Joan Olivia Wyndham (11 October 1921, in East Knoyle, Wiltshire – 8 April 2007, in London)[1] was a British writer and memoirist who rose to literary prominence late in life through the diaries she had kept more than 40 years earlier, which were an account of her romantic adventures during the Second World War, when she was an attractive teenager who had strayed into London's Bohemian set.
After the divorce, mother and daughter went to live in west London, at 22 Evelyn Gardens, off Fulham Road, and sought solace in devout Roman Catholicism.
[3] After her father was caught In flagrante delicto with the Marchioness of Queensbury, 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, rather than embarrass his lover.
The 17-year-old Wyndham soon volunteered to train as a nurse and in 1941 she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).
An affair with their London lodger, Shura Shivarg, a Jewish academic of Russian descent who had grown up in pre-Communist China, led to an amicable divorce and second marriage, which also produced a daughter, Camilla.
[3][12][13] Eventually her younger daughter found her wartime diaries and encouraged her mother to edit and publish them.