Two Flamboyant Fathers: A Memoir
Nicolette Devas
Some years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I came across Two Flamboyant Fathers, written in 1966 by Nicolette Devas, which is a book that defies categorization.
It’s basically a memoir, and a very funny memoir at that, and above all else it’s extremely well written.
Nicolette Devas (née Macnamara) — whose sister, Caitlin, famously married Dylan Thomas in the 1930s — was the daughter of Francis Macnamara, the Irish poet, and later the wife of Anthony Devas, the acclaimed painter.
And if that sounds as if she was little more than an appendage to others, forget it, because Nicolette Devas was an artist and writer of outstanding talent, who, as a child and young woman, was raised in the bohemian household of artist Augustus John, and the French home of her loving, but ever so slightly batty, Irish grandmother. It was an upbringing that turned her into something very unusual indeed, namely a woman of independent action and thought who — at a time when women were expected to be seen and not heard, unless you lived in the John household of course — turned her life experiences into some of the finest paintings to come out of the middle of the 20th century, and a writing talent that is natural, and a joy to read; oh, and she was also a rather good ornithologist, as poet Laurie Lee (who lodged with the Devas’) discovered during World War II, when Nicolette took him to see a colony of owls that had moved into London as a result of the thousands of mice now overrunning the bombed-out buildings.
As a publisher’s editor has written on the sleeve of the book:
From school in France she moved into the John orbit between Salisbury plain and the New Forest, where T.E. Lawrence, Henry Lamb, Lytton Strachey, Stanley Spencer and others might be encountered barging into one another coming in or going out. Nicolette herself went to the Slade, paid for by John, where she met her future husband, the artist Anthony Devas. Not long afterwards her sister Caitlin married Dylan Thomas. And so we are conducted in this fresh and original memoir, into the robust, colourful environment in which geniuses are taken for granted, loved and quarrelled with daily…
