by Barbara Pym
Do write very soon – I hope you are both well. Hilary sends her love.
And so of course does your affectionate sister,
Barbara
May
What is the heart? A damp cave with things growing in it, mysterious secret plants of love or whatever you like. Or a dusty lumber room full of junk. Or a neat orderly place like a desk with a place for everything and everything in its place.
Something might be starting now that would linger on through many years – dying sometimes and then coming back again, like a twinge of rheumatism in the winter, so that you suddenly felt it in your knee when you were nearing the top of a long flight of stairs.
A Great Love that was unrequited might well be like that.
So many places where one has enjoyed oneself are no more – notably Stewart’s in Oxford – shops are pulled down, houses in ruins, people in their marble vaults whom one had thought to be still living. One looks through the window in a house in Belgravia and sees right through its uncurtained space into a conservatory with a dusty palm, a room without furniture and discoloured spaces on the walls where pictures of ancestors once hung. One passes a house in Bayswater with steep steps and sees a coffin being carried out.
Walking in Mayfair just before eleven on a Sunday morning (21st May), the air soft and warm and lovely, trees in leaf and red hawthorns in flower. There is a delicious nostalgic smell of churches and new paint and later a Sunday dinner coming up from the basements. His [Jay’s] house is newly painted in cream and royal blue and a window-box next door has petunias in it. How all things are in tune to a poor person in love. A fine, sunny afternoon in May, Beethoven and German lieder. I go to my irises, thinking to throw them away, but find that each dead flower has a fat new bud at the side of its stem. And so I take off the dead flowers and the new flowers begin to unfold. The photograph of him at the Union stands on the mantelpiece and in front of it a spray of red roses – but they are artificial ones from Woolworth’s.
Whitsuntide weekend – an old lady with a curious bakelite apparat – perhaps an ear trumpet – talking about spiritualism in a restaurant. A clergyman composing hymns, where perhaps emotion and fervour get the better of reason.
6 June. On the hottest day of the year I saw two nuns buying a typewriter in Selfridges. Oh, what were they going to do with it?
17 – 18 June. Prescription for a lonely weekend in London. After getting into a good emotional state over Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Love Affair go into Lyons and have tea. Then walk in the park and back through the deserted streets of Mayfair. Such of the aristocracy as still lives here is away for the weekend. Turn off Park Lane and stand at the bottom of Park Street – you can look right up over Oxford Street and along Gloucester Place to some distant view of trees and spires which is comforting. One day you will really go and see what it is. But not yet. You must go back and read your new Vogue and wash stockings – for that is an essential part of a lonely weekend in London. A great deal of washing and tidying must be done, and if it is the Oxford end of term, well, so much the better.
July
On the 4th of July I met one I loved and had not seen for more than a year [Jay]. Such meetings should be avoided if possible. On this same day I went inside that curious house in Mayfair with its oil paintings and smell of incense and met his mother, a splendid character for a novel.
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity.
I used to quote that two years ago but it was only recently that I read the whole poem. Here is the last verse –
Ah! would ’twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.
[Keats]
And so it is, I suppose, with this gentle girl and boy. But now when the world is in this sad state, when one hardly dares to look ahead into the years, all this is a warm comfort … the remembrance of meetings, letters, a photograph (absence – cheek pressed against the cold glass), all the little relics, all the jokes, everything that did happen and didn’t quite happen and might still happen. Twenty hours – but perhaps twenty years of memories.
Part II
THE WAR
1940–1945
In a small provincial town in wartime life resumed some semblance of normality.
Went to the pictures for the first time since the war started. Took gas masks but felt rather silly.
Budget out. Cigarettes up – Players 1/ 1½d – and income tax. All drawing in our horns.
Put in some hyacinth bulbs. Reading a biography of Caroline of Brunswick. Band Waggon. This is a war diary but this seems to be our life.
There were some excitements:
Postcard from Don Liddell to say that Jock, Henry and Elsie are leaving Finland. Flight from the Bolsheviks in an open boat. Somehow, though it’s serious, I can’t help laughing.
But everyday life supervened:
Made 16/- by selling old clothes to Mrs Ramage.
All this time she was writing steadily and conscientiously:
I did a little writing – it is getting involved and I don’t quite know what I am driving at. That’s the worst of a plot.
After supper I did some writing which quells my restlessness – that is how I must succeed.
She had already, in 1938, completed Civil to Strangers and a novel with a Finnish setting, half jokingly based on Henry’s life there (both unpublished). During 1940 she wrote the first draft of a novel with a wartime setting, which she called ‘my spy novel’, which was more remarkable for its observation and humour than for its plot.
When one is tired one gets strange fancies. On one occasion when we had the evacuees I fancied I smelled rabbit cooking in church and the altar looked like some celestial Aga.
I like to see that all lights are put out and never trust anyone but myself to do it. Also it has become doubly important since the war as our Air Raid Warden is the grocer with whom I am not registered.
During 1940 and part of 1941 she worked in the YMCA canteen at the local military camp:
Did my nails with Pink Clover but later, doing the money at the camp, it all peeled off.
A Scotsman called me ‘a wee smasher’ but what he meant is rather obscure.
Busy poaching eggs in little machines.
A ravishingly handsome Second Lieutenant poured into an exquisitely tailored overcoat came in, but he studied his book of Gas Drill rather than me.
But there were quite a number of soldiers only too happy to flirt with her a little. One of them, a Scot, inspired her to start learning Gaelic, as she had learned German for Friedbert and Finnish for Henry.
She also helped at the baby clinic in the town:
I’m learning quite a lot about babies and their feeding. I am gradually learning to pick up a baby with a nonchalant air.
And at the First Aid Post:
Long First Aid lecture. Shall I ever grasp the circulation of the blood?
In the evening an anti-gas lecture. Went into the tear-gas van – a snouted figure – got my badge.
Like all women in civilian life she was busy with housework, making over her old clothes now that there was clothes rationing, and constantly preoccupied with food:
Links managed to get a 7lb jar of marmalade – such are the joys of going without. Not even love is so passionately longed for.
She did not have to brave the perils of air raids though enemy planes passed over:
A big bang in the night, reputed to be a bomb at Bagley.
And the sirens went most nights:
Had a bath after tea in case the sirens should go.
We have a rota at the First Aid post now and if I hear the siren I don’t ha
ve to go tonight. It went at 12. All clear 4 a. m.
In October 1941 she had to register for war service and after various suggestions (‘Had a phone call asking me if I’d be interested in apolitical intelligence job in the country’) she was offered a job in the censorship at Bristol, censoring civilian letters, mostly to Southern Ireland.
Hilary was already working as a secretary in the BBC Schools Department at Bristol, living in a large house called The Coppice in Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, overlooking the Suspension Bridge. Barbara joined her there in December 1941.
Barbara compared life at The Coppice to a play by Tchekov and certainly the inhabitants, all working for the BBC and living in close proximity, were an interesting collection of personalities, and there was a very Tchekovian mixture of comedy and tears. They were: Dick Palmer with his wife Mary, their three children, Liz, Gill and Sally, and Tamara, a Polish friend; Flora Meaden; Hilary, and Honor Wyatt with her two children Julian and Prue. Honor had separated from her husband, the writer and broadcaster C. Gordon Glover, when she got her BBC job, and moved to Bristol taking the children with her. Gordon was based in London on the staff of the Radio Times but was living at Arkesden in Essex. He used to visit Bristol to see the children, since the separation had been amicable with no bitterness.
Barbara fell in love with Gordon and they had a love affair, very serious on her part, perhaps less so on his. There is no written record of this period in her life, apart from a few letters to the Harveys, since Barbara burned her diaries for this year (see her notebook entry for 17 February 1976), but she started writing a kind of narrative which she called After Christmas in 1943 after she and Gordon had parted.
It was a strange, ironic situation, to be living in the same house as Gordon’s wife Honor, to whom she was deeply attached, following with sympathy and anxiety Honor’s love affair with George Ellidge (whom Honor later married), then on active sevice in North Africa, and the progress of her divorce from Gordon. The interrelationships and emotional undertones were complicated and painful and in July 1943, to make a break in an impossible situation, she wrenched herself away from the warmth and familiarity of The Coppice and joined the WRNS.
She served as a rating at HMS Westcliff and was then promoted to Third Officer and worked in naval censorship. A testimonial from Director of WRNS on her demobilisation described her as ‘an intelligent and adaptable censor officer with a keen interest in her work’. But Barbara could never quite believe that she was part of service life.
Gradually people will begin to discover what a fake I am — how phoney is my Wrennish façade.
She did, however, find herself immersed in social life, especially when she was stationed at Southampton:
There is plenty of social life whether you like it or not, because most of the invasion forces, both English and American, are concentrated in the South-West and there are always far more men than women at dances. The Wrens get so many invitations they hardly know which to accept.
In 1944 she was posted to Naples where social activity was even more hectic:
In the evening went to a party at Admiral Morse’s villa, quite enjoyable but I am never at my ease there, feeling Jane Eyre-ish and socially unsuccessful. Danced with Flags and Astley-Jones, both doing their stuff – charm etc. How artificial it all is. I wonder if they feel it.
She returned to England in June 1945 and went to Oswestry to be with her mother who was very ill and who died in September.
A fellow Third Officer, Frances Kendrick, introduced Barbara to her aunt, Beatrice Wyatt, then Secretary of the International African Institute in London and it was arranged that Barbara should work there as an Editorial Assistant.
H.H.
Adapting to the War
Addressed to Robert Liddell but also intended for the Harveys with whom he was staying in Stockholm
Oswestry.
12 January 1940
Dear Jock –
How can you possibly know that I was delighted with your letters when I do not write to tell you so? I feel I should write nearly a whole novel to make up for my neglect. ‘Oh, surely that will not be necessary,’ I can hear you saying, in a high nervous tone. ‘I really do not think you need put yourself to such trouble. Is it not true that the Government is exhorting us to save paper?’ ‘We are digging for victory,’ said Barbara, in a deep resonant tone. ‘I suppose that is what you mean.’ But as you will have seen from my letter to Elsie I somehow imagined you would all be coming back to England soon, though I now see that it is not so easy for you as I had at first supposed.
And now, as I had your last letter yesterday morning, I feel we need not have any more of this reproaching. I am answering it now. I am sitting in a comfortable chair by a blazing fire, and realize that I am lucky to be in such a position. In about half an hour I shall be going with my mother to see The Lion Has Wings, and so I can look forward to a nice emotional evening, though I believe it is a very fine film. So I shall start this letter and then go on with it and perhaps on and on until it breaks into ottava rima.
A very happy New Year to you and may it be not quite as bad as we expect, and even bring the end of the war in sight. We are told now to prepare for much grimmer things, and certainly we have not yet been called upon to endure anything except the evacuees. As I expect I’ve already told you – they have gone to another billet and we are having a rest.
Rationing has started but there is Plenty of Everything Here. It is always better in the country anyway. Mrs Pym says she will take her sugar ration with her when she goes out to tea or evening bridge, but Mr Pym ridicules the idea. ‘One should be able to get a special container for it,’ she says.
You are so nice wishing good things for my poor novels. I do not see much prospect of getting them published just now, though I believe they are the kind of novels some people might like to read at a time like this. (That sounds very cautious). Anyway I shall try. I am now getting into shape the novel I have been writing during this last year, and which I have had to lay aside because I have been so busy [provisionally entitled Crampton Hodnet]. It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end … I’m sure all these might be a comfort to somebody. I have also done nearly half of a novel about the war. There is a nice vicar’s wife called Jane, her daughter Flora (a comic character) and evacuees etc. And there is always my poor Tame Gazelle.
Your new work sounds very fine and I hope I may see it soon. It might even console me (in a nice way) to find that you have human frailties in your writings. The influence of Miss Compton-Burnett is very powerful once it takes a hold, isn’t it? For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed, there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is. But purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair. I’m afraid I never had the former, unless one can say that they are the same thing. Somehow I do not believe one can. Who knows what the war may bring though? Already to think is to be full of sorrow, but I am never without hope. The winter has never seemed so long or so cold as this year and I am sure I never had chilblains before. And now that I have come down to the ridiculous I can tell you that most of my hopes are rather small ones and my pleasures too. Getting letters, finishing my blue tweed jacket, watching my bulbs sprout and flower (that’s not so small), imagining that one day I shall see my friends again. I suppose everyone lives from day to day now and it is really the best way, if you cannot see anything pleasant in the future. The present is at least dull and peaceful and there is much writing and reading to be done. Or do you think I should join the ATS. Would you not be proud of your friend Sergeant Pym?
Poor Michael Benthall has sent me a photograph of himself in the uniform of a private. He looks very fine, almost
like a Field Marshal and with a noble expression on his handsome face. He spent Christmas with Osbert and Edith Sitwell in their ancestral home somewhere in the north of England. We had thought of writing a play together which was going to be very successful – the sort of chintz and teacups comedy that the matinée-goers like so much and Lionel Hale is so scornful about. I have no recent news of Friedbert for you as I have not written to him since September – ‘nor he to me,’ added Miss Pym, her tone losing in fulness. ‘Henry has not written to you either,’ said Jock in an open interested tone. ‘One does not expect letters from enemy aliens or from married men,’ said Miss Pym.
Well, I seem to have written about as much as I can. I hope the CENSOR will not open this letter and think that my crossings-out are of any significance. Your first was opened but not the second.
‘Oh these are dull people,’ said the Censor, in a low dragging tone. ‘They do not seem to realise that we are at war. They write only of trivialities and the young woman does not know her own mind. All these quotations too, it is not natural.’
We have got a new Shakespeare calendar in the lavatory. So far all the quotations seem to be from Troilus and Cressida – the more noble parts. Last year we had Golfing Hints. Well, you dear people, know that you have all my love. My mother and I have sent money to the Finns. Take care of yourselves – BMCP.
