A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym

by Barbara Pym

  I haven’t written anything for ages – I have really no time now as I am in a full time job and also assist in running a house. I am working in ‘a Government department’ [the Censorship] but am not allowed to say what when I write abroad, so you will have to guess what would be most suitable for me as you remember me. I find the work very interesting, though the secrecy is rather annoying as I can’t talk about it or share jokes with any except my colleagues. I manage to live comfortably on what I earn as Hilary and I (she is here in the same Institution [the BBC] as in London, if you remember) have taken a share in a big house in this most select residential district of Clifton – a really beautiful position, high up over the Suspension Bridge with the woods in front of us. We share with two families, who work with Hilary, and there are altogether six children so we know all about communal living, though the house is big enough for us to have our own sitting room and to keep ourselves to ourselves if we want to. We cook all our own meals as domestic help is nearly impossible to get now, and so by the time we are in from work (about 6.30) and have cooked, eaten and washed up an evening meal there isn’t really much time for intellectual pursuits – though I try to read a little and have lately finished War and Peace. But there won’t be a new Compton-Burnett for another year I suppose. It is depressing to go round the bookshops and find how little there is that one really wants to buy. I hate reading books about the war – I get quite enough of the war in my job – and so in bed at night I read Jane Austen and Byron and Anthony à Wood – (I might read The English Rogue if I had it or even The Gallant Hermaphrodite). You see, Henry, she still remembers the names.

  Hilary is going to be married in August – her future husband is in the Air Force and is called Alexander (Sandy) Walton. He was at Cambridge and did architecture and has been out in Greece doing an architectural survey of the island of Chios – this was before the war, of course. It’s funny that he didn’t meet Jock out there as they must have been there about the same time and probably knew some of the same people. Strangely enough he reminds me in some ways of Jock – he is fair and tallish and very musical – he has set some of Betjeman’s Continual Dew poems to music! I am hoping he will be able to get a nice best man for me as I am to be bridesmaid. It is going to be quite simple, we shall wear day clothes, Hilary a pale blue crêpe dress and coat and I a dull pink crêpe dress with a lovely romantic black hat with a heart-shaped halo brim, which I bought yesterday in Bath. (All this description is for my dear sister Elsie, of course.) We now have to give coupons for clothes, as you know, so it is no good buying something that won’t be useful afterwards – but it needs great ingenuity to plan everything. We shall get shabbier and shabbier but who cares. In many ways you would hardly realise we had been three years (almost) at war. We still have plenty to eat and although we can’t get oranges and grapefruit and bananas (Do you remember bananas?) we have excellent lettuces and cabbages and carrots etc. fresh from our garden and raspberries and blackcurrants too.

  Of course the raids have done some damage. Oxford is quite untouched I am glad to say. I should hate anything to happen to it. I am very sad about Cologne, I did love it so, and although it is satisfying to know that we can do these 1000 bomber raids I can’t feel any elation about them. Still, I suppose it must be done. Wars aren’t what they used to be in Victorian times, when they were fought abroad decently by professional soldiers!

  I wonder what you both look like now? And who is the baby like? Perhaps it’s a good thing she isn’t a boy – how heartbreaking for some poor girl in the English Reading Room twenty years hence! If you ever get this please write to me. God bless you all. My love to you. Pym.

  To Henry Harvey in Stockholm

  Bristol.

  22 October 1942

  Dearest Henry:

  It was lovely getting your letter, a week ago it came. And a charming baby, so intelligent looking. It was nice too to get a glimpse of Elsie’s face. Why not send me a photo of yourself? I don’t think I could send any – anyway I haven’t any recent ones. I look just the same except that my hair is longer, as is the fashion now. Still pretty well preserved, still sometimes admired. But why tell you this who didn’t admire anyway!

  You know, that was the nicest letter you ever wrote me. Why do you say you can’t write letters? It’s an idea you seem to have got hold of which makes a very good excuse for being a bad correspondent. This was so exactly like you – I knew you hadn’t changed at all. It is over four years since we met. Solemn thought. Oddly enough I have a great friend [Gordon Glover], made since I came to Bristol, who reminds me very much of you in many ways. He is a journalist, very amusing, a great philanderer but very sweet and kind, and as I haven’t fallen in love with him I see only his best side. So strange being reminded of you – I didn’t think anyone ever could do that. (He wouldn’t say ‘Otway is remarkably fine’ though.)

  You will see that I have become a very bad letter writer! As for other writing, I haven’t done any for ages. I just don’t have time in the evening, after work, what with meals to get etc. If I do write it is letters to my friends now literally all over the world. All that you say about my work is quite true and one day perhaps I’ll be able to put it into practice.

  Later – Tuesday 10 November

  Oh how ashamed I am, not to have finished this before now! I’ve been busy writing other letters, I’ve forgotten all about my old Harvey. I seem to be embarked on a kind of love affair, not exactly of my choosing, it just seemed to happen very unexpectedly and well, it is all very nice so far – I’ll be seeing him next weekend. I don’t suppose we shall ever be able to get married, so perhaps Belinda and Harriet will come true after all – though Harriet would have to be a widow or divorced or something! Hilary has a cold at present and I have been taking her some blackcurrant tea in bed. Sandy (her husband) is coming next week.

  I haven’t heard from Jock yet. I might write tonight after finishing this. I seem to get so little time now except evenings and weekends are taken up with our little amusements mostly drinking in Bristol’s nice pubs, and occasionally, as last weekend, films – Gone with the Wind. Four hours wallowing in it, so much so that at the end my eyes were quite dry even through so many deathbeds. It’s odd to think that I now have a completely different circle of friends and that you don’t know darling Honor Wyatt or Gordon or Sandy or George (now probably on the coast of N. Africa somewhere). Isn’t the news wonderfully exciting – perhaps it really will end some time though not as soon as most (some) people seem to think. Of course we have hardly felt anything of it, but I often wonder if anything is worth all the suffering and misery there has been already. But I suppose it would have been worse if we hadn’t fought.

  You seem to be surrounded by nice persons of culture and intelligence. How I would love to see you again. It would be so nice now – we should get on better together than when we were both young and silly. Do you remember Langbaine?!!

  With love to you and Elsie and ‘the baby’.

  Pym

  17 December

  Henry, this is awful – to have left this letter so long unposted – what with censorship and everything – (happy Christmas to the Censors – I always think they must have a very arduous job especially at this time – bless them!) heaven knows when you’ll get this.

  Since I finished it there is nothing special to report. I am very, very happy, but the future is rather dark, as far as my personal affairs are concerned. We just do not know what is going to happen to us – but at present we are happy and that is a lot these days.

  With love,

  Pym

  After Christmas I

  January 1943. Bristol. Having time to kill I walked down Park Street and turned off by a notice which said To St George’s Church. I went in by the back way. Surprisingly it was not locked. It was almost dark inside so that I could hardly see what it was like but I said a prayer there and then walked round the churchyard. This consists of a few overgrown slabs, sadly neglected, which mer
ge suddenly into an allotment with cabbages etc. Solemn and rather horrifying thought, what may be nourishing this soil. ‘When my grave is broke up again…’ And at the end of it all a kind of cement mixer (I think). An unusual churchyard. My walk brought me round to the front with an eighteenth century façade with heavy columns. I couldn’t see much inside, except the glint of stained glass in the dusk. I am suddenly thinking of that other little church in Marylebone, St Luke’s, was it, into which I walked at Harvest Festival and the vicar’s wife made me go round and admire the decorations. The vicar had just returned from Italy and gave a curious pagan sermon – about the decorations hiding the vileness of the church, as far as I remember.

  I went into the Public Library. It is open till seven and was now full of rains of humanity, come into the reading room for learning. And on my blotting paper I write ‘A Testing Time’ in Red Pencil – to remind me.

  Gordon said he would die about the time when the evenings began to lengthen and birds sang. I had the first taste of it today. I had imagined it, little knowing that it would be this, not death but parting. That eternal dustbin in the dawn, with fines of Donne (?) floating above it.

  The Day breaks not, it is my heart,

  Because that thou and I must part.

  Thursday 21 January. I’m firewatching – for the first time since Gordon and I parted. I’m sleeping downstairs in my favourite room, with the plaque of Ernest Wyman Savory on the wall, where I so often wrote letters to my darling. I have been dreading this occasion and now here it is – and it is as if I had taken some soothing drug which gives me a sort of remoteness and detachment from my pain, so that I know it is there but do not feel it. Only calmness and love and certainty, almost. As if the happy atmosphere of this room still lingered and was lapping me round.

  It is a wicked thing to want time to pass and not to try to enjoy one’s days. Now I try to make things to look forward to, however small. At lunch yesterday I read this in Trivia –

  So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, today, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.

  Well, of course, following voices to the ends of the world isn’t possible now, but there’s still the whimsical and perilous charm perhaps. I don’t want to lose that.

  I hope I shall sleep tonight.

  Friday 22 January. It wasn’t so bad at all, but I didn’t sleep very well, mainly because as usual, it was very hot and there were various strange noises, loud voices outside and howling cats. (But no yaffling woodpeckers in the cypresses.) I dreamed of Gordon a little, but mostly of Jay. (Darling Jay, mein Kleines, this is half your book. Imagine after my death two old men wrangling over it. One a dried-up politician, the other a burnt-out old ruin, the most waspish member of the Savage Club. Both so unpleasant that it is difficult to imagine how either of them could possibly have been loved by such a delightful person as the present writer obviously is!) I woke up at a quarter to six, dreadful sentimental time. (In continental trains, seeing the faces of strange Germans, the young airman who sat opposite me during that night journey back from Germany – Dresden – in May 1938). I suddenly decided to cycle home for breakfast which I did in ‘the darkness which precedes the dawn’ (who said this?). Julian, coming out of the gate, greeted me with the news that Daddy had sent him some liquorice allsorts. Rush of ridiculous emotion, of course! Plenty of intolerable birds. A green Christmas means a full churchyard… We haven’t really had any winter yet.

  When I came in at tea-time today the Coppice seemed gay and amusing – Viennese waltzes in the kitchen and the chickens madly eating the beans and the cabbage.

  How satisfying is a phrase in music when it goes where you want it to go – you anticipate its ending confidently and fulfilment satisfies.

  I have got to realise that it is no longer anything to do with me what Gordon does. Although it is a month since I saw him, there are an endless number of months to be got through – a long dreary stretch until it doesn’t matter any more. And heaven knows how many that will be.

  Oh what a clever book this is! Really I haven’t got a beautiful character at all. I suppose I should have been delighted if Gordon had said he was miserable. I ought to be glad that he is getting on all right.

  Wednesday 27 January. Every time I go past the big windows leading on to the balcony I stand for a moment and look out over the stone lions, towards the Victoria Rooms and the 18 bus stop. Lately I have begun to realise that I do this and I ask myself sardonically – ‘Well, and what do you expect to see?’ What I do see is sometimes sunshine and crowds of people, other times the rain glancing off the lions and few people. Always a rather dreary prospect. Well, that is what things are likely to be at the moment, a rather dreary prospect. It is impossible that I shall be really happy for some time to come.

  Monday–Tuesday, 1–2 February. I am reading Robert Graves’s novel Wife to Mr Milton. He has in it a phrase, ‘I had my enemy the spring to contend with.’ Enemy because of the cold winds etc. Oh yes, I have the rheumatics in my back and neck and arms, but it is the intolerable birds that are the enemies, and the primroses bravely pushing up in the tangled Coppice garden. And yet not enemies really – they never were before. Winter would surely be much more of an enemy.

  Today on my way home I discovered a beautiful pre-Raphaelite tomb. I had got to the top of the hill into Victoria Square when I was suddenly filled with a desire to go along the paved stone alley leading to St Andrew’s Church. So I walked into it with my bicycle and discovered on either side of me tombstones in a rather well-kept grassy churchyard, with trees, palms (which seemed odd) and a forsythia coming into flower. And towards the end of this alley on the right hand side is the pre-Raphaelite tomb. A square, box-like affair supported by angels at the corners, and the angels are beautifully Rossetti with flowing hair parted in the middle. I can’t remember who is buried there. I must notice next time I visit it, for I feel sure there will be a next time. At the end of the alley one comes upon the church, a dramatically empty shell, blitz, of course.

  Thursday 11 February. This evening there was a pre-Raphaelite sky. Bright blue with orange clouds like Thermogene wool. And a monkey puzzle dark against it, and none of us getting any younger.

  I am reading Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, but not really getting very much from it as I do not understand many of the theological terms and arguments. And how reasoned and logical is his account of his conversion – I am still waiting for the miraculous act of faith, that finally sent him over. The sort of dramatic thing Gordon or I would expect. But somehow I don’t think it’s going to be like that. He says – ‘From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion: religion as a mere sentiment is to me a dream and a mockery.’ No Abbotsleigh or pre-Raphaelite tombs there.

  I like the account of how ‘Lead, kindly Light’ came to be written. It was in 1833, when he was 32, I had imagined it much later. After a tour of Italy and Sicily, during which he was ill with a fever, he waited for a ship home at Palermo for three weeks. ‘At last I got off in an orange boat bound for Marseilles. We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio. Then it was that I wrote the lines "Lead, kindly Light…".’

  Today I took Saroyan with me and read it at lunch. I like the picture of myself dipping alternately into Newman and Saroyan.

  Friday 19 February. Avonmouth again and a pleasant ride back in the top front seat of a 99 bus, feeling very sentimental and quite pleasantly melancholy as today Julian was going up to London to spend his half term with Gordon.

  Wednesday 10 March. Last Friday I joined the Wrens. It is done – inevitable now, I suppose, though I can still withdraw if I want to. I am calm and happy about it and sometimes excited – all settled. Like Going over to Rome. And Cardinal Newman has gone, and I’m still reading The Daisy Chain.

  In Shirehampton Vi
carage garden there is a chestnut tree with green uncurled leaves – and almond trees galore, daffodils a few, and an afternoon alone at Avonmouth. Working hard, answering the telephone, making tea, and finally, looking out the window with silly tears in my eyes, because I suddenly remembered Gordon with his hair smoothed down sitting opposite me at breakfast in the Coppice kitchen on a Monday morning.

  Oh, a bad day. Beware of complacency, and you must fight all the time and have the same struggles. Tears on top of the bus going to Avonmouth, up into Sea Mills, down into Shirehampton and Johnny Doughboy in the park. And at lunchtime when I was alone, I howled… At teatime I went to the office in Bristol, feeling very Rip Van Winkle, to find people away and on the point of leaving and the blackout stuck halfway across the skylight of our room, casting a gloom, quite a gloom as they say, over the place.

  Later, ironing and humming the Warsaw Concerto, and later still listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and reading The Daisy Chain, which is so well written, very Compton-Burnett and very sad, and then eating eggs and bacon for supper. Then Hilary came in wearing a pretty little hat and I cheered up. And now – after midnight – I’m glad to say I feel better. But that bat hovers around (rather like a squander bug) so I won’t say any more. Dusty old creature, to think I’ve still got you, after ten weeks.

  Thursday 11 March. My own darling raving dilettante, what is ‘a leaf-nosed bat’? (see Introducing this week). It sounds a gentler creature than the thing you left with me. (Gordon’s broadcasting tomorrow and I’m firewatching – so…)

  Sunday 14 March. Well, on Friday, she came back from Avonmouth, loitered a little at the Academy and then, with a sudden wave of inspiration, went and had some tea in the Berkeley. Ludicrous place with palms and minors, but no orchestra now. It was the end of the day and she felt rather a ludicrous object sitting there drinking tea, eating bread and butter and smoking a cigarette. There ought to have been an orchestra and she ought to have been at a table rather too near it, with two curious women – but of course things never happen quite like this. At 5.35 I left and thought of Gordon just beginning and wondered if he was feeling nervous. Then home, very tired, drained of all emotion.