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
J. Allan Dunn came to the United States in 1893. He spent about five years in Colorado, five years in Honolulu, ten years in San Francisco, and then relocated to the East Coast in 1914, after which his writing career blossomed. From 1914 forward, and in his pulp-writing career, he was known as "J. Allan Dunn"; before that he primarily went by "Allan Dunn." While living in San Francisco, he worked for the Southern Pacific Company, which published "Sunset" magazine. He wrote an article for "Sunset" on author Jack London. The two became friends. In 1913, Dunn was a frequent visitor to London's