The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Mercifully, her new life now beckoned. An envelope arrived with a one-way ticket to Rochester in Kent, where she was to complete her Wrens training. There was a list of regulations about clothing and a warning of no alcohol. She would not be allowed even the smallest of double gins. On her last Sunday at the Coppice (‘a sweetness and sadness about everything and everybody’), there was tea in the garden and a supper with her health drunk in cider. Later, she looked through Honor’s press cuttings and found a wedding picture of ‘the two people I love best in the world’.[11]

  Pym’s work colleagues gave her a present of an expensive box of talcum powder and she gave Prue her wreath of flowers from Salzburg and Honor a scarf with Edelweiss from Dresden. There was a quick dash home to Oswestry and on her return to Bristol a theatre visit with Hilary to Uncle Vanya at the Theatre Royal, ‘a wonderful play and well acted. So very like the Coppice – except that we don’t sit down under our sorrows – no we are drearily splendid and even join the Wrens.’[12] Then it was her very last day in Clifton: ‘It’s raining, trees – the beech tree swaying in the wind – Julian shouting and Scarlatti on the radio … preparations for Prue’s birthday party – she looking intolerably sweet in a white smock with my wreath of Austrian flowers in her hair.’[13]

  The biggest wrench, however, was leaving Honor. Pym made her dear friend a final cup of tea and then they left for the station. Honor held her hand in the taxi and there were many tears shed. ‘As she said she and I were the worst possible people to be left together at the end.’ On reaching London, she took the 2.27 to Rochester, ‘a bright green train that stopped at every station’. Miss Pym’s new adventure was about to begin: ‘Got to Rochester just before four and staggered along with my suitcase (helped by two kind Wrens) to the Training Depot.’[14]

  CHAPTER IX

  Miss Pym experiences Life in Uniform

  It was almost like being back in boarding school, though Pym thought that the Nore training depot resembled a North Oxford Victorian Gothic house. Up until now, she had only lived with people of her own class and education, but the Wrens recruited from far and wide. At first, she struggled with the class differences, with many of her fellow trainees not on the ‘same wavelength’. Her cabin mate was just nineteen, though ‘my own class and quite nice’.[1]

  There was a lot to learn about life in the Wrens, such as the naval terminology. The bedrooms were called cabins (hers was Beehive XI); the Tea Boat was where they congregated for tea; ‘fo’c’sle’ was the recreational room, and ‘fatigues’ were her duties. At the moment, she was a ‘Pro-Wren’, not yet given a uniform or proper duties, so there was plenty of time for writing up her journal.

  For supper, the first evening, they had toad in the hole and bread and jam; for breakfast scrambled eggs and bacon and cornflakes and tea: ‘Good!’ It was hinted that Pym might be ‘white paper entry’, which meant potential officer material, though, ‘I can see now that one must be in the ranks first!’[2] She was amused to be in the YMCA canteen, on the other side of the counter, so to speak: ‘I never thought in the days when I used to serve in the old YM that I should be one of the Troops myself one day.’[3]

  In many respects, the culture shock was the biggest challenge. Many of the girls recruited were from working-class backgrounds, with names like Vera Potts and Peggy Wall, rather than Honor, Prudence and Flora. ‘I don’t think there are really any of our kind of people,’ she confessed to her diary. She missed her life in Clifton and shed tears when Honor sent her a newsy letter about the Coppice. ‘Honor in her curlers, Flora finding a nest of insects in her desk and Dick (Palmer) joyously examining them under the microscope.’[4] Honor and Gordon had brought culture and sophistication to Pym, taking her beyond the Oswestry days of Jack Payne and his dance hall orchestra. She had been introduced to Berlioz, Brahms, Haydn and Mozart. And she had listened to radio plays with Honor, as they chatted and knitted. But in the fo’c’sle, the radio was tuned to the Forces Programme, blasting out Happidrome and Memories of Musical Comedies. She would rather have been back at the Coppice with Honor, talking, having a cup of tea and listening to the more highbrow fare of Marlowe’s Edward II on the Third Programme.

  Pym, always happy to have an alter ego (Sandra, Pymska, Miss Pym), coped by concealing her true self. She went for a solitary walk around Rochester, where she found a tea shop and took the opportunity to wander among the tombstones in the cathedral: ‘And for about half an hour I was my old gothick self – the self that I’ve had to put off while I’ve been here.’[5] At least her roommate was reasonably interesting, with a ‘long, melancholy face and I can see her when she is older as an English gentlewoman – one of her names is Mildred’.[6] Pym would use this name when she created her most memorable genteel spinster, Mildred Lathbury.

  For all the class differences, she was fascinated by her fellow Wrens. There was a small, dark-haired girl who used to be a secretary for a literary agent, and a ‘plump wanton-looking Wren with gold rings in her ears and dark hair – and pink nails’. However, Pym liked spending her free time alone. She had a copy of Tristram Shandy with her, and soon she had purchased apples and cherries and a copy of the Radio Times; she spent a happy hour lying in her bunk ‘eating and reading a Graham Greene novel’.[7]

  Pym liked other women, but she adored male company. ‘Too Many Women’, she noted in her diary. She still missed Gordon and ached for Honor and her friends at the Coppice. Honor wrote to say that Gordon had heard the news about her going into the Wrens and said he hoped it would turn out nicely for her. ‘My only reaction is – well (dear) it had better be! I was a little disappointed, having expected some message a little less dreary,’ Pym wrote waspishly in her journal.[8]

  Pym was formally enrolled and kitted out in her proper uniform. ‘My hat is lovely, every bit as fetching as I’d hoped, but my suit rather large thought it’s easier to alter that way.’[9] She was also given a mackintosh and greatcoat, three pairs of black hose, gloves, tie, four shirts, nine stiff collars and two pairs of shoes, and drafted to a holding depot at Westcliff-on-Sea, near Southend. Her new roommate was a girl called Beatrice Pizzey. Instead of clocks, the day was divided into watches, first bugle at 6.30 a.m. and the last ‘Pipe Down’ at 10 p.m. The work was more strenuous: ‘Gardened till lunch, then squad drill, then scrubbed a room in Palmerston Court. Quite worn out.’ She found Southend depressing: ‘definitely a common place with no charm as far as I could see … cheap stores – pin-tables and amusement halls – cinemas – the whole place smelling of fish and chips’.[10] She felt there was no beauty, no dignity or nostalgia, only decay. Her homesickness for the Coppice overwhelmed her and left her ‘howling’.

  Wanting Gordon still comes into it. Now that the novelty of being a Wren is wearing off. WRNS – you aren’t giving me enough. I’m doing my best, trying to see the funny side, looking out for churches and buildings, writing it up, talking to various people and trying to take it all as a great chunk of experience – an extraordinary bit of life – but I want music and intellectual companionship and affection – to be able to lavish it as I did at the Coppice.[11]

  As ever, she comforted herself with ‘the whimsical and perilous charm’ – there were small things to look forward to, letters from home, cinema visits and cigarettes.

  After a week had passed, it was confirmed that Miss Pym was a ‘white paper entry’ and she was moved to the regulating office, where she was given more responsibility and better pay (‘had to march a squad of Pro-Wrens back – managed quite successfully’). But she was also beset by feelings of inadequacy: ‘We had Divisions and I couldn’t swing my arms properly so Third Officer Honey had to move me. Gradually people will begin to discover what a fake I am – how phoney is my Wrennish facade.’[12]

  There were brighter moments: a tug trip with some Irish Merchant Navy, ‘one had a little sacking bag full of cockles which he offered to us, also cigarettes. The sea was rough and the spray sometimes drenched us.’[13] Her self-confidence was growing
and being busy was a blessing. She was also learning the valuable life lesson of how to deal and cope with people from all sorts of class and background: ‘I’m not frightened of anyone. It has given me confidence – and I feel I can do something I thought I couldn’t before.’[14]

  CHAPTER X

  Introducing ‘Wren Pym’

  Life at Westcliff was proving to be more congenial. Pym began going to dances with some of the sailors and marines who were stationed there and she attended concerts with her more like-minded fellow Wrens.

  For her first weekend of leave, Pym went home to the Coppice. Everyone admired her uniform and she was overwhelmed by the ‘luxuriant greenness’ of the garden. On Saturday morning, Hilary brought her breakfast in bed: ‘toast seems a luxury and a soft bed’. Later Pym walked with Honor and they talked a little about Gordon. Pym acknowledged that it was best to try and forget him.

  There were other weekend visits. She went to stay with Rosemary in London. They had a pint in the Star and Garter and then a stroll in Kew Gardens. The two women talked about their lives as they walked and Rosemary was encouraging about Pym’s decision to join the Wrens. That October 1943, Pym recalled that it was a year to the day that Gordon declared himself and they had their brief, stormy but heavenly two months.

  Pym was immersed at this time in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which she found both delightful and profound. Woolf’s extended essay, first published in 1929, was based on two lectures she had delivered at Cambridge, which argued for a literal and figurative space for women to write within a literary tradition dominated by men. To put it more simply: a woman needed £500 and a room of her own in order to write fiction. Perhaps, just as importantly for Pym, the narrator identifies herself as a woman who has rejected marriage and children in order to be a writer. She has learned that it is crucial to be true to yourself: ‘it is much more important to be oneself more than anything else. So Virginia Woolf. I wonder what she would have made of service life.’[1]

  When Pym returned to the Coppice for a weekend, however, there was upsetting news. First, Honor told Pym that her divorce from Gordon was imminent. Pym’s initial feeling was of elation – the thought that Gordon would finally be free. But the next day she was crushed when, on asking Honor, she replied that Gordon’s intentions had never been honourable; he’d never intended to marry her, even had he been free to do so. Gordon had told Honor that he ‘didn’t intend to make any more “experiments”’. It was a cruel, wounding term. He had also described to a mutual friend his affair with Pym ‘as a pleasant sentimental episode which was now closed’. This was a bitter pill. ‘So now what becomes of my illusion that this was a great renunciation and that he had even for a moment wanted the same things as I do?’ wrote Pym. In a fit of rage, she tore up his letters. At the same time, she felt that she still loved him and would ache for him: ‘sweet, hopeless person, the most delightful companion’.[2]

  In the morning, she felt calmer. Pym was glad that she had been courageous enough to press Honor for information about Gordon’s true feelings. When she returned to London, via Paddington, she felt that she was the loneliest person there. On the train to Westcliff, she sat at a table with a Canadian soldier, who offered her a cigarette. They began talking and he insisted on paying for her meal. This act of kindness moved her deeply: ‘I couldn’t say to him – you’ve brought comfort and friendliness to a rather lonely and miserable person, but that’s what he did.’[3]

  On Friday 22 October, Pym spent most of the day wondering how Honor was getting on with the divorce. Finally a telegraph arrived: ‘Successful and Painless. Love. Honor.’ She went to London for a solitary jaunt and found herself in Lyons Corner House having a second breakfast. Then, after a concert, she returned there and sat next to two men. One of them was very dark and good-looking, reminding her of her ‘dear Friedbert’.[4] They soon got talking and the dark man told her that one should never feel lonely at Lyons.

  But she did feel lonely, and the prospect of another winter made her depressed. She knew that, despite their divorce, Gordon belonged to Honor: ‘how completely he is Honor’s really’. She remembered him sitting by the fire in Honor’s room, telling her ‘whatever happens you mustn’t be made unhappy over this affair’. Pym wrote a rather poignant, funny poem in his honour, starting out from his regular column in the Radio Times, in which he ‘introduced’ a well-known public figure:

  Introducing – You in the Radio Times

  Successful, Byronic, rather second rate,

  Me in the Wrens pretending to be a sailor

  Drearily, splendid, bravely accepting my fate

  (or romantically celibate?)[5]

  She wrote to tell Henry Harvey that she had recovered from the Gordon heartache after a full nine months – ‘like having a baby’. She also felt that Gordon had let her down ‘pretty badly … and it’s the loneliness I feel more than any special need for him’. She told Henry that she had met up with Gordon and now felt indifferent towards him and that, although charming, he was ‘hopelessly unstable’.[6] Which made him sound a little like Henry himself.

  Getting her commission was a much-needed boon and in March 1944, Third Officer Pym was posted to a large neo-Palladian house nineteen miles from Southampton, ‘with beautiful grounds full of camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons … and a view over to the Isle of Wight’. She told Henry that the house once belonged to the Rothschilds and before that the Mitfords: ‘Unity’s family, you know, lived there.’ Unity, almost the same age as Pym, equally entranced by pre-war Nazi Germany, had been left severely brain-damaged by her suicide attempt. On Hitler’s special orders, she had been hospitalised in Germany and then transported home to her family, accompanied by her youngest sister Deborah, the future Duchess of Devonshire.

  Pym was assigned to the Censorship Division of the Wrens, due to her experience in Bristol. Her new officer’s uniform gave her immense pleasure. It was made-to-measure with gold buttons and a tricorn hat, ‘with a rather beautiful naval badge, blue and gold and crimson’. Preparations were being made for the invasion of north-west Europe and the south coast of England was an important staging post for the Allied forces as they waited to open up the second front. It was an exciting time, though everyone expected the losses to be severe: ‘I am vaguely depressed waiting for things to happen, as we all are now. I wish it could be over and done with – we shall know so many people in it and I suppose a good many of them won’t come back.’[7]

  Pym wrote to tell Henry that she had had a short-lived romantic entanglement with a petty officer at Westcliff, but broke it off: ‘So it looks as though you and Jock may get your way and have me as Miss Pym all my life.’[8] Meanwhile, Mrs Pym sent a drawing from The Tatler of Captain Julian Amery, which made Barbara’s heart turn over.

  Pym remained in Southampton until September 1944, when she heard the exciting news that she was being posted overseas – to Naples.

  CHAPTER XI

  Third Officer Pym is posted to Naples, where she meets ‘Pay-Bob’ Starky

  On 17 September 1944, just over three months after D-Day, Pym began a Naples journal. From the ocean liner Christiaan Huygens, she recorded her first impressions of Italy: ‘layers of orange and pink and biscuit-coloured buildings and in the evening, a mass of twinkling lights’.[1]

  The Allies had invaded mainland Italy a year before, with General Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossing from Sicily and the Americans landing at Salerno. Within weeks, they had entered Naples and, in conjunction with a popular uprising, freed the city from occupation. The port was now a key centre for maintaining control of the Mediterranean during the final phase of the war. There was still fighting against the retreating Germans in the north, and thousands of troops passed through the naval base in Naples. It was a place of intense but short-lived affairs, bustle and intrigue. There were far more men than women, providing opportunities for an exciting social life.

  Barbara had a cold in her first week, and had no sense of smell, but o
nce she recovered she breathed in incense or perfume passing a barber’s shop. She noticed a lot of poverty in Naples; the people ‘rather ragged and dirty, but some girls nicely dressed and pretty, nearly all wearing shoes with very high wedge heels – many priests’. She preferred Capri, with its lemon groves, royal blue convolvulus, rich puce bougainvillea and hanging bunches of grapes. The warm air and blue sea were a welcome change from grim, grey Southend.[2]

  On the voyage over, Pym had snatched kisses with a lieutenant called Michael. Now in Naples and Capri, among romantic baroque villas and churches, the warm-scented air fragrant with citrus and pine, there were ample opportunities for flirtations with handsome officers in their white uniforms.

  Initially Pym felt a sense of ennui, ‘a faint feeling of dissatisfaction with life here, the dull day’s work and empty round and the fear that I shall never, never write that novel’. But in Capri she was entranced by the Villa San Michele, built by the innovative Swedish psychiatrist and author, Axel Munthe. It stood on a plateau 330 metres above the sea, looking across the Bay of Naples and the Sorrentine Peninsula, with a view of Mount Vesuvius in the distance. Munthe had created an extraordinary garden, often described as the most beautiful garden in Italy. He planted camellias, flowering ash, azaleas, wisteria, hydrangeas, roses, agapanthus, busy Lizzie and hundreds of other plants from the Mediterranean and other regions of the world. The indigenous wild flowers included acanthus, myrtle, broom, rock rose. To contrast with the vivid colours, he planted rich green ivies, box, thuja and mosses. There was an avenue of cypress and a colonnade fragrant with wisteria. Munthe built outdoor ‘rooms’; shady courtyards, pergolas and arbours for respite in the hot summer months. He added sculptures and antiquities, many of which he had found and dug up in the garden. Pym liked best a ‘cool little courtyard’ filled with ‘Roman pieces’. When she walked in it, ‘white-walled and peaceful with trees against the sky’, she felt tearful: ‘The peace, the beauty, the antiquity, perhaps something of the feeling I have for churchyards came over me.’[3]