There is, as his son Peter notes in an insightful introduction to Dear Mona, something of D.H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel in Jonah Jones: working class boyhood, son of a Durham miner, auto-didact craving for education. 

Len, as he was then known, enjoyed an unlikely trajectory from coalfield to library, to Conscientious Objector who saw military service in the Parachute Field Ambulance brigade, to artist and writer. 

As unlikely, in fact, as this soul-searching sequence of letters, written over seven years to his Quaker mentor, friend and library employer Mona Lovell, which manifest an acute emotional intelligence and a penchant for self-effacing introspection.

Mona is, in no small degree, Len’s muse, and was a major catalyst for his artistic transformation, the handmaiden to an unexpected career. 

Mona Lovell, born in 1904, was fifteen years Len’s senior, and although there is little evidence of her written responses to his own letters, her interest in Len became more than philanthropic.

But Mona clearly saw something beyond the ordinary in Len Jones. Her Quaker instinct for education, for encouraging the bounty of learning in others, precipitates a lifelong, necessarily Platonic, bond, marked, at very many points, by the proffering of books to the corners of the UK in which Len finds himself. 

At any moment, the inventory might include Flaubert, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Baudelaire, Yeats or a treatise on the efficacy of free love. The selection is eclectic, and perhaps surprising, given the chronology of the correspondence, which covers the turbulent period between 1940 and 1947.
 

And there is no doubt that the interchange – at different times tetchy, pragmatic, visceral, and economical with emotional truth – shapes an already highly intelligent and enquiring mind. Jones is learning as he proceeds, and the eloquence of his responses palpably matures as time progresses. 

The correspondence unfolds at distance: Jones’ CO status condemns him to lengthy periods of state servitude as a lumberjack and logger, first in an Exmoor valley, thence to the Scottish Borders, and onwards to the Tyne Valley and Yorkshire Dales. 

If not as brutal as the Russian Gulags, Len’s letters describe a life of hardship and endurance against a backdrop of cold, damp, extreme physical exertion and tawdry diet. And throughout, an ongoing suggestion of a stifled artistic sensibility paradoxically emergent in the letters he is compelled to write. 

The hardship, in fact, enables a flexing of intellectual muscles: the descriptions at this time are at once detached, intelligent and lyrical in their rendering of landscape and colleagues. But most, the reader takes away a search for self amongst the details of Len’s past, the undirected nature of his artistic aspiration, and the relentless appraisal and re-appraisal of his relationship with Mona. 

A fragile temperament is made friable by uncertainty; unable to square his behaviour with his own mandate to ‘do the right thing’, he distances Mona as, in the next breath, he embraces her. 

The early letters show a mind riven by inconsistency, if not inconstancy: their frequency circumscribes fidelity to purpose, if not to state of mind.

That relationship is tangential to his affiliation with the Quakers, from whose philosophy he derives his initial impulse for conscientious objection, but to whose religious tenets he cannot remain faithful. 

The distance he imposes between himself and the Society of Friends is indicative of an impulse for independence, and it echoes his reluctance to commit to Mona, who occupies a shared psychological space.

The letters of Len Jones bear an integrity borne out of that fidelity; he does not lose focus respecting commitment to self-imposed principles, and to this extent his decision to pursue active wartime service in an ambulance field brigade is a compromise between a powerful sense of duty and a moral rejection of the bearing of arms: he can help to save lives without terminating others in the process. 

But most, his military experience is a deliberate means of distancing Mona, whose tacit acceptance of his position ironically describes a counter-intuitive sense of durability: though frequently fraught – Len’s responses are a measure of his controlled exasperation – his compulsion to commit thoughts to print remains always more powerful than the desire to cast himself adrift.

And there is a growing manifestation of Art in maturity and experience, maturity through experience. His descriptions of parachute drops in heavy flak are both stoical and terrifying; his visceral depiction of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and the carnage of its aftermath is, at once, uncompromising and empathic. 

This last, about which few witnesses vouchsafe any beyond cursory responses, bears the mark of skilled, very necessary, reportage. We are compelled to admire Jones’ ability to stand back, for getting to the heart of the horror by remaining in control of his literary powers. Here, in a wrecked hospital full of the dead and dying, the writer yields a glimmer amongst the gangrenous detritus:
 

‘At first they seemed resigned to death in many cases and I know one young boy who could move neither to eat of defecate and sullied his bed. Now he is struggling to the lavatory himself, & he is one less to spoon feed.’

Such observation would be profoundly unusual in letters home. Len’s even-handedness is characteristic of an ability to sense the bigger picture. His earlier, in context, shocking fellow-feeling towards the enemy, amongst the general nationalist hysteria of the homefront, acts to sharpen his intellect, to temper hubris with the emollient of insight.

The war over, the 6th Airborne Division departed for the potential tinderbox of Palestine, where the influx of displaced European Jewry threatened to overwhelm an Arab region. 

The writer’s acute deconstruction of the salient political pointers is remarkably non-partisan and demonstrates a startling grasp of the ‘delicacy’ of the situation. 

His understanding of history is both extensive and enlightened and he is not above ascribing retrospective blame to ‘British Imperial perfidy...at its worst’.

But, often, you sense a yearning for home against a monotony of heat and flies. The tender lyricism of his homesickness is sharpened on the whetstone of the harsh, unforgiving landscapes of the Middle East; his skill at rendering it, weaned on experience and hard-earned artistic maturity:
 

‘...the sight of Penn Hill (Wensleydale) in a warm haze, the black mass of trees over by Aysgarth, the falls themselves with the church over the shoulder of the hill.’

The increasingly ‘poisonous’ atmosphere in Palestine, the political isolation of the Jews and the nascent steps towards the development of the state of Israel, conspire to entrench Jones’ desire to return to Britain; his letters of late summer, 1946, begin to bear the mark of desperation.

The denouement, the moment at which the relationship between Len and Mona begins to wind down, is the former’s admission of having married a Jewish girl, Judith Grossman, whilst in Palestine. 

The anger with which the news is initially received is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that Mona had heard it first through a third party, and if the bonds of their union were strong enough to endure, they were ineffably weakened by distance and the new circumstances.

But the correspondence, in fact, continued for many more years subsequent to Len’s demobilisation and return, with his new wife, to Britain. Taking up a career as an artist, sculptor and writer, in a new home in north west Wales, Len, now Jonah Jones, settled into family life, becoming the father of three children, whilst Mona married a former German POW in Oxford.

Though the letters become very infrequent, the testimony of Jonah’s sense of artistic purpose, his professional success, is one measure of the productive intensity of the period of correspondence in which this comprehensive collection is framed. 

That the book opens a wide window on a cataclysmically-changing wartime world is a tribute, not least, to Seren’s insightful editorial approach: the clear and well-organised chronology includes short, and very illuminating, italicised selections of commentary, which act to embolden inferences yielded up by the letters themselves. 

The picture of Mona we construct in our mind’s eye might not substitute for the substance of documented words, but we feel her presence at the table’s empty seat.