Love is Blue by Joan Wyndham

This rare book was well worth the search. By turns sharp, hilarious and heartbreaking, the voice of memoirist Joan Wyndham is filled with contradictions. She's a devout Catholic with divorced parents. Adhering to conventions inculcated by her mother, she attends art school and frequents concerts, galleries and theatres as well as mass and confession. On the rare occasion her artist father turns up, he takes her for a meal and then drinking at club after West End club.

Intelligent, convent-educated and artistic, Joan is 17 when the war starts. The RADA, to which she's already been accepted, closes indefinitely, putting paid to her plan of studying to be an actress.

Aware of her innocence, she's also guiltily determined to enjoy experiences the church forbids.

Along with jazz and wild parties, she discovers men. Innocent but filled with enthusiastic curiosity, she plunges into the convention-defying lifestyle of Bohemian London. After experimenting with some benzedrine found at her father's flat, she goes on to get the drug prescribed so she can drink copiously without feeling drunk. Experimenting with sex, she runs through a range of men from immature egotistical artists to depressed refugee philosopher-poets. She develops a special fondness for a gloomy sculptor, a German Jew who's terrified the government will intern him - and he does end up spending much of the war in a camp in Australia.

All that's before she gets involved with the displaced fighting Norwegians on Shetland and the RAF. As the war progresses, she interacts with a "conchie," and watches other artistic friends go to war. The mad party scene filled with art, jazz, booze, sex and drugs doesn't end, but continues in a different form when Joan joins the WAAF, and embarks on a whole new set of adventures.

One volume of a three part memoir of Joan Wyndham's life during WWII, Love is Blue offers an intimate glimpse of wartime life. Based on diaries the author wrote at the time, this volume is rich with details of cafes, bars, slang, mores, clothing, food and sketches of colourful contemporaries. We follow Wyndam through Chelsea and Soho, then on to Preston, Shetland, and Inverness.

The final scenes set down a living record of one woman's reaction to the shock of the liberated concentration camps, the exhilaration of VE day, the somber numbness of VJ day, and the emotional commemorative events that followed the end of the war.

In this deceptively simple journal format, Joan Wyndham portrays the great issues of her time. Refraining from comment, she allows readers to judge for themselves what to make of the rigid class system, the social expectations of women, the casually dismissive terms used for out-groups, and the devastating effects of war on the people caught up in it.