The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  The men in Crampton Hodnet are, on the whole, weak and spineless. Jessie Morrow spurns Mr Latimer’s declaration of his ‘Respect and Esteem’. She knows that he does not love her:

  It had been such a very half-hearted proposal … poor Mr Latimer! She smiled as she remembered it … ‘I respect and esteem you very much – I think we might be very happy together.’ Might! Oh no, it wouldn’t do at all! … For, after all, respect and esteem were cold, lifeless things – dry bones picked clean of flesh.[6]

  The phrase ‘Respect and Esteem’ was one that Henry Harvey had written to Pym when he was trying to explain his feelings towards her. (Henry may well have been quoting from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, since these are the words that Elinor Dashwood chooses for the way she feels about Edward Ferrars – terms of affection strongly rejected by her more romantic sister.) Now, in her Oxford novel, the lukewarm words are put to work by being described as dry bones picked clean of flesh. The same metaphor recurs in a diary entry written a few months later, in which she recalled her romance with Julian Amery: ‘Respect and Esteem, the dry bones picked clean of flesh. To one who has known Oxford in the spring with Jay they are not enough.’[7]

  Faithful wives are expected to turn a blind eye towards marital infidelity. Mrs Fremantle, spouse of the master of Randolph College, endures her husband’s affairs. Old Mrs Killigrew feels that it is her ‘duty’ to report to his wife that Mr Cleveland is having an affair with his student, Barbara Bird. Mrs Cleveland’s first impulse is to laugh. Her second is to squash down the stiff straw hat that Mrs Killigrew is wearing, and tear off the stuffed bird before flinging it into the fire – the bird symbolism is clear. But there is sympathy, too, for the men imprisoned in dull marriages: ‘The walls had closed round him again. There was no escape.’[8]

  Pym worked hard at her novel over Christmas and into the early part of the new year. Elsie had written to Pym to tell her that Henry had decorated the Christmas tree with his own hands. Pym wrote back: ‘things like that make me want to cry’.[9] She told Elsie: ‘The best piece of news from London is that spring has come … There was that unmistakable feeling in the air that sends people mad, particularly old spinsters like your sister Pym who is already rather queer in the head.’[10]

  Her intense love of flowers always made her happy. The shops were full of them: daffodils, narcissi, tulips, blue irises and of course lots of mimosa. On Julian’s birthday, 27 March, she placed red roses by the photograph of him that she had on her mantelpiece.

  Pym was feeling that she might never be married. Her old Oxford friend, Mary Sharp, had married and moved to America. Pym told Elsie: ‘I think you would be shocked if I were suddenly to marry, for instance. But there seems to be no chance of that.’ Part of her was enjoying her single status, visiting exhibitions with Hilary, including ‘one of pictures and drawings by Man Ray, which I didn’t understand or like very much’. The other exhibition was of work by the contemporary Surrealist artist, Wolfgang Paalen, which she thought more interesting. The first thing they saw was an umbrella covered entirely with sponges, which she thought was a waste of expensive sponges.

  Pym resumed her diary in March 1939. She kept the anniversary of the time she first met Julian Amery. On 15 March she noted grimly: ‘Nazis in Prague’. On 17 March: ‘Sat on a peach-coloured sofa in Grosvenor House in the afternoon and waited for Dr Alberg. International situation serious.’

  Dr Alberg was making arrangements to bring his family out of Poland. Mr Thwaites’s family had already been evacuated from the country; Pym met his wife in London: ‘Things seem to be about as bad as they can be there – she and the children have come back to England and see no prospect of returning to Poland yet and the Embassy and Consulate in Warsaw have sent all their women and children home.’[11]

  If she felt any guilt over her affair with Friedbert, she had locked it away in the lumber room. On 11 April Pym noted: ‘Friedbert 28 today’.

  On 27 April there was an Oxford Union motion on conscription. Pym wrote in her diary that it had been proposed by Julian Amery. In May, conscription was indeed introduced for men aged between twenty and twenty-one. ‘I don’t know what Jock would say to these views, if he is still a Pacifist,’ she wrote to Elsie Harvey. She told Elsie that she was training for a first-aid certificate, ‘which ought to be useful even if there isn’t a war’. She went every week and enjoyed it: ‘Fancy me learning how to make splints and bandages!’[12]

  Pym began to loiter around Julian’s house in Belgravia. On a sunny day in May, ‘the air soft and warm and lovely, trees in leaf and red hawthorns in flower … a nostalgic smell of churches and new paint’, she wandered through Mayfair and ventured to 112 Eaton Square. The aroma of a Sunday dinner rose up from the basement:

  His house is newly painted in cream and royal blue and a window box next door has petunias in it. How all things are in tune to a poor person in love. A fine, sunny afternoon in May, Beethoven and German Lieder. I go to my irises, thinking to throw them away, but find that each dead flower has a fat bud at the side of its stem. And so I take off the dead flowers and the new flowers begin to unfold. The photograph of him at the Union stands on the mantlepiece and in front of it a spray of dead roses – but they are artificial ones from Woolworth’s.[13]

  A couple of weeks later, Pym watched the movie Love Affair, with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, which made her feel very emotional. She walked in the park and then back to ‘the deserted streets of Mayfair’ for a sighting of Julian: ‘Such of the aristocracy as still lives here is away for the weekend.’ She continued: ‘One day you will really go and see what it is. But not yet. You must go back and read your new Vogue and wash stockings – for that is an essential part of a lonely weekend in London.’[14]

  In Crampton Hodnet, Anthea goes to London and stalks her beloved’s Belgravia house, hoping for a glimpse and worrying that, ‘Lady Somebody might be giving a dance for her horrid debutante daughter and Simon was very eligible.’[15] It is July and she scours the newspapers to see if the Beddoes have left for Scotland, or the countryside, or abroad. When she arrives in Chester Square, she sees that the house is shut up: ‘She could hardly have had a greater shock than if the house had been in ruins. She had been so sure he would be there.’ Pym harboured similar nightmares and daydreams about Julian.

  On her twenty-sixth birthday, Pym met Jock for a walk in Hyde Park and then had lunch with him at the Queen’s Head in Chelsea (known as the Old Lady of Tryon Street, it was indeed a celebrated watering hole for ‘queens’). With the prospect of war imminent, Pym was in a thoughtful, reflective mood. Julian Amery was much on her mind. He had sent her a birthday letter: ‘Darling, a line to wish you many happy returns of the day and to tell you that I have never forgotten you and that I never will.’ He said that so much had happened since they last met that they probably wouldn’t recognise each other. (‘I think I would,’ she said to herself.) He told her that he had been in Spain, in France and in Switzerland and that he was learning to fly an aeroplane. He remembered their time in Oxford when ‘we drank Niersteiner and spoke with our eyes’. He said that he wished he was having a birthday party with her and asked her if she would ‘write a special novel’ for his next birthday. He asked her to reply to his letter and sent a message in German: ‘God greets you a thousand times.’[16]

  Pym began a new notebook-diary, entitling it ‘Reflections by Barbara Pym concerning herself and Julian Amery’, which she preserved along with a pressed flower and one of his blue handkerchiefs. She wrote lyrically about her love:

  What is the heart? A damp cave with things growing in it, mysterious secret plants of love or whatever you like. Or a dusty lumber room full of junk. Or a neat orderly place like a desk with a place for everything and everything in its place.

  Something might be starting now that would linger on through many years – dying sometimes and then coming back again, like a twinge of rheumatism in the winter, so that you suddenly felt it in your knee when you were nea
ring the top of a long flight of stairs. A Great Love that was unrequited might be like that.

  Some Solemn Thoughts – That so many places where one has enjoyed oneself are no more – notably Stewart’s in Oxford – shops are pulled down, houses in ruins, people in their marble vaults whom one had thought to be still living. One looks through the window in a house in Belgravia and sees right through its uncurtained space into a conservatory with a dusty palm, a room without furniture and discoloured spaces on the wall where pictures of ancestors once hung.[17]

  She wondered if Julian knew how deeply he was beloved: ‘Suddenly it occurs to me that as at no other time somewhere in the world, somewhere in England probably, a young creature very beloved is still alive and going about his independent life, which touched one’s own for twenty hours.’ On 4 July, she got her wish: ‘I met one I loved and had not seen for more than a year.’[18]

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  A Peek into 112 Eaton Square

  It is highly probable that Pym engineered a ‘chance’ meeting at the traffic lights in Portman Square. She was nothing if not persistent. Julian invited her back to Eaton Square and she was delighted finally to be inside his curious home, with its oil paintings and smell of incense.

  Pym was introduced to Julian’s mother, thinking her a splendid character for a novel. Florence Amery, known to her friends as Bryddie, was Canadian. She was a striking woman with a strong intellect. Like Pym, she was a graduate of St Hilda’s College. Julian was unashamedly devoted to his mother and always had been, even at prep school. Like Pym, he was a lover of nicknames and had christened his mother ‘Porick’. His father was ‘Coco’. In his letters home, he called his mother ‘my Sweetheart’ or ‘my Angel’. In the face of John’s appalling conduct, Leo impressed upon Julian the importance of being a good son to his mother. He was.

  Pym was fascinated by Bryddie and she would appear several times in her novels. It is possible, too, that Pym met Leo. A week later in her diary, she quoted a phrase made by ‘Leopold Amery’: ‘Family Life is founded on sex. Today’s great thought.’[1]

  Pym only went this once to Eaton Square, but the visit gave her a mine of memories. After she left, she returned later in the evening and observed Julian through a window, dressed in white tie, tails and wearing a red carnation.

  It seems probable, from later writing, that she knew that he had lost interest. He was making many conquests at the time, but no commitments. With war imminent, everyone’s future was uncertain. Barbara knew that Julian was ambitious and would not throw himself away.

  She returned home for the annual family holiday to Pwllheli – ‘a carefree fortnight’ – while the international situation grew worse. Hilary was working for the BBC, and, with war now inevitable, left London for their emergency quarters at Evesham, while Barbara returned home. Soon Pym was recording the news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in her diary: ‘Heard on 10.30 news that Hitler had taken over Danzig and invaded Poland – bombed many towns including Katowice.’[2] She had been living there with the Albergs only a few months before.

  The third of September 1939 was a gloriously sunny day in Shropshire. Pym wrote in her diary: ‘We gave Hitler until 11 a.m. to withdraw from Poland and at 11.15 Mr Chamberlain spoke to the nation and told us that we are now at war with Germany.’[3] Like almost every family in the nation, they huddled round the wireless to hear the prime minister’s broadcast.

  Pym, with her heart full of Julian, felt the comfort of their brief encounter:

  But now when the world is in this sad state, when one hardly dares to look ahead into the years, all this is a warm comfort. All this … the remembrance of meetings, letters, a photograph, all the little relics, all the jokes, everything that did happen and didn’t quite happen and might still happen. Twenty hours – but perhaps twenty years of memories.[4]

  In her diary that night, she told of how, with the declaration of war, such irrelevant memories of ‘past happiness’ came into her mind. Oxford and its libraries, cocktail parties, country pubs and punts on the river seemed a very long way away.

  BOOK THE THIRD

  War

  CHAPTER I

  Operation Pied Piper

  The same evening that war was declared the ‘Birkenhead refugees’ arrived in Oswestry.

  By the end of the first week of September, 8,500 children, parents and teachers from Liverpool and Birkenhead had been evacuated to rural areas and small towns in Wales, Cheshire and Shropshire as part of a national scheme known as Operation Pied Piper. Liverpool and Birkenhead were targets for the Luftwaffe because the Mersey estuary was a significant port in the north. One of the most powerful propaganda posters of the time depicted a mother with young children, with a spectral figure of Hitler standing over her, telling her to ‘Take them back’ to the cities, where they could be bombed. ‘DON’T do it, Mother’ screamed the poster, ‘Leave the Children Where They Are’.

  Pym’s war journals and stories offer unique insights into work on the home front. In the run-up to the outbreak of conflict, new voluntary groups mushroomed. Women were at the core of this enterprise. The government expected women to help the war effort in a number of ways. One, for instance, was on the domestic front: caring for the family, managing rations, growing one’s own vegetables, mending clothes, ‘making do’. Another was to help the government in war work. Two of the main groups in which women were involved were the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service), set up in 1938, and the ARP (Air Raid Precaution). Alongside the British Red Cross, these organisations played a vital role in wartime community service.

  Pym had already joined the WVS in London, where she practised making bandages. Now that she was back home at Morda Lodge, she prepared to welcome the evacuee children. In Pym’s short story ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital’, the autobiographical heroine Laura Arling recalls the police car which had come round ‘on a dreadful Sunday evening’ to tell the family that 500 evacuee children had arrived at the local station.[1] In her wartime diary there is little sense of Pym’s emotional response to the plight of the evacuees, so far from home. Instead, she notes the extra amount of housework they brought that left her exhausted. In her fiction, however, she is more expressive. Laura remembers with pity ‘the sad little procession dragging through the garden gate, labels tied to their coats, haversacks and gas masks trailing on the ground’.[2]

  Pym started work on a new novel about the home front, writing as events directly unfolded. Jane Palfrey (based on her mother, Irena Pym) is moved to tears when she first sees the evacuees: ‘The children all carried gas masks and an assortment of luggage, satchels, little cardboard suitcases and cretonne bags and Jane felt a sudden pricking of tears in her eyes.’ Her daughter, Flora, sees them as an ‘invading army’. Both mother and daughter ‘never quite believed the children would come’.[3] With Hilary working for the BBC in Evesham, it was left to Irena and Barbara to look after the children. The Pym family, with their comfortably sized detached house, could be expected to take at least four children. In the event, they took four and one mother from Birkenhead, who refused to be parted from her children.

  Before the evacuees arrived, Barbara spent the day making blackout curtains for the bedrooms and dining room. ‘Everyone cheerful,’ she observed.[4] One aspect of the home front which Pym captured so well was the way in which many women were energised and invigorated by the war effort. The women of the host families had to deal with all of the problems that came with the children, such as lice infestation and dirty clothes. Most of the Birkenhead children were from working-class backgrounds and had barely left the confines of their own town before. In Pym’s novel, Flora, less sentimental than her mother, thinks it is ‘bad enough talking to children of one’s own class, but the lower classes were even more difficult’.[5] She is amazed to find the children hail from a family of nine. ‘I expect the father’s unemployed, too, she thought, very prim and social and birth control clinic.’[6]

  At Morda Lodge, Irena’s first thought was to tak
e the four evacuees to the lavatory. Jane does the same in Pym’s home front novel, as does Janet in ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital’: ‘Janet had been so splendid. She had taken them all to the lavatory, which was just what they wanted, if only one had been able to think of it, for after that they cheered up and rushed shouting about the garden until it was time for bed.’ Which is precisely what happened to the children billeted with the Pyms, who were delighted to find a large, private garden at their disposal.

  Pym, with her acute eye, was surprised to see how people like her mother, whom she often describes as ‘dreamy’ and ‘vague’, took up the challenge. In her home front novel, spinster cousins Agnes Grote and Connie Aspinall are asked to take in a mother and two children. When Connie finds head lice, she is determined to send the children away – ‘no one could expect to have children who were not clean in the house’ – and is roundly reprimanded by Agnes:

  ‘Send them away!’ Agnes stood in the middle of the room, a magnificent figure with a newly lighted cigarette jutting aggressively from her mouth. ‘My dear Connie, this is wartime. Go and get the Lysol out of the bathroom cupboard – I shall wash the children thoroughly in the scullery and their clothes must be dealt with too.’[7]

  Agnes bakes the evacuees’ clothes in the oven to rid them of the lice and gives the children a thoroughly good clean, as though she is washing a family pet. Pym is brilliant at showing the immediate sense of purpose and meaning that the war brings to the lives of women whose lives hitherto have been rather quiet and dull. All of a sudden, they are needed. Agnes makes plans to dig up the garden to plant vegetables to feed the children and even mild-mannered Connie feels the excitement of change: ‘Oh God … don’t let there be a war. But at the back of her mind was that a war might be rather exciting. It would certainly make a difference to the days that were so monotonously the same.’[8]