Joan and I had both returned to Britain after having lived in Chile for years; our companeros were famous or well-known supporters of the Popular Unity government who had both suffered the terror of military raids on our homes and detention of our loved ones. Our meeting that evening in Highgate was the beginning of our long friendship.
 
I had been lucky. My companero Ricardo was alive, after months of detention on Quiriquina Island and local prison.
 
But in Joan’s case, Victor had been assassinated in the National Stadium. On the eve of his imminent death, he penned a poem for the world to witness the horrors that he and the thousands of other prisoners detained there were suffering in the stadium.
 
Despite her sadness and the difficulties of adapting to life in London with her two daughters, Manuela and Amanda, Joan threw herself into solidarity work, campaigning to free the thousands of prisoners being held without trial by the criminal Pinochet regime. She tirelessly travelled the world denouncing the junta and campaigning for the disappeared and for human rights.
 
Joan, a classically trained dancer, had worked in dance and performance in Chile for many years before the coup. That was her profession and her vocation. She was not a writer, yet she agreed to write her story — and I can remember her confessing to me how difficult she was finding writing the book.

An Unfinished Song is a well-written and moving account of her life before and after going to live in Chile and the personal tragedy of the coup which murdered Victor Jara. Later Ricardo and I collaborated with Joan on the translation of some of Victor’s unpublished songs for a Danish publisher.
 
Until the coup, Joan had always felt very much at home in Chile — Victor’s home country. So in 1984, she decided to return to Chile, setting up a school for modern dance, Espiral (Spiral), which is still going strong today, run by her daughter Manuela.

Later she created the Victor Jara Foundation, which her daughter Amanda helps to run. The last time Ricardo and I met up with Joan was in 2016. An interesting conversationalist at her 89 years, she was straight-backed and still walked with a dancer’s poise.
 
After the end of dictatorship in 1990 she was recognised by the Chilean government and was the recipient of several honours and prizes. She was loved and respected by the people of Chile, who admired her courage, dignity and loyalty to the unwavering ideals of her communist husband, Victor Jara.

And more than any satisfaction she no doubt felt in recent years at the fact that Victor’s killers are now in jail, will have been to see Victor’s name and image held aloft by demonstrators in the massive October 2019 protests along the length and breadth of Chile, and to hear his iconic song El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The right to live in Peace) sung by thousands and thousands of people, young and old.  Joan - dancer, performer, activist, reluctant writer and public speaker - was certainly a worthy compañera to the valiant Victor Jara, whose name and song will live forever.