Love lessons from my aunt

Thetis was just showing me her underwear drawer when an air-raid began and hundreds of planes whizzed by like minnows overhead.

The guns were firing on Primrose Hill and the family on the floor below were screaming on the balcony. My spaghetti burnt and everything was thrilling, just like at the cinema. What a life!"

This was a part of my aunt Joan ­Wyndham's diary entry for 5 September 1940.

An 18-year-old fresh out of convent school, she lived in Chelsea with her staunchly Catholic mother.

Coming of age just as Hitler's Blitz hit London, Joan was blown off-balance: "I never know if I'm going to be bombed or seduced from one moment to the next."

Joan's wartime scribblings about love, sex and danger among the impoverished sandal-and-beret-wearing artists of the Fulham Road are a hilarious read. Like a bohemian Nancy Mitford she records her sexual adventures with an innocent frankness; she's a witty, wide-eyed teenager yearning to be a sophisticated aesthete. At last, after some false starts and fumblings, Joan is deflowered by the charming and floppy-haired Rupert Darrow. ("Well, well, well,' I said, looking in the mirror. A long farewell to my virginity.'")

In 1939, much of the younger generation thought the war was an irritating distraction. They had more important things to think about like clothes, music and the movies. Unlike their parents they hadn't lived through the horrors of the Great War, and it was only in the summer of 1940 when the Germans raced through western Europe that things got scary. By September, even the artists of Chelsea couldn't ignore the crisis as the bombs started to fall on their studios and homes.

For 40 years Joan's journals lay gathering dust until her daughter Camilla discovered them in the attic. Published in 1985 as Love Lessons, they became an instant bestseller, and a sequel ­volume followed about Joan's ­adventures as an officer in the WAAF — Love Is Blue.

I thought the story would make ­wonderful television, and in 2005 I started writing a screen adaptation under Joan's watchful eye. Our script meetings were very eccentric. My aunt was recovering from an operation so her husband Shura had banned her from smoking and drinking. As soon as he was safely out of the room, Joan would produce half a bottle of whisky and a packet of Benson and Hedges from underneath the kitchen table and we would settle down to work.

There was never a dull moment. ­"Darling," she said once, "I've read your draft of the first episode and I just can't believe that I threw up quite that often. Also, my mother would never have used the expression complete balls'." I said it was all there in the diaries if she wanted to check.

As work continued I sat open-mouthed at the erotic reminiscences of an 80‑year-old lady. They say that sex was invented in the Sixties but there was obviously a lot of fun to be had in ­Chelsea in the Forties. It was a world populated by wild pre-hippies: aristocratic dropouts, lecherous sculptors, exotic homosexuals and even Aleister Crowley's ex-mistress. In the words of one of the characters, "We can't let ­Hitler stop us from enjoying ourselves, now can we?"

For me the fun ended when Joan's health started to deteriorate, and she died in 2007. I was devastated to lose her and also to lose the sparky working relationship we had built up. Dejected, I put the project in mothballs but I think Joan (watching from somewhere) decided I should "bloody well finish" what I had started. A message was sent in human form, and into my life stepped American actress Maggie Contreras.

"My life was certainly not dull. As a Catholic virgin in 1940, my days were largely spent in trying to remain one and my nights largely spent in trying to stay alive. It was a strange time — frightening but exhilarating, and I felt the urge to write it all down so as never to forget." So opened Maggie Contreras's one-woman theatre adaptation of Love Lessons.

In the spring of 2008 I sat watching a special preview performance at the Chelsea Arts Club, surrounded by a lovely crowd of its more veteran ­members who had known my aunt well. Twenty-four-year-old Maggie looked uncannily like the young Joan ­Wyndham, and her 60-minute ­monologue was riveting.

My first reaction to Maggie's arrival in London was to think: "What the hell is this Hollywood whippersnapper doing to my idea?" She was just as ­suspicious when she discovered that I, too, had been working on the project. Aunt Joan had been a little bit "vague" with both of us.

After the show I introduced myself. "Oh Mr Guinness. I thought you were uninterested in my project, if not quite rude. You never replied to my emails." The email address she had for me was wrong. Luckily I was ­forgiven, and soon after we agreed to collaborate on a television adaptation of Love Lessons.

I heard Maggie's story. Aged 20 she attended drama college in London under the tutelage of theatre director Richard Digby-Day. Her thesis was to be a one-hander based on an historical character. After a week sitting on the floor of Waterstone's bookshop sifting through the turgid memoirs of past queens and literati, Maggie found what she was looking for — a diarist who was still very much alive. She then had the bravery to ring my aunt and ask for an interview.

At first Joan was quite prickly: "I can only give you an hour — there's a Chelsea match on the telly at noon. A practising Catholic, are you? I gave up all that rubbish years ago", but their relationship developed and the stage play was written. Maggie is bringing it to London again this month, performing three shows at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Last year we started writing the new TV adaptation of Love Lessons. We had to figure out how to make a period drama which didn't need a Hollywood-sized budget. It would be a bit complicated in the credit crunch to reduce half the Fulham Road to rubble and deck Soho out in wartime Christmas lights, so we decided to focus on the humour and intimacy of the story. I think we've achieved something that is charming, sexy and a snapshot of a long-lost London tribe during that unique period.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the TV story involves an American actress coming to London and meeting a famous lady diarist. As the relationship between the two women evolves, so does the life of the teenage Joan in her wartime ­reminiscences.

There's a moment in Love Lessons when Joan gets worried (with a typical teenage sense of priorities) that her brand new pale blue coat from Harrods might have been burnt in a bombed house. Last October Maggie and I were signing our partnership agreement in a London restaurant when suddenly there was a huge explosion and the kitchen spewed out a cloud of suffocating smoke.

Everyone was evacuated safely and we had a cocktail party on the pavement. Maggie realised she'd left her coat behind in the inferno. I'm sure that Joan was teasing us again.

Maggie Contreras will be performing her stage adaptation of Love Lessons at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 16b Jermyn Street, SW1 (020 7287 2875, wwwjermynstreettheatre.co.uk); Monday 15 June, 8pm; Wednesday
17 June, 3pm; Monday 22 June, 8pm. Tickets: £13

Life of Joan Wyndham
By Liz Hoggard

Born into an eccentric upper-class family and educated at a Catholic convent, Joan Wyndham broke the taboo that nice girls don't like sex.

When her wartime teenage diaries were published in 1985, they caused a sensation. Joan, by then in her sixties, was happy to discuss her past life of "sin" — including the loss of her virginity during an air raid in an artist's studio in Chelsea, her near-seduction by Dylan Thomas ("he smothered me in wet beery kisses") and hanging out with Quentin Crisp.

Three more volumes of candid memoir followed, mining a rich vein of social history. No wonder one newspaper christened her "a latter-day Pepys in camiknickers".

Wyndham was born in 1921 in Wiltshire to an aristocrat and a former debutante. The family lived in an Arts and Crafts house, Clouds, which had 40 bedrooms — food was transported to the dining room by miniature railway. Her parents divorced (her father was known as "one of Europe's great flagellists") and her mother took her to live near Fulham Road.

Aged 16, she won a place at Rada. War interrupted and she was drafted into the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Despite being, in her words, "not amenable to discipline and a bad example to other ranks", she was promoted to flight officer. Cue colourful affairs including one with a Norwegian naval officer who cut knotches on her bedpost with his commando knife and gave her fleas.

She enrolled at Chelsea Poly and was taught sculpture by Henry Moore. Following a fling with Lucian Freud, she married first husband Maurice Rowdon, and accompanied him to Baghdad where he lectured for two years. They had one daughter.

Returning to London, an affair with her Russian poet lodger, Shura Shivarg, led to divorce and a second daughter. She married Shura in 1952. Wyndham held court in Swinging London where her circle included Michael Foot, Christine Keeler ("rabbit teeth"), transsexual April Ashley and various rent boys. In the 1960s she ran a hippy restaurant in Portobello Road and catered for many of the major pop festivals.

By the 1970s she was a restaurant critic, jetting between London and New York. She moved to Oxford and opened the city's first espresso bar. Then she returned to buy a scruffy five-storey Georgian house in Wellington Square off King's Road and landed a job on Housewife magazine.

She didn't begin writing until she was in her sixties, living back on Fulham Road. Her younger daughter came across her diaries and convinced her to publish them as Love Lessons. Her second memoir, Love is Blue (1986), detailed her affair with the 17th Lord Lovat, hero of the Dieppe beaches, whom she seduced over a partridge dinner at the Ritz. 2004's Dawn Chorus chronicled the Rada years including stalking a young John Gielgud ("I sometimes followed him home so I could kiss his doorknob").

Wyndham was no snob. In old age she adored Blind Date, Chelsea football club and Diana, Princess of Wales. And she loved the fact that her childhood home, Clouds, became a rehab centre. Garrulous, frank and very naughty, she epitomised a generation who survived nightly bombing, determined to live to the full. She died in 2007, aged 85.