Joan Wyndham

Joan Wyndham, writer: born East Knoyle, Wiltshire 11 October 1922; married 1952 Shura Shivarg (two daughters); died London 8 April 2007.

Like the novelist Mary Wesley, who broke into print at the age of 70, Joan Wyndham rose to literary prominence late in life. As if that weren't unconventional enough, she achieved this belated acclaim thanks to the diaries she had kept more than 40 years earlier.

These provide a charming, wide-eyed account of her romantic adventures during the Second World War. At that time she was an attractive teenager who had strayed into London's Bohemian set. Her subsequent literary reputation rests on Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), two hilarious, deservedly popular selections from her diaries which led one critic to call her "a latterday Pepys in camiknickers".

In common with many of the people attracted to the Bohemian pubs and clubs of 1940s Chelsea and Fitzrovia, Wyndham hailed from an upper-class background. While her mother, Iris, was an ex-débutante, her father, Dick Wyndham, was an aristocrat whose ancestors included Lord Edward FitzGerald, the 18th-century Irish revolutionary. Socially compatible though they were, her parents had little else in common. The marriage was already faltering by the time Joan was born in 1922.

Her early years were spent in the opulent surroundings of Clouds House, a Philip Webb-designed mansion set in the Wiltshire countryside near East Knoyle. So enormous was the building that a miniature railway had to be constructed to carry the food from the kitchen to the dining-room, where Oscar Wilde, Edward Burne-Jones and Lord Alfred Douglas had once sat. As the bibulous Wyndham enjoyed telling people, Clouds later became a rehabilitation clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts, mention of which invariably reduced her not to tears of regret but to a thunderous rumble of laughter.

Caught in flagrante with the Marchioness of Queensbury, Wyndham's father was pushed into a divorce. Rather than subject his lover to the indignity of being named in court, he followed the custom of the period by registering at a hotel in Brighton where he arranged for a private detective to photograph him in bed with a prostitute. After the divorce, his daughter went to live in west London, at 22 Evelyn Gardens, off the Fulham Road, with her mother, who sought solace in devout Roman Catholicism. Together, they attended Mass every day and confession once a week.

Meanwhile Joan's father had become a friend of the writer and painter Percy Wyndham Lewis, whose work he subsidised through a regular allowance. Under Lewis's influence, he took up painting and began mixing in artistic circles. When the friendship ultimately soured, he found himself caricatured in Lewis's 1930 novel The Apes of God. By then, his daughter had been sent to a Catholic boarding school.

There Joan Wyndham started keeping a diary which recorded her chaste crushes on her fellow pupils. As a schoolgirl, she developed a passion for the theatre, fuelled by her reading of Shakespeare and repeated trips to see John Gielgud's celebrated interpretation of Hamlet. At the earliest opportunity she decamped to London where she had won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but the impending war thwarted her theatrical ambitions.

Prompted by the threat of unprecedentedly destructive air-raids, Rada closed down. The 17-year-old Wyndham soon volunteered for training as a nurse. Within only a few days, she had become fixated on a much older refugee German sculptor who had a ramshackle studio near to where she was living with her mother. "Well how can I describe him?," she wrote of "Gerhardt" in her diary. "If I was feeling romantic I should say Pan, if realistic, then the most depraved long-haired Bohemian, in a blue shirt and corduroy pants, that ever drank cheap red wine."

Her mother's disapproval acting as a potent aphrodisiac, she pursued the sculptor, who encouraged her to enrol at Chelsea Polytechnic, where she was taught by Henry Moore. "The war was the first exciting thing that had ever happened to me," she recalled when I interviewed her four years ago. "One never knew what one was going to lose first - one's life or one's virginity."

Towards the end of 1941, she was drafted into the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and sent to a base in Suffolk. From there, she made regular forays into London, her preferred destination being the pubs of Fitzrovia. In the smoky confines of the Wheatsheaf and Fitzroy Tavern, she got to know Dylan Thomas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, M.J. Tambimuttu and the other sacred monsters of wartime Bohemia.

Yet, to find her vocation, Joan Wyndham drifted into a succession of jobs after the war. Following a stint as a restaurant critic for What's On?, a precursor of Time Out, she moved to Oxford, where she set up the city's first espresso bar. Gravitating back to London, she worked as a sub-editor for The Housewife magazine. She had, in the meantime, married Shura Shivarg, a Jewish Russian who had grown up in pre-Communist China. When he landed a lecturership in Baghdad, she accompanied him. They remained in Iraq for two years.

On their return to London in the 1960s, by which stage they had two daughters, Joan ran a hippie restaurant on Portobello Road. She also provided catering for many of the major pop festivals. She went on to work at the Royal Court Theatre, cooking for the actors, among them Ian McKellen.

Without the intervention of one of her daughters, she might never have made the abrupt transition from catering to literary stardom. Rummaging round in the attic, her daughter unearthed her wartime diaries and began reading them. At the insistence of her daughter, she tried to get an edited volume of them published. It was eventually acquired by William Heinemann Ltd and released in 1985 under the title Love Lessons. It became a commercial and critical success, justifying the publication of a sequel. Love Is Blue, the second instalment, covered Wyndham's days in the WAAF. The books' popularity was enhanced by Prunella Scales's series of readings from Love Lessons broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1990.

Between then and her death, Wyndham produced only a couple more books. These consist of Anything Once (1992), another volume of diaries, and Dawn Chorus (2004), a memoir of her childhood and early adolescence. The latter offers a typically beguiling example of her casual humour, as one of her aunts is described as "a perfectly normal upper-class girl devoted to show-jumping who ran away with a black lesbian actress and lived the rest of her life in Harlem".

For all their virtues, neither Anything Once nor Dawn Chorus could repeat the success of Wyndham's earlier books. Shortly before her death, she had submitted the manuscript of an autobiographical novel to her agent, Pat Kavanagh. Fans of Wyndham's work can look forward to a posthumous excursion into her distinctive world.

Meeting the authors of cherished books can be a disenchanting experience. Often it is hard to reconcile the person with the prose. For me, the octogenarian Wyndham proved a delightful exception. When I landed an assignment to interview her for a magazine, I found that her girlish cheek and vivacity, characteristic of her diaries, were undimmed by the passing decades. Before leaving, I asked her to sign my dog-eared copy of Love Lessons. With a suppressed smirk, she wrote above the title, "D'you need any?"

When I last saw her husband not long after she had been diagnosed with cancer, he said, "There's nobody quite like Joan." And there's certainly nothing quite like her books, which share her charm and admirable determination to see the funny side of any situation, no matter how bleak.

Paul Willetts