Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters

"It was so strange! I really don’t know how he did it… He was living in a room on the top floor of a Quaker-run club, or hostel, whatever you want to call it. It was set up for young men who’d been ambulance drivers in the First World War , to give them a club in London – after the war, there were lots of clubs for people who’d been in the services, and people who’d been conscientious objectors but driven ambulances weren’t really part of that. So it’s set up as a club for outsiders, in a way. You could live in it: there were students who treated it as halls, and there were people who lived in it for a few months, but you could also go and stay there for a couple of weeks. And even if you had your own room and you lived there for years, if you went away for a couple of weeks the room would be let to somebody else. So it was never actually your room, even if, like John Wyndham, you were living there for 20 or 30 years. He lived life in this hostel, in one room, with his long-term girlfriend in the next room – to all intents and purposes, married. But fantastically, all food’s laid on, and no one has to do any housework. So that was his way of dealing with having a partnership that was not a marriage. It’s not clear, even within the hostel, how many people knew that Grace was his girlfriend. They’d somehow managed to end up being allocated rooms next to each other, which makes you think people must have known. And yet at the same time, there are references to the question of whether her cousin knows – and her cousin also lived in the hostel. Then down the road, there’s a group of men he was drinking with every Thursday, talking about books. He was the quiet man in the corner, but he’s the man that they turned to when they wanted to set up a new magazine, for example, and he was handing out prizes at events. In a quiet way, he was very well respected. They probably thought he was perhaps gay, or maybe just celibate, somebody who wasn’t really very capable of dealing with women in real life, off the page. Then one day, he walked into the pub and said, “I’ve got married.” And they all said they just couldn’t believe it, that they’d known him 40 years and yet never actually known him. I’m not sure how you could live in such a schismatic way. It’s incredibly private, and he obviously wanted to keep himself private because he chose to burn all of Grace’s letters. So we only have one half of the correspondence, because he made a condition that he wanted all his correspondence, his diaries, to be burnt. Grace apparently chose to do as he’d said, as far as destroying her letters to him, which he’d kept; but she obviously decided she didn’t want to destroy his letters to her. I mean, why would you? It was very strange writing his biography. I found out things about him that he didn’t know. He had this ridiculous long name – John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris – and he never knew why he was called Wyndham. He thought that it was something to do with Wyndham theatre. But actually it was a bit of brown-nosing by his father, who was from Wales, and there’s a very famous Wyndham family in Wales who his father had very slightly known. It was very strange, knowing that he had never known that… a strange experience, but a lot of fun."