The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Oh mumbling chumbling moths, talking worms and my own intolerable bird give me one tiny ray of hope for the future and I will keep on wanting to be alive. Yes, you will be alive, it will not be the same, nothing will be quite as good, there will be no intense joy but small compensations, spinsterish delights and as the years go on and they are no longer painful memories.[15]

  It was time for a change in her circumstances. She needed to leave the Coppice. Pym went up to London for an interview, staying with her old Oxford friend, Rosemary Topping. ‘Last Friday I joined the Wrens [Women’s Royal Naval Service]. It is done – I am calm and happy about it and sometimes excited – all settled. Like Going over to Rome. And Cardinal Newman has gone and I’m still reading The Daisy Chain.’[16]

  Meanwhile at the Censorship Office there was a hum of excitement about a new circular which called up all examiners under the age of forty-one for service. Pym felt smug because she had already decided to apply for the Wrens. She was ready for a new chapter of her life.

  CHAPTER VI

  Miss Pym has a Medical Examination

  On Tuesday, 30 March 1943 Pym was due to attend a medical assessment as part of her application for the Wrens – ‘unless I’m having a period, which I will be’.[1] She was about to turn thirty, single and geared up for a new challenge. If she had not volunteered for the Wrens she may well have been called for factory work, for which she would have been ill-suited.

  She heard news of Gordon, who was staying with some mutual friends. He was not happy, but his friends ‘thought it might be a good thing for him to have to work things out for himself’. The friends did not allow him to ‘dramatise himself’ as was his wont. Pym, however, felt compassion towards him: ‘But oh I hate to think of him being unhappy and me not being able to do anything for him.’ Nevertheless, she was determined to move on with her life: ‘I’ve never before felt so conscious of “making a life for myself”.’[2]

  Pym’s medical examination went well, though it took two hours to complete: ‘First of all we filled out the medical form – then went upstairs and undressed, except for shoes, knickers and coat – then produced a “specimen” into a kind of enamel potty with a long handle like a saucepan – of which I was quite glad.’[3] She was pleased when she was informed that her case was marked as ‘urgent’, suggesting that ‘they probably had something in mind for me’. Her work at the Censorship Office was helpful to her case. She was by now desperate to become a Wren: ‘my heart is set on it’.[4]

  It was all a very welcome distraction, but then news of Gordon came and, momentarily, set her back. Pym had been wrestling with feelings of jealousy towards his children and, to some extent, Honor: ‘How could I bear not to have as much of him as she has had and still has in the children.’ She loved Honor, but she also knew that Honor had a history with Gordon and, with that, she could not compete. Prue, who only learned of the affair in later years, remembered that her mother was angry at the way that Pym had been treated by Gordon and believes that the end of the affair was Pym’s reason for wanting to join the Wrens:

  I loved my father dearly but he didn’t treat women very well. He had had several affairs over the years, which is why my mother left him. They always remained good friends. But, when he dumped Barbara, my mother was furious with him for treating her dear friend so shabbily. Barbara was inconsolable and thought they would marry. It was his behaviour that led her to join the Wrens for the rest of the war, as a sort of escape.[5]

  Gordon and Honor’s divorce was gaining speed. Honor told Pym that Gordon had ‘supplied the evidence’ (presumably of his serial infidelities). This threw Pym into turmoil, as Gordon had used the excuse of his married status to call off their affair: ‘I couldn’t help thinking how joyous I might have been at this stage being reached. Whereas now I have no reason to hope – I don’t even know if Gordon ever thinks of me and nobody can reassure me on that point.’[6]

  Pym felt that she was going round in circles. After her medical, she came home to the Coppice kitchen, usually the hub of life and activity, to find it very tidy and silent. It brought back memories of 28 December, when Gordon had ended their relationship and she had walked through the house crying. She had sat on Honor’s bed and tried to explain why she was so upset. Honor, who clearly knew more than she was letting on, tried to comfort Pym by saying that she didn’t think Gordon was the right person for her and that Pym was brooding over an idea. Honor more than anyone knew Gordon and his self-absorption. But Pym was still clinging to her fantasy: ‘Surely I didn’t see what wasn’t there?’[7] On the suspension bridge she saw a girl (‘rather plain’) being kissed by a Dough boy (American soldier) and had another pang: ‘Lucky pigs I thought.’[8]

  There were, however, ‘small compensations’ and ‘spinsterish delights’. She spotted fabrics at Bright’s department store: ‘red spotted chiffon for a spinsterish nightdress’, bought beauty aids at Woolworths and had breakfast at the Copper Kitchen: ‘we were served by the usual inefficient waitress, who is like “Can I do you now, Sir?” in ITMA.’ Hilary was back and made a delicious salad with pilchards and then rhubarb for pudding. They then listened to ITMA. Afterwards they had ‘a long technical conversation about Tampax!’[9]

  April was extremely warm and Pym gardened and gathered vegetables and flowers. She spent her Sunday morning scrubbing potatoes and making salad: ‘Surely my spiritual home is in the Coppice back kitchen?’ To her surprise, Honor, usually a source of great strength and common sense, was suddenly in tears. Pym brought her tea and they had a long talk about the burden and continual strain of ‘being splendid’; how, under unbearable pressure, ‘something snaps’. (This would become an important theme in Pym’s novels.) Gordon was being difficult about the divorce. Honor showed Pym the divorce petition, ‘a horrifying document, but perhaps faintly comic’. She talked about her marriage and Gordon’s new play, which was about his breaking off a love affair with another woman. She told Pym a story about Gordon’s behaviour that Pym found fascinating. He had taken his lover, Anna, to a concert, telling her that the last time he had been at the venue it was with another woman for whom he no longer cared. To Gordon’s bewilderment, Anna burst into tears: he thought she ought to be pleased.

  Pym wrote down her feelings about this incident, which had stoked her creative imagination: ‘What a haunting scene for a novel – it could have taken place in a churchyard where he has been with someone he once loved. And she, the new one, sees it happening again and again.’[10]

  ‘Gordon’, she imagined the long-suffering heroine saying, ‘if you ever take any other woman to Abbotsleigh, may you never rest peacefully in your grave with the marble chips on top.’[11]

  CHAPTER VII

  In which Miss Pym pays a visit to her Old Love, Rupert Gleadow

  By the spring of 1943, Pym was one of the lucky ones. Nobody she knew had yet been killed in the war. She had had her share of heartbreak, but she was a resilient young woman, still full of life and hope. Her first love, Rupert Gleadow, had not fared so well.

  In December 1937, in Paris, Rupert had married a beautiful French woman called Marguerite Rendu. Less than a year later, Marguerite had died, probably in childbirth, leaving a baby daughter, Sylvie. Rupert was distraught. He wrote to Barbara, saying that she had probably seen the announcement of his wife’s death in The Times. He told her that he’d been ‘terribly weak in health, which is only natural’.[1] He asked her to see him or drop him a line and ended with a poignant reflection:

  One learns to love, you know and I began learning in 1932. It seems incredible to realize that in those lovely days none of the tragedies of life had yet happened. But if we had not had those wonderful times together probably I should not have known those sublime heights of love which Marguerite and I together achieved and which will always remain a light to my life.

  So you see you have made a difference to my life which I shall not forget.[2]

  Rupert wrote again, a year later, from near Bridport in Devon: ‘T
his last year has been pretty unpleasant for me, but I am now staying with people who are very nice and are willing to bring up my daughter with their own children.’ He told Pym that he had been in St Tropez when the war broke out and that the journey back across France had taken a long time. He said that he had no intention of doing any war work, at least until forced to: ‘it is a waste of time for an intelligent person. Hitler is doomed anyway.’ He ended his letter: ‘I hope there are still 67 pubs in Oswestry and that you are in love with some beautiful person as usual.’[3] His letter was written in coloured ink, a reminder of the letters he sent to her as an undergraduate. He also sent a photograph of his daughter Sylvie and Pym replied that she had inherited his large black eyes. ‘You are quite right about my daughter having large black eyes,’ he responded, ‘but in other ways she takes after the mother, being fair, fearless and fond of animals.’[4]

  Rupert was not the kind of man to be on his own for long. He told Pym that at the outbreak of war he had seduced a virgin in St Tropez. He was now living in London with a woman called Helen, who was a painter: a ‘beautiful blonde with blue eyes’. It was, he told Pym, love at first sight for them both: ‘Our days are as blissful as our nights.’[5]

  Helen Cooke had grown up in Oxford, where her father was Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church. Helen, a gifted painter, and her sister Betty studied art at the Ruskin School in Oxford. Betty Cooke married a member of the Pinney family (slave owners who had once rented a house in Dorset to William and Dorothy Wordsworth) and moved into their ancestral home, Bettiscombe Manor, where there was a ‘screaming skull’ said to belong to an African slave whose remains were buried there. Helen and Rupert, meanwhile, were now living in another place with interesting associations: Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, looking over the river – a road that had at various times been home to the composers Arthur Sullivan and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti and T. S. Eliot, the artists J. M. W. Turner and James Whistler, the actors John Barrymore and Laurence Olivier, the novelists George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Somerset Maugham and many other notable figures. First World War memoirist Vera Brittain, now a pacifist, was in residence at the time.

  On 10 April 1943, in the midst of her heartbreak over Gordon, Pym rang the bell and Helen opened the door: ‘Are you Helen?’

  ‘You must be Barbara?’

  I’ve done this before, Pym thought, ‘in the summer of 1938 when I met Elsie for the first time in 86 Banbury Road’.[6]

  Barbara liked Helen immensely. She had blonde curly hair and ‘very blue eyes’ and was ‘sweet and vivacious’. The two women had a ‘good gossip’ before Rupert arrived home on his bicycle, looking ‘quite his old self’. They had dinner with cowslip wine and amusing talk. There seemed to be no awkwardness at all. ‘I was conscious of feeling happier than I had done for a long time,’ wrote Pym. The next day was equally pleasant. Rupert and Helen had a morning engagement, so they left Pym with a breakfast tray and a copy of Tristram Shandy. Then at eleven she immersed herself in ‘a delicious bright green bath with pine essence and bright pink Spanish geranium soap’. The Gleadows gave her a good lunch of olives and a flan and they opened a tin of apricots. After lunch, all three of them took a stroll in Battersea Park, ‘all the flowering trees were out – lilacs nearby, double cherry and magnolia’. When discussing her love life and her broken heart, the Gleadows told Pym that ‘her eyes had too much sparkle for one who had been crossed in love’.[7]

  There was little contact with Rupert after this visit, though a brief glimpse of Sylvie Gleadow comes in a memoir by Susanna Pinney, Helen Gleadow’s niece. According to Susanna, her mother, Betty, held a large house party at Bettiscombe Manor to which Helen and Rupert were invited, along with the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover, Valentine Ackland. Rupert did a tarot reading for the screaming skull. Susanna noted the presence of a little French girl called Sylvie, ‘smooth-haired, well brought up’. She recalled that Sylvie had been brought up in France with her godmother, but spent her summers in Bridport with her father and stepmother, Helen.[8]

  Back at the Coppice, Pym was given a warm welcome by Honor. ‘I really feel it did me good going away and being with Rupert and Helen, who are so blissfully happy together they hardly seem to be real. Oh, but it can be done.’[9]

  CHAPTER VIII

  Miss Pym passes her Interview

  Honor Wyatt was clearly getting a little impatient with Pym’s endless moping about Gordon. She advised her, not unreasonably, to have an affair to get him out of her system. ‘I quite agree,’ said Pym, ‘but OH DEAR.’ She was finishing a new blue satin nightdress: ‘Lucky pig who ever gets to … well reader fill in the rest yourself.’[1]

  The government, in a bid to keep the people of Britain fit and well, initiated a radio fitness programme ‘Up in the Morning Early’, named after a poem by Robert Burns. There were ten minutes of exercises for men, then ten for women. Pym and Honor decided it would be a good idea to participate: ‘certainly helps to dispel that feeling of lowness with which one usually starts the day. One gets instead an agonising stiffness in the backs of the legs, so that one feels trembling and doddery.’[2] Honor said that Gordon would laugh if he could see them at their exercises.

  There was more discussion about the impending divorce: it seemed that Gordon already had a new lover, though he was refusing to divulge any information. Pym swung back and forth; one minute she was convinced that if Gordon wasn’t the best and the real thing, which she hoped, then she might find someone else. The next, she remembered that it was six months to the day that ‘my poor darling declared his ill-fated love and started me on this chunk of misery’.[3]

  Pym and Honor went shopping in Clifton and came back with string bags bulging with tins of treacle, packets of Shredded Wheat, cakes and buns. On the way home they discussed ‘the technique of misery’. Pym was still feeling very low and the rain fell on her half-day and Bristol was only ‘half-alive’ with most of the shops closed, so she returned to the Coppice. The ‘bats’ were back in her head:

  I came home and did some sewing and gave myself a little concert of Dohnanyi, Brahms and the Classical Symphony. The latter is quite spoilt so I may well count it as a dead loss. The nicest lover I never had and the rest of it and A ring is round but not round enough and The sea’s deep but not deep enough and I will fight for what I want and if I can’t have it, then I will have nothing, but NOTHING!

  The beech trees are out in tender green leaves – the spinster feels like going rushing out into the garden and embracing them, crying Thank you, thank you! You at least do what is expected of you and never fail … I must have many bats (all with broken wings) flying around in my head.[4]

  On 26 May, Gordon’s autobiographical play Farewell Helen was broadcast. Honor and Pym were ‘tense and nervous’. Pym made a cold supper of asparagus, hard-boiled eggs and potato salad.

  I knitted feverishly – the sleeves of my black jumper. The time came. It was exciting and clever and funny and rather embarrassing – Spain and darling, darling, darling and Oh so typically Gordon. None of it really applicable to me. The bit of La Rochefoucauld he once quoted to me in a letter came in.[5]

  The play was about a young man who made an agreement with his lover that if one of them felt ‘even the tiniest bit tired of one another’ then they should be honest and say so. But when the time comes, he loses his nerve and lacks the courage to be honest. Though Pym believed the plot was not applicable to her, she must have been struck by the lack of moral fibre in Gordon’s hero, John.

  Afterwards, she felt both excited and depressed and decided that she should write a play.

  More importantly, she went to London for the selection boards for the Wrens. It was a nerve-racking experience. There were eight girls and she was the last to be interviewed at the end of the day. Three Wren officers sat on a panel, firing questions: ‘one grey-haired and soignée, another motherly and wearing a hairnet and the third dark
and massive and ominously silent’. At the end of the interview, they said they would be in touch within a couple of days. ‘After it was all over, I felt exhausted and depressed and would have given the rest of my life for the comfort of Gordon and a drink with him.’[6]

  Pym stayed the night at Kew with Rosemary Topping and she was glad to drink beer and flop in the green sheets, ‘wearing my new blue satin nightdress – my body spread-eagled like a corpse’. The night was hot and the war felt very close. At 2 a.m., the sirens went and she heard gunfire in the distance. She lay awake, thinking of Gordon, ‘longing hopelessly for him’. She was frightened, too, about the decisions she had made: ‘panic came over me at what I had done and the life that was before me’. But her Pym pragmatism kicked in: ‘Everything seems gloomy and dark when you’re lying awake in the middle of the night. One day, perhaps soon – it will be better.’[7]

  There was good news. She heard that she had passed her Wrens interview. First Officer Salmond, ‘curly hair and a faint Scots accent’, told her that she must serve three months in the ranks and after that she was sure of her commission. ‘I was very pleased and happy.’[8]

  At Whitsun, Pym went to stay with Hilary and Sandy in their country cottage in the South Downs. They had other friends to visit and ate sausages and potatoes and ham and chicken. She wasn’t unhappy but still ‘remote and lonely’. She missed having someone special: ‘One feels so without a chap especially when one has had one. A nice lump of misery which goes everywhere like a dog.’[9]

  There was worse to come. Gordon began behaving badly towards Honor and the children. He was being ‘sticky’ about their allowance and then demanded a large armchair that was in the sitting room at the Coppice. Pym was indignant on the children’s behalf and the business of the armchair was a step too far: ‘But oh darling – can my love stand this? May it not be the beginning of the end. Could it be because of an armchair that I first began to fall out of love with you! But of course one doesn’t fall – it’s a slow wrenching away, painful at once, afterwards just sad and dreary.’ Like many women in the throes of a broken heart, Pym cut her hair short. She also tried to find humour in the situation – ‘I have sunk very low. I emptied tea leaves out of the window’ – and poked fun at herself for the unromantic setting of her affair with Gordon: ‘Oh Coppice back kitchen full of kisses and jokes and tears – and the blackcurrants are ripening.’ It helped that she disliked Gordon’s novel, Cocktails, which Honor had lent her to read. She could not find any interest in it: ‘so brittle and unreal’.[10]