The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  The day after the children arrived was gloriously sunny; Barbara had a dull time, mostly telling the children not to do things. The fine weather made it difficult to believe that England was at war with Germany. Pym would wake every morning with feelings of happiness before the realisation of being at war suddenly hit home. One of the effects of war was that young women who were previously in domestic service often left for service or factory work. Dilys, the family help, did stay on but the Pyms were permanently anxious that they would lose her to the munitions factories.[9]

  Nonetheless it was hard work running Morda Lodge with the extra lodgers and everyone in the house had to pull their weight. The first few days were exhausting. Pym’s diary is full of references to washing, ironing, bed-making, washing-up, mending, sewing curtains and sheets – ‘sides to middle’. One of Barbara’s jobs was to draw the curtains at night: it was a job she took seriously as the ‘Air Warden Officer’, who came to do the checks, was also the grocer, with whom she was not yet registered. Rationing would begin a few months later in January 1940.

  After just three days, Pym expressed her hope that the war would soon be over. It was wishful thinking of the highest kind.

  CHAPTER II

  In which we meet Mrs Dobbs of Birkenhead and Lady Wraye of Belgravia

  Morda Lodge’s first evacuees only lasted for four days. The children’s mother was ‘breaking her heart to go back’ to Birkenhead.[1] Evacuation was a voluntary process, and it was often hard for families, especially those in close-knit communities, to be torn apart from their extended relations. This was especially true for pregnant and nursing women and mothers of young children, who refused to be separated from their little ones, and then found it difficult to settle in the countryside, far from home. Some said that they would rather be bombed by the Nazis than be bored to death in the country.

  Pym gives no description of the Birkenhead mother in her journal, but in her novel there is a rather savage portrayal of a feckless young mother, Mrs Dobbs, who has a bold face and brassy bleached hair which could do with a ‘good brushing’. She lies in bed all morning, wearing a ‘slightly soiled’ pink shiny nightgown, lavishly trimmed with artificial lace, smoking and dropping her ash onto the carpet. Agnes commands mild Connie to get Mrs Dobbs out of bed to help with the children:

  ‘Yes, I was just having a smoke,’ said Mrs Dobbs, producing a hand from underneath the bedclothes and revealing a cigarette, which she had evidently hidden on hearing Connie’s knock. ‘I thought you was the other one,’ she said with an ingratiating smile.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like some breakfast?’ Connie began, not liking to say what she had to say straight out.

  ‘Well, that’s an idea,’ said Mrs Dobbs brightly. ‘It would be ever so kind of you. A nice cup of tea and a bit of toast and I daresay I could fancy a nice boiled egg. You get nice fresh eggs in the country.’

  ‘Well, if you like to get up, you can go down into the kitchen and cook yourself something,’ said Connie ineffectually.

  ‘Rightyho, dear, just as you like,’ said Mrs Dobbs, settling herself comfortably among the pillows and with obviously no intention of getting up.[2]

  Mrs Dobbs is unconcerned that her children’s heads are crawling with lice, as all the rest of the kids have got them. She saunters down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, tucking her cheap satin blouse into her skirt. Agnes makes sure that she is not given the best china. ‘I only came for a bit of a holiday,’ Mrs Dobbs explains to the startled spinsters and tells them that she expects she will go back home soon. She trots off to Woolworths to meet the other mothers. Meanwhile the children run wild and complain about the home-made country food. What they would like is fish and chips, but there are no fish and chip shops in the countryside.

  Pym was unfamiliar with working-class characters, knowing few people outside her own class, but, as she says in the same novel, the war is a leveller. It was the first time in her life that she had spent time in the close company of people outside her social sphere, other than their Welsh maids. Almost as soon as the original children, and their mother, left Morda Lodge, three more young children arrived to take their place: Billy, Ronnie and Gordon. ‘They look very sweet,’ Barbara noted, ‘but are reputed to be naughty.’[3]

  The weather was hot and she felt ‘tired and worn – washed and ironed’.[4] One of Pym’s many duties was to do the shopping. Then, once back home, she usually did the children’s washing up and made supper for the adults, after which she felt absolutely exhausted. Later, she was responsible for getting the children ready in the morning, before they went off to do their schooling with the other youngsters and their teachers.

  After a month, Pym was not only exhausted but depressed. She was finding it tough being at home and the children were driving her mad, ‘running about like bears in the kitchen’. Feeding them was like being at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she noted. ‘Billy screamed all day about something or another.’[5] Another evening, a frightened Ronnie and Gordon woke her up in the middle of the night. She got up and took them back to bed. One morning she awoke to hear them cheerily singing ‘The Lambeth Walk’.

  Whenever she could, Pym escaped into her writing. Visiting Julian’s family in Eaton Square, just before the outbreak of war, her novelist’s mind had been richly stimulated. Fascinated by Lady Amery, she knew that she would make a great character in a novel and so she would prove to be. The unpublished manuscript of Pym’s home front novel begins with a prologue about a character called Mandy Wraye – this is omitted from the fragment of the novel published posthumously in Civil to Strangers. It is dated early July 1939: the time when she was rejected by Julian Amery.

  Pym’s depiction of Lady Wraye draws deeply on Julian’s mother (flip the W to an M and you have an anagram of Amery). She is thin with a long face, solemn eyes and a melancholy expression. Pym knew that Bryddie had much to be sad about, given the anxiety about her eldest son, but neither of them could predict the tragic consequences of John’s delinquency. Pym, sensitive to sadness, perceived a profound loneliness in Bryddie. Like her, Mandy Wraye is married to a busy politician whom she barely sees, is lonely at her home in Eaton Square and has a son with political ambitions:

  He had been such a dear little boy until he went away to school. And now he was a nice young man with charming manners who called her by her Christian name and made fun of her in an affectionate way and didn’t need her anymore. Nobody does, she thought wistfully, not even Lyall. Certainly not Lyall, she added to herself as he got up purposely from the table. ‘I have work to do and I don’t want to be disturbed.’[6]

  Her Belgravia home smells of incense, as did Julian’s. The smell of cooking drifts up from the basement kitchen. The house has been freshly painted and petunias grow in the window boxes. All of these details were used from Pym’s diary, as she walked the streets of Belgravia in the hope of a glimpse of Julian. There is a ‘church-like’ atmosphere to Belgravia on a sunny Sunday morning, but there are also the telltale signs of war: trenches are dug into the square: ‘A wave of desolation swept over her and she now saw Eaton Square a mass of mouldering ruins. Would they all crowd into the trench of sodden clay, like a newly dug grave.’[7]

  Lady Wraye returns to her home in the country to help with the evacuees. Her loneliness is assuaged by children from Birkenhead. Flora Palfrey (the heroine based on Pym) describes the boys as ‘little beasts’, who let the chickens escape from their coop and wet the bed. But Mandy Wraye is charmed by the children, as her cold, snobbish sister-in-law, Lady Eleanor Nollard, is repelled:

  ‘Oh, I can hear the children,’ said Mandy, her face lighting up. ‘Eleanor, can you hear?’

  ‘I could hardly fail to,’ replied Eleanor with a shudder.

  ‘I love Saturday morning when they don’t go to school. I like to hear them laughing and singing about the house.’

  ‘I doubt whether you’d be quite so enthusiastic if you had to look after them yourself,’ observed Eleanor drily.

&n
bsp; ‘But I do look after them. I take them for walks and give them their tea and bath them and put them to bed. And I always say goodnight to them. They are so sweet – it’s almost like having Edward a baby again. Better, really, because Nanny never let me do anything for him.’

  ‘All this evacuation will only make them dissatisfied with their own homes,’ said Eleanor severely. ‘There was certainly no obligation on your part to purchase clothing for them.’

  ‘It wasn’t an obligation!’ Mandy said. How could she convey to Eleanor that one of the happiest moments of her life had been the one when she had taken the children shopping in the nearest large town. She had bought coats and shoes and trousers and dresses and berets and all the other clothes they needed and even some that they didn’t need – just for fun.

  ‘Do you realise,’ she said ‘that Jenny had never had a new coat before. Always something handed down or from a rummage sale! Imagine!’

  But, of course, Eleanor could not imagine and Mandy was only just beginning to do so.[8]

  This exchange between the two ladies is a masterclass in its economy of style and strong characterisation. Lady Nollard does not have the imagination or sympathy to comprehend anybody outside her own narrow social class and not even the war will change that. But Lady Wraye is a character for whom the war has been transformative: ‘She went out of the room humming what anyone but Lady Nollard would have recognised as a rather silly song about the Siegfried Line.’[9]

  CHAPTER III

  Miss Pym reads a Government White Paper about Nazi Atrocities

  On the day that war was declared, a young Englishwoman who was living in Munich drove to the beautiful Englischer Garten, on the banks of the river Isar. It was a place she loved and where she walked her dogs under the willow trees and along the winding pathways, before letting them off their leads to run free in the open spaces. A few weeks earlier, she had found new homes for the dogs. Today, she was alone. She took out a small pearl-handled pistol from her handbag, put it to her right temple and pulled the trigger.

  The woman was Unity Mitford. Unable to bear the thought of war between her beloved Germany and England, she shot herself, leaving suicide notes for her parents and a sealed letter for Hitler. She failed in her mission: the bullet lodged in her brain, leaving her in a coma, but it did not kill her. It was the first of the war casualties for the Mitford family. In 1940, Diana Mitford was arrested and incarcerated in Holloway Prison without trial; her closeness to Hitler and the British Union of Fascists was enough to have her detained. It was an indication of how serious it was to be involved with the Nazis and fascism.

  Pym would not yet have known of Unity’s fate. It would be many months before the story got out. Pym was restless at home and bored by the mundanity of domestic duties. The first months of the war seemed an endless round of housework, punctuated with the odd moments of pleasure, such as planting hyacinth bulbs, going to the cinema and writing her novel. The first time she went to the pictures since the start of war meant taking her gas mask with her, which made her feel ‘rather silly’. She had heard from a friend that Julian was now in Egypt, which only enhanced his glamour.

  On 18 September Pym noted in her diary that the Russians had entered Poland. She did not know if the Albergs had managed to escape. On 1 October she listened to Churchill giving a ‘fine and inspiring’ speech about ‘Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men’.

  In mid-October, Pym heard from Don Liddell that Jock and the Harveys were trying to leave Finland. ‘Flight from the Bolsheviks in an open boat. Somehow, though it’s serious, I can’t help laughing.’[1] Henry and Elsie had cleared their flat and were escaping the bombs by moving to Elsie’s aunt’s home outside Helsinki. Henry burnt his papers, ‘suitcase after suitcase’, including the majority of Pym’s love letters, a decision he later greatly regretted.[2]

  The wireless was a lifeline and Pym devoured letters from friends. But it sometimes seemed that everyone else was having a more exciting time: ‘This is a war diary, but this seems to be our life.’[3] In late October, she had upsetting news about her favourite Aunt ‘Ack’, who was diagnosed with cancer and was facing surgery. It was turning out to be a bad month.

  Then, on 31 October, Pym wrote a grim entry in her diary: ‘Government white paper on Nazi concentration camp tortures.’ If she still entertained any doubts about the brutality of the Nazis towards the Jews, that could no longer be the case. The White Paper reported that the treatment of prisoners in German concentration camps was reminiscent of ‘the darkest ages in the history of man’. A former prisoner from Buchenwald concentration camp spoke of filth and mud and beatings on the slightest pretext, such as asking for a drink of water. The men lay on straw sacks and were not allowed to sleep on their backs. Sentries were ordered to use their rifles without warning. Some prisoners pretended to escape so they could be shot, putting an end to their misery. Hitler himself had given an order permitting flogging up to sixty strokes for Jews.

  Flogging and torture were the order of the day, and it was common knowledge that the National Socialist movement was taking a terrible revenge on those who had the temerity to oppose it … the violence and brutality of the Nazis did not spare … British subjects, including a member of the staff of His Majesty’s Embassy, were wantonly assaulted in the streets by uniformed S. A. men on duty.[4]

  Extracts in the daily newspapers made for harrowing reading. Pym had not heard anything from Friedbert since the outbreak of war in September, when he sent what she believed would be his final letter. Now she was filled with horror and guilt. Everything she had read about German brutality towards Jews and the concentration camps in The Oppermanns was proving to be true. The warnings she had ignored from Rupert and Hilary were now vindicated. Her romantic disposition had led her into dangerous territory. Now she was alone and had no one in whom to confide or express her remorse.

  CHAPTER IV

  Our Heroine is rejected Again

  Pym was making good progress on her wartime novel and was close to finishing her North Oxford novel, Crampton Hodnet. She had not written down the details of her meeting with Julian at Eaton Square in June 1939, but it was clear that he had effectively ended the relationship. She recreated this rejection in different scenes in the two novels she was working on and in doing so, managed to process some of the pain.

  In Crampton Hodnet, charming Simon Beddoes, who is too ambitious to marry the daughter of a vicar, rejects Anthea with a pompous letter, telling her that he has fallen in love with someone else: ‘“I think you will agree that it has been evident for some time that we were growing rather weary of each other’s company” … the curious, parliamentary phraseology seemed to her infinitely pathetic.’ Beddoes is dismissed (somewhat bitterly) as someone who would ‘avoid the truth at all costs’, and who was therefore well suited to politics: ‘the Secretary of State for Something, answering questions in the house’.

  In the home front novel, there is a face-to-face rejection in Eaton Square. Flora has sensed that Edward, the character based on Julian, has gone cold on their relationship. He stops returning her phone calls; nor does he answer her letters. Flora knows that Edward wants to become prime minister and knows that he is too ambitious to throw himself away. She also knows that he is bored of her and she is nothing but a fun diversion. Edward is kind-hearted and does not like hurting women, but there is little time for love in his carefully planned-out life. And she knows that he will make a ‘suitable marriage’ when the time is right. ‘Oh Edward, once upon a time last Easter … and now he is bored!’[1]

  When he ends the affair in his room at the top of the house, he ‘does what is expected of him’ – puts his arms around her and kisses her affectionately several times, ‘but now his bright hazel eyes were looking out over Flora’s head, while one hand played absently with her golden hair’. He is already thinking of another more suitable girl and his next term back at the varsity and whether he will be head of the Oxford Union.

  Edward o
ffers Flora a glass of sherry, but she refuses and says she needs to go back to her aunt’s house in Bayswater. One can sense his relief. She has become an impediment. Flora, sensing that she will never be in his room again, takes a final look: ‘the books, the desk littered with papers, the white horses on the red curtains and Edward standing there in his grey suit’. She quotes two lines from a hymn, because she can’t help herself and because she has a religious background: ‘By many deeds of shame we learn that love grows cold.’[2] Flora feels that she will burst into tears and run down the three flights of stairs in a ‘grand’ gesture, but she remains composed and dignified and walks quietly to the front door. On the way down, she sees Lady Wraye, who notices the tears in Flora’s eyes and is full of pity: ‘[P]oor girl, if only I could say something comforting to her, make her see that in twenty years, ten years, even one year, it won’t matter at all.’

  Pym was humiliated and hurt when she was rejected by Julian. Even Henry Harvey had never found her boring. Julian had asked Pym to write a novel for him and so she wreaked her artistic revenge in the characters of ambitious but weak Simon Beddoes and Edward Wraye.

  Later, when Flora meets Edward again, before he is about to go off to war, she notices his flaws: ‘Surely he was not as tall as she had always thought him.’ He had a spot on his forehead and his manners, which she once thought of as charming, she now finds affected.[3] Flora realises that Edward wants to go to war knowing that somebody back at home will be thinking of him. He gives her a signed photograph and she tries to summon up the romantic feelings he had once inspired. She is momentarily touched by his childish manner and his black hair, which reaches to a point at the back of his neck, but things are not the same as they once were. He gives her a violent kiss by a cabbage patch, but she is unimpressed and wonders if her lips are bleeding.