by Paula Byrne
But thoughts of Julian Amery were comforting and improved her mood: ‘the heart can still bound a little at the idea of Jay in a fez (dark red, I hope) and the idea that people might one day whisper about me and say – Wasn’t there once something about a Persian Major?’[7]
There was better news for Britain, allaying fears of imminent invasion. Hitler had turned his focus to the Soviet Union and the Luftwaffe had been reassigned to the eastern front. The sustained bombing of British cities had ended in May the previous year. The last air raid on Liverpool took place on 10 January 1942, destroying several houses on Upper Stanhope Street. By a curious twist of fate, one of the houses destroyed was number 102 – once the home of Hitler’s half-brother Alois, his Irish wife Bridget, and their son, the Führer’s nephew, William Patrick Hitler.
CHAPTER III
The Marriage of Miss Hilary Pym and the Birth of a Baby
Later that year, 1942, Pym had a letter from Henry’s sister announcing the news that Elsie Harvey had given birth to a baby girl. It had been a long time since Pym had heard news from the Harveys, who were now living in Stockholm. She wrote at once congratulating them: ‘You cannot imagine how pleased I am at this news and how happy to know that you are safe. I have thought of you constantly during these last two years and it has been awful having no news.’[1]
Pym explained to the Harveys that she had no time for writing as she was so busy with her war work. She was not permitted to tell them that she was working in the Censorship Department. ‘You will have to guess what would be most suitable for me as you remember me,’ she joked: ‘I find the work very interesting, though the secrecy is rather annoying, as I can’t talk about it or share jokes with any except my colleagues.’ She said that she couldn’t bear to read novels about the war, ‘so in bed at night I read Jane Austen and Byron’.[2]
They still had plenty to eat, she continued, ‘although we can’t get oranges and grapefruit and bananas (Do you remember bananas?), we have excellent lettuces and cabbages and carrots etc straight from our garden and raspberries and blackcurrants too’. Pym informed Henry that Oxford was ‘quite untouched’, although not her beloved Cologne: ‘I did love it so.’ She joked about the Harvey baby being a girl: ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing she isn’t a boy – how heartbreaking for some poor girl in the English Reading Room twenty years hence!’[3]
All in all, Pym was thoroughly enjoying her new life. No longer cocooned by Oxford or home, she was working, earning her own salary and feeling very independent. Hilary was to be married in August. Her husband, Sandy Walton, was serving with the RAF. He had read architecture at Cambridge and shared Hilary’s love for Greece. Pym told Henry that Sandy reminded her of Jock: ‘fair and tallish and very musical – he has set some of John Betjeman’s Continual Dew to music!’ As was conventional in wartime weddings, the bride wore daywear. Clothes were still rationed and only available with coupons, so all but the wealthiest brides required clothes that could be reused. Hilary wore a pale blue crepe dress and coat, while Barbara sported ‘a dull pink crepe dress with a lovely romantic black hat with a heart-shaped halo brim’, purchased in Bath.
Life at the Coppice continued to be lively and fulfilling. For the first time in years, Pym was surrounded by like-minded people, well informed about art and literature, all of whom had interesting jobs. The household often had breakfast at the Copper Kettle and supper together in the BBC canteen. Sometimes they went to concerts in the city at Colston Hall. In the summer evenings, there were walks to the Rocks and the Commercial and the Club. When Gordon came for the weekend, he and Pym would stroll arm in arm, chatting and flirting, alongside George and Honor.
In his letter, Henry had included a photograph of his baby daughter. It must have been a wistful moment seeing the little girl, but Pym was her usual brave self, calling the child ‘a charming baby, so intelligent looking’.[4] Now that Hilary was married and Henry had a baby, Pym was thinking about her own future. She told Henry that it was strange to think that she had a new set of friends and that he had not met any of them.
CHAPTER IV
Mr Gordon Glover makes a Bold Declaration to Miss Pym
On 24 October 1942 Gordon declared his feelings, telling Barbara: ‘in a queer kind of way, I’m in love with you’. Pym was flattered and excited. They had their first kiss on a moonlit walk near Clifton Suspension Bridge.
Finding herself ‘embarked on a kind of love affair’, she confided in Henry that it was ‘not of her choosing’, and that it had happened ‘very unexpectedly’. Although she described it as ‘very nice so far’, she had few expectations that it would last. ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever be able to get married, so perhaps Belinda and Harriet will come true after all.’[1] She was rushing ahead of herself in even thinking of the possibility of any kind of long-term commitment from Gordon. Pym knew that he was still technically married to Honor and that he had a girlfriend in London, but she was swept off her feet by this older, sophisticated man. A few weeks later, she shared her feelings with Henry: ‘I am very, very happy, but the future is rather dark, as far as my personal affairs are concerned. We just do not know what is going to happen to us – but at present we are happy and that is a lot these days.’[2]
Pym destroyed her regular diary for 1942 – the time covering the affair with Gordon Glover. The events were too painful for her to hold onto and it marked another turning point in her life. She was too afraid to tell her parents that she was involved with a married man with young children, who was the husband of her close friend. The secret was also kept from young Prue, who had no idea that her father was having an affair with Barbara.
The courtship involved walks around Clifton, movies, ‘drinking in Bristol’s nice pubs’ and conversations in the Rocks Hotel. Gordon took her to see Gone with the Wind: ‘Four hours wallowing in it, so much so that by the end my eyes were quite dry even through so many deathbeds.’ There were trips to the medieval village of Abbots Leigh, visits to churches and graveyards – where Gordon expressed his dislike of marble chips on top of gravestones, a detail that delighted Pym and which she would save up for a novel.
Pym was also feeling the pressure of being single and unattached following Hilary’s marriage to Sandy. Honor was deeply in love with George Ellidge and did not seem to be surprised or hurt by her estranged husband’s love affair with her new best friend. Nevertheless, it was an odd set-up with Honor and Gordon’s children, Julian and Prue, all living there together.
Despite knowing that Gordon was a womaniser, Pym fell deeply in love. She wrote love letters to him in her favourite room in the fire-watching shelter. By Sion Hill, near the Rocks Hotel and the Portcullis, Gordon gazed into her eyes and called her his bright and shining Ba.
Christmas was fast approaching and Barbara made herself a special new dress, blue-green, with a full skirt. She was brimming with love and happiness and longed to show Gordon her new Christmas outfit. Then, out of the blue, three days after Christmas, he abruptly called it off. He told her that he thought it best that they should part so that she could find someone else to marry; that he would not be able to get a divorce for at least a year and a complete break would be for the best.
She again confided in Henry: ‘Did I tell you I was in love and that it was all hopeless?’ It was a ‘really dramatic Victorian renunciation’, she continued, ‘the sort of thing I adore in novels, but find extremely painful in real life’. It was a devastating blow, but Pym tried to make light of it, saying that maybe they would be reunited in the future: ‘We neither of us wanted any other kind of relationship so a complete break was the only thing.’[3] Reading between the lines, Gordon had hoped for just a fling and Pym clearly wanted commitment. He had no intention of marrying her and was trying to extricate himself without giving her too much pain: he was a kind but weak man. The affair was over after just two months. Pym minded, she told Henry, because she and Gordon shared the same ridiculous jokes. She considered it hell being away from him.
Pym
destroyed her diary but she filled two notebooks with her feelings about the Gordon affair and its demise. They were headed ‘After Christmas I’ and ‘After Christmas II’. The account was written as a diary, with some of the pages excised: ‘I went into the Public Library. It is open till seven and was now full of ruins of humanity, come into the reading room for learning. And on my blotting paper I write “A Testing Time”, in Red Pencil to remind me.’
She was having difficulty sleeping but drew comfort from a phrase that she had read in Trivia: ‘So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.’ The phrase would come to inspire her novels: ‘there’s still the whimsical and perilous charm perhaps. I don’t want to lose that.’[4]
CHAPTER V
It’s That Man Again
Gordon’s rejection cut deep. He was Pym’s first older lover and was a father figure, just as Honor fulfilled a maternal role. She loved her own parents, but they were not on the same intellectual level as the Glovers. Gordon’s close friendship with Robert Graves and Laura Riding enhanced his literary standing in Pym’s eyes. Once, she crept into Honor’s room and read something that Gordon had written to Graves in 1936: ‘The enthusiast is in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction but tries not to give himself time to feel his dissatisfaction. He hopes secretly for satisfaction, for something that will woo him into certainty.’[1] She began reading Graves’s Wife to Mr Milton.
It did not help that the name of ‘C. Gordon Glover’ kept popping up as the byline of articles in the weekly Radio Times, but in her usual good common-sense way, Pym tried not to mope. She was always good at poking fun at herself. One night she dreamed of both Julian Amery and Gordon:
Darling Jay, mein Kleines, this is half your book. Imagine after my death two old men wrangling over it. One a dried-up politician, the other a burnt-out old ruin, the most waspish member of the Savage Club. Both so unpleasant that it is difficult to imagine how either of them could possibly have been loved by such a delightful person as the present writer obviously is![2]
But in reality, Gordon’s rejection induced a depressive phase that Pym likened to entering a ‘dark tunnel’. He told her that she would be over him by spring, but she envisaged ‘an endless stretch of months to be got through – a long dreary stretch until it doesn’t matter any more’. Grief was a bat that hovered around her ‘like a squander bug … Dusty old creature, to think I’ve still got you, after ten weeks.’[3]
In terms of literary expression, Pym was experimenting with a more ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style of writing:
The other day I thought ‘And now it’s Spring’ and decided that this would be quite a good title for a novel. Why don’t you write it? Ah, but is it Spring? I know that the air is warm and sunny, birds sing at dawn and twilight and the daffodils are out in the Coppice garden and violets blue and white, sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes – I know, but what about the dusty heart?[4]
There were constant reminders of Gordon in his children. His son, Julian, who looked so much like his father, rushing out with a box of birthday Liquorice Allsorts to tell her that they were a present from daddy. His daughter, Prue, running away to the suspension bridge before being found safe and well.
Barbara’s grief would burst upon her, ‘tears in my eyes because I suddenly remembered Gordon with his hair smoothed down sitting opposite me at breakfast in the Coppice kitchen on a Monday morning’.[5] When she cycled down to Sion Hill to see friends, she was flooded with memories: ‘And the bridge was lovely in the twilight and horrid people sat in the window of the Rocks and I was filled with horrible nostalgia and love for him.’[6] On a bus ride to Avonmouth there were more tears and then at lunchtime, she positively howled.
She had enough self-awareness, as with her affair with Henry Harvey, to know that she partially enjoyed the misery of heartbreak; that it was like undertaking an exercise that would prove useful to fuel her imagination and that the feelings were somehow at a remove, experienced in the third person:
Well, on Friday, she came back from Avonmouth, loitered a little at the Academy and then, with a sudden wave of inspiration, went and had some tea in the Berkeley. Ludicrous place with palms and mirrors, but no orchestra now. It was the end of the day and she felt rather a ludicrous object sitting there drinking tea, eating bread and butter and smoking a cigarette … at 5.35 I left and thought of Gordon just beginning and wondered if he was feeling nervous. Then home, very tired, drained of all emotion.
Firewatching was quite peaceful. There is a curious timelessness about it, as if one were really in one’s marble vault.[7]
She wondered about attending a Tchaikovsky concert, which was a reminder of Gordon. It would leave her torn to pieces. Should she go or stay: ‘Reader what will she do?’ she wrote in her diary, ‘See next Friday.’[8] As though, once again, she was writing a picaresque novel.
Spring brought back memories of Julian Amery and their romance, the Parks, the Botanical Gardens and lunch at Balliol. Pasted into her ‘After Christmas’ diary, was a newspaper cutting about Captain Amery, praising him for having had one of the most adventurous careers of the war. It listed his many achievements and noted that his adventures had begun even as an undergraduate at Balliol. It was a reminder, too, that her affair with a younger man had been tremendously exciting.
Honor was a huge comfort. She had been through it all with Gordon and had come out the other side. Pym and Honor had begun listening to a light entertainment radio programme that they both loved. It was one of the BBC’s most popular wartime shows, credited with sustaining public morale and having over twenty million listeners. Even the king and queen were avid fans. It was called ITMA – It’s That Man Again. Newspaper editor Bert Gunn, father of the poet Thom Gunn, created a memorable Daily Express headline, referring to the never-ending news of Hitler in the build-up to the war: ‘It’s That Man Again’. The BBC borrowed the phrase for the title of its comedy series, which hosted a cast of much-loved characters, recognisable by their catchphrases. The show was a vehicle for the talents of Liverpool comedian Tommy Handley. ITMA followed the adventures of Handley as he undertook a series of (fictional) bizarre jobs. The first series began with him working on a private radio station, but he later moved on to work as Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries at the Office of Twerps, the mayor of seedy seaside resort Foaming-at-the-Mouth, and governor of the South Sea island, Tomtopia.
Hattie Jacques played the part of Sophie Tuckshop. The show also featured characters such as Colonel Chinstrap and Mrs Mopp; it generated catchphrases like ‘Can I do you now, sir?’, ‘I don’t mind if I do’, ‘I’ll have to ask me dad’, ‘TTFN’ (Ta ta for now), ‘d’oh’ (anticipating Homer Simpson), and, from a German spy: ‘This is Funf speaking’. One of the best lines was Sophie Tuckshop’s ‘I’ll be alright now’ after describing a long list of foods that she has consumed. The household at the Coppice were huge fans of ITMA. Pym was in need of good cheer and laughter and the wireless again provided a lifeline. But even there, Gordon managed to make his presence felt. He was presenting a radio show about the countryside called ‘Introducing This Week’. Pym listened in, of course: ‘My own darling raving dilettante, what is a leaf-nosed bat?’ she quipped. She had found herself ‘a new torture song’ called ‘I’m Going to See You Today’.
Pym noted that she wrote in her diary ‘only when I am depressed, like praying only when one is really in despair’. Honor, knowing that Pym was suffering, did her best to keep her busy. They took the children to the seaside at Weston-super-Mare. She thought it a ‘large bright Betjeman place’. For a while, they forgot about the war until they found themselves in the middle of a serious invasion exercise and were twice turned back for unexploded bombs. After that, they walked along the beach to the pier, ‘eating sweets and gathering little pink, yellow and white shells’. On the pier they looked at the naughty peepshows and went on the rides: ‘What a place to come to when one is lonely and miserable,’
she wrote.[9]
The next day was Julian Glover’s birthday party and Barbara made sandwiches whilst listening to Mendelssohn on the radio, ‘and of course I wept a little over the slow movement, alone in the back kitchen, my hands immersed in the washing-up water, need I say’. After the party ended, she gathered fresh flowers for her room and felt melancholy: ‘I am ashamed to say that I am sometimes just plain jealous when I think of other people who can be with Gordon. It is sometimes intolerable to be a woman and have no second bests or spares or anything.’[10]
Hilary had her husband, Sandy, home, which perhaps compounded Pym’s feelings of loneliness. Honor was deeply in love with George. Pym felt that she was the only one whose happiness had been snatched away.
I wrote home, went to the post, pumped up my bicycle, put cotton over the peas. And then lay on a mattress with my face close to the ground, thinking about that poem by Robert Graves, the man seeking lost love, who has become so sensitive he can hear wormtalk and moths chumbling cloth.[11]
Later, Honor and Pym ‘Baldwinned our legs – she was delighted, never having used a Baldwin [electric shaver] before.’[12]
Pym’s feelings of depression continued. She was reading Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, ‘so well-written, very Compton-Burnett and very sad’. Back in the office, she felt ‘very Rip Van Winkle to find people away and on the point of leaving and the blackout stuck halfway across the skylight of our room, casting a gloom, quite a gloom as they say, over the place’.[13] She tried to pull herself together. Gordon’s rejection continued to hurt, as though she somehow knew that this was her last hope of a conventional relationship consisting of marriage and children. ‘Oh darling, how peculiarly insensitive your sex is,’ she wrote in her ‘After Christmas’ journal.[14] She turned again to writing a new story:
