Jane was lively, half-Welsh, a graduate in French and Italian of Bedford College London, but also emotional and motherly, which was lucky as Priestley left the upbringing of the six children entirely to her. Jane, Priestley’s second wife, was nothing like his more famous third wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. After the standing ovations the Priestleys dined with the company and were showered with gifts of champagne, chocolates and enough tobacco to last Jack till Christmas. On Priestley’s 51st birthday, 13 September, he finally saw his play in the Kamerny theatre, seated in a box. “No comfort, no lav, no sleep, no food,” she wrote, and when they touched down at Minsk, “lav a wooden hut, so filthy as to seat, I had to do what others had done and use the floor!”īut they were royally welcomed by the Writers’ Group of the Society for Cultural Relations with USSR, who included Alexei Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak. “Everybody smoked piano-accordions were brought out and played and sung to bottles circulated and there was a birthday-party atmosphere, very Russian and very genial,” wrote Priestley. So in September, Priestley and Jane travelled to Moscow from Berlin in a Red Army Dakota piloted by a cheerful woman, without seats or seatbelts but with a metal bench, their luggage piled in the middle. The original Leningrad poster of An Inspector Calls
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