The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Julian Amery was never going to be content with a desk job. Soon after meeting Sandy Glen, he had become involved with the Special Operations Executive (one of his mentors always said he wanted to be a John Buchan character), an organisation formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe. SOE was sometimes known as ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’, or the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Julian was made to sign the Official Secrets Act and given the code name ‘AHA’.

  Pym had been keeping up to date with developments in the Balkans since the Italian invasion of Greece on 28 October 1940. On 6 April 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia. Julian headed to Istanbul, where he embarked on a number of successful secret missions. He would risk his life in many undercover operations during the war, including ‘Operation Bullseye’ – a daring operation into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia in which an SOE group was put ashore by submarine.

  Pym submitted her short story to the popular literary periodical Penguin New Writing. Founded by John Lehmann, a committed anti-fascist, it featured leading writers of the day, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. As well as being an evocative record of her life as a young woman serving with the ARP, it was another love letter to Julian Amery. Just as Pym would scan the newspapers to see if he had been ‘killed in action’, so too does her heroine, Laura Arling, who meets ‘Crispin’ at Oxford:

  She was remembering Crispin at a Commemoration Ball in Oxford … they had danced together an improper number of times … and at 6 o’clock, when the dance was over, they had gone on the river in a punt and had breakfast. It had been like a dream, walking down the Banbury Road in the early morning sunshine, wearing her white satin ball gown and holding Crispin’s hand.[3]

  Laura is deeply in love, but when the short-lived affair is over, she remembers Crispin’s kisses and the beautiful things he has said and she longs for letters which never come.

  When the war begins, Laura borrows a translation of Mein Kampf from Boots’ lending library. She never worries about Hitler and the Balkans. After the fall of France, she is relieved that Hitler is going in the opposite direction, the Drang Nach Osten – or push to the east. She is horrified when she then realises that Crispin’s ‘Balkan Capital’ is now being invaded.

  Laura has found it fairly easy to track Crispin. She consults Harmsworth’s Encyclopaedia to give her some local colour of his Balkan town:

  The British Legation was in the old part of town near to the famous Botanical Gardens. Laura often thought of Crispin walking there on fine spring mornings, perhaps sitting on a seat reading official documents, with lilacs, azaleas and later scarlet and yellow cannas making a fitting background for his dark good looks.[4]

  Like Pym, Laura is worried when the Balkan states sign the Axis agreement on 1 June 1941; all of Albania, Yugoslavia and Greece were under Axis control. Greece was placed in triple occupation and Yugoslavia was dissolved and occupied. Most alarmingly, Germany had gained a significant strategic advantage in having direct access to the Mediterranean.

  On the fall of Belgrade, Sandy Glen and the rest of the British legation fled to the coast and were evacuated by sea. Laura imagines Crispin ‘in his shirt sleeves, burning the code books, stuffing secret bulky documents into the central heating furnace, a lock of dark hair falling over one eye’. She imagines a hasty exit by ‘special diplomatic train’, with Crispin, sleeping in a comfortable cabin, ‘dark windows shuttered’. Maybe even the luxury of the Orient Express. But then Laura is overcome by a strong dose of reality:

  But Europe was never sleeping and now less than ever. Things happened in these hours when human vitality was at its lowest ebb; bombers rained death between one and four in the morning, troops crossed the frontiers at dawn … But it was ‘Goodbye Balkan Capital!’ and the train was rushing through the darkness to deposit its important passengers, blinking like ruffled owls in the early morning sunshine.[5]

  The truth was somewhat more prosaic. Julian Amery was having emergency dental treatment back in London and had missed the evacuation from the Balkans. During the operation to remove his wisdom teeth, a bomb exploded, knocking the anaesthetist to the ground; the operation went wrong and Julian ended up with a broken jaw and a serious infection.[6] He was told to stay in England to recuperate. He was furious at having missed out on the action.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Miss Pym is offered a Job in the Censorship Department (German) and hears News of Friedbert

  Nora Waln was an American journalist and anti-Nazi writer who wrote a best-selling book, Reaching for the Stars – a damning exposé of the Third Reich, published in 1938. It was based on her real experiences living in Germany between 1934 and 1938. Waln loved her adopted country and believed that the German people would rise up against the Nazis.

  The first manuscript of her book mysteriously vanished from Germany, but after returning to England, Waln rewrote it from memory and sent a copy to Himmler with an insolent description. He retaliated by seizing seven children, friends of Waln’s, whose names had been disguised in the book but whom he tracked down. Waln entered Germany secretly and in an interview with Himmler offered to serve as a hostage for the children.

  Himmler offered to release them and as many other people as she could list on a large sheet of paper, if she would promise to write nothing further about Germany except romantic historical novels. Waln declined the offer because, she said, ‘if you make a bargain like that, God takes away the power to write. If you don’t tell the truth you lose your talent.’[1]

  In 1941, Waln wrote and took part in a series of radio plays for the BBC, where she met and befriended Hilary Pym. At some point there was a discussion about Barbara and her relationship with an SS officer. It was by this route that Pym heard some news of Friedbert Glück. Nora Waln had told Hilary that he had gone ‘Anti-Nazi’.[2] Pym noted the news in her journal, adding a cryptic phrase in German, which seems to translate as: ‘Oh Henry, you were right’. (Henry Harvey had never truly believed that Friedbert was a committed Nazi.)

  On 13 November 1941, Pym was invited to an interview at the Censorship Department in London. Fearing that her German was rusty, she spent October and early November brushing up, reading Goethe and Rilke. There were also Friedbert’s letters, which evoked troubling memories: ‘After tea translated a letter from F. one of the last I had and painful to me. One feels one ought to be ashamed of ever having been fond of a German. Where are you now?’[3] Thus prepared, the interview went well: ‘feeling excited and pleased and hopeful’.[4] She had a letter from the Censorship Department requiring her to sit two language tests.

  That autumn Pym was disappointed to hear that her Balkans short story had been rejected by Penguin New Writing. Undeterred, she carried on with her spy novel, which was to be dedicated to Julian Amery, throughout October and November. She was also busy with the family’s house move. There was much tidying and sorting to be done. She found an old Victorian frame in which she inserted a photograph of Julian in the Union Club, and added a small picture of Balliol chapel and a pressed orchid. On 7 December she went to hang curtains at the new home, Blytheswood, and enjoyed a supper of ham and chips. The next morning, the day of the house move, came news of the Japanese navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor: ‘later heard Winston and Roosevelt’. The following day a letter came from the Censorship Department offering her a job in Bristol. She would be starting within the week.

  After accepting the post, Pym wrote in her diary: ‘it will be lovely to be with Poopa’. Hilary was living in a communal house in Bristol and arranged for Barbara to join them. Pym left Shropshire on Sunday 14 November and went by train to Bristol. Another amorous adventure lay ahead.

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  From the Coppice to Naples

  CHAPTER I

  Miss Pym moves to a ‘Select Residential District’ of Bristol

  The Coppice was a large double-fronted Edwardian house on the outskirts of Bristol, overlooking Clifton Suspension Bridge. It w
as rented by the BBC when, after the war broke out, they evacuated some of their staff, with families, to Clifton.

  When Pym arrived in December 1941, Hilary introduced her to Dick and Mary Palmer and Honor Wyatt. Between them, they had six children. It was a warm, noisy, fun household, with cosy chats in the large back kitchen and happy children running around the huge garden. Honor Wyatt, like Hilary, worked in the BBC Schools Department. She was a scriptwriter for children’s programming and a published author. Among her plays and scripts for radio was a series called ‘How Things Began’, a sequence of short plays about evolution. Hilary arranged music for radio broadcasts, including those of Honor’s. They all became close friends.

  Honor Wyatt was to become a much-loved mentor to Barbara Pym. A glamorous and bohemian figure, she was separated from her husband, Gordon Glover, who worked in London – though he was often in Bristol visiting the children, Julian and Prudence. Gordon, a writer and broadcaster, was a philanderer and perhaps not temperamentally suited to marriage, but the separation was amicable. Before the war they had lived in Spain where they befriended the poet Robert Graves and his lover, the writer Laura Riding. In 1937, Honor had published a novel, The Heathen, with the Seizen Press, which Graves and Riding co-founded and ran together. Both she and Gordon had now moved on to other relationships. She was seeing an industrial psychologist called George Ellidge, who was now serving with the RAF, while Gordon had a girlfriend called Anna Instone, who worked in the Music Department of the BBC.

  Honor was a warm, maternal figure, and a fabulous cook. She took Pym under her wing. Prudence recalled her mother’s instinct that within one hour of meeting Barbara Pym she knew they would be friends for life. For her part, Pym became devoted to Honor and to the children. It has sometimes been assumed that Pym disliked children and found them difficult. Certainly, she was often exasperated by the young evacuees in her charge, but that was in different circumstances, where the work was exhausting and she rarely had a chance to form bonds before the children were taken away and replaced by others. Now she formed a close bond with golden-haired Prue Glover.[1] She was only two and her brother six, when their mother first moved to Bristol.

  The communal arrangement was a happy one. Pym wrote to the Harveys, explaining her new set-up: ‘We share with two families, who work with Hilary and there are altogether six children so we know all about communal living, though the house is big enough for us to have our own sitting room and to keep ourselves to ourselves if we want to.’[2] The house had three storeys; Barbara and Hilary shared the first floor with Honor and the children. Honor had a large bed-sitting room, leading to a smaller bedroom shared by Julian and Prudence. ‘The Girls’ (as Honor called the Pym sisters) shared a bedroom. They had meals together in a ‘cosy little area’ remembered well by Prue, with suppers eaten on a round table covered with an oilcloth.

  Afterwards, they would sit around the fire, listening to music and chatting whilst they mended clothes. The Girls would discuss at some length their outfits for the following day. Hilary, Prue later recalled, was the ‘far prettier’ of the two, smaller and more curvaceous. Barbara was tall, slim and elegant and had prominent front teeth, ‘a bit like Joyce Grenfell’, though at the time, through her little girl’s eyes, she did not notice such details, as she loved Barbara so much.

  Prue’s pen portraits of Pym are striking, as she genuinely captures Barbara’s unique personality and sense of humour. Pym teased the little girl for being rather prim. One evening Honor bathed her and dried her by the fire. Prue was shy and did not want Barbara to see her naked, so she grabbed the towel to cover herself. Pym thought this hilarious and composed a limerick: ‘Oh, Miss Prudence Glover is SO refined. She has no bosom and no behind!’ The little girl responded: ‘That’s not a nice song, is it mummy?’, leaving them all howling with laughter.

  Barbara also invented a son called Christopher, who was always better behaved than Prue. ‘Christopher would never behave like that,’ she would say. She told Prudence that Christopher was at boarding school and spent his holidays big game hunting with his father. Prue recalled Hilary and Barbara as the ‘aunts I never had’, though it is clear that she was closer to Barbara. Julian was less keen, though; as Prudence admits, the Pym sisters were not so good with boys. Prue remembered that Barbara’s work was ‘top-secret’.

  Pym’s first day at the Censorship Department was pleasant enough. She did some ‘codes etc’ and cycled back to the Coppice, where she enjoyed an excellent meal of stew, then rhubarb and cream.[3] After supper, she sat by the fire and chatted to Mary Palmer. The next morning, she cycled off to work and opened her first batch of letters, one of which looked suspicious. The censors were called ‘Examiners’ and Pym felt that she was finally making an important contribution to the war effort. In Excellent Women, Mildred Lathbury, one of Pym’s most memorable heroines, works as a censor during the war: ‘no high qualifications appeared to be necessary, apart from patience and a slight tendency towards eccentricity’.[4]

  Like London and Liverpool, Bristol was heavily bombed during the Blitz. One of the common types of bomb dropped on the city were canisters, referred to locally as ‘Goering’s bread baskets’, containing a large number of incendiaries. These caused numerous fires and were designed to generate panic amongst the citizens and to stretch the fire services to the limit. On the home front, men and women volunteered as fire-watchers, who would raise the alarm in the event of such fires. Pym volunteered for once-a-week fire-watching duties.

  The Coppice continued to be a fun and pleasant household for Pym: later she remembered it as ‘Chek[h]ovian’, but by then she had met and fallen in love with Gordon Glover.

  CHAPTER II

  In which we meet a Philandering Gentleman called Gordon Glover

  On Christmas Eve, Honor’s estranged husband came to stay for the festivities. Gordon Glover was handsome, charismatic and funny. Rather than the classical elegance of Henry Harvey, he had craggy good looks, with dark curly hair tinged with grey, and blue eyes. He had a beautiful speaking voice, inherited by his son, Julian (who would become a highly respected classical actor, working for the Royal Shakespeare Company and subsequently becoming famous for his Game of Thrones character and for voicing Aragog the spider in the Harry Potter movies).

  Pym was immediately mesmerised. There were long discussions about music and literature in the Coppice’s warm and cosy back kitchen. Gordon introduced her to classical music and they shared a similar sense of humour. But he was still in a relationship with Anna Instone and, for the moment, they were content with being friends. He reminded Pym of Harvey. She wrote to Henry to tell him about Gordon, ‘a great friend made since I came to Bristol’. ‘He is a journalist, very amusing, a great philanderer, but very sweet and kind and as I haven’t fallen in love with him I see only his best side.’ She teased Henry for his attachment to obscure Restoration authors: ‘He wouldn’t say “Otway is remarkably fine” though.’[1]

  Pym would sit and chat for hours with Gordon. There were Sunday morning drinks and ‘talks about food and Catholicism’, and there was an evening when they discussed the ‘Barbellion passage we both like – about the dead haunting the places where they have been happy’. The reference is to The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion, a searingly honest, often sad, sometimes very funny, diary, published just after the First World War, by a young man who had multiple sclerosis and died at the age of thirty. The work was a huge influence on Denton Welch, another writer who would be of enormous importance in the later life of Pym.

  Gordon, like Pym, loved ephemera. He introduced her to Logan Pearsall Smith’s All Trivia, a book of aphorisms on the pleasures of small things, such as ‘the busy bees’, ‘empty shells’, ‘the rose’. Pearsall Smith was also a stickler for correct English language usage and was a devotee of Jane Austen, referring to himself as a ‘Mansfield Parker’. The discovery of a mutual love of both Austen and All Trivia was another bonding moment for Pym and Glover, validatin
g her own interest in ‘the trivial round, the common task’. Hilary later described Gordon as a delightful companion. He had a ‘splendid way with words and quotations that matched Barbara’s own and he wore his knowledge of literature and music lightly, as Jock and Henry had done’.[2] Gordon loved the English countryside and was a keen ornithologist.

  Hilary had news of Julian Amery. He was now a major in the ‘Persian Army’: ‘How beautiful, how right, how more than mildly amusing,’ Pym noted.[3] It was now spring, Barbara’s favourite season, and there were almond trees and forsythia blossoms in the streets of Clifton, which reminded her of North Oxford. In the clear evening light she picked daffodils in the garden. But Pym also felt a new maturity; the war was taking its toll on her spirits: ‘a little less joyousness and hope in myself – a more sombre, damped down, possibly more suitable frame of mind’.[4] She admitted to feelings of loneliness while fire-watching:

  Firewatching. West wind and small rain and I thought all the usual things coasting down through the dark on my bicycle – riding or walking in the dark, especially to firewatching, is surely the most detached and lonely time … and now I’m sitting in this uncosy high-roofed room with no sound but the ticking of my common little clock and the click of my companion’s knitting needles.[5]

  She loved the poetry of Matthew Arnold and found herself reciting lines from his works as she drew the blackout curtains in the fire-watching station:

  The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,

  The heart less bounding at emotion new,

  And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.[6]