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HomeJacquetta‚s affair with Walter Turner, with its heady combination of intellect, wit, and physical attraction, had in fact prepared her for Jack. However they both had families, and neither was in an unconventional marriage that could allow other partners. This - if there was anything to begin - would have to be everything, or nothing at all.
And so the affair began slowly. Jacquetta‚s conversation charmed Priestley in that office in Belgrave Square. He was delighted to put a face, and a lovely and interesting one, to the mysterious signature at last. And there it ended for now.
Their next meeting came soon after, in Paris, July, 1947. The delegation was being briefed on the final preparations for UNESCO‚s inaugural conference in Mexico City. Described as a splendid UNESCO jamboree ˆ there was no post-war rationing in that city, and the delegation stayed at the luxurious George V hotel ˆ the atmosphere was ripe for continuing the London conversation. Jack was given two assistants. One was Helen de Mouilpied, the midst of a protracted love dilemma over Denis Forman. The other was Jacquetta.
Jack took Helen out to dinner, partly to comfort her ˆ but also to have the occasion to discuss Jacquetta. ŒWhat a woman!‚ he said. ŒIce Without and fire within!‚ Jack had read Jacquetta in an instant.
Jack also took Jacquetta out to dinner. The attraction was there, but the time was not right. Jacquetta, after all, was still grieving her father and Walter Turner. And there was still the unresolved issue at home.
Jack, widowed before marriage to Jane, also had family problems, of which Jacquetta was only too aware. His talented musical daughter, Mary, had suffered a severe breakdown after being prevented from marrying a young man she met abroad, but hardly knew. Jack and his wife, Jane, were wrestling with the problem. Back inteh summer he had even written to ŒJ.J.Hawkes‚, pulling out of the Mexico conference. Then Mary was taken into hospital and, with family visits banned, there was nothing more than Jack could do. Mexico would at least take his mind off things. And so Jack withdrew the cancellation.
Their dinner over, whatever renewed spark Jack and Jacquetta had that night would have to remain diminished. Both were emotionally engaged elsewhere. But there was always Mexico.
Back in Fitzroy Road, Jacquetta continued with her writing. Prehistoric Britain came out in hardback and she had the outlines of two books for Dennis Cohen, at the Cresset Press to follow Symbols and Speculations. One was A Land, the other a history of prehistoric religion.
In August, there was a family holiday to France, staying in the Dordogne area, enabling Jacquetta at last to visit the magnificent sites of prehistoric cave art which would help her research. The book on prehistoric religion was never written, but the quite fantastic finds in the caves of Southern France do appear in her book, Man on Earth.
The visit was something of an adventure. She and Christopher were guided into the caves at Lascaux by the same two French schoolboys who had discovered them when looking for their lost dog 7 years earlier. The couple met and talked with Monsieur Laval, the boys‚ teacher, who had excitedly realised what his pupils had found. And that summer they also began a long acquaintance with the expert in the field of prehistoric art, the wartime hero, the Abbe Breuil.
The fabulous cave paintings captivated Jacquetta in the way Mount Carmel had stirred her emotions. Jacquetta returned to Lascaux and other cave painting sites, several times, and frequently in her writings. She mused long on the symbolism, not least of the wild and restless creatures trapped in the dark confines of a cave.
The paintings were placed high and low on the walls and ceilings. Again, as before, she could apply her creative imagination to the science of this archaeological discovery. We do not know how Christopher, now deep into academic work at Oxford, responded to the sight of these extraordinary paintings looming out of prehistory; he also had an artistic sensibility and could surely have not failed to have been amazed at the condition of the paintings, and the mastery with which they were executed .Perhaps he also fell back in wonder as he realised how the flickering of flames from ancient tapers and torches would appear to animate the creatures hunted on the European plains far above them, up to fifty thousand years before. But it was Jacquetta who wrote, almost intoxicated, of her amazement at this, Œthe earliest art in the world'.
"Suddenly out of this wildness and the brain and being of man there sprang a noble art. . . . These early Europeans in a world where, quite simply, there had never been art, took manganese and hematite and ochre, bone and stone, antler and ivory, devised brushes and chisels and painted, carved, engraved and modelled superb portraits of the wild beasts among which they found themselves. This is an originality unequalled and almost beyond understanding.‚
She admired the surety of these earliest artists: Œthere was no bungling or hesitancy in them. Before long they were manifesting every subtlety of shading and foreshortening in a brilliant impressionism."
The purpose of the cave paintings at Lascaux, similarly the reasons for the building of Stonehenge, divided the archaeologists of the time. The functionalists regarded this not as Œart‚ at all, suggesting that there was no deeper meaning that a simple representation of animals they had killed. Jacquetta rejected this ˆ as she later did the idea of Stonehenge as being some form of computation device. To a woman who was exploring symbolism and who was sensitive to the workings of the psyche, this was the stuff of derision, comments made out of 'a total ignorance, only possible to men of the Machine Age, of the modes of artistic creation'. The arguments continue today but here they are a prequel to a range of her writings expanding this theme, and her suspicion of an overly-scientific approach to archaeology.
To Jacquetta, this was even more than Œart‚, more than Œmagic‚. She observed in Man on Earth, that the animals represented were an intrinsic part of the society and could not be divorced from it: 'Many hunting peoples apologise to the animals they kill, asking their forgiveness, propitiating them.'. And she imagined those who painted the walls 'dressed themselves in their skins, horns and antlers, they ate ritual feasts, probably they imagined common spirit ancestors that made them one flesh with a totemic animal."
As she toured the caves then, and on subsequent visits, Jacquetta was also developing ideas about the evolution of sex, something which may have been prompted years before by her explorations of Grimes‚ Graves in Suffolk, and the female figures she knew were found in the depths there. In the caves around Lascaux and beyond, she saw 'a few carvings of women, always wide-hipped, big bellied, and with full breasts. In one cave the woman, a dignified utterly impersonal figure sits holding a horn, in another there are three female bodies, carved among those of bison, horses and ibex, the inessential heads and feet missing, but the sexual organs emphasised'.
Jacquetta and Jack were brought together again, at the conference in Mexico, and an affair began.
If Jack ever doubted the intensity of his feelings, this time it was clear from day one. Jacquetta had spent practically the whole journey across the Atlantic in her cabin on the Queen Elizabeth, seasick. When she failed to appear at a meeting on board that he was chairing, Jack's reaction was hardly ambivalent; instead he was filled with a Œfurious disappointment‚.
Mexico City provided an inauspicious start for the delegation, with six weeks to be spent in a hotel that was far from the luxury of the George V. Both went down with dysentery, this providing the excuse for Jack to come to Jacquetta‚s room with a bottle of brandy concealed as a bottle of medicine. She write later: ŒThat brandy together with his irresistible voice, marked the beginning of a wonderful sense of being looked after‚.
Although Jacquetta's honest opinion about his writing left Jack hurt ˆ her childhood fear of lying prompted her to repeat them over dinner - such dents to his pride were superficial. As Diana Collins noted,`the forces that drew them together were immeasurably deeper and more powerful than any surface misunderstandings'.
The metaphor of depth is appropriate here. Jacquetta, with her love and appreciation of the buried past, and Jack, fascinated by Jung and articulating his own understanding of time complexities in plays on themes of `Split Time, Serial Time and Circular Time', had a common passion to be shared beyond physical or intellectual compatibility. Jacquetta disclosed the pair became lovers after a night out when, walking back to the hotel on the Pasa de la Reforma when Œthere just seemed to be the two of them walking as one beneath the stars‚.
Although they continued to insist to each other that their closeness was no more than `a special Conference affair', both were anticipating major changes in their domestic lives. An early attempt to end the relationship when Jack had to leave for New York, failed, not least because of Jack's overwhelming romanticism. On the train, Jack wrote to Jacquetta:
I know I shouldn't be doing this - it's against everything I meant or even said - but I can't help it. I must write one letter to you - ifonly selfishly, to try and relieve myself of this terrible weight of sadness and loss. . . . Missing and missing and missing you...".
Jacquetta responded by wandering joyfully through Mexico City hunting for a post office from which to send Jack "the message that would put him out of his immediate misery'.
Back in England, Jack returned to his family obligations, and a wife who was resentful that he had left her alone to deal with the problem of Mary‚s illness. It was to Mary, however, that he wrote of his dismay at the bleak weather and his inability to write well, when the underlying cause of his despair was an absence of Jacquetta. During this winter of 1947-48 he wrote "Home is Tomorrow", regarded as one of his best plays.
If life was miserable and strained for Jack and Jane Priestley, Nicolas remembers this period as one of calm. Christopher was settled in Oxford,and if he was concerned by his wife‚s unfaithfulness, he did not allow it to surface when they met. The couple remained friendly and never quarrelled. In the way that Christopher wrote to his wife after Turner died, he was a gentleman of a husband, who would rather withdraw. But there is no doubt that Christopher continued to love his wife deeply. Work was one way to conceal his pain.
Meanwhile, Jack and Jacquetta met when they could, she writing frankly that they made love when and where they could. Jack, whose family were living on the Isle of Wight, also had a home at Albany, in the West End, around the corner from the Society of Antiquaries. Jacquetta told Diana Collins that she felt that she had been created anew, experiencing in her late thirties `the pleasures and spiritual transformation of total love'. Jack, she felt, was less capricious than Turner, being `a good shoulder to cry on'.
`I must confess', she wrote later, `that I revelled in the wildness of those days, telling myself that to be such a mistress was a finer thing than to be a wife. . . .‚
But it was still early days, and many unresolved issues to face. Jack tried to keep Jacquetta‚s spirits up, writing that although there was `a colossal gap to bridge, but I am absolutely certain that we need each other in a very special way - and only pride will prevent our admitting this . .because, though we differ in so many things, each of us has a very personal vision of mankind as a whole, you through the long vista of prehistory, and I through drama and politics. We turn into poets, though of different kinds, more or less at the same moment.'
Although his love of Jacquetta was undoubted, Jack was particularly anxious that their affair should remain a secret. He wanted Jacquetta to destroy his letters to her, which, of course, not least as an archaeologist and a poet, she could never do. He did destroy her letters to him, and so reading the relationship years after the event becomes a piecing of evidence that is knowingly one-sided. It is sometimes a frustrating task, rather like assembling the body of a pot with the vital handles, base, and lip missing.
More seriously, it seemed that the earlier Œhighbrow‚ or Œlowbrow‚ debate was still not settled in Jacquetta‚s mind, and Jack was moved to defend himself.
Given the sometimes testy correspondence, one wonders why Jacquetta pursued it so avidly when she was, after all, Jack‚s mistress, and he - or she - could have cut off the affair at any time. Perhaps she was articulating a series of insecurities about her own work, sensitive too, to the reaction she might have been prompting at Oxford should any of Christopher‚s colleagues have an idea of the troubles caused to this brilliant young man by his wayward wife.
In truth, the couple were distracted by the intensity of their relationship and their awareness of the terrible impact it would have on their family if it became known. Jack still felt obliged to work at his marriage, but the strain only made him miss Jacquetta more. He poured his frustrations into writing with his usual high productivity.
Jack created a fictional character, Elizabeth Heron, as way of disguising his impropriety in a letter of professional friendship to Jacquetta.
Jack‚s first wife, Pat, had died of cancer. Jane Priestley had put up with her husband's infidelities in the past ˆ including an infatuation with the actress Peggy Ashcroft - and had recognised the signs. But as time passed she now felt that he was involved with someone serious, a woman who could break up her marriage. It was all the more likely as all her family but one son, Tom, had left home.
Nicolas Hawkes was still at school, and through this troubled time noted nothing strained in the household, or rather nothing changed, as he was aware that his parents had led independent lives for many years. This relative harmony was in contrast to Tom Priestley's anguish at the eventual break-up of his parents. Another crisis had just been resolved: his sister Mary, whose emotional instability had occupied Jack's thoughts on his earliest meetings with Jacquetta, had married the man she has fallen in love with, and gone to live in Denmark.
At least Jack Priestley was approved of by Peggy Lamert, who met him
eventually
in London. Jacquetta had sent her to pick him up in her car and bring him to
Fitzroy Road. It was to be an evening spent in the company of another
notable
figure, the archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, who was also fond of Jacquetta.
Peggy's first remark to her confidante about the latter's romantic prospects
`But Jacquetta, he's so old!' - had evidently been shared. Peggy recalled
the
vision of the author when she arrived at his door: `Jack was limping around
the
place, rubbing his back and saying: `I'm so old!' Peggy's minor criticism
turned
into hearty recommendation.
However, some years later, when Jack and Jacquetta were an established couple, the particularly astute Peggy noted aspects of the playwright‚s character that had created tension in his own now disrupted home. She could also see how their fateful pairing was a complementary one.
Jacquetta‚s output was undiminished by the underlying emotional drama. Her 1948 publications included, for Archaeology‚s Winter issue, 'British Archaeology 1948 - a survey', and she began to write numerous articles and reviews for The New Statesman & Nation (NSN) rather than The Spectator. There were also articles that year in Time & Tide, on Excavations at Colchester, and for UN World and John o'London's Weekly.
In 1949, with Symbols and Speculations also now published, a well-received article appeared in a significant - and literary - book, Penguin New Writing . This flagged up the best writing talent of the day and her essay: ŒArt in a Crystalline Society‚ was an opportunity to bring her unique combination of art and science to a new, and wider, readership. Jacquetta set out a new image of post war Britain, describing the older organic types of society as a tree with all the interrelated and diverse parts, whereas the crystal, with its identical particles, is an image of the new intellectual and increasingly atomised society. She was both incisive and prescient. This Modern age was one of loss: `with religion it has lost the motive o£ uniting itself with the universe, and with art one of the chief instruments for achieving that union'.
She makes a call for artist, once an integral part of the community, to be restored as art was now `no more than an unnecessary ornament tacked on to the edge of life.‚
In 1950 Jacquetta was elected President of the South East Union of Scientific Societies, and gave an address entitled" Archaeology & the Present". In the SPRING OF 1949 she had begun to write A Land, the brilliant synthesis of art and science that would make her name. She concluded it in September 1950.
Jacquetta‚s notes for A Land suggest she tackled it with a clear sense of what she wanted to achieve. Inspired by her garden in north London Œthe London Clay which, as Primrose Hill, humps up conspicuously at the end of the road', she was to take the reader on a journey around Britain, pausing to consider the aspects of scientific evidence and poetic imagination. Indeed, she would quote poetry as well as attempting to lay down the origins of human existence in the strata of geology. She would also engage with the new, the Atomic age, and its consequences.
It was an ambitious task, but Jacquetta achieved it by returning to her first principle, that of bodily sensation. The book begins with the author conscious of feeling the ground beneath her in the garden, where `this ground presses my flesh against my bones and makes me agreeably conscious of my body'. She hears a train whistle, and is transported. Her descriptions move between the personal and the universal: `..the coastline of Britain encloses me with a shape as familiar as the constellations if the stars, and as consciously felt as the enclosing walls of this garden'.
If there were to be no more published poems, then Jacquetta's lyricism reached its heights in A Land. In her later works, such as Man on Earth, which included her poetic descriptions of archaeology, Jacquetta tended to be over-reaching. In A Land, however, her words lie perfectly balanced between grand metaphor and powerful restraint. Some compared her work with that of John Donne. It won an award and went into several different editions.
Jacquetta, perhaps thinking back to handling the Neanderthal skeleton on Mount Carmel, illuminated her personal volition as she considered Œthe growth of consciousness, its gradual concentration and intensification within the human skull. That consciousness has now reached a stage in its growth at which it is impelled to turn back, to recollect happenings in its own past which it has, as it were, forgotten. In the history of thought, this is the age of history. . . .".
A Land received great critical acclaim from literary critics upon its publication in 1951. Its originality and breadth, but above all its synthesis, spoke of the intellectual moment, as Hugh Massingham commented in the Spectator: 'It is a germinal book and truly heralds a change in cultural orientation that bitter experience has made tragically overdue'. ŒA Land‚, said Harold Nicolson in the Observer, was `written with a passion of love and hate'.
Diana Collins, who remained dazzled by it all her life, commented: ŒIt was not much approved of by pure archaeologists, but a great many people read and loved it, it well deserved the wide success that it achieved, and it established Jacquetta as a literary, as well as an archaeological, writer.‚ During the writing, Jacquetta did not neglect her duty as a parent: Nicolas, then 13, learned a great deal, one imagines, by doing the index.
The book featured illustrations and photographs, including two colour plates by Henry Moore, who became a personal friend. The drawings, which appear in the Cresset Press editions, but not in others, include Knights and Kirtled Ladies Waiting for Creation which Jacquetta later had in her study at Fitzroy Road. They idea of these figures patiently awaiting a resurrection illustrated perfectly the text in which Jacquetta discusses the notion ˆ shared by her and Moore amongst others ˆ that the sculptor had the gift of releasing great art from stone. There is surely an analogy here with archaeology, when one thinks of how the buried vessel, or skeleton, or ancient ruin, is released into the light by the careful work of the excavator.
Jacquetta uses her commentary on the geology of Britain to discuss how Moore 'uses his understanding of the personality of stones in his sculpture, allowing their individual qualities to contribute to his conception', and of his use of Horton stone, how 'The sense of light and darkness seems to go the depths of man's mind, and whether it is applied to morality, to aesthetics, or to that more general conception - the light of intellectual processes in contrast with the darkness of the subconscious - its symbolism surely draws from our constant swing below the cone of night . . . Rodin pursued the idea of conscious, spiritual man emerging from the rock; Moore sees him rather as always a part of it.'
Jacquetta was writing A Land while charged with her increasing love for Jack, and little wonder that she also begins to develop her theme of human sexuality for Man on Earth, a book dedicated to him. Pondering a British spring as she whittles the idea of how humans evolved from the reptile state, she wrote:ŒFor the first time, the male had to seek the female. . . . There is something here more than a sexual selection, immensely powerful as that has been in the evolution of life."
A Land was really the story of Britain, and so it was fitting that she should be invited to be the Archaeology Advisor for the great post-war celebration, the Festival of Britain, also in 1951. She left the Ministry of Education for her new role which complemented her post at the Council for British Archaeology, where she was now Vice-President. She also appeared on television increasing her celebrity further.
Jacquetta‚s brief was to design the area of the South Bank exhibition which dealt with the land and the people of Britain. She had a relatively free hand and tried hard to convey the thrill of archaeological excavation to a non-specialist audience, using almost theatrical aplomb. Graham Sutherland produced a striking painting for the section.
In her work here, Jacquetta combined her love of aesthetics with her mission: to communicate the past and the continuum of which her visitors were also a part. It was a huge success, and she was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours of 1952. She wrote about the project and its aims for the UNESCO publication, Museum.
Meanwhile, life continued at Fitzroy Road. Nicolas was still away at boarding school, Christopher in Oxford; the family holidays continued, to Pembrokeshire and to Askrigg in Wensleydale, where they lodged at the Dakin family home. In the late August of 1950, she took Nicolas to Catalonia in Spain for a combined holiday and the International Archaeology Congress in the Balearics, where she was to give the inaugural address. Christopher joined them from them from Switzerland. Jacquetta gave an impressive lecture in French to Congress on ŒLa Philosophie de la Prehistoire‚. In the later part of the trip, Jacquetta took Nicolas to visit Robert Graves and his family at Deya, Mallorca. They had been corresponding after Jacquetta sent him some of her poetry. There was also a mutual interest in the Œwhite goddess‚ idea the subject of a Graves book. It was a relaxed visit; one photograph shows a louche Jacquetta posing with Graves, a cigarette dangling from her long fingers.
In October, there was a potentially serious turn of events. Christopher became very seriously ill with typhoid fever, and nearly died. He had caught it in Spain, despite extreme care on his part. He was hospitalised at the Slade for some time. Jacquetta, who genuinely still cared for him, visited him frequently, and they exchanged letters. In one, she had told him about a bad reception she had received when giving a lecture in Cambridge. Cast once more into the role of a wife ˆ Christopher‚s at least ˆ she must have considered how these weeks would affect her relationship with Jack.
Christopher recovered and resumed his duties at Oxford. Jacquetta‚s circle continued to expand to artists, writers, actors, some of whom perhaps wondered why such an extraordinary and attractive woman should be apparently uncoupled. Only a very few people knew about Jacquetta and Jack, but at the Priestley home, Jane was becoming ever more anxious about her family‚s future.
There was one romance to be celebrated, however. In 1948, Jacquetta‚s good friend and UNESCO colleague, Helen de Mouilpied, had at last married Denis Forman. The couple were often entertained by Jacquetta and Christopher, when he returned home to Fitzroy Road. Nicolas was never aware of tension on these occasions; his parents appeared to exist in an atmosphere of companionship.
Jacquetta published another well-received archaeology book in 1951, The Guide to Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales. The preface to this solid guide to field monuments puts the publication in context.
'Many people who saw the topographical appendix to Prehistoric Britain asked to have it expanded, enlivened and illustrated with maps. The present book has been written to answer their request. It describes nearly all the prehistoric and Roman antiquities of England and Wales which the eye and the imagination can still enjoy, and gives some account of their history'.
ŒThe Past: an introduction‚, begins the book proper, with the declaration: ŒThere can be no human being, I believe, who is not stirred by the places of his childhood. Perhaps those who have moved away from them in later life feel this emotional attachment even more strongly, or more consciously, than those who settle in the place where they were born.
It is a book about England and Wales but it draws on Jacquetta‚s widening experiences. Yet to travel with Jack to the United States, she writes: 'Anyone who has travelled in the Middle West of America must have felt a desolation which seems to rise like a fog from territories mauled by man but lacking any of the attributes of history. Territories that have taken shape since man ceased to battle with and court the land and began instead a loveless exploitation...'
And she underlines:'It is always a mistake to think of the surviving relics of prehistoric times in isolation...The handiwork of the earliest is incorporated in that of all succeeding generations ...the present has secured itself by re-aborbing the past, and can never now exist without it...‚
Jacquetta begins chapter one, ŒThe Land of Britain‚, with a familiar weaving together of tactile examples, echoing A Land: 'the folding of our area of the earth‚s crust; the accumulation of the bodies of water-snails on the floor of a long-forgotten lake..."
Chapter Two, ŒThe People and their Monuments‚ is written as 'a continuous narrative' about those who left their remains behind. 'When visiting a region, all its monuments of whatever age must be looked at together; here I wish to arrange them in due order in their historical setting'. She summons then a cast list including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, 'beds dinted by Queen Elizabeth' and the 'lace gloves worn by Charles the First on the scaffold at Whitehall'.
Cassivellaunus, Cunobelin and Caractacus are teamed together historically but also as a lyrical triplet. Her description of 'the slow shaping of hands which brings to any countryside a sense of rightness, peace and finality, a quality of holiness' draws together the labour and imagination driving humanity, and that of the book itself.
'Already I have gone too far in this narrative...' she notes, and one wonders whether her corrective for overstepping the boundary of prehistoric and Roman England and WALKES, is also a marker for her own sensibilities.
As the guide proper gets underway, Jacquetta takes the reader on a journey, the same device as used in A Land, but with more thought to archaeological enquiry.
She recalls Pitt-Rivers's powerful description of an ancient human head which fell apart and on to him as he excavated Cissbury mines, being that of 'a young woman who had either fallen head-first down the shaft...or whose dead body had been flung in as unwanted rubbish when the shaft was being filled; there was no suggestion of sacrifice'. 58
The undisturbed gallery of a flint mine is etched into the imagination: 'The explorer must go in as the last miner came out...Perhaps picks and a shovel left lying on the floor or leaning against a wall, the handles still carrying chalky finger-prints.."
In Monmouthshire she writes of ancient Caerwent: 'At Venta Silurum itself one is baffled and exasperated by the sense there is so much more to be seen than is visible' thus reassuring the lay reader that if they felt frustrated, so might a trained archaeologist.
At Goldsborough, in the North of England, she recalls the discovery of three skulls, one a woman's found in a well, quoting the archaeological report: " In the south-east corner of the tower there had been an open hearth over which the skeleton of a short, thick-set man lay face downwards...Near his feet lay the skeleton of a taller man, also face downwards, and beneath him the skeleton of a large and powerful dog, the head against the man‚s throat, the paws across his shoulders. Near his feet were two silver coins of Eugenius (392-4) and Honorious (395-423).' These facts are embellished by imagination: 'Baffling anonymous but most poignant history held in matter - a few bones and pieces of money. Here, on a pin's head, one is privileged to see the fall of the Roman Empire' (262).
She ends the journey pondering the mystery of markings on the landscape: "It has been a long way to go in both time and space, but I think we have seen all the finest of out ancestral monuments, all the places where the past stirs the imagination; the places where formerly we were and from which we have come'.
The eminent historian A.L.Rowse, reviewing The Guide, commented that the author Œpersuades us ˆ no, she shows us, how incomparably rich the landscape of this old land is for those who have eyes to see∑All this adds a new pleasure to travelling about the country‰. Another reviewer, the archaeologist Cyril Bibby enthused: ŒIts qualities are such that it can, and indeed must, be read as part of the story of our land‚.
Meanwhile Jack and Jacquetta continued to see each other, the relationship deepening, and their frustrations intensifying. Jack‚s early letters reflect the problems. Perhaps it was because Jacquetta felt instinctively that all would be well in end, that she went against Jack‚s orders, and kept them.
While Jacquetta could be at peace alone in Fitzroy Road, Jack‚s family life was producing a series of uncertainties Œmysterious surges of antagonism coning up from the depths'.
Lest Jacquetta should think that Jack actually relished the drama of these difficult times, the Yorkshireman came straight to the point, he missed "not the two extremes of earnest talk and making love, but all that lies in between..."
In his children at least, Jack‚s complicated family life appeared to find some resolution. One daughter, Barbara, married an airman, Peter Wykeham; Sylvia married another designer, Michael Goaman; Mary‚s marriage, as had been predicted, failed. Both Jack‚s other daughters, Angela and Rachel, also settled down. Left alone with Jane, and the weight of his adultery, Jack immersed himself in writing a vast novel of 275,000 words called Festival at Fairbridge, which had, as its central theme, the Festival of Britain.
Forward to Chapter Seven
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