Amateurs in Eden

But in Amateurs in Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell, Joanna Hodgkin has also detailed the near-perfect year they spent before their marriage in 1935 in a tiny cottage in the village of Loxwood, West Sussex.

“They had an idyllic time,” says Joanna. “They had been together for about seven or eight months - met, in fact, when my mother had been in love with someone else - when my mother inherited some money and they rented the cottage with a friend.”

Lawrence Durrell, born in India in 1912 and the author of novels including The Alexandria Quartet, was earning his keep as an estate agent, jazz pianist and a studio photographer, when he met Nancy Myers, a tall and striking art student at Slade, when they were both 20, while she starred in a West End musical about lesbian schoolgirls. Nancy was taken by Durrell's vulnerability, intellect and wit, and they quickly fell in love. The couple pursued a bohemian lifestyle despite Durrell's generous funds and Nancy's small fortune gained in inheritance when she was 21.

Their newfound economic freedom allowed them, in the summer of 1933, to exchange the sociability and intellectualism of Fitzrovia for the solitude of Loxwood, accompanied by their friend, George Curwen Wilkinson. Part of the reason behind the decision to leave London was to enable the two men to write novels, and they used Durrell's Hillman car to search in the Guildford area for an “old beamy cottage”. They found a 15th century two-room farm labourer's cottage called Chestnut Mead at the north end of Loxwood, built in the traditional Sussex method with low ceilings held up by oak timbers, and fairly primitive, with no phone, electricity or bathroom. They furnished the cottage with bare chairs and a table and two beds. Nancy bought Larry a second-hand baby grand piano for £60, which took up most of the tiny sitting room. George acquired a drum kit and in the evenings they played jazz, with Larry singing and playing the piano.

They lived a simple life. The men chopped wood for the open fire while Nancy did the cooking. The household was messy, with George cleaning up only occasionally and Larry emptying the chemical lavatory in a pit at the end of the garden every fortnight or so. The authors spent every morning working on their novels, and after lunch, they would embark on long walks in the primeval surroundings. The trio never entertained, and made no attempt to enter into village life. Thus, the locals were dubious about them.

If the trio were considered outsiders, then the local population were in for a surprise when some of their rare guests turned up. During their adventures in literary London, Durrell and Nancy became acquainted with pretender to the Polish throne Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (1903-1997), poet, pagan and pamphleteer, and with his brother Cedric. The brothers were known to wear sandals, tunics and cloaks, medieval-style, so Loxwood was in for a shock one day when Cedric Potocki turned up at Chestnut Mead in full regalia and a scarf wrapped round his head due to toothache, accompanied by an American mistress who was only ever addressed as “Madame”. Nancy provided a meal for the pair, purchasing the luxury of a tin of chicken in aspic, to which Cedric retorted that the future ruler of Poland would not deign to touch tinned food.

There were tensions in Chestnut Mead throughout the brief time the strange bohemian ménage à trois lived there. Durrell was incandescent with activity, and had become purposeful and focused with the move from London. George became thoroughly de-motivated by his friend's progress and Nancy was also at a loose end. When Larry asked her to provide illustrations for a book he wrote as a gift for his little brother Gerry (Gerald Durrell, later to become a famous naturalist, zookeeper, author and TV presenter), her perfectionist nature and shaky confidence left her with artistic block, and she became more and more unfocused and upset.

After a year, George headed the upped sticks and headed for Corfu, followed by the newly married Durrells. The marriage quickly deteriorated, Joanna recounting in her book how Durrell would forbid Nancy to talk to any man over 5ft 4in tall, his own height, often screamed at her to shut up and referred to her as “nothing but a dirty Jew”.

Joanna, Nancy's daughter from her second and happier 40-year marriage, says, “The time my mother and Larry spent in Loxwood coloured his writing. She came into his first book, which in a way was biographical, and into his other novels, even though later he tried to airbrush her out of his life.

“I only met him a couple of times and discovered his great charm. He was indeed very short and had to work hard to make up for it.”

Amateurs in Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell by Joanna Hodgkin. Published by Virago/£25.