Lee had met her as he played violin on a beach in Cornwall in 1937, just after his first travels in Spain, portrayed in his memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Impulsive and striking, she has been characterised by Lee’s biographer, Valerie Grove, as a combination of the fictional figures of Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp, all “rolled into one captivating and maddening creature”. Yasmin, who died in 2009, was the result of a passionate six-year affair between the writer and Lorna Garman Wishart, a married and wealthy bohemian who eventually left him to become the mistress and muse of the painter Lucian Freud. Sitting here on the drawing room floor I can watch the seagulls diving backwards and forwards over the willows, such a winter light, threatening snow, the one time the ground and trees feel more frail than the sky.” But two weeks, after just re-finding you is too long, maybe this sounds comical to you after twenty-one years. “Don’t forget me! I have missed you too much this past fortnight, although I have been too busy, all the meals and things to do. His daughter’s emotional reply is just as lyrical: Darling, I have thoughts of you every day and dreamt of you.” “The stable clock has just struck six, and there is snow all over the landscape and the moon is shining, and the birds in the aviary (which include several peacocks and golden pheasants) are making nocturnal tropical noises in spite of the winter cold. You are the one spark in my shadowy life and I’m not complaining,” Lee writes. Typical of the tone of the early correspondence are the author’s lines to his daughter written from Germany just after Christmas in 1960. Yasmin was 19 when she discovered the identity of her real father, and many of the letters are “tinged with a sadness”, according to her daughter. Laurie admits he also once covertly visited her art college in Worthing, standing outside just to see her,” David told the Observer. My mother had initially walked out, after seeing him inside, but he followed her out.
“In the first letters they talk about meeting at the Queen Anne pub in Fulham, London, which Laurie liked. “They were all in a drawer inside the chest … When I opened it up, I was amazed how many letters there were by just how much they had written to each other,” said Clio David, a film-maker who lives in London. They came to light when Yasmin’s daughter, Clio, was sorting through her late mother’s possessions last year. The unseen letters date from the 1960s, when they first met up as adults, until Lee’s death in 1996.
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