Death of a muse: Joan Hunter Dunn (1916-2008)
Ah, and so she died today, aged 92 – and I hadn’t even known for sure that she ever existed.
Even though I first met her when I was 16. (She must have been 61, by then.)
I met her in John Betjeman’s poem, of course, ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song.’
And now she’s finally dead – dead as Dickens’ doornail, and dead as old, lecherous Betjeman himself:
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. She was an unnoticed figure at Sir John’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 1984.
Here’s the poem:
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 summer-house, 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.
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