by Paula Byrne
At Banbury Road, Pym was greeted by Jock, who opened the door in a ravishing paisley dressing gown. At one point Henry pulled Barbara onto the bed, insisting that she lie beside him. Jock and Barnicot left them to it. So far, so normal. For once, Henry was being nice. He said he had a headache and he was kind and gentle and once again, Pym felt her feelings of love revive.
She and Henry were in the midst of an embrace when the other men unexpectedly came back. Henry would not let go of her; there was a struggle on the floor and Pym showed ‘most indecent sights’ and more of herself than was appropriate: ‘I was simply furious and burst into a passionate fit of crying.’ Jock and Barnicot were embarrassed and left with Henry so that Pym could have some time to calm her feelings. Henry came back and was solicitous and they all had supper. It was late by the time Pym left and she had to climb through a window to her room. Then, to complicate matters further, Bill Hussey called in whilst she was in her nightclothes and feeling ‘distrait’. She was relieved when he left after ten minutes.[4]
Now that Henry appeared to be losing Pym to another man, he was at last showing more interest. He invited her to tea. She refused. He came after lunch and behaved with kindness and courtesy until he ruined it all with one of his cruel comments: ‘Oh you are common property.’[5] When he saw how much he had upset Pym, he began to be nice to her again. After Henry left, Pym comforted herself by translating Friedbert’s letter, finding many nice things to please her and restore her shaken confidence. It was cruel behaviour. Henry did not want her, but he did not want anyone else to have her attention.
With the start of term, Pym moved back to St Hilda’s, into her old room. It felt as if prison walls were closing around her – she missed the freedom afforded by the private lodgings in Ship Street. She bought a frame for her picture of Friedbert and put in on her desk. Her thoughts were consumed by him: she walked to Port Meadow to read his letter in more romantic surroundings.
In the evening, she learnt more German and thought ‘much of going to Rhineland again’. She went to the movies and saw Bertolt Brecht’s Whither Germany? – a love story set in the last days of the Weimar Republic when unemployment and homelessness were rife, and interspersed with left-wing political commentary. ‘Affected me deeply,’ she wrote.[6] She was also reading Jew Süss, a historical novel by the well-known German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, about the rise and fall of a Jewish businessman. Later, the Nazis would adapt the novel, turning it into a propaganda film and one of the most anti-Semitic movies of all time.
Barbara occasionally saw Henry and Jock, who both asked her to mend their socks (‘I intend to do so and take my wee penknife with me’). She went to their digs in Banbury Road in her (Sandra) scarlet satin shirt and black skirt. As she sat darning seemingly endless pairs of socks, Jock amused her with funny stories, though Henry was rude. Later, he said he was sorry and that he would teach her Chaucer and introduce her to the works of Gerard Langbaine, a minor seventeenth-century author who was one of his favourites. He walked her to the bus stop and asked her to tea. She refused. Back in her room, she looked at her photograph of Friedbert and said, ‘Oh my darling – it’s you I love.’[7]
Pym had promised to darn more socks for Henry and Jock, so she returned the next evening. She noted that Henry and Jock were arguing and then she had a row with Henry. She was so upset and distracted by this that she lost her precious swastika brooch on the Banbury Road and burst into tears.[8]
Pym was worried, as Friedbert had not written back to her and she felt that she was falling back in love with Henry. Henry came to find her in the library and told her that he and Jock were unable to find her swastika pin, which was depressing. Henry was clearly wishing to resume their sexual ‘no strings’ relationship, which only made Pym feel used and rejected. On the steps of the Radcliffe Camera, Henry asked her to tea and promised he would not touch her in an inappropriate way: ‘But how can I believe him after all the other times he’s sworn and promised?’ She was surprised that her instinct was to reach out her hand and touch him, realising: ‘Deep down in my heart I know that I love him.’[9] She felt her usual hopelessness: she loved Henry, but she could not trust him.
CHAPTER IV
Miss Pym’s Final Term
If it hadn’t been for Friedbert and the memory of Germany, Pym’s final term at Oxford might well have been unhappy. Her on/off affair with Henry dragged on. Jock Liddell came back to their flat in Banbury Road to discover the pair naked in bed reading Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Pym was penitent for her behaviour and they all had supper together.[1] Later, her friend, Honor Tracy, warned her about Henry and advised her not to continue the affair.
Friedbert and Germany, meanwhile, still held sway over her: a visit to the Ashmolean made her compare the art unfavourably to that of the museum in Cologne. Back in her room, she read the German paper Die Woche; it helped her with her German vocabulary and kept her in touch with the latest news from the Third Reich.[2]
On 12 May Pym went to London for a National Union of Students reunion. Several of the people she had met previously on the Cologne trip were there, together with some new Belgian and German boys. The reunion was fun and they watched a cine film and found a photograph of Pym and Hanns aboard the steamer on the Rhine, drinking wine, glasses raised in the air: ‘Promoting International Goodwill I called it!’[3] After the reunion Pym went to Cambridge and enjoyed touring some of the colleges, noting that ‘there seem to be remarkably few pansies in Cambridge’.[4]
Back in Oxford, Pym tried to buy a new swastika pin, but could only find a gold one, which was too expensive. ‘I want so terribly to go to Germany again,’ she wrote.[5] She longed for a letter from Friedbert, who seemed to have gone quiet. She read a German play, Das Mädchen Manuela, but had to look up almost every word in the dictionary.
Henry, again, joked about Pym’s poor reputation and for once she let her irate feelings show, calling him a ‘fatuous idiot’. But it wasn’t long before she began to feel sentimental about him once more. She was honest about her own feelings, knowing that if Friedbert wrote, then she would have a distraction from Henry. She decided that men often seemed to let her down. ‘I have very little faith in Mankind now – although Hope does spring eternal in the human breast, especially in Sandra’s.’[6]
The next day, Pym wrote Henry a love note and enclosed forget-me-nots. She went with Pedley to a production of Noël Coward’s Design for Living, a play about a complicated three-way relationship between a woman who cannot decide between her two male lovers and chooses to live with them both. Barbara wondered whether she ‘should do that with Henry and Jock’.[7] Evenings were spent improving her German and revising for her final exams. She had a letter from Hanns, claiming that Friedbert had said that she was returning to Germany in June. But still there was silence from Friedbert himself. She noted, sadly, in her diary: ‘I suppose the truth is that I belong to a cruel, sweet Englishman called Henry Stanley Harvey.’[8]
On the day before her twenty-first birthday, Pym saw Henry and Jock for supper. Henry remarked that she looked ‘blonde and Aryan, like something on the cover of Die Woche’. They drank Liebfraumilch and embraced: ‘to kiss Henry in a wonderful kiss was the loveliest thing that has happened in years’. Henry tried to take it further, but Pym, and Jock, refused to let him. Henry drove her home: ‘Goodbye twenty.’ She did let it go further on her birthday itself: ‘He was quite sweet really as far as I can remember. The usual proceedings happened of course, then had a bath while I read Spence’s Anecdotes to him.’ Pym occasionally had pangs of conscience about her sexual activity with Henry; she sometimes felt ‘miserable and conscience-stricken’ and wept: ‘Silly Sandra, but I suppose it was a relief.’[9]
When Jock returned home after work, they had supper and he read Jane Austen aloud to Pym. Jock was an ardent admirer of Austen (later, he would write a very good critical book about her art). Listening to Austen being read aloud was an important lesson for Pym in the art of dialogue and comic
timing. It is unclear whether Pym told either Jock or Henry of her aspiration to be a novelist.
That summer term, Henry had a German guest staying. He was called Anton Fendrich. Pym considered him ‘nice in a dark Friedbertish way’. She spent her final period at Oxford with Henry and Anton. One beautiful summer’s day the men wanted to bathe naked at Parson’s Pleasure, so Pym was sent back to Banbury Road with a latch key. She did the washing up and laid the tea things, resisting the urge to poke around Henry’s things. By the time the boys came back, she was sitting quietly, reading. Anton had cut his foot and Pym bound it up – acting the part of the ‘Hausfrau’. After tea, they all got drunk and drove into the Cotswolds for supper at the Lamb in Burford. Anton flirted with Pym and turned cartwheels in the road. Then he wrapped her in a rug in the back of the car and kissed her. She liked kissing German men: ‘How seriously and sensuously they kiss.’[10]
Back in Oxford, they hired a punt to get Pym home to St Hilda’s. It was late, and the college was locked up, so Henry helped her over the wall and they walked together in the moonlit garden with the stars filling the night sky. He had been on his very best behaviour and Pym felt ‘blissfully happy’. She went to bed hearing the birds singing the dawn chorus.
The next morning, Pym went to Henry’s flat clutching a large bunch of yellow and red roses. The boys were still asleep, but they finally awoke to her persistent knocking. Henry was delighted with the flowers. After breakfast, Pym lay on the blue divan and Anton tried to kiss her, but she did not feel up to a German kiss at that hour of the day.
Henry put on the Brandenberg concertos and he gave Pym a last, tender kiss. ‘No more need be said about the last morning of my last term at Oxford,’ she concluded. But there was one final thought: ‘He made the last two days sweet enough to make up for all the unhappiness of the last year.’[11]
CHAPTER V
Night of the Long Knives
Pym waited for her results. She was awarded a second-class degree. Then she firmed up her plans to return to Germany. Friedbert had finally written, suggesting that he could find her a tutoring job, but Pym’s mother was not keen that she should go back merely on his recommendation. It was one thing having the safety net of the NUS and quite another to go alone and unprotected.
Back home in Shropshire, Pym signed on the dole and felt very much the same as during any other long vacation. Boredom set in: ‘I feel rather comatose.’ Another letter from Friedbert arrived, which raised her spirits. On 1 July 1934, she went on a family visit to Bath, but events abroad, ‘political and personal’, were on her mind. She kept the wireless set on, riveted by the unsettling reports from Germany. What she heard was news of Hitler’s purge of the SA in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. His power and that of the SS was consolidated. The brownshirts had been eliminated and the SS became Hitler’s personal instruments of terror, loyal to him alone. We have no way of knowing the extent of Friedbert Glück’s involvement in the purge, though it would appear from later events that he was close to Hitler.
Pym followed events on the BBC and in the newspapers, while also starting to read Goethe in German. ‘Tonight I cut out Nazi Germany cuttings … at present my thoughts are most on Germany,’ she wrote in her diary a few days after the Night of the Long Knives, on 7 July.[1] That same day, The Times headline proclaimed ‘Perplexity in Germany. Fate of Brown Army’. Their correspondent reported that the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, had given a (carefully stage-managed) address to the national congress of Nazi leaders, in which he stated that the ‘merited death of a dozen mutineers averted a fearful bloodshed’.[2] Hess made clear that members of the SS were the ‘black-coated executioners’ and that the SA must ‘resign itself to being a non-military and submissive body always under the eye of the SS’. More disturbing reports followed, emphasising Hitler’s severity, the necessity of the ‘clean-up’, and the importance of the Hitler Youth, who ‘looked up to the Führer as [their] idol’. Hess also hinted at the ‘abnormal proclivities’ of some of the SA leaders: their chief, Ernst Röhm, summarily shot on 1 July, was a known homosexual.
Unity Mitford wrote to her sister, Diana, about the purge:
I am terribly sorry for the Führer – you know Röhm was his oldest comrade & friend, the only one that called him ‘du’ in public … It must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Röhm himself and tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines and found him in bed with a boy. Did that get into the English Papers? Poor Hitler.[3]
If Pym felt anxious about events in Germany, she did not show it. Friedbert continued to occupy her thoughts, as the negotiations for her plans continued throughout early July: ‘I still desire passionately to go there and am still trying to acquire more vocabulary.’ Plans went awry and it looked for a while as if, rather than returning to Friedbert in Cologne, the only option would be to go with the NUS to Hamburg: ‘Today I thought sadly of Friedbert … Perhaps it would be dangerous to see him again. I thought of him at the very first lunch in Cologne making a speech in his black uniform. Life is sad but sometimes very romantic.’[4]
In the meantime, Pym returned briefly to Oxford for her viva. She saw Henry, who invited her back to the flat on the Banbury Road. In his usual cruel manner, he talked about a pretty Finnish girl he had met, but that did not stop matters becoming physical between them: ‘we proceeded as usual. I felt he was very sweet but my love has calmed down a good deal.’[5] He told her that he expected that they would probably go on having these sorts of meetings in the future. But he was offering nothing more than casual sex.
Pym stayed for supper. Barnicot turned up and Henry opened a letter which informed him that he had got a job as a lecturer in Finland, at the University of Helsinki. Henry got so excited that he thought he was going to be sick, so Pym calmed him down and stroked his head. Later, they toasted his success with whisky (her first taste of it). It was a glorious, ‘forever to be remembered’ evening. They sang, danced and, to Pym’s delight, they spoke German all night. Henry gave Pym a present of a pair of red leather and wool slippers. She painted his mouth with lipstick and then made herself and Barnicot up as clowns. The boys then walked her back to her digs, the happy threesome arm in arm.[6]
The next day, following her viva, Pym had tea with Henry and he accompanied her to the station. It was an emotional parting and the end of an era: ‘He said I was part of his background, like Jock and Barnicot, which pleased me – it is what I’ve always wanted – I love him too, but don’t want him for my very own yet awhile.’[7]
CHAPTER VI
Miss Pym returns to Nazi Germany and attends a Hitler Rally
Belinda Bede, the heroine of Barbara Pym’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle, is closely modelled on Pym herself. In the first draft, Belinda is actually called Barbara. In the original manuscript version of the novel, Belinda visits Hamburg in the summer of 1934. She sails, as Pym did, by Russian ship (the SS Kooperatzi was the cheapest way to travel to Hamburg). Her heart lifts upon her arrival:
By this time Belinda was safely up the mouth of the river Elbe and had almost reached Hamburg. She looked out of her porthole and saw the sand and those pretty little homes on the shore. There were petunias and geraniums in the window boxes. Swastika flags were fluttering in the light breeze. Hast du schon abgestimmt? Denk an deine Stimmpflicht (Have you voted. Remember to vote).[1]
The juxtaposition of the innocent red flowers and the sinister red flags is entirely lost on the heroine, just as it was lost on Pym.
Barbara would never forget her second trip to Nazi Germany, particularly as she was in time to witness an important speech by Hitler. President von Hindenburg had died on 2 August and Hitler quickly seized his opportunity. A referendum on merging the posts of chancellor and president was to be held on 19 August. Two days beforehand, Hitler declared a national holiday and travelled to Hamburg to give one of the most crucial speeches of his political career to date. That very same day, Pym arrived in the city. The bright red swast
ika flags were indeed fluttering, as in the words of the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, the new anthem of the Nazi party.
Pym was caught up in the excitement of the day. Hitler delivered his election speech on the referendum for the head of state from the balcony of Hamburg city hall. It was a spectacular event, the Nazi party had pulled out all the stops. Hitler was flanked by SS and SA stormtroopers, and banners screeched Ja dem Führer (‘Say Yes to the Führer’). The Führer’s address was broadcast on the radio, reaching an audience of more than four million Germans.
The swastika flags and the propaganda posters fascinated the fresh-faced British traveller. She noted in her diary: ‘There was plenty of publicity etc urging voters to say Ja for Hitler. The ones I can remember best were Führer wir folgen dir, Alle safen Ja! E in Führer, fin Ja. At the station – Reisende! Denk an eure Stimmpflicht.’[2] Pym found the whole thing ‘delightful and more than usually interesting’. Seeing Hitler in the flesh was an added and unexpected boon: ‘I thought he looked smooth and clean and was very impressed.’[3] In a passage later deleted from the manuscript of Some Tame Gazelle, Pym records the memorable incident: ‘Was it not a fortunate coincidence that she had arrived in Hamburg that very day … Belinda, who remembered seeing the Führer as if it were yesterday. So nice and clean and tidy he had looked, and of course she had heard his speech in the evening, although she had been able to understand very little of it.’[4]