The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Flora delivers a final blow. She knows that deep down the reason that she is in love with him is that ‘there was really nobody else to be in love with’.[4]

  CHAPTER V

  Miss Pym begins a Novel in Real Time

  With Julian’s rejection temporarily expiated, Pym threw herself into work. Closely observing and being part of the women’s war effort would give her one of her great themes, though she was scarcely aware of it as yet. She was writing her home front novel as she was living it, giving her fictional world a sense of vivid immediacy. As always, there were good jokes.

  The preface completed, Pym begins her novel in earnest ‘somewhere in England’. Canon Palfrey is returning home to the vicarage. He is unsure about what he will find as it is the evening of the Red Cross lecture, but not even he expects to be confronted by an elderly spinster in her underwear:

  He remembered the first occasion very vividly and his shock at seeing a skeleton dangling in front of the large still life oil painting in the Dutch manner … but this evening an even more alarming sight met his eye. Miss Connie Aspinall was lying in a bed in his drawing room … Miss Heves and Miss Beatrice Wyatt began to roll the clothes off the bed, leaving Miss Aspinall exposed to full view, her hand furtively pulling down at her shapeless grey flannel skirt, which had slipped up to reveal an inch or two of mud-coloured celanese knickers … her helpless body was rolled from side to side while Nurse Stebbing briskly demonstrated different ways of changing the sheets.[1]

  Having demonstrated bed-changing, the lecture turns to bandage practice. The home front was expected to be prepared for casualties when Hitler’s bombs struck. Curate Michael Randolph uses the opportunity to flirt with Beatrice Wyatt. He’d like one of those ‘elaborate cap things’, but she responds crisply: ‘I shall do you a broken jaw,’ said Beatrice seriously. ‘Sit down here and shut your mouth firmly.’[2]

  The home front women complain that the men are not doing enough for the ARP. It is the women who seem to do all the work, whilst the men stand around and mock, note Agnes and Beatrice as they prepare dark curtains and buckets of water for incendiary bombs and fit up the cellar as an air-raid shelter. Agnes, as seen deploying her brisk competence with the child evacuees, comes into her own during the war, making blackout curtains and removing lightbulbs where necessary, even in the lavatory. Beatrice Wyatt and her invalid mother take in a schoolteacher, whom Beatrice dislikes, but somehow the houseguest manages to amuse her querulous mother. The war keeps surprising people and brings out their best and their worst.

  The vicar, who is watching the women busily preparing for the war, is impressed by their activity, though too lazy to help: ‘Excellent Women, thought Canon Palfrey idly, always busy doing something.’ His curate notes: ‘There’s something very soothing about watching a lot of busy women … like reading Jane Austen.’[3]

  The novel is extraordinary in the way in which it captures Pym’s own thoughts and feelings as events unfold. Flora knows that Edward will go to Egypt when the war begins (as Julian Amery had), and she is terrified for his safety, even though he has ended their affair. But she is also frightened for all the men she has loved:

  There was nothing that could save them now. How long would it go on she wondered? Oh years and years. All the men I know, all the men everywhere will be killed. Edward will be killed. Edward whom she loved or had loved, it wouldn’t matter in a year or two that he didn’t love her any more … She would never marry or have children now. This war was the end of everything.[4]

  Flora, lying in her bath, becoming drowsy, is startled by her mother knocking on the bathroom door, reminding her of ‘Aunt Bella’, who fell asleep in the bath and drowned. Flora thinks that drowning in one’s own bath is a rather nice way to die, ‘rather inconvenient for other people, but peaceful. Not bloody or violent like dying in a war would be.’[5]

  When news of the war is announced, Mandy Wraye feels deep compassion for Chamberlain, whereas her husband, Sir Lyall, blames him for his policy of appeasement. Pym knew about Leo Amery’s intervention in Parliament, denouncing Chamberlain with his infamous ‘Speak for England’ remark. The prospect of war appears to divide the long-married Wrayes rather than unite them. Sir Lyall reprimands his wife for her ‘undignified’ weeping alongside her servant, Rogers, but Mandy knows that war binds womenfolk together: ‘When Mr Chamberlain started to speak, the tears pricked Mandy’s eyes and soon Rogers had turned away her face too and they were just two ordinary women like all the other ordinary women over England crying because there was going to be a war.’[6]

  CHAPTER VI

  The Shadow of the Swastika

  In the summer of 1939, Julian Amery was staying with family friends on the Dalmatian Coast. On 31 August, war impending, his father sent him a telegram advising him to leave at once and head for Egypt, via Bosnia and Belgrade, to report to the Air Ministry. He packed his belongings into his car, draped it with the Union Jack, and drove off.

  Pym, meanwhile, was writing his character in Edward Wraye: the young man hoping to gain a first in his finals, win the presidency of the Oxford Union, become a barrister and then prime minister. But under the spectre of war, the intrepid Julian had no thought of going back. He may have been a charmer, ‘compliments flowing easy from his lips’, but few could doubt his courage and thirst for adventure. He did not return to Oxford, gain a first or become president of the Union. He went to war.

  At Belgrade, Julian was persuaded to stay on as an assistant attaché to Stephen Lawford Childs, the embassy diplomat in charge of press relations. He founded a magazine, the Britannia, whose sole purpose was to circulate as much pro-British propaganda as he could muster. Amery’s gift for languages and his charismatic personality won him many friends (and a few enemies). Later, he would meet a spy called Sandy Glen and his career would take a different turn.[1]

  Pym kept a close eye on Julian’s movements and her attitude began to soften as his exploits in often dangerous Balkans territory were reported and applauded. She was often alarmed for his safety. In her scrapbook, she pasted clippings of his war adventures. Pym felt a sense of pride that she was part of his romantic life and that he had once loved her. Meanwhile, she sat quietly sewing and listening to radio plays on the Home Service. This was a new BBC national radio service – the former National Programme and Regional Programme had been merged on 1 September 1939. It offered news items, updated war bulletins and light entertainment, often of a morale boosting or anti-Nazi kind (in 1967 the Home Service became Radio 4).

  Pym tuned into a play called The Shadow of the Swastika, a six-part series about the rise of Hitler. The voices of ordinary people were dramatised, as well as the fanatical and paranoid – those in fear of being toppled by their enemies. One of the most chilling moments in the script is when a father criticises the Nazis and then is terrified that his son (a member of the Hitler Youth) might report him to the authorities. Pym remained silent.

  Each day seemed to bring bad news. On 30 November, the Soviet Union invaded Finland and bombed Helsinki, where Henry and Elsie had lived before they were evacuated. Two hundred civilians were killed and once again Pym was distraught that she could do nothing to stop such terrible things. The only good news was hearing from Dr Alberg that the family was safe and well in London. It was a reminder of her lucky escape. In her home front novel, she ponders on why it is men who fight wars:

  If only women ran the world … there wouldn’t be any wars. No, thought Jane, because if they had their houses to look after as well they simply wouldn’t have time to annex countries and break treaties. Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini hadn’t got enough to do, that was the problem. They would soon give up thinking of Lebensraum if they had a handful of evacuees to feed and clothe.[2]

  By Christmas, to Pym’s great relief, most of the evacuees had returned to their homes. In what had become known as the ‘Bore War’ (later the Phoney War), no bombs had dropped and yet food shortages, conscription and transport difficulties led to a strange
mixture of discomfort and anti-climax. In December there were warnings issued by the prime minister about the dangers of not taking the war seriously enough. Pym wrote: ‘One can live only from day to day – the future is full of frightening uncertainty.’[3]

  On Christmas Eve, she picked stocks and primroses from the garden and spent the day peacefully reading Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. On Christmas Day, the Pyms had good food and Barbara was given Elizabeth Arden beauty products and a red leather writing case. On Boxing Day, she slept late and was roused by a crowd of militia marching past her window. On New Year’s Eve she finished Mansfield Park: ‘a comforting book with which to finish 1939’. She wrote to Jock Liddell: ‘A Very Happy New Year to you and may it not be quite as bad as we expect and even bring the end of the War in sight.’[4]

  CHAPTER VII

  Food Glorious Food

  The year of 1940 in Shropshire started cold, with heavy frosts. The snow began to fall, which froze the pipes in Morda Lodge, leaving the Pyms without hot water in the upstairs rooms. On 8 January rationing began, with bacon, butter and sugar top of the list.

  Propaganda poster campaigns, aimed especially at women on the home front, cried out: ‘Use less water’, ‘Grow your own food’, ‘Plan and grow for winter’, ‘Carrots keep you healthy and help you to see in the blackout’, ‘Every available piece of land must be cultivated’ and ‘Eat in moderation: a clean plate means a clean conscience’. The Pyms, like everyone else in her town who had gardens, were growing vegetables and cultivating chickens for meat and fresh eggs. Even so, when rationing came in on the heels of a bitter winter, times were hard.

  Barbara kept up her correspondence with Jock. The winter had never seemed so long or so cold; she had chilblains for the first time. All she could do was hold out little hopes and take pleasure in small things such as getting letters, sewing a blue tweed jacket, watching her bulbs sprout and flower, and imagining that one day she would see her friends again. Hunger pangs were hard to bear. Once at church she became convinced that she could smell rabbit cooking and hallucinated that the altar was a celestial Aga. Pym had always enjoyed good fare and her novels are full of references to food, often carrying symbolic value. Wartime rationing made her even more aware of its value.

  She told Jock that she had heard nothing from Friedbert, which was just as well as he was now an ‘enemy alien’. By 2 January, Pym had done with Nazi Germany and all it stood for, and began ‘expurgating my 1933–4 diary!’[1] As fervently as she had once admired the Nazis, she now turned against them with equal vigour.

  Nevertheless, Pym was still counting her blessings. She had gathered Christmas roses and was now sitting in a comfortable chair with a blazing fire: ‘there is much writing and reading to be done’. She told Jock all about her novel, which she had now almost finished, believing that it might be exactly the sort of novel that ‘some people might like to read at a time like this’ because it was set in a world far from the war. Here she was referring to the one which she was finishing, not the home front one she had just begun. ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did … Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end.’ She agreed with Jock that the influence of Compton-Burnett was ‘powerful once it takes hold’.[2]

  For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is, but purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair.[3]

  At the end of the month Pym fell ill with measles and was confined to bed. Snow continued to fall: ‘Thick snow and a sad, sad world.’[4] When she recovered, she saw the first blatantly propagandistic film, Confessions of a Nazi, starring Edward G. Robinson. Part of the plot was based on a real-life espionage case. This may have inspired her to begin taking notes for a spy novel.

  February was cold and dull. She read Jane Austen’s Persuasion and knitted balaclava helmets for the airmen and stockings for the WAAFs working the barrage balloons. Thinking of Julian, it struck her that the troops in north Africa would not need warm headgear. She had assumed that by now he was in Egypt, though he was still in the Balkans. She wrote to him and got no reply.

  Finally, the weather improved and Pym was able to pick snowdrops in the garden. One morning, she awoke from a vivid dream about Julian: he was standing in the dining room and she begged him not to disappear. She continued to keep a note of his birthday, remembering that he was twenty-one on 27 March. She drank his health with burgundy and lit a candle in front of his photograph: ‘I wish I knew where he was.’ The candle was lit because she did not have a reading lamp, but the light and shadows gave a pleasing aspect: ‘As it was there was a beautifully religious effect in my room at night – a single candle before his photograph lighting up his lovely, sparkling Russian eyes. Like an ikon – he would have appreciated it.’[5]

  Julian was now living in the heart of Belgrade with Sandy Glen. He held a twenty-first birthday party at their flat with Gypsy musicians borrowed from a local cafe. The wine flowed into the early hours and glasses shattered against the wall, as was the custom.

  Pym was determined to finish her North Oxford novel, settling on the title, Crampton Hodnet: Crampton for her middle name and Hodnet being a village in Shropshire. She made notes in her diary, which give a revealing glimpse into the narrative methods: ‘A scene in which Mr L[atimer] says he does not care what her father is or did. Make Barbara more strikingly beautiful so that F[rancis] expects more than she is able to give. Make Mr L less feeble. Bring Barbara affair [with] Mr Cleveland sooner – naughtier … mildly sexual!’ The memory of her love affair with Julian continued to inspire her and kept her from brooding too much:

  But I remember, I remember … I was never more happy in my life than with him in the Spring of 1938. I am sure that I truly loved him and do still. I put this in writing so that in the years to come I may look back on it and reflect about it (as poor Friedbert would say) and smile and say ‘No, no it was only a passing infatuation’ or ‘Yes, yes, you did love him’.[6]

  A radio broadcast by Leo Amery on the Balkans made her reflective. One morning, she found an old box, ‘walnut with black and yellow inlay and a brass crest on the lid’. She polished it up and filled it with all her Julian Amery relics:

  In went all the letters, pressed flowers, Niersteiner corks, handkerchiefs … If I were to die tomorrow I should either have it sent back to him or buried with me (probably the latter) … People who are not sentimental, who never keep relics, brood on anniversaries, kiss photographs goodnight and good morning, must miss a great deal.[7]

  Pym was in a pensive mood. Her days passed pleasantly and uneventfully, and she felt that she was not accomplishing very much. ‘I have done so little writing this year. But writing is not now quite the pleasure it used to be. I am no longer so certain of a glorious future as I used to be – though I still feel that I may ultimately succeed.’ The dullness of her days was not helping her writing and she longed for ‘some shattering experience to awaken and inspire’. But how to get it? ‘Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? Join the ATS and get it peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors?’[8] (The ATS was the women’s territorial army.)

  She still longed to fall violently in love, ‘which is my idea of experience’, but admitted that even that did not help much in the way of writing. She mused: ‘Perhaps the war will give me something.’ She was thinking about whether she could be happy not being a writer and be content with domestic life. However, clear-eyed as usual on such matters, she knew that she would grow restless and dissatisfied:

  But women are different from men in that they have so many small domestic things with which to occupy themselves. Dressmaking, washing and ironing and everlasting tidying and sorting of reliques. I think I could spend my whole day
doing such things, with just a little time for reading and be happy. But it isn’t really enough, soon I shall be discontented with myself, out will come the novel and after I’ve written a few pages I shall feel on top of the world again.[9]

  CHAPTER VIII

  Oxford Revisited

  Pym was twenty-eight. Many of her Oxford friends had settled down, married, or were living seemingly glamorous lives with the new opportunities provided by the war. At the end of April 1940, she sent Crampton Hodnet to Jock, who was back in England. He replied immediately, saying that he was impressed with the novel and asking whether Hodnet was named after Hodnet in Shropshire, the sometime seat of the Percy family.

  As so often, when she was feeling listless and low in spirit, Pym returned to Oxford. For once, the city did not work its magic. ‘In Oxford once more and it is melancholy, because I know absolutely nobody except the Liddells – and they are charming in their way, but it is not in a way which fits all my moods.’[1] Jock gave her a copy of his new novel, The Gantillons.

  Pym was becoming less emotionally self-indulgent: ‘How differently one behaves now though on a melancholy evening! Instead of the abandonment of tears and the luxury of a good cry one thinks philosophically about what is the best thing to do – to smoke, get ready for bed, read a nice light novel and then sleep a long sleep.’ As ever, her musings gave rise to thoughts about writing: ‘It would be interesting for a novel to trace one’s development … in matters of emotional restraint.’[2] Pym did the conventional Oxford things: walking on Christ Church Meadow, evensong, a sherry party with Jock, afternoon tea. She was sad to find that Stewart’s, the setting of many a love affair, had been replaced by Marks and Spencer. On the whole, though, Oxford appeared to be unchanged, except for the people walking around carrying gas masks. Many of the college gardens had been dug up and planted with potatoes and beetroot. But it was still hard to believe that Britain was at war. Within days, all this was to change.