The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  When she could bear it no longer, Pym lingered outside ‘Schools’ (the examination hall), chatting to Rupert Gleadow. When Henry came out, she asked him if he’d enjoyed himself. He did not reply, only grinned ‘rather fatuously’ and walked off. Rupert thought him ‘quite beautiful and merely weak-looking – not vicious’. She saw him again in ‘YR’ (his car), with Jock sitting in the front seat, ‘looking prim and proper’.[7] She waved and was delighted when he turned around and smiled. Seeing him made her feel delirious and she danced happily to the gramophone, though suddenly feeling despondent that Henry was going down and she would likely never see him again.

  Of course she did see him again. He offered her a lift. As she left the car, Henry coolly said: ‘Well, I may see you again.’ Pym found it all frustrating. ‘Thinking of that remark in my miseries that followed, I wondered whether he really meant to be so cruel, because he really did make me feel hopeful and then it all came to nothing.’[8]

  Pym worked hard on an essay on the old English poem, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’. The poem details an argument between the two eponymous birds, overheard by the narrator. They argue about their physical appearances and the beauty of their respective birdsong. The nightingale tells the owl that he brings unwanted gloom, whilst she brings joy and reflects the beauty of the world. The owl retorts by saying she only sings in summer when men’s minds are full of lechery and that her song entices women to adultery and promiscuity. The nightingale argues that it is in the nature of women to be frail and any sins committed in maidenhead are forgiven in marriage. It is the fault of men, for taking advantage of women. All this seemed apt. Pym, feeling rejected and taken advantage of by Henry, worked hard at her studies and received a good report from her tutors: ‘got through with my bright and bluff questions’. She wrote in her diary: ‘LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! Do the dons know how much it affects our work, I wonder.’[9]

  Pym had been frightened by the intensity of her feelings and the bouts of depression that had consumed her during the summer term. She suffered ‘attacks of terrible misery’ when she felt that nothing mattered beside Henry and that if she could not see him then ‘life didn’t hold any more’.[10] She was, despite her bright and cheery disposition, a deeply sensitive girl and there was an obsessive, emotionally charged aspect to her personality. She fought bravely against this character trait, always hoping that her good sense would prevail. Many years later, she read the journals of Sylvia Plath and felt a connection with her. She was amazed to find that Plath, too, had a string of male admirers at Cambridge and was a girl who liked a good time, as well as wanting to be taken seriously as a writer.

  It had been an unhappy term and, for once, she was glad to leave Oxford to go home to Shropshire.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Miss Pym reflects upon Stormy Weather

  For many people, the years leading up to the Second World War were a golden age of music. Dance music was at its height, with band leaders such as Jack Hylton, Billy Cotton and Bert Ambrose riding the airwaves. The advent of the wireless set was a game-changer. By 1939, the number of BBC licence holders in Britain was a staggering 8.8 million.[1] The BBC had its own in-house Radio Dance Band, offering light music programmes such as Band Wagon, Monday Night at Eight and Music Hall. On Sundays, though, Sir John Reith, the austere director general, insisted on broadcasting uplifting programmes, leaving his younger audience to tune into Radio Luxembourg to get their daily band-music hit.

  On an unseasonably cold summer’s day, Pym switched on the wireless to hear the dulcet tones of ‘Ambrose and His Orchestra’ playing ‘Stormy Weather’. ‘And the weather is stormy,’ she noted in her diary. ‘It does nothing but rain (cos my man and I ain’t together).’[2] She thought constantly of Henry and when she managed not to think about him, her mind turned instead to his friends, Jock Liddell and John Barnicot.

  Nevertheless, she pulled herself together, noting that although she felt ‘depressed’ she wasn’t as ‘acutely miserable’ as she had been at Oxford.[3] She reflected that although Henry had brought so much unhappiness, he had also been responsible for ‘a little heaven and a lot of fun’. She decided she must take control of herself: ‘It’s really time this diary becomes a real one and stopped being a saga of Gabriel Harvey.’[4]

  Her mood improved when her sister Hilary came home from school for the summer holidays. They went for a short break to Ross-on-Wye, driving through the beautiful Shropshire countryside. A trip to London, to visit the cousins in Hatch End, also helped cheer her up. She read in The Times that Geoffrey Walmsley had been awarded a first in theology and pondered upon that unrequited but ‘happy passion’. An Oxford acquaintance came to tea at Hatch End and Pym was happy to gossip about mutual friends: ‘She didn’t know Gabriel. Nor did she know that Richard Rumbold was a pervert. Fancy that!’[5] Rumbold was a blond, handsome Christ Church man, who was president of the English Club, where he invited, amongst others, Oscar Wilde’s lover ‘Bosie’ to talk. Rumbold had recently published a highly controversial novel called Little Victims, which detailed homosexual adventures at boarding school. Pym’s epithet ‘pervert’ for a homosexual man was not uncommon for the 1930s, though she would modify her language and her prejudices when she became close to men such as Jock Liddell.

  Later that evening, Pym went to the cinema at Watford. She was amused to see that the film had a character called Sandra who was ‘perhaps even more of a nuisance than I have been to the object of my affection’.[6] She loved London and shopping at Selfridges, where she bought rouge and lipstick and a brown, spotted, silk scarf. Her spirits were raised by her fun-loving cousins.

  A trip to Stratford-upon-Avon was planned, to see Romeo and Juliet. She bumped into several Oxford people, but not the people she longed to see: Henry, Jock and Barnicot. The actor playing Romeo looked like Henry, she thought, with a similar nose and mouth, and Juliet was very young and lovely. The lovers were intensely passionate and Pym was struck by their parting: ‘“Thinkest thou we shall ever meet again?” I couldn’t help applying those lines to another case. But my answer was not so sure as Romeo’s.’[7] She particularly admired the vault scene, with the lovers silhouetted against a dark blue sky with stars.

  Pym had enjoyed her time in London and Stratford and was sorry to be going back home to Shropshire. When she returned to Morda Lodge, she tidied her bedroom and swapped her navy blue swimsuit for Hilary’s yellow one, which set off her golden suntan. She went out to buy The Times and saw that Henry had been awarded a second-class degree. He continued to consume her thoughts: ‘How I do want him – where is he tonight? – how is he looking? – what is he doing?’ In bed at night, her darkest thoughts emerged and she was subject to another one of her ‘attacks of misery’:

  When I got to bed last night I felt really depressed and just longed for Gabriel – not actually in the lascivious sense. It would have been enough if he’d just been there for me to talk to him. The feeling was the first attack of that terrible misery – (at least is was so to me) that I used to feel last term when nothing else mattered beside Gabriel and that if I couldn’t see him nothing at all mattered – life didn’t hold any more. Rather a frightening sort of experience – slipping through space into nothing … but I just kicked my feet about in dumb misery and went to sleep.[8]

  CHAPTER XIX

  In which Sandra returns

  Ever since seeing the ‘Sandra’ film in London, Pym’s alter ego had been creeping back with a vengeance. The purchase of the dark red lipstick and rouge in Selfridges was a nod to the re-emergence of her wilder side. Her journals were suddenly full of references to Sandra. But there was still a sense of internal struggle.

  The pragmatic, sensible Barbara reminded herself of the foolishness of her romantic yearnings: ‘I suppose it’s really rather funny – I shall probably be amused to read this in later years. How seriously we fools who imagine we’re in love do take ourselves.’ She took some Yeast-Vite tablets, which she had heard were a cure for a broken heart: ‘
A slightly unromantic way of curing lovesickness I admit, but I certainly feel a lot better now.’[1]

  Sensibly, Pym buried herself in academic work, though her choice of reading material, All Men Are Enemies and The Anatomy of Melancholy, might not have been the most helpful in her present circumstances. But, as ever, her sense of humour prevailed: ‘Perhaps I’m suffering from the spleen too – in that case I may be completely cured by taking a course of our English poets.’ Her common sense told her that she should develop a ‘whatever is, is right’ attitude and ‘quite honestly I suppose all this is rather good for me – and an affair with Gabriel probably wouldn’t be!’[2]

  In some ways, she was both cured and cursed by her course in the English poets. Her romantic nature was stirred by her summer reading – Marlowe, Shelley, Spenser and Shakespeare – most of which made her think of Henry. She began knitting a green jumper for him. Her love for him seemed inextricably linked with her fascination with his best friend, Jock Liddell: ‘Jockie reminds me of a flower I discovered tonight. I don’t know what kind.’ For pleasure, Pym was reading Norman Douglas’s controversial South Wind. Written during the First World War and set on Capri, it anticipated Crome Yellow in its focus on the antics and discussions of a motley group of bohemians. Barbara copied out a paragraph that she thought was appropriate for her wild Sandra persona: ‘If I had children I would let them run wild. People are too tame nowadays. That is why so few of them have any charm … Why is everybody so much alike? Because we never follow our feelings.’ She added a thought that would prove to be important for her own novels: ‘Incidentally people may be very untame inwardly – one can seldom know.’[3]

  The novel assuaged some of her longing for smart conversation. Her frustration with her dull life in Shropshire is apparent in many of her diary entries: ‘I dislike tennis parties – here anyway. Too much small talk with people who are generally bores – sometimes one even dislikes them … at 8, Mrs Makelam and Maud came to play bridge. I sat in an armchair like a docile donkey and knitted my green jumper.’[4] Her mother did her best to help, reminding her daughter not to work too hard, bringing endless cups of tea and taking her out for drives around the countryside. She did not know the extent of Barbara’s fragility, but offered her comforting sayings such as ‘God moves in a mysterious way’, and ‘It will all work out for the best’.

  A family holiday was planned to Pwllheli, where there were beautiful beaches for the girls and a coastline golf course for Links and Dor. Pym was still moody: ‘I contended that there was a smell of dead fish everywhere.’ Many family friends were on holiday, some of them staying in the same hotel, but she was in no mood to humour them: ‘It was very sordid seeing people like the Flemings.’ She only longed for ‘liebe Gabriel’. Despite enjoying sunbathing in the glorious weather and swimming in the sea, she thought constantly of Harvey: ‘Darling Gabriel, why aren’t you here, why can’t you write?’[5] In the evening, there was a band and dancing in the ballroom. She danced with a nice young man to ‘Stormy Weather’. But in bed later she felt cast down. Pym was growing up and growing apart from her family. Even Pwllheli had somehow lost its charm. The Oxford long vacation was far too long.

  Back in Shropshire, the first weeks of September were sunny and beautiful. Pym worked hard on Restoration drama, but enjoyed contemporary novels far more. She read Rumbold’s Little Victims ‘properly’ and found it sad. ‘I used to laugh at it before I knew one.’[6] ‘It’ was homosexuality.

  A brand new novel about female undergraduate life – Hot-House by Gertrude Trevelyan, who had been up at Lady Margaret Hall during the 1920s – made Barbara long to write an Oxford novel herself, but, prudently, she decided that she should wait until her ‘emotions are simmered down fairly well’.[7]

  It was time to make clothes for Sandra. Pym went into town and bought some red satin to make a Russian-style blouse, which she thought would be plain, but distinctive. She began reading another novel that was hot off the press, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s More Women Than Men, set in an all-girls school. She was unimpressed: ‘saw no point in it – unreal people and not much story’.[8] (Later, she would change her mind and become one of Compton-Burnett’s most ardent fans.) Pym still found herself beset by strange behavioural moods:

  In the afternoon I laughed until I cried, a bad sign – only over a piece of blue georgette too! I wasn’t unhappy, I put it down to the length of the vac and depressions of the obvious kind … Oh for Gabriel Harvey to press kisses on my not unwilling mouth as he did on that not yet forgotten evening of May 10th![9]

  She was preparing herself for the return to Oxford. Hilary went back to school in Liverpool and Pym went shopping, buying a black mackintosh (like Henry’s) and a ‘chaste green linen bedspread’. She packed her trunk, her books and her hats. Sitting on her bed, she resolved that once back at college, she would not let herself get unhappy about Henry, or his friends, ‘or anyone’.[10]

  CHAPTER XX

  We are given a Glimpse of Sandra’s Diary

  Pym went up a week early, in order to get away from home, and rented digs until she could move back into her college room – ‘very nice, nine bedrooms and no aspidistras’. Oxford was glowing in the autumnal sunshine, ‘everything looking swell’.[1] She had tea in Elliston’s, noting that they had new china but the same delicious coffee layer cake. The Bod and St Hilda’s were shut up, but the Radcliffe Camera was open and there was much shopping to be done.

  That term, Pym started a new diary. It was to be a record of the adventures not of Miss Pym, as was her first diary, but of Sandra. Its epigraph was from Hamlet: ‘Be not too tame either, but let your own discretion be your tutor.’[2] ‘Sandra’ was determined to fall in love with another man so as to forget Henry. Nevertheless, she traipsed up the Iffley Road and looked into the window of number 252, the room Henry had once shared with Jock.

  There was a lot of comfort eating – steak and kidney pie at Kemp Hall cafeteria, whilst looking out for Henry. The only friend she saw there was Jock, who gave her a ‘poisonous look, but I didn’t mind’. John Barnicot was another of Henry’s great friends and she occasionally saw him around Oxford. His eyesight was poor, so she was never quite sure if he was ignoring her or whether he couldn’t see her properly: ‘I smiled brilliantly but he took no notice – is he afraid, ashamed or merely short-sighted?’[3]

  Barnicot, a few years older than Henry, had travelled extensively in the Balkans during the early 1930s on a scholarship. After returning to Oxford he took a job in the Bodleian working on old Slavonic manuscripts. Confusingly, Pym calls him ‘the Count’ in her journals, whereas the real count in the group was Roberto Weiss. The latter was born in Milan and raised in Rome. There was a legend that Weiss had first gone to Cambridge University, but upon finding he didn’t like it, got into a taxi, went to Oxford and persuaded them to take him in.[4] By the time Pym knew him, Weiss was living in the village of Islip, where he worked as a researcher for the novelist, biographer and historian John Buchan.

  Pym moved back into St Hilda’s and set about decorating her room in the most artistic and aesthetic style she could manage. The chaste green quilt was laid and she had lovely checked cushions (one of them with ‘Sandra’ embroidered across it). She arranged her selection of books, her bookends and pictures. A fire burnt cheerily in the grate and she had a gramophone to listen to the latest music. On the table in the window alcove she placed a vase of bronze chrysanthemums. From her room she could hear the chimes of the great clocks of Magdalen and Merton. She went to dinner in her black polo jersey to scope out the new female freshers, none of whom she considered beautiful. There were rumours that Henry was back at Oxford, studying for a graduate degree, but she had seen no sign of him. The next day she went shopping for visiting cards and bought red roses for her female friends, noting that if she bumped into Henry, she would give them all away to him.

  Pym found that she was starting to enjoy her pose of romantically unrequited love. She went back to her cosy room and
was lying on the bed, listening to the gramophone, when her friend Rosemary burst in with the news that she had seen Henry in town. Pym was so excited and nervous that she could not eat tea. Off she went to Blackwell’s in hot pursuit. She wore her black polo neck jersey and a grey flannel suit with a marigold in her collar, giving a pop of colour. She was coming away from Blackwell’s for the second time when she saw him. He was with Jock Liddell and there was no escape: ‘He took off his hat and gave me a marvellous smile – a slightly mocking bow I thought – but it’s difficult to tell with him. I was horribly nervous and grinned, I imagine.’[5] She followed them and glimpsed them at Elliston’s and tracked them down St Michael’s Street, before losing sight of them. But she was not concerned. Henry was back and she had seen him again.

  Lovely Harry Harker was still in love with Pym and paid court, even though she had told him that she was still in love with Henry and that she could not kiss him. He took her out on dates. She knew that being seen with Harry would give a strong message to Henry that she wasn’t pining for him.[6]

  Sandra was growing in confidence. She bought a fez, the latest Duke Ellington record and henna for her new short hair. She painted her nails a becoming shade of rose pink. But she was also working hard. She enjoyed a lecture by Tolkien on Beowulf. She was becoming very drawn to Jock Liddell, whom she saw regularly in the library. She was fascinated by his air of ‘dissipation’, his disdainful sneer and his sharp dress sense. For the present, Jock found her to be nothing more than an irritating and annoying limpet, who was trying (and failing) to force her way into his circle of friends.