The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Mr Sagar. ‘What a loss to letters!’

  ‘Do you remember who was sitting in that chair a minute ago?’ said Aunt Janie.

  ‘Perhaps Heinemann will issue a memorial edition?’ said Mr Sagar in a hopeful tone.

  ‘Bring me burnt feathers,’ said Mrs Pym. ‘She has fainted, merely that.’

  ‘My daughter is restored to me,’ said Mr Pym. ‘I shall go back to my work on Pym v Harvey.’

  ‘Leave me with my sister,’ said Barbara in a feeble tone … ‘We shall always be together now.’[2]

  ICB was their go-to voice in times of crisis. Pym responded in similar style and bought herself an expensive black lace dress – her version of widow’s weeds.

  Nevertheless, the new year of 1938 started ‘peacefully’ for Pym. On 1 January she wrote about eight pages of her Finnish novel, which had now reached page 256. She was reading lots of contemporary novels and some modern poetry, including W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s travel book in prose and verse, Letters from Iceland: ‘a good book for bad days’. She went shopping in Liverpool to cheer herself up and bought a pale blue jumper, gold bracelet and a lining for a waistcoat.[3]

  On 26 January the first snowdrop came out and she received a letter from Elsie Harvey. Jock sent letters on writing paper with black edges, because when writing letters of condolence after a bereavement it was tactful to use mourning paper. He told Pym that Elsie had received her letter and considered it very brave. Elsie was kind and sympathetic and determined to be friends, expressing the hope that Barbara would be like a sister to her.

  Pym’s flirtation with Julian Amery was proving to be a godsend. Julian spent Christmas in Kitzbühel, before returning to Oxford where he met Hilary Pym at a sherry party (he heard the voice of a woman saying that she wanted to meet Julian Amery). Hilary thought him a curiously small man but rather intriguing. For Julian, seeing Hilary and hearing her voice, so like Barbara’s, made him think of the older sister and he wrote to Pym asking her to visit him in Oxford:

  I am angry with you. You have been in my mind all day and stopped me concentrating on Louis XVI – I simply can’t believe that I have only seen you once for an hour and a half. What will it be like when I see you again … write to me and tell me what you are doing and thinking and don’t forget to tell me when you’re coming.[4]

  Pym confided in her diary her gratitude towards Julian for taking an interest in her when she ‘was still feeling rather unhappy and lost about Henry’s marriage’. Rather than ridicule Pym’s love for all things German the way that Henry had, Julian called her ‘liebe’ and wrote endearing messages in German. Hearing Hilary’s voice, he said, gave him a ‘serious attack of sehnsucht’ – a lovely, untranslatable word meaning ‘yearning or craving’. He signed off with the title of a recent German song, ‘Mein schönes Fräulein, gute Nacht’ (Goodnight my pretty lady).

  Pym found out all she could about Julian Amery. She learned that he was a speaker at the Oxford Union and was writing for a political newspaper called Oxford Comment, which was edited by Woodrow Wyatt. He was friends with Randolph Churchill. She was determined to return to Oxford to see him.

  In Gervase and Flora, the heroine knows that the only way of getting over her hopeless love for Gervase is to fall in love with someone else. Pym went to Oxford at the end of February, excited but also worried because Julian had failed to answer her latest letter. She tossed a coin to decide whether or not to leave a message and then left a note at Balliol, telling him of her arrival and address. After tea and shopping, she returned to her lodgings and saw a light on in her room. She walked in to find Julian with his back to her, wearing a camel hair coat. He turned around, holding out his hands. Pym was nervous. Julian told her that he thought perhaps she was disappointed in him. It was only their second meeting. But, as Pym recorded, they soon had their ‘arms around each other and I knew it wasn’t so’.[5]

  CHAPTER XXV

  A Trip to the Botanical Gardens

  Pym was convinced, from the outset, that Julian Amery was going to be someone very special in her life. For him, in turn, it was the ‘first experience of true love’.[1]

  The next day, she found him again waiting in her rooms. He was wearing a brown suit and a red spotted tie. He walked her to St Giles’, where she was meeting friends, and they made plans for the evening. Pym went to his rooms in Balliol, where there were three blond Etonians ‘like teddy bears’. Two of them were probably Julian’s close friends, Simon Wardell and Sandy Hope. When they left, Julian kissed her with such force that he hurt her nose and ‘made it crooked’.

  They had supper at Stewart’s, where they ate chicken and fish and drank wine. Julian was charming, showering her with compliments and kissing her fingertips throughout supper. Afterwards, they went on to the Oxford Playhouse to see a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. The play – about incest, illegitimacy and venereal disease – seems an odd choice for a romantic date. Pym wrote that ‘it was the most terrifying play she had ever seen’. In the interval they talked about their life ambitions. She hinted about her relationship with Henry and her unhappiness. Julian told her that he ‘couldn’t bear to die without having done something by which he could be remembered’. Then they returned to the play. Its horrifying conclusion left them both feeling ‘frightened and distressed’. Back in Pym’s room, they shared a bottle of wine, before Julian headed back to his rooms at Balliol. She wrote him a love poem and felt grateful for the happiness she felt. The next morning, she wrote him a ‘Stevie Smith’ letter, which she posted in the Broad, feeling ‘intensely happy’.[2]

  Pym had arranged to see Jock in his Banbury Road flat, but he was critical about her Finnish novel, which left her feeling depressed and tearful. Seeing Jock in his flat brought back painful memories of Henry, ‘my own life seemed pointless and just a waste of time if I wasn’t even going to be able to write’. She went back to her digs and cried, thinking there was nothing to live for and feeling more miserable than ever. Jock’s criticism had hit her hard. The next day, she pulled herself together and thought about writing a new novel or getting a job.[3]

  She went to a pacifist meeting in the town hall, where she spotted the Liddell brothers and Julian Amery in the audience. Afterwards she ran after Julian to ask if he were going to sign the ‘Peace Pledge’. He took her hand and asked if they could go back to her rooms. She felt happy, looking at his ‘dear little face’; he told her that she was looking very sweet. They walked back arm in arm, stopping at the Randolph to buy a bottle of Niersteiner wine. Pym told him all about her Finnish novel, which he asked to read. Back in her room once again, they ‘drank wine and talked and loved’. She confessed that he was just what she needed: ‘To have Julian say in his young, intense voice – God, you are so sweet! So ist das leben – und die liebe – und so bin ich!’[4]

  Pym recalled making a half-hearted attempt to convert Julian to pacifism, but he told her that he thought there were worse things than war, and ‘if he thought all Beauty was going out of his life he would simply shoot himself’. She put her arms around him at the top of her staircase and they kissed. She wondered what Henry and Jock would make of it all, but decided that they would not understand.

  She and Julian met again the next morning outside the Ashmolean. They looked out at the Randolph Hotel and the bright blue sky behind. Pym was carrying a notebook and Continual Dew, the new poetry collection by John Betjeman. Julian was also holding a book and she asked if it was interesting: ‘It’s not now,’ he replied, charmingly. ‘We were like two people having a coltish flirtation.’ He bought her a bunch of violets and she gave back six – ‘one for every occasion we had met’. She told Julian how much she loved the Botanical Gardens and the orchids in the hothouses. Then he left to write an essay.

  Inspired by her reading, Pym wrote Julian a poem in the style of John Betjeman.

  Oh the sky is blue behind it

  And the little towers of stone

  Of the Randolph Hotel wi
ll still be there

  When this present day has flown.

  When Jay has quite forgotten

  That one early closing day

  He leaned against the wall with me

  And I would not go away.

  And I went back to my lodgings

  And there I made a shrine

  Of Oxford Comment and violets

  And the bottle that once held wine.

  And I took a glass I had used before

  And filled it to the brim

  And I thought as I drank of the night before

  When I had been with him …[5]

  The fifth of March 1938 was a glorious hot day in Oxford, ‘full of sunshine and happiness’. Pym went to lunch with Julian in his rooms at Balliol, ‘eggs with cream on the top, chicken and chocolate mousse’. They drank their favourite Niersteiner wine and she was flooded with joy: ‘the sun was shining all the time when we were eating and drinking and kissing’. During an afternoon walk, the pair discussed going away together for the weekend, to the Cotswolds or even Italy. They visited the Botanical Gardens, where they lay down on the grass under a tree by the river. There were bunches of mistletoe in the branches, so they kissed and kissed again. Julian told Pym about his older brother, John, whom he described as ‘more charming and more cruel than he was’.[6]

  John Amery was a troubled young man. From his earliest years, he had displayed signs of disturbing behaviour. His relationship with his younger brother was difficult. When Julian was a baby, John had thrown a lighted match into his pram and tried to poison his milk bottles by washing them in liquid polish. When he first saw the new baby he had a screaming tantrum, upending his breakfast and storming out of the nursery. Nanny Mead found him ‘not quite normal’ – which would prove to be an understatement.[7]

  John always carried around his large teddy bear, taking it to restaurants and buying it drinks and comic magazines. He also had a fixation with his overcoat and would buy an extra seat for it in the cinema or at the theatre.[8] He was sent to Harrow, his father’s school, but disliked rules and ran away to become a car mechanic. He was found and returned and sent to a renowned psychiatrist who came to the conclusion that he had ‘no moral sense of right and wrong … no sense of remorse or shame’.[9] He was sexually precocious and during his teenage years contracted syphilis. He claimed that he was selling his body to homosexual men for money.

  By the time Julian was in Summer Fields prep school in Oxford, John had married a woman called Una Wing. She was a prostitute, frequenting London’s West End, and considered her husband to be a ‘sexual pervert’. He continued to sell his body to men for money and paid prostitutes to beat him. He also liked to force his wife to watch whilst he had sex with other women. Leo Amery and his gentle wife, Bryddie, who doted on John, were at their wits’ end.[10] Their latest worry was that John, who was a staunch anti-communist, had come under the influence of the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot. Under his tutelage, John travelled to Austria, Italy and Germany to witness fascism for himself.[11] Even then, no one could have anticipated the consequences of his actions.

  Back in the Botanical Gardens, Barbara and Julian talked about Budapest. She lay on the ground with her head on her arms, willing herself to ‘capture and hold the happiness of that moment’.[12] The day only improved. They went into the hothouses to look at the fish and palms: ‘Julian kissed me by the orchids and stole a spray of three for me … they were pinky mauve with purple centres like velvet.’ She liked the sweet smell, though he thought they had the whiff ‘of the tomb’. She quoted Andrew Marvell: ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace.’[13] She said she would prefer a marble vault together than a house in North Oxford, or a farm in the puszta. Then they wandered down Rose Lane and into Balliol – where they had tea and peppermint creams – and Pym kissed him, smearing lipstick on his forehead. He seemed to have none of Henry’s aversion to lipstick.

  The next morning, Pym went to the English Reading Room and wrote Julian a letter, in part to dispel the ‘unhappy associations’ of the place.[14] The next few days were warm and sunny, and filled with Julian. Lunch in his rooms consisted of ‘fish, duck and green peas, fresh peaches and cream, sherry, Niersteiner and port’. After his scout had cleared the dishes, they sat looking out of the window: ‘There was one long, happy embrace which was so lovely that I would gladly have died there and then.’ Julian then had to see his tutor. As he stood at the mirror, combing his hair, Pym sat at his desk and wrote him a farewell note. He came up behind her, kissed her and said ‘Servus’. Julian was on his way to Spain, with two of his Oxford friends, to report on the civil war there.

  Pym recorded, rather melodramatically that this was the last time she saw him. In fact, she would see him again, but not ever at Oxford. For that she was grateful, as she wanted to preserve, in a place she loved, what had been an unclouded and perfect love affair.

  She inscribed a postcard of the Swiss artist Arnold Boecklin’s Die Insel der Toten (the Isle of the Dead) with their initials and the dates of their first meeting and their last, and ‘Neuer Frühling gibt zurück’. She thought the new spring a perfect leitmotif for their relationship: ‘He and the spring have given me back what the winter took from me.’ As she left, Pym took a red anemone from her buttonhole and left it on top of Julian’s pale blue pyjamas. Then she walked around his rooms, touching things and kissing the mantelpiece. She walked slowly out onto St Giles’, in a happy daze. Pym went back to her digs to change for a dinner at St Hilda’s. She wore a green chiffon dress and pearls and diamonds. As she left her room, she saw two huge bunches of daffodils in the hall and a card written in German from Julian saying that, although he had to go away, he thought of her: ‘I felt it was the perfect ending to what had been one of the happiest episodes of my life.’[15]

  CHAPTER XXVI

  An Old Brown Horse

  Barbara Pym sat by the fire in the drawing room of Morda Lodge, smoking a cigarette and listening to the wireless. Her Aunt Janie was knitting a white jersey and they sat together in companionable silence.

  Pym was in high spirits from her ‘spring reawakening’. She had written to Julian, who was on his way to Spain, wishing him good luck in his exam results. He posted a warm and loving letter from the ‘gloomy’ Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, which reminded him, he said, of the Randolph. ‘Darling,’ he wrote. ‘If anything in the world could have got me through Pass mods, they [her letters] would have.’ He told her that it was all to no avail as he had forgotten to attend his French unseen examination. But he was so excited to be travelling to Spain that he hardly cared about Oxford. ‘If I never come back, well you can remember that at least I cared [about you].’ He told her to say a prayer for him on his birthday and buy a bottle of Niersteiner to drink his health: ‘Meeting you Darling has been one of the big pieces of luck in my life and if I’ve mended your heart, well that is more than I ever dared to ask.’[1] He asked her to visit him in London when he returned.

  Julian was rather enjoying the pose of young man going off to war, leaving behind his sweetheart, but he was too kind and too honest to lead her on: ‘I cannot promise that I will always be faithful to my little Finn, but I can promise you that she will have to be a very charming woman to gain my heart now that I have at least your memory.’ He also told her that if ‘Wien’ (Vienna) was now a ‘concentration camp’, she should remember that the ‘Danube does flow through Budapest as well’. He told her to ‘be happy and smile when you think of Julian’.[2]

  Pym was aware of the worsening situation in Europe. On 12 March 1938, Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and on the fifteenth the Führer himself arrived in Vienna in a triumphant blaze of glory, cheered by 200,000 German Austrians. His speech at the Heldenplatz announced that annexing Austria was his ‘greatest achievement’. Friedbert had recently been in touch.[3] He had been posted to Dresden and wrote to say that it was schade (too bad) that she was not in Germany ‘to experience these so great ev
ents which have shaken the heart of Germany’. He was clearly referring to the Anschluss. Pym wrote a ‘very cautious’ letter in reply, justifying it to herself on the grounds that she did not ‘like to be rude to a dear friend who has been always so kind to her when she was allein in einer Grosstadt [alone in a big city] like Marlene Dietrich in the song’.[4]

  Her heart was still full of Julian. In Pym’s diaries, she reflected on their relationship. He was soon to turn nineteen and she twenty-five, but she felt that five years and ten months did not seem to make much difference to their relationship. She had only spent a total of twenty hours in his company, but none of that mattered. It was the intensity of the romance and the happiness it brought her that mattered. She didn’t care if she never saw or heard from him again – and indeed she felt that ‘it might almost be better so’. The brief encounter had been the perfect antidote to her misery over Henry: ‘Nothing can take away what has been and in my heart there is so much more than I could even write here. Harold Julian Amery – Barbara Mary Crampton Pym.’[5]

  She was reading two writers who would be an important influence on her writing and were inextricably bound up with her love for Julian. The first was John Betjeman, whose latest poetry collection she had been carrying when she met Julian outside the Ashmolean. In a 1978 BBC radio interview for Finding a Voice, Pym cited Betjeman: ‘His glorifying of ordinary things and buildings and his subtle appreciation of different kinds of churches and churchmanship made an immediate appeal to me.’[6] ‘Ordinary things’ would be her theme, too. The best-known poems of Continual Dew were ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at Cadogan Hotel’ and ‘Slough’, in which Betjeman mocks the industrialisation of the town where ‘there isn’t grass to graze a cow’ and everything – from fruit and meat to milk and beans to minds and breath – is ‘tinned’.[7]