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

by Barbara Pym

  Barbara

  31 October. In the Churchill hoping for relief from my fluid. Conversation in the bed opposite:

  ‘There’s some nice music tonight.’

  ‘I’m not a great lover of music’

  ‘No – it just passes the time.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  21 November. Churchill. Ward 7. A cold, raw typical November day, but we got here and I’ve just eaten a kind of supper – vegetable soup, baked beans and sausage. After the removal of four pints of fluid. The curious mixed or unisex ward is surely Donne’s

  Difference of sex no more we know

  Than our guardian angels do.

  December 1979. Christmas card to Philip Larkin

  WITH BEST WISHES FOR CHRISTMAS AND

  THE NEW YEAR

  (Still struggling on – perhaps a little better!) Another visit to hospital (brief) on 2nd Jan.

  Barbara

  She died on 11 January 1980

  Copyright

  First published in 1984 by Macmillan

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-6540-5 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-6539-9 POD

  Barbara Pym’s text and The Early Life © Hilary Walton, 1984

  Preface and all editorial matter © Hazel Holt, 1984

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