by Paula Byrne
Inside the villa, Pym was taken with the beautiful old furniture and the inscribed Roman sculptures: ‘Oh the agony of not knowing Latin!’ Above his desk, in his study, she was entranced by a great stone head of Medusa, which he spotted in the clear water by the old foundations of Tiberius’s bath. ‘How wonderful to have seen it before anyone else did,’ she noted. Looking out over the sea, was a gigantic 3,000-year-old Egyptian Sphinx. Visitors were encouraged to make a wish, so Pym ‘wished a simple wish that could come true’.[4]
Down in Anacapri, she walked along a pleasant little square which had shops filled with souvenirs, ‘corals, straw hats, cameos and the little silver bells which are supposed to be lucky. Of course I bought one, being sentimental and a little superstitious.’[5] She loved Capri so much that she rather dreaded her return to Naples, but she soon grew to enjoy the city and felt the exhilaration of being in a foreign land. There was dancing on the quarterdeck of HMS Sirius and a trip back on the motorboat by moonlight, with ‘wind and spray and stars – dark shapes of ships and the lights of Naples’.[6]
Pym saw Rigoletto at the opera house (luscious, red and gold and baroque), which boasted an elaborately painted ceiling. The admiral invited some of the Wrens to his villa, romantically situated with a terrace overlooking the bay. Another party was held at an Italian apartment which was full of original furnishings – ‘a lovely big table of mirror glass – portraits round the walls, with one of which I fell in love – a young man, looking like Jay in 17th century dress’.[7]
There were still moments of boredom (‘an exquisite experience to be savoured and analysed like old brandy and sex’) and a longing to be with ‘her own kind’ – Pym finding many of the people from working-class backgrounds ‘dreary’. Her prejudices were soon to be challenged when she began a flirtation with a young paybob (supply officer, usually the person responsible for the accounts). Pym initially thought him rather common. However she was attracted to his dark good looks and his height. ‘The first person in Naples with whom I’ve had any conversation. About sex!’[8] His name was Iain, though his nickname was Starky, the same name she had given her kangaroo. He was unlike any other man she had met. He was blunt, sarcastic and very sexy: ‘He has a cynical attitude to life and the technique of outrageous rudeness.’ He found Pym attractive and, above all, he was taken by her wit and clever conversation: ‘He told me I would make a good mistress because I would be able to hold a man’s attention by my intelligence.’ The evening, she noted, followed its usual course: ‘an expertly sensuous kiss leaning against a wall … and no word since!’[9]
Pym had never had an affair with a man who was not from her own social class. She found Starky intriguing: ‘He is rude and impossible and casual, in themselves quite attractively provoking qualities.’ She told herself that she was flattered by his attention. But she also felt that he was the only person that she could talk to about anything, ‘though not cultured as far as I know’. She was also surprised to find that she felt ‘fiercely protective’ towards him, as he seemed to be disliked by the other Wrens. As well as being tall and handsome, he had ‘nice short-sighted eyes’. The only trait she disliked was his accent: ‘his voice gets on my nerves’.[10]
When she heard that Starky was to return to England, Pym found herself minding. She was desperate to make contact and sent notes for him to the Navy House. She saw him standing on the balcony, gazing across the bay. ‘Oh let him be gone and no more hankering for this, second rate as it is.’ One of her fellow Wrens, Morag, told Pym that she ‘enjoyed wallowing in emotion’. It was a perceptive remark that Pym allowed had some truth in it, but it did not stop her from minding: ‘Does one ever learn not to mind.’[11]
Plans changed and Starky did not leave for England, so they were soon reunited at a dance. Pym could not help noticing that he lacked social skills: ‘he is gauche and rather ineffectual, but so sweet’. She was tired of the ‘handsome and conceited Flags [Flag officers]’, and helpless in the face of the sexual attraction she felt for Starky. They went to his cabin, ‘where we lay in the dark and talked a little and loved a little and there was the same good thing between us as we had the evening of Mac’s party’.[12]
There were still class barriers between them. He thought she was in love with him because she called him ‘darling’ so many times, which she found funny. Starky was clever but unsophisticated: ‘Our relationship is physical and intellectual, but not, repeat, not cultural.’[13]
Perhaps more importantly, he made her laugh. They took a romantic trip to Mount Vesuvius. The woods were very pretty leading up to the bay. They hired a guide and long sticks and made the climb, plodding through the ash and lava. Starky, she thought, proved himself well and carried her hat and bag. ‘We looked down at the crater and then came down hand in hand and hysterical with laughter as I kept falling down.’[14] On the drive home, they were both silent, as he was returning to England and they knew that the affair would not last. They decided on a late last drink and ended up at a party, Starky, drunk and sentimental, ruffling her hair. They said goodbye at ‘the Wrennery’ (her digs), ‘me saying “Thanks for a lovely volcano” and him “excuse me for kissing you goodnight with my glasses on”.’[15]
Pym was well aware that the affair had no future: ‘It isn’t, as we said, that one’s cynical, it’s that one knows from experience that these things peter out.’ But she did miss Starky and felt gloomy on the second anniversary of the Gordon declaration: ‘Two years ago tonight – if Gordon hadn’t said “In a queer kind of way I’m in love with you,” I shouldn’t be in Naples now.’[16]
She wrote to Jock, telling him about Starky. As ever, his advice was astute and more than a little dry: ‘I do not think you would be very long happy with your handsome beast, irresistible as the appeal of handsome beasts is to intelligent and educated people. I hope you will not throw yourself away.’ He teased her for not becoming entirely a ‘bluff salt’, telling her that ‘I have formed a beautiful picture of you returning, enriched like [Jane Austen’s] Captain Wentworth, with prize money and finding happiness with some faithful curate.’[17]
Persuasion was much on Pym’s mind. She had taken a copy of the novel to Naples and copied passages into her notebook. Pym was struck by Austen’s phrase ‘desolate tranquillity’ to describe Anne Elliot’s mood. She wrote out a famous passage about women’s fidelity in the face of their ‘confined’ lives:
We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.[18]
Later, in one of her novels, she would put across a very different view: that women’s domestic lives are an effective distraction from matters of the heart. That men are more likely to brood than women. She also copied out a more hopeful passage from Persuasion: ‘when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.’ Pym wrote down Austen’s beautiful and unforgettable iteration on female constancy: ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!’[19]
Knowing that she was subject to fits of misery, Pym resolved to stay away from parties: ‘Parties and drink are a bad thing when one has a little misery lurking somewhere.’ She and Starky began a correspondence, but they both knew it was a ‘war-affair’ of the ‘live-for-the-moment’ kind. Trips to the island of Ischia with her colleague Morag helped. She bought a heart-shaped basket for her sewing and they walked around the isle, finding it ‘beautifully green. Oranges and orange blossom with shining green leaves, lemons, vines, bougainvillea, mild sunny air.’ They chanced upon a delightful ruined cast
le that offered: ‘Sentimental delight in decay.’[20]
Pym had her sense of humour, as ever, to sustain her. One of Starky’s friends pleaded with her to go to a party – ‘said he was sure Starky would have wanted it – just as if I were Starky’s widow!’ Soon she was dancing with a sailor in ‘Cyclamen chiffon’ to the magic of ‘“Long Ago and Far Away”’ – ‘oh so cheek-to-cheek’. She was pleased to hear herself described as ‘that very blasé Wren officer with a perpetually bored expression’. Her friend Cynthia told her that she was also known as ‘the girl with the fascinating eyes’.
Starky had been a pleasant interlude, but not one she cared to repeat. Gordon sent a letter ‘so funny and sweet’ that it brought a sudden rush of tears to her eyes. The fact remained that Starky would never have suited Pym in the long term and Gordon’s letter was a reminder of ‘how much my own sort of person he was and is … please can’t there be somebody like that again’.[21]
CHAPTER XII
The End of the War
Pym made the most of her time in Italy. She travelled to Positano, Amalfi and Ravello – which she found romantic at twilight. She saw cypresses, olives, an orange grove and a Byzantine church.
On Christmas Day, she went to a party at the villa of an admiral – ‘quite enjoyable but I am never at my ease there, feel Jane Eyre-ish and socially unsuccessful’. In some respects, her affair with Starky had upended her class prejudices. She now found the flag officers fake and insincere: ‘Danced with Flags and Astley-Jones, both doing their stuff – charm etc. How artificial it all is. I wonder if they feel it.’[1]
In the spring of 1945, with the end of the war nigh, Pym spent her leave exploring Rome and the countryside outside the city: ‘Country lovely – brilliant green grass, yellow-green trees, blossoms, cypresses as one gets further north. Villages on hills, grey with a church spire or cupola – but ruined with sightless windows … Little white wooden crosses mark the graves.’ The wooden crosses were not the only signs of the cost of the war. In the town of Frosinone she saw: ‘horrifying damage. Like the Blitz but more desolate.’[2]
The wide pavements and the light in Rome reminded her of the German capital before the war: ‘magic twilight (as I first saw Berlin in 1938)’. Pym had come a long way since the days of Friedbert and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. In St Peter’s (‘vast and unchurchlike’), she noted the marble in various colours, the white cherubs and holy water basins. It was Palm Sunday and everyone carried little palm crosses and sprigs of myrtle. She peered into the Vatican City, ‘in the hopes of seeing carpet slippers slopping up and down the backstairs’.[3]
Although she had not started a new novel, she had written down many ideas in her notebook, ranging from ‘The Opera House on an April evening’, to ‘the dusty plants where we stub out our cigarettes’. Another idea for a story was ‘the haunted feeling of places and objects too, in villas and houses now taken over by the military’.[4]
Pym was still in Naples when news came of the German surrender and the end of the war in Europe. Her journal is silent on the subject. There are no descriptions of any of the celebrations that broke out, no mention of the losses suffered.
Jock’s brother, Don, who had written to Pym throughout the war and who had offered her such support and encouragement to carry on writing, was one of the casualties of war. His death in Normandy in the summer of 1944 left his elder brother bereft. He would pay tribute to his beloved brother in his North Oxford novel. Jock would never return to live in England. He cherished Pym’s bereavement letter. He told her that he could bear no one else’s sympathy: ‘You can imagine how broken I am.’ He told Pym how he had envisaged a future only with his brother:
You know as well as anyone what it means – all my mind and memory are bound up with him and I am rather like the last survivor of a race, talking a dead language all by myself. And other things go with him, the flat, Oxford … I don’t think it was unduly selfish to hope he would be the survivor … he was much stronger in character and better fitted to survive alone. Please pray for me: I am afraid of the future, more of the consolations than desolation, I think.[5]
Jock wrote from Gaza, thanking Pym for sending lines from John Betjeman, telling her that he had shed tears from the poem and that Betjeman was one of the writers belonging to his brother and him, along with Jane Austen and Henry James. He closed his letter with deep affection: ‘Dear Pym, take care of yourself in foreign parts – I do need you there for my empty old age – we old, life-worn people will have so much to say when we meet.’[6]
And then there were the Amery brothers. Pym had heard nothing from Julian, other than what she had picked up from the news, but his family’s story would end tragically. Julian had told Pym something of the trials of his elder brother. From the outset, John had been a wild and difficult child, whom neither school nor parents could control. He was constantly in trouble and asking for financial assistance. John was passionately anti-communist and had become a pro-Nazi British fascist. During the war, he had made propaganda broadcasts for Nazi Germany. In 1945, he was arrested in Milan and sent to prison in London, where he awaited trial for high treason. If found guilty, his sentence would be death by hanging. Julian was devastated and did everything he could to help his brother, even suggesting the defence that he was not legally capable of being a traitor to England as he had become a Spanish citizen. He could not believe that John was a traitor.
In November, John Amery’s trial for treason began. Leo suggested that his son was insane, but the claim was dismissed. At the last minute, John changed his plea to guilty. On 18 December 1945, he was hanged by the neck and buried in Wandsworth prison cemetery.
Barbara, too, faced a death in the family that year, though one far less public. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and operated upon. A few weeks after VE Day, Pym asked for compassionate leave. She returned to England and was assigned to WRNS headquarters in Queen Anne’s Mansions in London, waiting to be demobilised. Barbara and Hilary spent as much time in Oswestry as they could, devotedly nursing Irena through what would be her final illness. On 10 September she died. Family life, like the war, was over. Barbara Pym left Oswestry for good, determined to make a new life in London.
After the war had ended, Friedbert Glück wrote to Pym. She kept a note of the receipt of his letters, but made no comment on their content. It was a part of her past that she thought was best kept locked up in the lumber room.
BOOK THE FIFTH
Miss Pym in Pimlico
CHAPTER I
In which our Heroine and her Sister take up Residence in London
In November 1945, Barbara and Hilary moved into 108 Cambridge Street, Pimlico, on the corner of a garden square. It was ‘not a very good district, but perhaps we shall raise the tone’, wrote Pym.[1] Her room was on the second floor, with windows on two sides, offering a view of Warwick Square and St Gabriel’s church. It was difficult to find digs post-war, as so much of London had been bombed, so the Pym sisters felt grateful to have a light airy flat within walking distance of an Anglo-Catholic church that remained standing (though most of its windows had been blown out).
Following Irena’s death, Blytheswood was sold and their father had moved into a hotel in the centre of Oswestry. Hilary and Pym furnished their rooms in Pimlico with pieces from the family home. The house belonged to a Mrs Monckton, whose husband was a colonel, still away in the army. The Pym sisters had to share a bathroom with the occupants of the flat above. Though Barbara liked her spacious room and her independence, she was aware of the ‘humiliations’ of her position as a single woman, such as not having a bathroom of her own. This was something the upper-middle-class Virginia Woolf never had to worry about.
Pym would use the details of her time in Pimlico to create the world of London ‘bedsit-land’ in her next novel, Excellent Women. Widely regarded as the most successful of her books, its heroine, Mildred Lathbury, is one of those ‘splendid women’ whom most people take for granted: ‘I have to share
a bathroom, I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own.’[2]
Pym was pleased when Henry wrote on hearing of her mother’s death. She told him what a miserable time she had had, but that she felt better now she was away from Oswestry. She explained that her nerves were ‘frazzled’ after six years of war: ‘If I can get a nice little job to earn me a bit of money I shall then settle to writing again and see if I can get a nice novel or something published.’ She mentioned that Jock had also written: ‘he seems much happier and is enjoying the sinshine – oh dear what an unsuitable mistake to make – of course I mean sunshine’.[3] Henry and Pym were all too aware that homosexual liaisons were more readily available and less likely to lead to criminal prosecution in the Mediterranean than in Britain.
