The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  At ARP training there were make-believe casualties for practice: ‘very macabre and surrealist’. Pym also had a new job at the baby clinic in town: ‘I’m learning quite a lot about babies and their feeding.’[6] She had a very amusing letter from Private D. S. Liddell, Jock’s brother, now in the army. Both Liddell brothers continued their regular correspondence, though she rarely heard from Henry.

  Later that month, it was time to say goodbye to Stewart, who was about to leave for the war. Pym felt melancholic. She thought of him getting up at 4.30 a.m and going off to fight the Germans. After lunch, she read a new novel by R. C. Hutchinson called The Fire and the Wood, a story of decency and oppression in the early years of Nazism, centred on the incarceration of a Jewish doctor. The incongruity of reading its concentration camp scenes whilst listening to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto led her to declare in her diary: ‘Oh Germany.’[7]

  Many of the British soldiers whom Pym befriended had now left for active service. When she went to Park Hall later on, she was saddened by the air of absence, though one of the remaining soldiers caught her eye: ‘A ravishingly handsome second lieutenant poured into an exquisitely tailored overcoat came in, but he studied his book of “Gas Drill”, rather than me.’[8]

  It snowed for most of January and into February. Her friend Rosemary Topping’s London flat was bombed in the Blitz and Rosemary was buried in the ruins, though survived unharmed. Pym was deeply impressed by the courage of her friends: ‘Now we have heroes and heroines for friends who before were just ordinary people.’[9]

  CHAPTER XII

  I Married a Nazi

  ‘Went to the clinic,’ Pym noted. ‘I am gradually learning to pick up a baby with a nonchalant air.’[1] This was all well and good, but in the new year of 1941 she felt that there might be more challenging work she could undertake for the war effort: ‘Busy in the house and wondering (as I sometimes do) whether I ought not to be doing other things – leading a fuller life.’[2]

  There were no more small luxuries such as cigarettes and chocolates. Within a few months, the government announced clothes rationing. Each person received a ration book of sixty-six coupons, which had to last for a year. Every item of clothing had a coupon value attached to it. Coats needed sixteen coupons, a jacket thirteen, trousers eight, a shirt five, shoes seven and underwear eight coupons. Clothes had to be adapted to suit every season. But at least the cinemas were still open. Pym had loved the pictures ever since her student days in Oxford. Her war journals list all of the films she saw, many of them war propaganda movies.

  In May, Pym saw a film that had many resonances. The Man I Married (sometimes known as I Married a Nazi) was a powerful anti-Nazi film. It tells the story of an American art critic, Carol, who has married a handsome and genial German man, Eric. They have a young son. Despite the protestations of their American friends, they visit Germany in 1938, where Eric becomes caught up in the Nazi movement. Initially, Carol is enthusiastic about the Nazis and believes that Hitler has restored pride to her husband’s nation. ‘I gather you’re one of those people who pride themselves on being fair to the Nazis,’ says one of the Jewish characters, who is unimpressed by her naivety.[3] But once she is in Berlin, she is horrified to witness the violence of the Nazis against the Jews.

  Meanwhile, Eric becomes indoctrinated after hearing Hitler speak at Nuremberg. He falls in love with a blonde Aryan fascist called Frieda. Carol befriends an American journalist who tells her that making a joke about Hitler is a crime. She is horrified by the transformation of her charming husband into a cruel and heartless Nazi. He asks her for a divorce and, when she refuses, he threatens to tell the Gestapo that she has insulted Hitler – a crime that gives grounds for a man to divorce his wife. When Carol tries to flee to America with her son, he refuses to allow the child to travel, claiming that he needs to stay in Germany, where he will eventually become part of the Hitler Youth. The day is saved by the intervention of Eric’s father, who is deeply troubled by the events in his country and wants his grandson to live as an American citizen. He tells Eric that his mother was a Jewess – a revelation that causes Eric to break down in tears, much to the disgust of his wife.

  The film caused Pym to reflect once more on her troubled relationship with Germany. She had become close to being engaged to Friedbert and it was a frightening reminder of the vulnerability of her position. At one point, Carol is taken by the Gestapo for helping a Jewish family and is only released by the intervention of an American journalist. Pym thought that the film was ‘very good’. Inevitably, her thoughts turned immediately to her Nazi boyfriend: ‘Oh, if I had married poor F[riedbert].’ There is a whole wealth of meaning in that sentence. Sassy, straight-talking Carol’s fate might well have been Pym’s own. The transformation of handsome, clever, cultured Friedbert, in his green Tyrolean hat, into a Jew-hating Nazi was all too close to the bone. Her joke in Some Tame Gazelle about the ‘poor Nazis exiled to Africa’ could have cost her much if indeed she had married poor Friedbert.

  Nevertheless, Pym was happy to ‘hear German spoken’.[4] Her fluency in the language would come in handy by the end of the year, when the government decreed that unmarried women and all women from the ages of nineteen to thirty were required to register for war work, and the Ministry of Labour sent Pym details of a job in the Censorship Department (German Division). She began brushing up her German by reading Friedbert’s letters. ‘Even if there are things to regret and even be ashamed of, one cannot forget happiness and kindness.’[5]

  CHAPTER XIII

  Miss Pym returns to her ‘Sentimental Journal’

  Pym reported her impressions of the war: the frightful bombing, sirens blasting and the distant rumble of bombs over Liverpool and Birkenhead. She endured long nights at the first-aid post, getting through by smoking, knitting, talking, eating and trying to sleep in the stuffy air, covered with a scratchy army blanket. She also worked hard in the YMCA canteens at the tented camp and at Park Hall.

  Early in 1941, Pym rummaged in search of a notebook in which to keep a record of her dreams. She found her recollections of Julian Amery, describing it as a ‘sentimental journal’ in contrast to her pocket diaries in which she recorded ‘everyday happenings’. This was where she reflected on past loves, future hopes and momentous events. She actually described it as ‘a sentimental journal or whatever you (Gentle Reader in the Bodleian) like to call it’, which suggests a degree of confidence that she would become a published author and posterity would want her archive.[1]

  The spring made her think of Julian yet again: these were ‘his months’. She had been temporarily in love with Stewart, but ‘it has all passed now and my heart is quite free again with Jay’s memory warming it’. She had accepted that her love for Julian was a fantasy and that he was a useful muse: ‘I hear no news of him – I don’t write.’ She was improving her mind by reading Walter Scott, Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen. She also read Vanity Fair after hearing it as a serial on the wireless: ‘That marvellous Waterloo chapter was especially appropriate this summer although I had nobody in France or at Dunkirk.’[2] Pym’s writing in her sentimental journal was sensuous and lyrical: ‘Here it is – summer and at least the dream of flowers has come true. In my room delphinium, sweet williams, roses and sweet peas … Afterwards picking flowers I thought of “Go Lovely Rose” and “How small a part of time they share/That are so wondrous sweet and fair”.’[3] She was self-reflective, too:

  It is extraordinary how the slightest emotional disturbance (like hoping to have a little German conversation with a Czech officer) can put all other ideas out of one’s head, making one stupid and unable to concentrate on anything intelligent … it is humiliating to discover that one has not grown out of this sort of thing, but enlightening too, a useful experience and happily it passes.[4]

  Pym was still trying to discover what kind of writer she wanted to be. Writing short stories for magazines was a useful way to be published, but her heart was in writing novels. After reading Tols
toy’s Anna Karenina that summer, she considered writing something ‘nostalgic, faintly Russian and true … it seems that the best stories nowadays are more atmospheric than anything else’.[5]

  She had also been reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. She had encountered Woolf before, but this was the first time she took note of her ‘special technique’. Though at face value it is difficult to imagine more different writers than Virginia Woolf and Barbara Pym, Pym was acute in sensing their mutual interest in small things and events and in the creation of mood. Less concerned with plot, in favour of philosophical introspection, Woolf’s novel reads more like a series of observations and thoughts. It was a style that appealed to Pym:

  It is one that commends itself to me – I find it attractive and believe I could do it. Indeed, I already have, in a mild way. Sitting by the kitchen fire drying my hair, a cat, a basket chair and a willow tree and Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt meeting in the middle of the ocean to discuss War and Peace Aims.[6]

  Woolf’s To the Lighthouse recalls childhood experiences and emotions which, combined with her experiences of the evacuees and in the nursery, gave Pym a new interest in children. Home help was increasingly difficult to find in 1941 and the Pyms hired a grandmother, Mrs Morris, who brought along her granddaughter, Dorothy. Barbara’s sharp eye took in every movement:

  Dorothy follows you about or if you are sitting in the garden stands and peers at you through the trelliswork by the back door. One morning when I was washing up the breakfast things she came and stood with her hands at the draining board staring at me … We are embarrassed when children stare at us – there is something unnerving about it.

  She toyed with the possibility of writing something about a child ‘like Dorothy or evacuees’.

  Pym’s reflective mood in the summer of 1941 was heightened by the fact that Dor and Links had decided to sell Morda Lodge. The house was large and expensive to maintain, and Hilary was working and living away from home with little sign of returning to Shropshire. The Pyms found a new house called Blytheswood and in September Barbara began planning her new bedroom. Moving away from her childhood home was an important moment. Sorting out old letters, she found the one that Henry had written to her which had caused such anguish: ‘Respect and esteem – perhaps the same for me now.’[7]

  Wartime privations also heightened Pym’s preoccupation with food. There was tea at Garth Derwen, her aunt’s house outside Oswestry. ‘Lovely food – tomato sandwiches, blackberry jam-scones and bread, swiss roll and chocolate cake.’[8] Comestibles once taken for granted were now elevated to delicacies of the rarest kind: a large jar of marmalade seemed more desirable than a new love affair.

  One night when Merseyside and Belfast were badly bombed, Pym had to stay in the air-raid shelter until 4 a.m. It was a clear night with a cluster of bright stars. The next morning, she was back at work at the baby clinic. She was tired and emotional, thinking of Julian and the last time she saw him standing in the doorway of his house in Eaton Square. In one year, she had only been as far as north Wales. ‘I was altogether in a restless and unenviable state today wondering whether I ought not to be in some job or one of the services for my own sake as well as patriotic reasons.’[9] But there was always the comfort of writing: ‘After supper, I did some more writing, which quells my restlessness – That is how I must succeed!’[10]

  CHAPTER XIV

  So Very Secret

  Pym had begun notes for a spy novel in January 1940, but she was now ready to begin writing in earnest. She used her experience in the ARP to good effect, but the work is Pym’s weakest. Self-confessedly, she was struggling with the plot and it is lacking in her unique sense of humour. But there are vivid details of England in the early years of war and ‘the rather ludicrous activities of a country village in wartime’.[1]

  The heroine, Cassandra Swan, is busy at the militia camp canteen, poaching eggs, cutting thick sandwiches and distributing tea out of a huge urn to the ever-hungry and thirsty servicemen. The village is so dull that ‘even the evacuees left us’ – though the local people prefer to think of their village as a small town, with its few shops, hairdresser and cinema. Cassandra is visited by one of her school friends, who now has a glamorous job in the ‘higher reaches of the Civil Service’. Cassie is a middle-aged spinster whose once-great love, Adrian, is now a politician. She would have liked to have been his wife, but, she has to admit, he never asked her.

  One of the characters, Frau Nussbaum, is a refugee from Vienna whose husband has been incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp: ‘Oh, we were silent, pitying and remembering horrors we had read about.’[2] People confuse her origins and believe that she is a German and therefore suspect. An argument breaks out between the women in the camp when Frau Nussbaum shoves another helper out of the way of the toaster: ‘We don’t want Germans here … to have some fat German woman pushing me away from the toaster.’[3]

  There are discussions about the way the war is going, the threat of invasion and the ‘jackboot gangsterism’ of the Nazis – though they are conceded to be more ‘efficient’ than the Allies. The dangers of pro-Nazi sentiments are emphasised: it is a crime that can be reported to the police.

  When Cassandra’s friend Harriet mysteriously disappears from the local hairdressers, the threat of kidnapping, even rape, hangs in the air: ‘It was a relief to know that she wouldn’t be likely to suffer the sort of experience about which Miss Moberly rather gloated, with shrewd whispers and goggling eyes.’[4] The elderly Miss Moberly has appeared before, in Gervase and Flora.

  Cassie returns to Maida Vale, which has been bombed but still has an air of nobility, as though it is a city of ancient ruins. She meets and befriends a prostitute and worries about what Miss Moberly would say if she knew. Though Cassandra has lived a sheltered life, she has often observed the prostitutes who hang around Piccadilly underground station in their high heels.

  The prostitute, Jenny Dale, has a message from Harriet and takes Cassandra back to her flat. Cassandra expects to find a messy room with an unmade bed, but the flat is like a Victorian parlour, tidy and neat. Cassandra cannot help looking at the bed and imagining the scenes that have unfolded there. She puts her curiosity down to a subconscious ‘Freudian’ feeling linked to her state of spinsterhood. Cassandra has renounced sex and this young woman is selling it.

  There are two characters based on Julian Amery: a young Balliol man called Hugh Fordyce, whom Cassandra thinks might one day be Secretary of State for India (the post Leo Amery would hold throughout the war), and the older man, Adrian, the love of her life. In London, she realises that she is being followed by Frau Nussbaum and takes refuge (improbably) in Adrian’s Eaton Square house, whose front door just happens to be unlocked. The place smells of incense and Turkish cigarettes. Cassandra finds his library and is tempted to pry through his papers, but when she hears footsteps, she hides in an alcove. She longs for a romantic reunion, but when she is discovered, Adrian does not recognise his old love. Though in the prime of life and still ‘outwardly’ handsome, despite a greying around the temples, his face is ‘blank and wooden’. He has become a pompous politician.[5] Nevertheless, he still has the charm, which he switches on ‘like an electric fire’. Cynically, she imagines him comforting pensioners and cuddling babies. He is no longer, as she had once written in a poem for him, the ‘Jewel of Balliol and Eaton Square / United in him virtues all too rare’.[6]

  Pym’s wish fulfilment is self-evident. She is rewriting the scene in the library in Eaton Square, where Julian had once kissed her and then broken off the affair, and imagining a romantic reunion twenty-seven years later. Though she longs to rush into his arms, she knows that he is married to his work and that he barely remembers who she is – he is a handsome, charming MP and she has become a ‘dried-up spinster’ in a faded dress.

  So Very Secret ultimately fails as a novel. The spy novel is not Pym’s genre and she is not a master of intricacy of plot. The characters, for once, are flat a
nd lifeless. Nevertheless, it was her first sustained experiment in first-person narrative, which is handled ably. It gave her the idea and structure that she would execute so perfectly in the character of Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women.

  And it helped her to find her great theme. Cassandra is frustrated by male incompetence. ‘Men are so inefficient – why is it that they take twice as long as we do over the simplest little job?’ Part of her enjoys the freedom conveyed by her spinsterhood and she finds the male species often repellent: ‘As I am unmarried I have no very great respect for men.’[7] Pym wrote on the flyleaf of the manuscript: ‘Is Spinster an occupation – very definitely!’

  CHAPTER XV

  Operation Bullseye

  Julian was often on Pym’s mind. Though not hearing directly from him, she kept her ear to the ground for news of his movements. On his twenty-second birthday (27 March 1941), she put a vase of daffodils next to his photograph. Two weeks later, she placed a vase of spring flowers for the one ‘who may be now in the Balkans and whom I shall always love’.[1] And two weeks after that, she finished a first draft of her story, ‘About me, Julian and the ARP’.[2] It was titled, ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital’. She had finished it and typed it out in a matter of weeks. Pym had read in the Telegraph that Julian had been made captain; she was proud of his achievements. His war career was even more exciting and glamorous than she had anticipated.