A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym Read online

  We had a small paddock in which we kept a pony called Mogus, not for riding but for driving in a governess cart. Morda Lodge had a stable (which later became a garage) with a harness room and a loft above it where we used to play games. We kept hens, too, somewhere this region, so there were sacks of what used to be called ‘Indian corn’ and other things.

  I can’t remember when Barbara made up nicknames for our mother and father, or why, but they stuck and were soon taken for granted. She was ‘Links’ and he was ‘Dor’. Our favourite Aunt Janie was ‘Ack.’ I suppose this could be taken as an early example of an original mind at work! I soon became part of her stories and scenes, perhaps as ‘little fishy’ or ‘a fierce drowdle’. She had a very protective attitude towards me, and an early remark, often quoted later by our mother, was ‘What are you doing to Hilary? Put her down.’

  Church was a natural part of our lives because our mother was assistant organist at the parish church of St Oswald, and her family had always been on social terms with the vicar, curates and organists. Having curates to supper was a long-established tradition; and for Barbara and me there were children’s parties at the vicarage. Our father, too, sang bass in the church choir. Barbara and I started our church-going with the children’s service on Sunday afternoons for which our mother would be playing. One might sometimes sit on the organ-stool with her. Music and acting were important to both our parents: they were members of the Oswestry Operatic Society in the 1920s, the heyday of amateur productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and they both took leading roles. I suppose it was this influence that was responsible for Barbara’s first (publicly recognised) creative work, an operetta called The Magic Diamond, which was performed at Morda Lodge in April 1922. The ‘ Morda Lodge Operatic Society’ consisted of us and our Selway cousins. Our mother’s sister Nellie was married to C. J. Selway and lived at Hatch End in Middlesex. Their four children were our favourite cousins and used to come and spend Christmas and Easter with us. Family ceremonials evolved, rituals like the sugar mice on the Christmas cake and celluloid animals in our stockings (nowadays they would be considered too dangerous!).

  Apart from Gilbert and Sullivan (which of course we knew by heart) our mother taught us songs like ‘ Oh Oh Antonio’, ‘Going to School’ (both quoted in Less than Angels), ‘The Poodledog’ and the first-world-war song ‘We’re going to tax your butter, your sugar and your tea’. One of her favourite books which she would read to us was The Adventures of a Donkey, a translation of La Comtesse de Ségur’s Memoires d’un Ane. We always liked animals better than dolls. There were also many family jokes and sayings: it was she who encouraged Barbara to write and me to draw, and I’m sure it was her determination that sent us away to a boarding school rather than continue our education in Oswestry. Barbara was twelve when she went as a boarder to Liverpool College, Huyton. I missed her very much, just as I had missed her when she went to her first school and I had (apparently) spent the whole day waiting at the gate for her to come home!

  I can’t remember that we ever asked about our father’s family in Somerset – we seemed to have plenty of relations and a very full life. There was a biography of John Pym in the house, with the name ‘ Harriet Pym’ on the flyleaf (my father’s grandmother, I think). The story we were told, regarding the name Pym, was that we were descended from the brother of John Pym the Parliamentarian – but I’m sure we never checked it. (I don’t think there’s any evidence that John Pym ever had a brother.) There was one Taunton connection that we did know about: Frank and Mildred White were great friends of our father and one gathered that he had been brought up in their house during part of his youth. Mildred White was my godmother.

  At Huyton Barbara had an average career, not being particularly good at anything that counted; but she was chairman of the Literary Society. (The senior English mistress was Helene Lejeune, sister of C. A. Lejeune, the film critic.) During this period she wrote poems and parodies. Huyton was a very disciplined school and there was a lot of local churchgoing – this was before the dedication of the School Chapel, recalled by Mildred and Dora in an episode in Excellent Women – and her friends remember her amusing observations and fantasies about the different clergy and other characters who appeared on the scene. During her school years too, influenced by our family interest in golf and the fact that our cousin N. C. Selway was a Cambridge blue, she started the Hartley Book, a detailed record of the achievements of the two famous golfing brothers, Lister and Rex of the jam-making firm. It goes up to 1931 and includes autograph letters from them both. Meanwhile, her early reading of Edgar Wallace and Kipling (both admired by our father) and a lesser-known sleuth from The Scout, Frank Darrell, ‘the man of many faces’, had given place, when she was sixteen, to poetry and the novels of Aldous Huxley.

  In 1931 Barbara went to Oxford to read English at St Hilda’s. From 1932 we have her own account of those days. I followed her there three years later (to Lady Margaret Hall to read classics). Being younger, I was rather in awe of her circle of friends at first, but we gradually began to have friends in common. It was never our particular intention, in spite of the prophetic circumstances of Some Tame Gazelle, which she had started in 1934, to live together, but it somehow turned out that from about 1938 right up until the time of her death in 1980 we were never apart for more than a year or so at a time. In 1946, when I left my husband Sandy Walton, we started sharing a flat in London, then in 1961 we bought a house, and eventually, in 1972, a country cottage in Oxfordshire.

  We didn’t necessarily do everything together – our different jobs after the war (Barbara worked at the International African Institute and I was already in the BBC) gave us a variety of interests and friends and holidays – but the bond between us was strong enough to keep us always on good terms. As we both got older, our lives did come together more. There never seemed to be too much argument about who did what in our domestic round: we both genuinely liked housework, but Barbara was by nature better at cooking and planning meals (a fact borne out by the interest in food in her books). I never got the feeling that she shut herself away to write, as she always seemed to be available and enjoyed social life and entertaining. I suppose I was in some ways more practical and down-to-earth; I also earned more money, but this never caused difficulties or came between us. As our salaries were the only money we had, it was there to be used.

  We had a saying that Barbara used to make things happen by writing about them. It seemed to become increasingly true, and could sometimes work in reverse. Or it might produce rather alarming results, as for example when a church that she had brought into a book might become redundant or be demolished. Not so with the shared life of ‘Belinda and Harriet’, which started well and ran a good course.

  Part I

  OXFORD

  1932-1939

  To a young girl coming straight from boarding school, Oxford in the early 1930s must have seemed like total freedom – a room of one’s own, no more timetables, self-expression in one’s clothes and the opportunity, after living in a one-sex community, to meet Men. The old chaperone rules had gone and the remaining restrictions (signing the book if you wanted to be out after 10.30 and never being allowed to entertain men in your room) seemed negligible. Barbara went up to Oxford in 1931 eager for a lively social life as well as for academic achievement.

  She planned a whole new wardrobe of clothes (an abiding passion), many of which she made herself, and evolved a decorative scheme for her room at St Hilda’s which featured checked gingham and a doll called Wellerina, of a kind then very fashionable.

  Her cushions were embroidered SANDRA, which was the name she had given herself, and the name she often uses in her diaries to indicate the more dashing aspects of her character. This name may have been (as her friend Robert Liddell suggests) short for Cassandra, but it seems possible that it was simply a name she considered glamorous and sophisticated, being short for Alexandra and thus having overtones of Russian and Central European aristocracy.

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bsp; She was a tall, good-looking girl, very extrovert and entertaining, and she had many admirers – the ratio of women undergraduates to men being quite disproportionate. These early diaries are written with a kind of breathless vivacity and a vibrant enjoyment of everything that Oxford had to offer, both intellectual (her love of ‘our greater English poets’ – a source of comfort as well as pleasure in later years – was born here) and social. There was an endless round of dinners, tea parties, sherry parties (a newly fashionable form of entertainment), theatres and, above all the cinema, to which she went several times a week and even, amazingly, on Christmas Day.

  All these activities she recorded with enthusiasm but also with style. There is no doubt that she was a born writer. The fluency of her writing, the vividness of her descriptions and the sharp observation of comic detail are all present from the beginning. The style had to be polished and the craft learned, but the fundamentals were there, bright and true. Her first attempt at novel writing, Young Men in Fancy Dress (1929), was dedicated to a perceptive friend who kindly informed me that I had the makings of a style of my own’.

  After her meeting with Henry Harvey (Lorenzo), a deeper, sadder theme develops and the writing becomes more mature and introverted.

  She had always had a passion for ‘finding out’ about people who interested or attracted her. Tracking people down and looking them up were part of her absorbing interest (that continued all her life) in ‘ research into the lives of ordinary people‘. Her researches ranged from looking people up in Who’s Who, Crockford or street directories to the actual ‘tailing’ of the object of her investigation. She was very resourceful at this and often said that she would have made a good detective. Her powers of observation and research were certainly of great benefit to her as a novelist.

  Barbara noticed Henry Harvey at lectures and in the Bodleian Library and had thoroughly investigated him (tracking him around Oxford and asking a friend to look at his pile of books in the Bodleian to find out his name) long before she actually got him to speak to her. Henry was two years older than she, and he and his friend Robert Liddell (Jock), who was then working on the staff of the Bodleian, seemed very much her intellectual superiors. ‘I was inclined to be rather aggressive in my ‘‘lowness’’, talking about dance music etc. I think I did this because I felt intellectually inferior to them.’

  In 1934 she went on a National Union of Students’ tour of Germany and in Cologne she met Hanns Woiscknick and Friedbert Gluck, who were officially entertaining the student party. Both young men were attracted to her and she and Friedbert had a love affair which continued for several years, both by letter and when Barbara visited Germany again in 1935 (when they went to Prague together) and in 1937. These were the early days of National Socialism but Barbara was far more concerned with the language, poetry and the general romanticism and Stimmung of Germany than the politics, which interested her not at all. She was really rather naive:

  There was much merriment – shouting and singing too – English and German songs. We sang God Save the King and Deutschland Uber Alles – that rather worried Friedbert, although I couldn’t understand why. He and Hanns had an animated talk about it in German.

  She found Friedbert glamorous (‘The Germans are glorious to flirt with’) and good for her self-confidence (‘ The Germans appreciate me even if the English [i.e. Henry Harvey] don’t).

  In 1934 Henry Harvey took up an appointment at the University of Helsingfors and in 1937 he married a Finnish girl, Elsie Godenhjelm. Barbara was badly hurt, though characteristically, she wrote them lively, satirical letters (some in the styles of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith) and even some to ‘My darling sister Elsie’.

  She divided her time between Oswestry and Oxford, with occasional visits to her relations at Hatch End, living on a very small allowance from her family. ‘I wrote home [from Oxford] for some books to try to sell them’ and ‘I want so terribly to go to Germany again and I am 12/ 10d overdrawn.’At that period there was no pressure on girls to take up any sort of job or career, many of her social class simply remained at home until they married or as ‘ the daughter at home’ if they did not. Barbara already knew that she was going to be a writer. In 1934 she wrote:

  Sometime in July I began to write a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish. Henry and Jock and all of us appeared in it. I sent it to them and they liked it very much. So I am going on with it and one day it may become a book.

  This was Some Tame Gazelle, ‘my novel of real people’. It was, in fact, the only one of her novels whose characters were taken directly from life: Belinda was Barbara herself, Harriet was Hilary, Henry was Henry Harvey, Agatha was Alison West-Watson, Lady Clara Boulding was Julia Pakenham, John Akenside was John Barnicot, Dr Nicholas Parnell was Robert Liddell, Edith Liversidge was Honor Tracy and Ricardo Bianco was Count Roberto Weiss.

  She finished the novel, revised it and had it typed by November 1935 and sent it to Chatto and to Gollancz, both of whom rejected it. She then sent it to Cape. In August 1936 she had a letter from Jonathan Cape himself, saying that if she would make certain minor alterations ‘I may be able to offer to publish it.’ She made the alterations and returned the manuscript but in September it was sent back to her with a letter from him.

  It is with very great regret that I do not find myself in a position to make you an offer to publish your novel. There is not here the unanimity of appreciation of the book’s chances that I feel is essential for successful publication. Personally I like your novel, but fear that if I were to offer to publish it, we should be unable to give it all the care and attention which I feel are necessary if it is to be successfully launched.

  This rejection distressed her very much, and she put the novel aside.

  (After the war she revised it and sent it to Jonathan Cape again. This time he ‘read it with interest and pleasure’. It was accepted and published in 1950.)

  Some Tame Gazelle, even in its earliest form, was a considerable achievement. It was unusual enough for a girl of twenty-two to choose to make her heroine fifty years of age, but to have created such a believable middle-aged world was quite remarkable. The observation and language were already mature, the cadences of speech were idiosyncratic and the handling of character wholly assured.

  In December 1937 she had a very consciously Romantic encounter in Oxford with a young undergraduate six years her junior. ‘Oh how absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself! everybody should try it.’

  This theme, the love of a woman for a younger man, occurred again later in her own life and she used the experiences with great delicacy in several of her novels, The Lumber Room (an unfinished novel started in 1938), The Sweet Dove Died and An Unsuitable Attachment.

  In August 1938, realising she had to leave Oxford, she went to Poland to teach English to the daughter of Dr Michal Alberg in Katowice, but she had to return to England after only a few weeks because of the worsening political situation. She enjoyed the experience and noted, as always, the unusual:

  Went into the town by myself. Saw a large animal like a wolf hanging up outside a provision shop. After supper a Polish cavalry officer and his wife came in. They were sitting drinking tea and eating Kuchen. A lovely picture.

  Went to Czestochowa by car with Mme A. Forests and barefoot peasants. Saw a wonderful church – turquoise marble, pink, grey, white fawn, green crochet work around the pulpit and altars in green and puce. Virgin Mary portrait with doors sliding over it.

  Went into a dark romantic forest (belonging to the Prince of Pless). Had tea at a deserted Beergarden – great Stimmung. Walked in the forest and visited a Golf Club. Very nice clubhouse, all notices written in English.

  Back in England she and Hilary, who was now taking a secretarial course, moved into rooms in London in Upper Berkeley Street (‘ Hilary paid £1.5s. 2d. for my rooms’). Hilary got a job as a secretary with the BBC and Barbara worked hard at her writing.

  The war was
coming nearer. There were ‘ territorials, with rifles but no uniforms, in the streets’ and she met again Dr Alberg and his family, now refugees from Poland. ‘ One almost thinks how comforting to be in the obituaries … ‘‘in her 93rd year’‘.’

  In July she returned to Oswestry to make black-out curtains and kelp to prepare the house to receive six evacuees from Birkenhead.

  H.H.

  1932

  15 January. A new term in a new year – a golden opportunity to get a peer’s heir – a worthy theological student – or to change entirely! But Oxford really is intoxicating.

  26 April. Today was an important day. I went to tea with Rupert Gleadow in George Steer’s sitting room – it was littered with books and we had tea off a table covered with a skin – on his sofa were lovely leopard skins. We ate a large tea and talked much. We got on amazingly well – Rupert was far more human than I’d thought. It surprised me when he put his hand on mine – and when he asked me to kiss him I was even more amazed but I refused! Went to the Union in the evening too sleepy to realise the brilliance of Philip Guedalla’s speech.

  28 April. Was in the Bodleian with Mary Sharp – coming out at lunchtime we met Rupert at the corner of Catte St. Neither of us knew quite what to say – a bad sign – or good. In the afternoon I had a letter from him in green ink, which cheered me up, as I was in the middle of a foul Sidney–Spenser essay. I saw him just before tea and he came back into St Hilda’s with me. After tea I returned to the Bod. – tried to finish my essay – but naturally I was thinking about Rupert the whole time.

  29 April I met Rupert at Carfax at 10.15. We went into Stewart’s and had coffee – then we wandered down the Banbury Road and thereabouts in the pouring rain. When we were thoroughly wet we went to 47 and drank some sherry. I remember putting my arms round him and loving him, because he was very wet and shivering and looked at me so sweetly.