During the Second World War, she was commissioned to photograph buildings that were likely to be bombed. She also worked as a nurse at the start of the war, but then trained in encryption, and worked in the British embassies in Madrid and Algiers before being posted to Cairo, where she first met her future husband Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1944. He was then an SOE officer famed for his part in the kidnapping of General Kreipe from Crete. Joan and he quickly fell in love, although she was still married to Rayner. Her marriage to Rayner was dissolved in 1947. She and Leigh Fermor remained close companions and were married in 1968, by which time he had published several books. Her private income allowed him to concentrate on his writing.
With Patrick in Greece
Joan had joined Leigh Fermor in Athens in 1946, where he was deputy director of the British Council's Institute, and joined him on a lecture tour of Greece. She was also secretary to the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster. She travelled in France with Cyril Connolly in 1948, taking photographs to accompany a guidebook that was never finished; Connolly later said that he was distracted by her beauty. Connolly described her in 1949 as "very beautiful: tall, fair, slanting eyes, yellow skin". She accompanied Patrick to the Caribbean after he was invited to write text for a travel book to accompany images by a Greek artist named Costas, published as The Traveller's Tree in 1950. She also accompanied Patrick on visits to remote parts of Greece that were published in his book in Mani about southern Greece and Roumeli about northern Greece, accompanied in the original editions by her photographs. Joan and Patrick lived together in a house designed and built by Patrick in an olive grove on a cliff top at Kardamyli, on the Mani Peninsula, the central peninsula of the three which extend southwards from the Peloponnese. Their circle of friends included Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Spender, Giorgos Seferis, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas and many others. She loved cats and enjoyed playing chess. After suffering a fall, she died in Mani, and was buried in Dumbleton, where Patrick joined her after his death in 2011. They had no children. A biography by Simon Fenwick, Joan, was published in 2017. Exhibitions: 2018 Benaki Museum, Athens Greece. https://www.benaki.gr/index.php?option=com_events&view=event&id=5601&lang=en
