The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Barbara’s time there was uneventful and there is a gap in her diary, which is resumed on her return to Oxford: ‘On this day I returned to my dear University.’ She was looking forward to Trinity (summer) term: although she needed to work hard, she was determined to play hard. This would be the time for punting on the river, picnics, and outdoor Shakespeare plays and concerts in the lovely college gardens. And perhaps for falling in love.

  During the Easter holidays, she had been told by her tutors to read the works of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. He was to be a lifelong passion. His sexy, romantic poems appealed to Pym’s passionate nature. Her interest in his poetry ran in tandem with her love affair with a dark, handsome man whom she had met briefly in Michaelmas term. For good and for ill, he would become a very important figure in her life.

  CHAPTER IX

  In which our Heroine meets a Handsome Young Man called Rupert Gleadow

  Pym was feeling her way in Oxford. She decorated her room with a self-portrait by Van Gogh in a gold frame, along with the pink cushion and brass cigarette box. Often, she noted, her room was a fug of smoke when she lit Gold Flake after Gold Flake. At the end of April she had her first punting experience with her friend Dorothy Pedley and Rosemary Topping. The pole got stuck, but they were rescued by a group of ‘chivalrous’ Teddy Hall men.[1]

  On May Day, at 5 a.m., she set off by punt to hear the choristers singing from the Great Tower on Magdalen Bridge. ‘May Morning’ is a special time of revelry in Oxford; following the dawn madrigals, the church and college bells ring out over the city for twenty minutes. Undergraduates would then decamp to local taverns and restaurants for a May Morning breakfast.

  Pym and her friends enjoyed picnics on the riverbank. Oxford was fully living up to expectations. She discovered that Fat Babyface was a theology scholar called Geoffrey Walmsley. ‘Oh Geoffrey, how I love you!’ she confessed to her diary. There were numerous sightings of him; in the street, on his bike, in Blackwell’s bookshop, in St Mary’s church. In his plus-fours he comes across as a Mr Toad figure rather than a truly romantic hero, even though Pym later claimed that he closely resembled the actor Leslie Howard. She went walking on Shotover Hill and picked blue forget-me-nots that were the colour of Geoffrey’s eyes.

  But she also knew that Geoffrey was a fantasy love affair. He had barely spoken to her or knew much about her. And she wasn’t entirely serious: ‘I’ll just forget you when you go down,’ she confessed to her diary. She was playing around with the idea of falling in love. This was to change when she became friends with a dashing young man called Rupert Gleadow. They had been introduced in the Michaelmas term, but it was only in the summer that the relationship flourished.

  Rupert was in his final year at Trinity College reading classics and Egyptology. He had been educated at Winchester, one of the most prestigious public schools, and had a large and beautiful family home in Surrey, as well as a London home. He was an altogether more sophisticated figure than the men she chased around the ancient streets of Oxford.

  In May, Pym spotted Rupert at the cinema. At the Bodleian, he invited her to tea: ‘I accepted – wanting to see more of him.’[2] She kept his invitation, scrawled on the back of a tiny library ticket, all her life.[3] He followed up his first message with a second more expansive note, explaining, tellingly, that there was nobody else coming to the tea. His ‘digs’ were at number 47 Wellington Square, but for the purposes of the tea he would borrow the attractive sitting room upstairs that belonged to his roommate, George Steer. A third note confirmed the invitation, with a hand-drawn map of the house in Wellington Square.[4] Rupert was clearly very keen.

  Pym wrote back, expressing some fears about the proctor, who lived in the same house. It was a risk for a female undergraduate to be found alone in the room of a man. Rupert reassured her and told her that the proctor was a good friend and he also thanked her for the ‘flattering suggestion’ that she had been unable to work since seeing him in the Bod.

  When she arrived, Pym was impressed with the room, which was covered with books and decorated with animal skins: ‘the leopard skinned couch was to play a more important part later’, she wrote mysteriously. She enjoyed Rupert’s company immensely and thought him ‘far more human’ than she had previously thought. His father had died halfway through his time at Oxford and he might well have hidden his grief and vulnerability behind a veneer of aloofness. She was surprised when he took her hand in his and asked her for a kiss; she refused.

  Exhibiting a clear tendency to rush into love affairs, Pym decided the very next day that she was in love with Rupert. But she also remained faithful to the idea of Geoffrey, whom she had not yet met alone and who had not shown any signs of reciprocating her affection. She was a young green girl ready to fall in love multiple times over. She noted her ‘double-love’ in her journal: ‘for Geoffrey – very real – and also for Rupert – also very real’.[5] This trait in her character – of rushing into love affairs without really knowing the recipient – would, in the long term, be damaging.

  Rupert was making all the running. Another undergraduate called Bill Thacker was keen on Barbara. The notion of a rival enhanced her charms in Rupert’s eyes. He wrote letters, begging her to drop in anytime, also writing that he would be keen to see her at St Hilda’s, even though he knew that this was forbidden, ‘otherwise they’ll have all sorts of Don Juans getting in’.[6] Rupert was presenting himself as a Byronic figure and Pym was ready to have fun. He told her that he was unable to concentrate on his Egyptian studies, as she was so much on his mind. Pym had joked about the inferior quality of his sherry and he promised better quality in the future. He told her that he longed for a motor car to take her around the Oxford countryside. There was much talk of his ‘wickedness’.[7]

  May was rainy and one wet day, Pym and Rupert went for a walk. Soaked through, they stopped off at 47 Wellington Square and drank sherry: ‘I remember putting my arms around him and loving him because he was very wet and shivering and looked at me so sweetly.’[8] She still longed for Geoffrey, but it wasn’t long before her real affair with Rupert took precedence. A photograph that he sent to her reveals him to be a dark, handsome man, with a lean, angular face of the kind that she found most appealing. He wrote letter after letter in different coloured ink to his ‘Darling Barbara’, telling her that he dreamed about her, worried that she might still be seeing other men and hoping that she would drop by whenever she pleased. They were the first proper love letters that she had ever received and she cherished them.

  Rupert was clearly smitten with this lively ‘northern’ girl who could hold a conversation and had so many admirers. He found her to be highly original, most unlike any other girl he had met. Her sense of humour and her quick wit made a lasting impression. When one of his eyelashes fell out, she picked it up and granted him five wishes. One of them was to buy his own aeroplane – a wish that was to be fulfilled sooner than he thought.

  The pair’s pursuits were still largely innocent; tea at Stewart’s on Queen Street or at Boffin’s, where the cakes and buns were excellent. But it soon became clear that Rupert wanted more from her than an uncomplicated friendship and Boffin’s buns. She went on a date with another boy to see a production of The Constant Nymph, the story of a girl hopelessly in love with a self-regarding composer, but her mind was on Rupert and the unopened love letter that lay in her bag. She felt ‘vaguely depressed and slightly hysterical’ when she returned home from the play.[9] It had only been a couple of weeks since the beginning of the relationship, but her feelings were gaining momentum.

  Early on the morning of her nineteenth birthday, 2 June, Pym received a letter from Rupert wishing her ‘a very happy Birthday and lots of happy birthdays and may they all come after one another as slowly as possible, so as to make you stay young and jolly like ever so – and I do hope I meet you again when we’re both far older and I hear that it’s all come true’.[10] He took her to Elliston’s and bought her an orange and royal blue
scarf. Later, his best friend Miles joined them for dinner and then they went to the cinema to watch Frankenstein. Miles laughed throughout, so she didn’t feel scared and she stole ‘surreptitious glances at Rupert’s profile’. Miles MacAdam, a large, ebullient man from Worcester College, became part of this close trio. Pym liked the way he talked and the sound of his voice.

  The next day, she allowed Rupert to kiss her, though she didn’t enjoy the experience. What she did like was the way he considered her thoughts and feelings. One of her male friends told Pym that he disliked Rupert and thought him ‘queer’ (in the old-fashioned sense of the word), but she was not deterred. They went for a walk on Boars Hill and took shelter under a tree when it began to rain. She expressed impatience with his physical attentions, ‘I got a wee bit sick of it – but tried to please him.’ He had final exams coming up and she wanted to ‘treat him as kindly as possible’.[11]

  CHAPTER X

  Miss Pym’s Summer of Love

  On a lovely June day, Barbara made her first visit to the Radcliffe Camera, the beautiful, circular neo-classical library that stands in the heart of Oxford. Built of golden Cotswold sandstone, it glows in the sunlight and is considered one of the architectural crown jewels of England.

  Pym worked in the library, spotting a couple of men, but then on the way out found herself alone with ‘heavenly’ Geoffrey. She thought of a ruse to grab his attention: ‘I longed to crash into him or drop my books – but the incident was over – and became one of those many might-have-beens about which its [sic] so lovely to speculate.’[1] The moment had passed, never to return. These ‘might-have-beens’ would become a refrain to her romantic life and rich fodder for her novels. She was in love with Rupert and yet she still had strong feelings for the remote Geoffrey. It was the first serious case of her lifelong obsession with unattainable men.

  Rupert wrote more affectionate letters, telling her how happy she made him and promising that he was ‘quite harmless really’. She consumed his thoughts, making him unable to work; something of a problem as he wanted to achieve a first in his exams. In between sitting his finals, he saw ‘My Darling Barbara’ – his ‘Cara Barbara mia’ – whenever he could.

  Pym recorded an evening spent in the darkness of ‘The Queener’ with Rupert and Miles: ‘We sat at the back in the corner and I had two arms around me for the first time in my history.’ After the movie, Goodnight Vienna, they stopped off at a coffee house on the Cowley Road and sipped chocolate Horlicks, toasting one another. This was ‘one of the loveliest evenings I ever remember’.[2]

  Following a rainy May, the weather had suddenly improved, heralding Pym’s summer of love. Her diary records riding on the handlebars of Rupert’s bicycle, walking in the woods, kissing in the streets of Oxford. On a hot June day, Miles and Rupert took her punting on the river and then to tea at the Cherwell Gardens: ‘much semi nakedness to be seen on the river’, she noted. Rupert dropped his watch in the river and stripped off his clothes to dive for it. It may have been the first time Pym had seen so much of a man’s body.

  There was a sense of sexual awakening in her diary. The next day, she saw Rupert and Miles and they told her the news that they had both won firsts. She was delighted. Now that the boys’ exams were over and she had endured her last tutorial, the trio were determined to enjoy themselves. They hired a punt and went on the river, taking a gramophone with them. Pym spotted Geoffrey. He had a beautiful smile on his face and she bade him ‘Sweetheart goodbye – Auf wiedersehen my dear … I can’t believe that I’ve almost certainly seen his dear face for the last time.’[3] She had another intimate hour and a half with Rupert at number 47: ‘the loveliest time I ever remember spending with anyone … Oh blessed George Steer and his lovely leopard skin – I hope he gets a first! This kind of a Private Lives Love scene was far better in reality than in anticipation.’[4]

  These were halcyon days. Rupert had acquired a motor car and they drove around the Oxfordshire countryside, visiting the lovely Cotswold villages of Great Tew and Charlbury, where they had tea; a nosy maid tried to stop them from kissing, but did not manage to succeed. ‘Surely time spent so happily cannot be counted as merely wasted.’[5] Rupert, having heard that an undergraduate had been ‘progged’ (sent down) for the same offence, kissed her in a public telephone box.

  Pym had not forgotten her female friends. They went on the river, where Mary Sharp almost fell in. Then had a final tea, with strawberry parfait, at Elliston’s. The next day she saw her friends off at the station as they returned home for the long vacation. In the evening, she had dinner with Miles and Rupert at Stewart’s; she felt sentimental and sad, especially as the radio was playing ‘Auf Wiedersehen’.

  On a memorable trip to Boars Hill, Rupert startled her by reciting Andrew Marvell’s beautiful and sexy poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (‘An hundred years should go to praise/ Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;/ Two hundred to adore each breast,/ But thirty thousand to the rest …’). He also recited Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, a sadder, more wistful poem about lovers who are parted. Pym was amazed, and touched. She had never heard the poems before and realised that Rupert was more brilliant than she had thought. In the romantic atmosphere, they had what she described as the ‘best kiss on record’.[6]

  They fetched Miles from a tutorial and went for a picnic on the river. Whilst punting, Pym fell in and was rescued by Miles. She lay on her tummy drying out, Miles’s trousers hanging from the paddle. She drowsed in the heat to the rhythm of the punt and was awakened by a gentle kiss from Rupert. They had dinner at the famous Spread Eagle pub in Thame and then drove back to Oxford. Miles’s presence inhibited their ‘love-making’, but Pym didn’t seem to mind very much. There was safety in a triangular relationship. Her friendship with Miles and her love affair with Rupert set a pattern that would be repeated.

  She and Rupert had a farewell lunch at Stewart’s: ‘they played Wien du Stadt meiner Traume. I heard it for the first time.’ Then, on the infamous leopard-skin couch, there was ‘a more intimate goodbye’ at number 47. Rupert had bought her chocolates from Elliston’s. Miles joined them later and saw her off at the train station. The trio held hands tightly and Barbara stared into their ‘blue and brown eyes respectively’.[7]

  On the train, Pym reflected that her first Trinity term had been so perfect that it had set a ‘perilously high standard’. She mused whether any other could live up to the happiness she had felt. Her instincts would prove to be right. A year later, she returned to her diary and wrote: ‘My second was bloody.’[8]

  CHAPTER XI

  Our Heroine returns to Shropshire for the Long Vacation and invites Rupert to stay

  Pym’s sister Hilary and her biographer, Hazel Holt, played down Rupert’s importance in Barbara’s story. By their account, he played a minor role in her romantic life and good-naturedly gave her up when she fell in love with another undergraduate. This is not the story of what truly happened between Rupert and Barbara. His letters and her journals reveal a deeply erotic and then traumatic experience, which affected Pym for many years.

  In the days following their parting in Oxford, Rupert sent letter after letter to his Cara Barbara mia. He described her as his ‘darling perfect one’ and wrote at length about the lingering glow of those final ‘golden days of June’s end! Those golden islands of life.’[1]

  That summer, Rupert was back in London in his mother’s new flat in Holland Park Court and worrying about future plans. He wanted to join the Royal Air Force, but his poor eyesight was a problem. He was also thinking about returning to Oxford for postgraduate studies.[2] Miles was with him in London. They raised toasts to Barbara, and Rupert reminded her in a letter of their ‘lovely nakedish times by the Cher’. Like many insecure young men in love with a popular, attractive woman, he felt worried about their romance, concerned that she had feelings for his rival, Bill Thacker. He was also insecure that had she seen Miles first, then she might have favoured him as a boyfriend. There is a risqu
é hint in his emphasis on the strong bond between the three undergraduates: ‘If I’d been told 5 weeks ago how happy we should be three together I should not have believed it … I think you don’t mind two at once!’[3]

  Rupert thanked Pym for her part in making his last term at Oxford so charming, sending her a photograph of himself that he thought made him look like an ‘angry Italian count’. He even made a bold suggestion: ‘Most interesting would be to get married and then see what happens?’[4] Meanwhile, he had plans for trips to Wales, Ireland and possibly Greece. He also thought of going to Germany but was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis: ‘they do seem to be killing an awful lot of people there these days’, he wrote.[5]

  By mid-July, Rupert had finally achieved his dream of owning a plane. He had taken Miles up for a flight and joked about the difficulty of fitting him into the cockpit. He wrote of how he missed Barbara and their summer together. If he met the River Cherwell in heaven, he said, it would ‘still have echoes of you on it – mistily golden echoes of you and Miles and me on the green banks among the willows’.[6] He assured Pym that his eyes were much better: ‘I had no difficulty landing an aeroplane!’ Perhaps he could take her for a spin: he must have seemed like a character out of a novel, this clever, handsome fellow who flew his own plane.

  Pym invited him to stay at Morda Lodge to meet her family, though she was concerned that her home was not up to Rupert’s high standards. Later, he would chide her about her inverted snobbishness. Rupert had kept the news of his love affair secret from his overbearing mother. Mrs Gleadow had been arranging for suitable girls to come to tea. There is a strong sense from his letters that Barbara would not be deemed the right sort of girl.

  That summer, Rupert began what would be a lifelong interest in astrology and the occult. He had consulted a ‘second-sight’ woman about his future and had been reading the works of spiritualist writer Olive Pixley. He had also taught himself to read character from handwriting. He studied Barbara’s letters and composed a fascinating account of her personality: ‘Barbara my dear, you are versatile, original and capable, not always reliable, especially about appointments, but full of variety and you have a sense of humour and some tact … you’re not very emotional or sympathetic and not naturally optimistic … most conspicuously you have a striking and original personality.’ Rupert was astute in seeing a hard edge to Pym’s character: ‘your sympathies do not come flowing out of a soft heart’. He said that they were both ‘hard-headed moderns’ and also ticked her off for displaying signs of an inferiority complex. ‘What on earth or under it made you make yourself out to be such an awful person?’ Mrs Gleadow had asked her son whether he had thoughts of marriage, but he had told her advice given to him by Barbara that a man’s brain was not ripe until he was twenty-five.[7]