![]() They looked after her, though Frances recorded in her diaries that she was a little unnerved by the idea of Janetta, the free spirit, becoming a baby-obsessed mother. Again though, the Partridges disapproved of Janetta’s lover. On 11 January 1943 Janetta’s brother Rollo was reported missing in North Africa – he had been killed in his Spitfire in early December – and on 16 February, her mother died. The only difference was that she was then alone, and I was not.” From the moment we had met there had been nothing casual about our reaction to each other – it was an immensely specific conviction of our shared sympathy and necessity for each other. She was beautiful, and she had, in her quietness, an immense presence. In his 2009 autobiography, Very Little Luggage, Sinclair-Loutit wrote: “She had straight hair, little make-up and a very economical and accurate vocabulary. They married in 1940 and in July he joined the Osterley Park Home Guard training school, as a guerrilla warfare instructor, but was sacked in 1941 for being a communist, whereupon he enlisted as a private in an anti-aircraft unit. Janetta admitted she was terrified by the air raids, and stayed in London solely because of Slater. The Partridges felt Slater wasn’t “good enough” for her, writes Chisholm, and had fierce political arguments with him. The same year she fell in love with Humphrey Slater, a communist who had studied at the Slade, fought in the Spanish Civil War and later wrote a spy novel, made into a film staring Elizabeth Taylor. At new year in 1939, Frances was too ill to go with Ralph and Janetta on a skiing holiday in the French Alps it was inevitable the sexually unrestrained Ralph would make a pass at Janetta, but she rebuffed him and he became a confidant to her, almost as sympathetic as Frances. She more or less lived at Ham Spray at half-terms and holidays, and Frances discussed her schoolwork and her hope to go to art school. ![]() They liked Jan – it did not seem to trouble Frances that she became, briefly, Ralph’s lover – and were always kind to Rollo but for both of them, there was something irresistible about Janetta”. The Partridges’ “life at Ham Spray,” Chisholm said in her 2009 book Frances Partridge, “expanded to include Jan, Rollo and Janetta. Anne Chisholm, Frances’s biographer, describes the young Janetta as “lovely-looking, with dark blonde hair and long legs”. Jan Woolley’s marriage to Geoffrey was on the rocks and Janetta was finding her father stifling. They were introduced in April 1936 by Frances’s friend, Gerald Brenan, who was so taken with Angela Culme-Seymour that he was eager to meet her mother. Much of the published information about Parladé comes from her diaries. ![]() Young enough to be our daughter, she became instead one of our closest friends”. The Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge and her husband Ralph first met Janetta “as a very attractive girl of 14, in Spain at the start of the civil war.
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