New biography explores the secret love life of celebrated author John Wyndham
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters includes previously unpublished love letters from The Day of the Triffids author
The first biography of the life of science fiction author John Wyndham is now available. It includes the first publication of a collection of love letters to his long-term partner and later wife, Grace Wilson.
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters, by Dr Amy Binns, author and senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), explores Wyndham’s wealthy but traumatic childhood. This was transformed by a spell at the first mixed-sex public school Bedales from 1915 to 1918, the source of the strange but fervent feminism of Consider Her Ways and Trouble with Lichen.
The biography covers his formative years as a pulp fiction writer, his experiences as a censor during the Blitz and his part in the Normandy landings. He described his struggles with his conscience in a moving series of letters to Grace, the teacher with whom he had a 36 year love affair.
After the war, he transformed the searing experiences of wartime London, France and Germany into a series of bestselling novels: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Kraken Wakes. But he remained intensely private, shunning fame and finally retiring to live anonymously with Grace in the countryside he loved.
Hidden Wyndham is distributed by Gardners Books and is now available on the Waterstones and Amazon websites, in Kindle and in paperback edition.
My Review
Thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours and to the author and publisher for a copy of this book.
I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read any of John Wyndham (Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)’s novel, although I have most definitely heard of him. And his books. I think I may even have heard of some of his pulp works, when I’ve read books about the early science fiction magazines. He was right about the covers of those magazines. *shudder*
Jack Harris (as he was more often known to friends) spend his life in a sort of boarding school with like-minded chums. His parents sent him to boarding school young, his mother moving him from one to the next as her fancy and travels to various spa resorts dictated. It was hell, until he landed in Bedales in 1915. He loved Bedales. When he finished at Bedales and moved to London after some time with his mother at one resort or another. In London he moved into a Quaker establishment, the Penn Club, where he rented a room for £10 a month for almost 40 years. Here, at the age of 27 he met his long term partner Grace Wilson. For four years they danced around the fact until, at the age of 31, on a walking holiday, they officially became lovers. They married 29 years later when they were both 60 and she had retired from teaching, before giving up their rooms at the Penn Club and moving back to Steep, the village nearest Bedales.
John had a small private income from is mother’s wealthy industrialist Birmingham family, so he didn’t have to work, and though he tried civil service, and did war work before joining the Army, he prefered it that way. He was able to focus on his writing. One of the many reasons he and Grace didn’t marry was that she would have to give up her teaching career due to the marriage bar and he’d have to get a day job to support them both. As an unofficial couple they could both continue to work, be independent and remain in the cheap, supported environment of the Penn Club. They were both very discrete and private people.
The main reason they didn’t marry until much later in life had little to do with money and everything to do with the disastrous example of Harris’ parents. They were mismatched; George Beynon Harris was a social climbing provincial solicitor from South Wales, drummed out of Cardiff for sexual impropriety, and Gertrude Parkes was the wealthy, pampered, self-centred daughter of a family of Birmingham foundry owners. They eloped after Gertrude’s overbearing father refused permission for their marriage.
Sounds like a romance novel.
To be fair to Mr Parkes, he was right on the money about George Harris. And to protect the family money he put everything in trust for the children. And made sure his daughter and son-in-law lived close by so he could keep an eye on things. Then helped his daughter and grandsons, John – known as Jack – and Vivian (Viv) escape the marriage when Gertrude had had enough of the abuse. From then on Gertie lived in hotels and spa resorts ‘for her nerves’, while George occasionally popped up to demand money. There was a very embarrassing court case.
After their poor example, it’s hardly surprising that both Jack and Viv remained unmarried. The poor example of motherhood set by his own mother, distant, pampered, whiny and emotionally manipulative, is reflected in Wyndham’s novels. The mother figures are usually distant or sketched in non-existant figures. He found the idea of women becoming wives ‘dwindling’. Because wives become mothers and mothers lose themselves in their motherhood. His books act as criticism of the 1950s glorification of the housewife as consumer: intelligent girls convinced that they need to marry and have a nice little house and a nice little life, rather than take advantage of the advances in their rights to an education and employment. He was a couple of decades ahead of everyone else.
Viv Harris lived with his partner Lila for decades in Matlock, both were formerly professional actors and helped with entertainment at the spa. Viv was also a firefighter and during WW2 helped downed pilots on the Peaks, until he had a mental breakdown from the strain. While one was in Darbyshire and the other in London, their lives were connected by letters.
Letters dot this book, especially during the chapters covering 1939 to 1943, when Grace was in Wales with her school and John stayed in London, a censor by day, firewatching by night, then later from ’44 – ’46 while he was in France and Germany in the British Army. His letters are whimsical renditions of the horrors and strains he lived through. Occasionally, reality, of his inner struggle, his fears for their safety and their future, breakthrough the gentle humour. Reading them now it is hard not to be affected and to imagine the effect they had on Grace at the time; how Grace truly responded shall forever be a mystery, since she destroyed all her letters to him after his death.
These first hand accounts of life in London and then the war in Europe, and the responses of people there, are important contributions to the history of the period. Most of those who lived through it as adults are gone. They leave behind an archive of social and political, as well as personal, information for future generations. I found his comments about the expected 1946 General Election fascinating. I saw parallels between now and then when Harris writes about most of the men being uninterested in parties and policies, except a few who had never really known and wanted information. The apathy towards voting.
Most of the men had never had the chance to direct their own lives and now they were being told they could have a say in directing the country. One must remember that they would have been the first generation to grow up with universal suffrage – everyone over 21 could vote. The idea that ordinary people, no matter how poor, could take part in democracy was still relatively new. For upper-middle class, privately educated Liberals like Harris, who had had the vote for a couple of centuries, it must have been a shock to realise that everyone else was still wrapping their heads around the idea, and didn’t necessarily have any party allegiance or political preferences. Penn Club was full of socialist, Liberals, and communists. It was home to lively political discourse and debate. Grace visited Russia in 1930, they’d watched appalled by the rise of Fascism/National Socialism, and when Stalin and Hitler allied there were arguments. In France and Germany, Harris had seen the terrible effects first hand and knew things had to change. His words on war and the endless war graves they passed made me cry. For a man who felt he wasn’t very good at times, his words were beautiful.
Binns makes the point that through his later works (post-war) there is truly only one heroine, fictionalised versions of Grace. Harris had found his heroine and now his protagonists would be modelled after her. He got to put his perfect woman in all sorts of terrifying situations and show the world how brilliant she was. He was an extremely private man, it could have been his way of telling the world how much he adored Grace without actually saying anything.
Another subject discussed is the outsider child motif found in several Wyndham novels. Harris was an outsider child in his boarding schools until he went to Bedales. He suffered through bullying. His letters as an adult show his continued feelings of being an outsider. At the Ministry of Information he is quiet compared to his colleagues, in the Army he is forced to be an extrovert, hiding his introvert self, and pretending to take part in the looting while actually finding it abhorrent (he describes multiple incidents of looting by Allied troops in Germany – this is first hand evidence. Don’t like it that your heroes were thieves? I suggest you go jump in a river.). On leave he went exploring cities and meeting people while everyone else went to find sex workers. He channels his experiences of war and of being the outsider into his novels, the works of maturity.
He identified with the outsider child. In The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids his empathetic writing encourages the reader to support the children, to empathise with the ‘alien’. His last book, Chocky, is definitely one I need to read. It’s a story of a child who can see an alien. His father supports, his mother just wants him to be normal, and feels that only normal people should be happy with themselves. The book is a letter to his younger self. Harris is the father, presumably the mother is a representation of Gertrude. I found a resonance in the discussion of this book with my own life. Not the parental thing (it’s complicated) but the ‘being different is fine, writing helps’ thing. I don’t know that Harris was autistic, but from the details I feel he was definitely neurodivergent. He saw things so differently from most of the people around him.
Anyway, for those interested in 20th century writers, science fiction – the development and history of, or just interested in personal perspectives of a very painful century, I highly recommend this book. It’s well written and researched, and easy to read. I did find the practice of putting the references for each chapter at the end of the chapter rather than in to customary place disconcerting, but to each their own.
About the author
With a decade of experience in news reporting, Dr Amy Binns is now a writer, researcher and journalism lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire.
Her PhD was on solutions to difficult behaviour on social media and other online communities, and she has contributed to a report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life on the intimidation of parliamentary candidates. She regularly speaks on Radio Five Live on social media issues.
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters, is Dr Binns’ second book. She has also written about local history in the book “Valley of a Hundred Chapels”, also available on Amazon. She has also published papers and chapters on interwar feminism and social history. Dr Binns lives in Yorkshire with her husband and two children
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