The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  On the way home from Oxford, Pym sat in a blacked-out train reading Jock’s novel by low light. Changing trains at Birmingham, she had a cup at tea at Snow Hill station, noting stained-glass windows in a tree design. It was one of her last moments of peace, before the war began in earnest.

  On 7 May, Julian’s father stood up in the House of Commons and called for new leadership that could ‘match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory’. He was thinking, of course, of his friend Winston Churchill. He ended his speech by addressing Prime Minister Chamberlain directly: ‘Depart, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’[3]

  Three days later, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium, pushing on into France. The phoney war was over. ‘Of course the first feeling was the usual horror and disgust and the impossibility of finding words to describe this latest Schweinerei by the Germans,’ wrote Pym. The sudden realisation that the war ‘was coming a lot nearer to us – airbases in Holland and Belgium would make raids on England a certainty’. As a major port, Liverpool was a main target for bombing and the people in Shropshire rightly feared that German bombs would be dropped over the countryside on the way back from air raids.

  Reactions to hostilities differed. ‘People were either gloomy (Mr Beauclerk, the electrician and Mr Cobb, the wireless shop), slightly hysterical (Miss Bloomer) or just plainly calm like Steele.’ Pym felt frightened, ‘but hope I didn’t show it and anyway one still has the “it couldn’t happen to us” feeling’. That evening, Chamberlain went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the king. The sound of his voice on the wireless was, for Barbara, a reminder of how he had tried so hard to attain peace: ‘there is no more courageous man in the government or indeed anywhere, I’m sure of that’.[4]

  Churchill was immediately asked to become prime minister and form a government of national unity. Hilary, always less naive than her sister, welcomed the change of leadership. She believed that Churchill ‘will be better for this war … he is such an old beast!’ Pym was forced to agree: ‘The Germans loathe and fear him and I believe he can do it.’[5]

  The tenth of May, now an historic landmark, was always a significant personal anniversary for Pym as it was the day she had gone on a date with Henry. Seven years on, in a new and terrifying world, she looked back: ‘Imagine a lovely summer evening at the Trout with the wisteria out and the soft murmuring of the water. And my heart so full of everything. And now, emotion recollected in tranquillity … dust and ashes, dry bones.’[6]

  CHAPTER IX

  Miss Pym joins the ARP

  Where once Pym’s diary was full of dates with boys, and shopping and travel, now it recorded the news on the wireless:

  16th May, Fierce fighting in France and Belgium. Duff Cooper. Very Good talk …

  21st May, Grave news from France …

  23rd May, The Germans have Boulogne.

  On 26 May there was a day of national prayer. Pym attended church services both morning and evening. Despite the bad news, she remained optimistic. The sermons were first-rate and the church was packed: ‘I thought, Friedbert against this, you haven’t a chance!’[1]

  Jock Liddell took a darker view of the events in France: ‘If Herr Hitler wins, I hope you will marry Friedbert and then do your best for us all.’[2]

  Liddell had written to Pym in March to tell her that his sister Betty had suffered a nervous breakdown. Both he and his brother Don believed it had been brought on by their stepmother, and events would prove them to be correct. The news had been kept from the brothers, but somehow Don discovered the truth and they went immediately to the hospital in Clifton where Betty was being treated. They learned that she had had three bad breakdowns. Their stepmother had insisted she had been suffering from the flu. Betty Liddell was a pitiful sight and begged not to be sent home to her stepmother. The doctor told the brothers that, although she was very ill, it was not necessary to incarcerate her, provided kind people could be arranged for her care. Jock insisted that she should be kept away from her stepmother and if necessary a family intervention could be staged if the woman made trouble.

  On 29 May, Pym noted: ‘Desperate fighting on the Western Front.’ On 10 June came the news that Mussolini had declared war on Britain and that France had fallen. The French government departed that day and on 14 June the Germans were in Paris and the occupation had begun. Two days later, she wrote: ‘France is in desperate straits. We must prepare for the worst knowing in our hearts that we shall win in the end.’[3]

  Many people, including Jock, believed that England would be next on Hitler’s list. He hoped that when the English occupation took place that he would be in Oxford. He wrote to Pym: ‘I am amazed at your confidence, convinced as I am that before the end of the month the swastika will be flying over St Oswald’s church.’[4] Pym was having none of it: ‘The country is lovely, honeysuckle in the hedges. How dare the Nazis think they could invade it.’[5]

  That month, she joined the Oswestry ARP.[6] Her role was to help man a first-aid post set up to deal with casualties from air raids. One of her initial tasks was to practise picking up imaginary casualties. When the air-raid sirens wailed, she had to rush to the post. In her short story ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital’, Pym channelled her experience into that of Laura Arling. Night-time duty was especially daunting. Every time Laura hears the siren wailing in the evening, her stomach turns over:

  Still, it was eerie when it went at night and one never knew for certain that the planes were just passing over on their way to Liverpool. Sometimes they sounded as if they were right over the house and, as the Head Warden had said, not without a certain professional relish, two or three well placed H. E. bombs could practically wipe out their small town.[7]

  The Blitz began on 7 September 1940. London was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe for fifty-six of the following fifty-seven days and nights. The Liverpool Blitz was no less horrific. The first major air raid took place in late August, when 160 bombers flew over the city in a single night. This assault continued over the next three nights, then regularly for the rest of the year. There were fifty raids on the city during this three-month period: some of them minor – a few aircraft dropping bombs and incendiaries over a few minutes – others comprising up to 300 aircraft and lasting over ten hours.

  Pym heard the bombers as they passed over Shropshire on the way to Liverpool. The Luftwaffe jettisoned bombs in the countryside on their way back to their air bases. The sirens would go off and they would dash to the shelter, returning home in the early morning when the all-clear was given.

  Like her heroine, Laura Arling, Pym was given an ARP badge, an armband and a tin hat, serving as a makeshift uniform:

  She came downstairs carrying her gas mask and a neat little suitcase, in which she had packed her knitting, Pride and Prejudice, some biscuits and a precious bar of milk chocolate. On her head she wore a tin hat, painted pale grey and beautiful in its newness … Going out like this and not knowing when she would return always made her feel rather grand, almost noble, as if she were setting out on a secret and dangerous mission. The tin hat made a difference, too. One felt much more splendid in a tin hat. It was almost a uniform.[8]

  Pym was also given a torch, with strict instructions to hold the beam downwards. The bulb was swathed in tissue paper and tied as on a pot of jam so that she wanted to write on it something like ‘Raspberry 1911’, as her mother used to do.

  In the story, Laura’s eyes soon become accustomed to the dark and she can hear the ‘sinister purring sound’ of the planes overhead. Her tin hat is heavy on her head, ‘like a flower on a broken stalk’. When she finally arrives at the shelter, she hears a woman saying: ‘Liverpool again.’ Laura wishes for something adequate to say, but there is nothing: ‘It was of no consolation to the bombed that the eyes of women in safe places should fill with tears when they spoke of them. Tears, idle tears were of no use to anyone, not even to oneself.’[9] Pym’s war journals are bald and factual,
whereas this moving short story is evidence of her very deep feeling and compassion for the pity of war.

  In Pym’s writing, however, compassion is always leavened with good humour and cheerfulness. Once everyone is gathered at the shelter, there is an air of bustle, efficiency and brisk jollity. People have their jobs to do. Stretcher-bearers dressed in dark blue boiler suits fill water bottles and collect blankets. An efficient girl mans the telephone. The doctor is stout and reassuring.

  One of the boons of the war was the way in which classes and ranks mixed. ‘The most unlikely people were gathered together, people who otherwise would never have known each other.’ In the darkness of the shelter, conversation is animated: ‘horrible stories of raid damage, fine imaginative rumours, tidbits about the private lives of the Nazi leaders gleaned from the Sunday papers’. They sit drinking tea and sharing their food; biscuits, rare blocks of chocolate ‘broken up and shared like the Early Christians’; thickly cut bread and margarine with a smear of fish paste on each slice. ‘No banquet was ever more enjoyed than this informal meal at one o’clock in the morning.’[10]

  All of these details were gleaned from Pym’s real-life experiences, recorded in her diary. One night, they all stood around listening to aeroplanes and looking for them amongst the stars, hearing the thud of bombs in the direction of Wrexham. ‘The Surrealists have nothing on us for odd situations!’ Pym noted, grimly. So too, her heroine Laura observes the ‘smoky room crowded with silent men and women, lying or sitting on beds, chairs or the floor, some covered with dark army blankets … there was nothing in Dali and the Surrealists more odd than this reality’.[11] Pym’s experience of war, collated in her observational journals, is transformed into her fiction, an alchemy that was becoming crucial to her art.

  CHAPTER X

  In which our Heroine works for the YMCA in an Army Tented Camp

  Almost as soon as war broke out, the YMCA set up mobile canteens to feed the troops. In 1939, an army tented camp was erected on the outskirts of Oswestry. In July 1940, Pym volunteered to help out. There was a great sense of excitement about the camp and the soldiers.

  Her first day was enjoyable: ‘Great fun and very busy.’[1] The next day, Pym made herself a fetching overall of blue checked gingham. She now had a bike and so she cycled to the camp. Her principal duties involved handing out food and drink, working on the cash desk and, most importantly, chatting with the soldiers and keeping up morale.

  Pym found some of the work exhausting, but it was fun talking with the other women and flirting with the soldiers. She was delighted when a Scotsman called her a ‘wee smasher’. She discovered a ‘beautiful pre-Raphaelite Lance Bombardier’ and a theological student called Harry. She thought it was amusing when one of the sergeants asked her if she would darn his socks – it was a world away from darning Henry’s in Oxford. Despite working all day and often in the air-raid shelters at night, she never complained.

  The Pyms were still able to enjoy their family holidays at the Welsh seaside resorts of Pwllheli and Abersoch: ‘many pretty boats and a glorious view’.[2] Pym also took a city break, visiting Hilary in Bristol, where she had relocated with the BBC. The sisters had a day excursion in Bath, a city made famous by Pym’s literary heroine, Jane Austen. It was another heavenly day when the war suddenly felt a long way away: ‘Sunshine and Jane Austen.’[3]

  Back at the tented camp, she met a nice gunner called Desmond Green. They made a pact to meet for a rendezvous on the Isle of Skye in 1944.[4] Desmond, ‘all violet-brillatined’, rode her bicycle around the field outside the camp. He took off her magenta chiffon scarf and put his identity disk in its place. ‘And now I wear it.’[5]

  In late October, the camp was packed up: ‘Down to the camp to find mud and desolation, everything being packed up – said many goodbyes.’[6] Pym’s life went back to its usual routines of dressmaking, cycling around Shropshire and occasional shopping trips to Shrewsbury. She missed the buzz and camaraderie of the camp. Things looked up in November, when she was assigned to a new camp in Park Hall, a former army barracks. Her duties were much the same and she met many more soldiers, though she continued to write to Desmond. She also helped out at the local food office: ‘I stamped 700 ration cards three times each. Aching in every limb.’[7] Again and again, she noted the sound of distant bombing as Liverpool was targeted by the Luftwaffe.

  Back on duty in the air-raid shelter, she read Jane Austen’s Emma to pass the time, sitting on the shelter stairs.[8] The shelter was hot and stuffy with so many people crammed into a small space. So hot that she longed to be inside a gas mask, ‘with its cool rubbery smell’. In ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital’, Laura describes the lethargy after the main meal and before settling for sleep:

  The women knitted rather grimly and the men, already tired after a day’s work, dozed and smoked. The room was very hot and people were seen dimly through a haze. Laura thought longingly of rivers, pools and willows, of her own linen sheets, of plunging one’s face under water when swimming, even of the inside of a gas mask, with its cool rubbery smell and tiny space of unbreathed air.[9]

  When the all-clear is sounded, there is sudden activity:

  A beautiful note sounded through the room, piercing and silvery as the music of the spheres must sound. It was the All Clear. In a surprisingly short time the blanket-covered shapes became human and active, everything was put away and they walked out into the sharp, cold air, their voices and footsteps ringing through the empty streets.[10]

  Pym describes the feeling of ‘the glow of virtue which comes from duty done’. No matter that there are no bombs and no casualties, ‘but they had been standing by. They had missed their night’s rest so that if anything had happened they would have been there to deal with it.’[11]

  As Christmas drew close, Pym finished Emma and looked forward to Hilary’s return from Bristol. At the end of the year she wrote: ‘I have met many charming people. May 1941 be as nice and bring us closer to VICTORY!’[12]

  CHAPTER XI

  A Sketch of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett

  By now, Jock was in Athens with the British Council. Before he left he had managed to procure a meeting with his literary idol, Ivy Compton-Burnett. He was planning an article for Horizon about her genius, but wanted Compton-Burnett’s approval first: ‘It would be a pity to make mistakes about a living writer who was there to correct them.’ Ivy invited him to tea at her home, Braemar Mansions in Kensington – and thus began a friendship which would endure over a quarter of a century. Liddell later wrote a book about his friendship with Ivy and another novelist whom he greatly admired, Elizabeth Taylor.[1] At the time of his meeting Ivy, he sent Pym detailed letters of the kind he knew she would enjoy:

  I called on Sunday at 3.30 and she let me in. Miss C.B. is a small, upright woman in the fifties, plainly dressed in a well-cut black silk dress. Her hair hangs low in a fringe on her forehead … it is reddish gold, little streaked with grey … in spite of keen blue eyes, she has generally a peaceful expression.[2]

  It was a great moment for Jock and he greedily absorbed every detail, the sparsely furnished room with grey walls, scattered with rugs here and there. He sat on a plain black velvet Empire sofa and they talked. Ivy told Jock that she liked his piece and hoped it would be published, as she was so little known.

  Tea went ‘through all its stages’ (a phrase lifted from the novel More Women Than Men): watercress sandwiches, cheese straws and home-made gingerbread. With Ivy was her life partner, Margaret Jourdain, whom Liddell felt was a most impressive figure. She was a great expert on English furniture and was the younger sister of Eleanor Jourdain, the principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Eleanor was famous for her ‘adventure’ at Versailles, where she and her friend Annie Moberly claimed that they had been transported back in time and seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon. The women wrote a book about their experience, which was a cause of great controversy. One wonders whether Pym’s adoption of the appellation Miss Moberly as th
e name for a cantankerous old lady might have been a tribute, or whether it was a coincidence.

  Liddell and Compton-Burnett talked about publishing – she complained about her publishers and said the only one of her novels that had sold well was Brothers and Sisters, because it was about incest. To his evident delight, Ivy told him that she was passionate about Jane Austen and liked Mansfield Park the best – she was ‘devoted to the Crawfords’. She ‘thought she would go mad’ because Jane Austen never finished her novel The Watsons. Jock remembered that they talked too much of the Marie Antoinette vision: ‘we wished to be speaking of other things’, he noted.[3]

  Knowing Pym’s fondness for relics, Jock attached to his letter a paperclip belonging to Compton-Burnett. He told her: ‘You had better keep this letter for use by literary researchers in better days, who will know all about that great writer.’ He also told Pym more about the ongoing crisis with his sister and stepmother. It looked to the Liddell brothers that Betty’s doctor was going to betray her back into her stepmother’s hands, so they headed straight to Clifton, with suitcases, to carry her off to Cornwall. They managed to convince their sister’s doctor that living with their stepmother was the cause of all her mental suffering. But as they left the clinic, Don opened the front door to reveal, to their horror, the most unwelcome sight of their stepmother: ‘It was one of the great moments of one’s life.’[4] After an awkward exchange, they escaped to the station, laughing with relief and anxiety.

  Pym’s life in Shropshire seemed slightly monotonous by comparison. At Park Hall camp, she befriended a Scottish gunner called Stewart. As she had learned German for Friedbert and Finnish for Henry, she began to learn Gaelic for Stewart. They went to the pictures ‘holding hands, eating ice-cream and being generally childish’. It was January and there was snow on the ground; Pym was bitterly cold despite her new fur-lined boots. She painted her nails ‘thistle’ and had Stewart to supper: ‘poached eggs, spaghetti and mince pies’.[5] He gave her a lesson in Gaelic, until they were disturbed by the sirens going off, forcing them to decamp to the air-raid shelter.