Joan Hunter Dunn the engagement is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem." She married Harold Wycliffe Jackson, a civil servant in the Ministry of Information, in January 1945, at St Mark's Church in Farnborough. Betjeman was invited, but was unable to attend. The poem was republished in Betjeman's book "New Bats in Old Belfries" in 1945, and was later mentioned in Flanders and Swann's "Tried by Centre Court". Joan Jackson accompanied her husband to Malaya after the war, where he ran a radio station. They then lived in Singapore, before returning to the UK in 1957. Harold worked for
The Slaves of Solitude overbearing and a bore and forces the shared meals the guests partake in to be conducted in an oppressive atmosphere. Soon after this, two American servicemen appear at dinner. Miss Roach becomes romantically involved with one of them, Lieutenant Pike, beginning a relationship centred on the local pub and kissing on a bench. This relationship becomes disrupted by the arrival of Miss Roach's German friend Vicki Kugelmann, who soon becomes Miss Roach's love rival. Miss Kugelmann moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms, charms Mr Thwaites and there soon begins a sort emotional struggle between the two spinsters. The poet John