Betjeman was on his way to becoming a national treasure through his
television broadcasts. I remembered someone from the BBC, at one of those
long liquid lunches of the time, saying he was sure that Betjeman had based
his poem on a real girl he had known and that it ought to be possible to
find her.
I wrote to the poet and in his reply he confirmed that Hunter Dunn was real
but the poem was a fiction. His paean to this amazon of suburbia was based
on his admiration from afar for the deputy catering manager at the Ministry
of Information, where he worked during the war. “Joan Hunter Dunn was quite
different from the mostly pale green intellectuals like yours truly,” he
wrote back to me.
“She wore a white coat and had a clean, clinical, motherly look which excited
hundreds of us. She had bright cheeks, clear sunburnt skin, darting brown
eyes, a shock of dark curls and a happy smile. Her figure was a dream of
strength and beauty . . . she raised our morales without ever lowering her
morals. When I first saw her I said to my friends Osbert Lancaster and
Reginald Ross-Williamson: I bet that girl is a doctor’s daughter and comes
from Aldershot. When I got to know her I found I was right and it is my only
experience of poetic prescience.”
When I went to see Betjeman in his tiny flat at 43 Cloth Fair – one of the
last 17th-century houses in Smithfield, central London – he was vague about
where “dear Joan” might be living. He told me her married name was Jackson
and that she was a widow living somewhere in Surrey or Hampshire: “Hindhead,
I think. Or is it Headley? She was so marvellous at first aid. I used to
wish desperately for a small wound from a bomb so that she could minister to
me. Try directory inquiries, dear boy, I’m sure you’ll find her.”
I’ve since learnt that the poet knew exactly where she lived and was not
averse to the publicity that a magazine feature about Hunter Dunn would
bring him. He must have been using vagueness as a delaying tactic to enable
him to warn her in advance.
When I found her number I must have reached her first, for she politely but
firmly declined to be interviewed and put the telephone down. A few days
later she relented and I arranged to see her with Lord Snowdon, who took the
photographs. As we entered the handsome whitewashed Victorian house at
Headley, in Hampshire, surrounded by pine trees and with ponies in the
next-door paddock, I noticed that she had made ready a tray with a silver
tea and coffee pot, bone china cups and a fine selection of biscuits and
cakes.
When Snowdon was out of the room I said I hoped she hadn’t gone to a great
deal of trouble. She smiled sweetly and said no, not at all, but it wasn’t
every day that the Queen’s brother-in-law paid one a visit.
I discovered that her life was a continuation of the Betjeman poem. In the
hall, the pictures “bright on the wall” were not of Egypt but fine old
prints of China. The graceful tennis player, of whom Betjeman wrote “With
carefullest carelessness gaily you won”, had been school champion at Queen
Anne’s, Caversham, and was still, aged 49, able to rush to the net on the
lawn in a game of doubles with her three sons (which she duly did for
Snowdon who had decided that that was the best way to take her picture).
There was euonymus in the shrubbery and the scent of conifers in the air.
Her sons all went to Winchester college. The youngest, Edward Jackson,
explained to me last week why his mother had been so reluctant to be
revealed as the muse for Betjeman’s poem: “She had always turned down
requests for interviews before you and Lord Snowdon met her because she
thought they would lead to a question about whether she’d had an affair with
Betjeman, which of course she hadn’t, though it’s obvious from the poem that
he had a crush on her.”
When I interviewed her in 1965, she told me that the closest Betjeman ever got
to her was in a taxi when he took her out to lunch in February 1941. That
day he gave her a copy of Horizon magazine in which A Subaltern’s Love Song
was published for the first time and said: “I hope you don’t mind but I’ve
written a poem about you.”
Betjeman told me in another letter that although he was sure she came from
Aldershot, when he showed her the poem she told him she lived in Farnborough
in Hampshire, where her father was a GP: “But I considered that was near
enough to Aldershot to count.”
Marvellous things must have happened to Betjeman in Surrey, judging by the
number of ecstatic lines that he devotes to the county in A Subaltern’s Love
Song and other poems, such as Love in a Valley: “Take me, lieutenant, to
that Surrey homestead / Red comes the winter and your rakish car”; or in Pot
Pourri From a Surrey Garden: “Conifer county of Surrey approached / Through
remarkable wrought iron gates.”
Even after telling me that Hunter Dunn came from Hampshire, he concluded his
letter: “She was one of the most cheerful, sweet and gentle girls I ever
knew. Oh goodness, I wish you had seen her striding about the ministry. The
spirit of Surrey girlhood and a pine-scented paradise.”
Before I left Joan’s house on that sunny day in 1965, after tennis and tea on
the lawn, she lent me a copy of her “bride’s book” to help me with my
article. It was touchingly documented with mementoes – pressed flowers,
lists of guests and gifts, and what she wore: “Granny Dunn’s wedding veil.
Old Honiton lace; stockings pure silk, last pair, 4s 11d prerations from
Peter Robinson’s.”
Neatly folded into the pages was the letter that her father, Dr George Hunter
Dunn, wrote to her on her engagement: “I know all your qualities and
capabilities pretty well, and what a grand little homemaker you will be, and
I know how lucky any man would be to have you as his wife.”
She also included her thoughts on her wedding day: “Jan 20, 1945. THE
LAST HOURS OF ME AS JHD. I had slept in the spare bedroom at home (Red
House) and woke to find a beautiful breakfast of boiled egg! What luxury,
but this was my wedding day. The sky was grey and heavy snow soon began to
fall, but later the sun came out and the sky was blue and Farnborough looked
whiter and brighter to me than ever before. I lay in bed for a bit and
thought deeply about this day.”
Hunter Dunn married Harold Wycliffe (Jackie) Jackson, a Ministry of
Information civil servant, at St Mark’s Church, Farnborough. They spent the
first night of their honeymoon at the Savoy hotel in London before
travelling to Devon. “Beautiful apartment,” wrote Joan in her bride’s book.
“Dined and danced. Roast plover.” The bill for the Savoy apartment,
carefully preserved, was £2 19s 8d.
It was a happy marriage. They moved from outpost to outpost in the last days
of empire as Jackie Jackson took important jobs in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore
and Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), where he started the
country’s television service.
Their three sons were born between 1948 and 1955 and were sent to boarding
schools in England. Jackie died of a heart attack in 1962. News of his death
had to be broken to the boys by their housemasters. Joan came back to
England and set up house in Hampshire to be midway between the prep school
of her two youngest sons, Charles and Edward, and not too far from
Winchester where her eldest son, Andrew, was a pupil.
It took her a long time to get over her husband’s death. When I met her she
was just beginning to become involved in village life at Headley, enrolling
on the roster of flower arrangers for the altar at the parish church and
helping with voluntary work whenever it was needed.
Her social life was focused on the school activities of her sons while they
were all at Winchester; she watched them play cricket, or perform in school
plays, went to open days and met other parents, some of whom became friends.
There were usually several “At Home” invitations propped on the mantelpiece,
with neat ticks in the corner to show that they had been acknowledged.
After Betjeman’s death she joined the Betjeman Society and, according to its
secretary, Philippa Davies, became “a driving force” in helping to bring
members together – hosting a Joan Hunter Dunn tennis tournament and
autographing T-shirts.
She went, unnoticed, to the memorial service for the poet laureate at
Westminster Abbey in 1984 and shed a few tears for the man she had described
to me as a good character and a religious man: “They say that God has his
agents on this planet and I am sure that John Betjeman is one of them.”
So were you, Joan Hunter Dunn. So were you.
A SUBALTERN’S LOVE SONG
Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.
Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summerhouse, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing’s the light on your hair.
By roads “not adopted”, by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
— Reproduced with kind permission of John Murray (publishers)
