THE ADVENTURES OF MISS BARBARA PYM
A Biography

Paula Byrne

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021

Copyright © Paula Byrne 2021

Paula Byrne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Cover photograph © the Barbara Pym Society

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Source ISBN: 9780008322205

Ebook Edition © 2021 ISBN: 9780008322229

Version: 2021-02-23

Dedication

for Stephen Pickles

Epigraph

‘No Need for Modesty in a Diary’

Barbara Pym, 9 September 1933

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: In which Miss Barbara Pym pays a Visit to Jane Austen’s Cottage

BOOK THE FIRST: A SHROPSHIRE LASS

I. In which our Heroine is born in Oswestry

II. In which we learn how a Servant Girl, Phoebe Pym, is seduced by a Gentleman and gives birth to a Baby Boy

III. In which Miss Pym is sent away to Boarding School

IV. Miss Pym attempts her First Novel: ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’

V. In which Miss Barbara Pym goes up to St Hilda’s College, Oxford

VI. In which our Heroine might have said Et in Arcadia ego

VII. In which Miss Pym returns North

VIII. In which Miss Pym returns to Oxford

IX. In which our Heroine meets a Handsome Young Man called Rupert Gleadow

X. Miss Pym’s Summer of Love

XI. Our Heroine returns to Shropshire for the Long Vacation and invites Rupert to stay

XII. In which Things begin to become a little complicated with Rupert

XIII. The End of the Affair

XIV. In which we are introduced to ‘the Saga of Lorenzo’

XV. In which Sandra makes her Appearance

XVI. In which Sandra has her First Date with Lorenzo and bites him on the Cheek

XVII. We’re having a Heatwave – a Tropical Heatwave

XVIII. Miss Pym reflects upon Stormy Weather

XIX. In which Sandra returns

XX. We are given a Glimpse of Sandra’s Diary

XXI. In which Sandra tries to renounce Lorenzo

XXII. A Pet Kangaroo

XXIII. Sandra returns to Oxford and resumes her Affair with Lorenzo

XXIV. The Saga of Sandra and Lorenzo, continued …

XXV. In which a Very Important Correspondence begins

BOOK THE SECOND: GERMANY

I. Miss Pym tours Germany

II. In which Fräulein Pym falls for a Handsome Nazi

III. In which Sandra returns to Oxford and loses her Swastika Badge somewhere on the Banbury Road

IV. Miss Pym’s Final Term

V. Night of the Long Knives

VI. Miss Pym returns to Nazi Germany and attends a Hitler Rally

VII. In which Miss Pym returns to England and begins writing a Novel

VIII. Miss Pym continues her Novel of ‘Real People’

IX. In which Miss Pym returns to Oxford to take her BA Degree

X. In which our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi

XI. An Untoward Incident on the River

XII. ‘An English Gentlewoman can never come to any Harm’

XIII. Omit the Nazis

XIV. Pymska

XV. In which Pymska is involved in a Tragic Accident

XVI. In which Jock and Pymska draw closer together …

XVII. The Inquest

XVIII. Miss Pym begins her Second Novel in the Summer of 1936 and returns to Oxford to be Henry’s Amanuensis

XIX. The Story of Adam and Cassandra

XX. Jilted

XXI. An Introduction to Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett

XXII. Pymska writes a Finnish Novel

XXIII. Paavikki Olafsson and Jay

XXIV. Liebe Vikki

XXV. A Trip to the Botanical Gardens

XXVI. An Old Brown Horse

XXVII. In which our Heroine sees Friedbert for the Last Time

XXVIII. In which Pymska returns briefly Home to England and Vikki Olafsson goes to Poland

XXIX. Miss Pym leaves Poland in a Hurry, whilst there is still Time

XXX. We rummage in the Lumber Room

XXXI. We go to Crampton Hodnet

XXXII. Introducing Mr Simon Beddoes

XXXIII. A Peek into 112 Eaton Square

BOOK THE THIRD: WAR

I. Operation Pied Piper

II. In which we meet Mrs Dobbs of Birkenhead and Lady Wraye of Belgravia

III. Miss Pym reads a Government White Paper about Nazi Atrocities

IV. Our Heroine is rejected Again

V. Miss Pym begins a Novel in Real Time

VI. The Shadow of the Swastika

VII. Food Glorious Food

VIII. Oxford Revisited

IX. Miss Pym joins the ARP

X. In which our Heroine works for the YMCA in an Army Tented Camp

XI. A Sketch of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett

XII. I Married a Nazi

XIII. Miss Pym returns to her ‘Sentimental Journal’

XIV. So Very Secret

XV. Operation Bullseye

XVI. Miss Pym is offered a Job in the Censorship Department (German) and hears News of Friedbert

BOOK THE FOURTH: FROM THE COPPICE TO NAPLES

I. Miss Pym moves to a ‘Select Residential District’ of Bristol

II. In which we meet a Philandering Gentleman called Gordon Glover

III. The Marriage of Miss Hilary Pym and the Birth of a Baby

IV. Mr Gordon Glover makes a Bold Declaration to Miss Pym

V. It’s That Man Again

VI. Miss Pym has a Medical Examination

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

VIII. Miss Pym passes her Interview

IX. Miss Pym experiences Life in Uniform

X. Introducing ‘Wren Pym’

XI. Third Officer Pym is posted to Naples, where she meets ‘Pay-Bob’ Starky

XII. The End of the War

BOOK THE FIFTH: MISS PYM IN PIMLICO

I. In which our Heroine and her Sister take up Residence in London

II. Miss Pym the Anthropologist

III. In which Mr Jock Liddell persists and persuades Miss Pym to revise her Novel

IV. Miss Pym finally tames her Gazelle and it is released to the World

V. In which Miss Pym enters the Age of Dior and the Beveridge Report

VI. In which we read of an Excellent Woman

VII. In which Miss Pym leaves Pimlico for Barnes

VIII. In which Jock and Henry return (briefly) to the Story

IX. Miss Pym the Novelist takes Tea with the Distinguished Author Elizabeth Bowen in the Company of Several Homosexuals

X. The Celebrated Miss Barbara Pym

XI. The Tale of Jane and Prudence

XII. In which Miss Pym meets Robert Smith, is promoted to Assistant Editor of Africa, and Marks & Spencer takes Umbrage

XIII. Miss Pym enters the New Elizabethan Age

XIV. Miss Pym goes to Portugal

XV. Bill

XVI. What a Saga!

XVII. Darling Denton and Orvil Pym

XVIII. Tracking down Orvil Pym

XIX. We drink a Glass of Blessings

XX. In which Miss Pym goes to Swanwick

XXI. In which Miss Pym goes over to Rome

XXII. A Sketch of Philip Larkin

XXIII. No fond Return to Print

BOOK THE SIXTH: THE WILDERNESS YEARS

I. Miss Pym’s Annus Horribilis

II. Miss Pym takes Umbrage

III. Hullo Skipper

IV. Miss Pym visits Keats’s House in Hampstead

V. Of Wistfulness and Whitsun Weddings

VI. Darling Richard

VII. The Tale of the Sweet Bahamian and the Goddess of Brooksville

VIII. In which Mr Philip Larkin is disgruntled (when was he not?)

IX. In which Miss Pym takes Skipper as her Guest to the FANY Club Lunch and he receives a Love Token from Another Man, in the form of a Drying-up Cloth patterned with Dachshunds

X. Miss Pym is Off-loaded, again

XI. Mr Larkin to the Rescue

XII. In which we read Miss Pym’s plangent Masterpiece, The Sweet Dove Died

XIII. Miss Pym feels her Age

XIV. In trying Circumstances, Miss Pym compares herself to an Amazon

XV. In which Holborn’s Renowned Department Store, Gamages, is demolished

XVI. Miss Pym moves to Finstock

XVII. A Luncheon at the Randolph

XVIII. The Kissinger Syndrome and the Return of Henry Harvey

BOOK THE SEVENTH: IN WHICH THE FORTUNES OF MISS PYM ARE REVERSED

I. A Real Pym Year

II. Tea with Miss Pym

III. Miss Pym plays a Quartet in Autumn

IV. Miss Pym attends the Booker Prize

V. In which Miss Pym is invited as a Castaway on a famous Desert Island

VI. In which Miss Pym works on her Last Novel

VII. In which Miss Pym makes her Final Journey

Epilogue: In which Mr Larkin attends the Funeral of his Much-Loved Correspondent Miss Barbara Pym

Afterword

Picture Section

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
In which Miss Barbara Pym pays a Visit to Jane Austen’s Cottage

It was August 1969, a few weeks after man landed on the moon and a couple of days before the assembled rock stars of the world played the Woodstock festival. The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus would soon be broadcast on the BBC. An unmarried female novelist, now fifty-six years old, was feeling adrift in this brave new world, so she made a pilgrimage to the cottage in the Hampshire village of Chawton that had been the home of another unmarried female novelist.

That night, Barbara Pym wrote in her diary: ‘I put my hand down on Jane’s desk and bring it up covered in dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me.’[1]

Like Jane Austen, our novelist had published six well-received novels. She had built a following of devoted fans, including such luminaries as the poet Philip Larkin and the Oxford professor Lord David Cecil. She also had a legion of ardent ‘excellent women’ who devoured her novels, borrowed them from the circulating libraries and waited expectantly for the next ‘Barbara Pym’. She had been hailed as the new Jane Austen.

But six years before her visit to Chawton, Pym’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, had rejected Pym’s seventh novel. It was 1963 and London was swinging. The decade had begun with the Lady Chatterley trial and now the Beatles had just released their first LP, Please Please Me. The editors at Cape felt that Barbara Pym’s ‘cosy’ domestic comedies were out of touch, outmoded.

Pym was shocked. She had just completed a draft of what would be her masterpiece. Like the novel she had submitted, it would be considered unpublishable. It was left to languish with her other manuscript novels in a linen cupboard in her shared house in London.

There have been times when even Jane Austen’s novels have fallen out of favour. Tastes and fashions change with each decade, each era. But a truly great body of work will sooner or later bounce back: Austen’s ‘courtship’ novels, for instance – which centred on village life, avoiding overt politics and the wider world – are, for all their limited scope, now acclaimed as forerunners of the women’s movement because they prioritised female experience in a world run by and for men.

Life had left Miss Barbara Pym emotionally bruised, though few would have known this by her outward appearance and demeanour. To look at her she seemed the epitome of middle-class respectability: perfectly coiffed hair; immaculately dressed; good shoes and handbag. To some, she might seem rather intimidating, redoubtable, even; though there was often a twinkle of good humour in those intelligent eyes. The young women in mini-skirts with beehive hairdos seemed to live on a different planet from Miss Barbara Pym, assistant editor of Africa magazine.

‘If only someone would have the courage to be unfashionable,’ Pym had remarked sadly to her friend Philip Larkin.[2] She feared that her novels would go out of print and she would never find another publisher. Her sense of identity had been founded on her literary status, so Cape’s rejection was a bitter blow.

Barbara Pym was a lover not only of Jane Austen, but also of Austen’s eighteenth-century predecessors. At St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she studied from 1931, female undergraduates were called by their surnames; Barbara was always ‘Pym’ to her friends. But she also liked the appellation ‘Miss Pym’: she frequently referred to herself in this way in her letters, notebooks and journals. In an early (unfinished) novel, she describes the heroine, who is partly based on herself, as a ‘perfect eighteenth-century lady’. She loved Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, but lost interest when Mr B’s intentions towards his beautiful maidservant became honourable.[3] (It is a good point: Mr B is a wonderful villain but loses all credibility when he reforms.) It was the racier aspects of the novel that attracted Barbara Pym.

Pym’s own diaries are prefaced ‘The Adventures of Miss Pym’, and later of ‘Sandra’ and of ‘Pymska’, in the manner of Henry Fielding’s masterpiece Tom Jones. Like Fielding’s naive hero, Miss Pym spent much of her youth falling in love and – surprisingly in the light of her reputation for provinciality – a considerable amount of it on the road. So it is fitting to imagine her life as a picaresque adventure, with a Fieldingesque narrative: ‘In which our heroine …’

BOOK THE FIRST

CHAPTER I
In which our Heroine is born in Oswestry

Shropshire is a rural county in the north-west of England, nestling on the Welsh border. It is a green and pleasant land, but not far from the city of Liverpool and the industrial shipbuilding town of Birkenhead; it is quiet, slow, rainy and green. The poet A. E. Housman immortalised its ‘blue remembered hills’ in A Shropshire Lad, even though he hardly spent any time there. Oswestry, in the north of the county and close to the border, was the birthplace of another poet, Wilfred Owen. It is an ancient market town dating back to 1190. Its narrow streets conjure up images of its medieval past: ‘The Horsemarket’, ‘English Walls’, ‘Welsh Walls’, ‘The Bailey’.

Barbara Pym was born in the family home, 72 Willow Street, near the centre of Oswestry. Across the road was the office where her father, Frederic Crampton Pym, practised as a solicitor; his brass plate ‘Crampton Pym and Lewis’ is still in place beside the doorway. Barbara was born on 2 June 1913; her only sibling, Hilary, was born in 1916. By then, the family had moved to a detached Edwardian house called Morda Lodge. Set back from the road, it boasted a paddock, a coach house and a spacious garden of three acres. The attic room of the converted coach house was a playroom for the little girls.

During the summer months the garden at Morda Lodge was a riot of colour and fragrance. In a letter written to her Oxford friends, Pym describes the array of spring flowers there: ‘primroses, violets, daffodils, scyllas, grape hyacinths, anemones’.[1] In one of her short stories, a heroine, modelled on herself, loves flowers with such passionate intensity that she believes that they have feelings and emotions and worries that they cry when they are cut down. Her diaries too are a record of her passion for flowers, which lasted for all of her life. Many of her happiest moments were punctuated by the gift of flowers, especially when they were brought by lovers – as when one lover once left a farewell note alongside two dozen ‘of the loveliest daffodils’.[2]

Pym described her father Frederic as ‘extremely good-tempered, undemanding and appreciative’.[3] Every day he would set off on foot for his office in the middle of town and return home for lunch. Sometimes, as young girls, Barbara and Hilary would visit him in his book-lined office, which he shared with his clerk and typist. Fred was a good singer, singing bass in the church choir. He was also athletic and a keen runner. A knee injury kept him out of the First World War, and he took up golf. He enjoyed reading: Rudyard Kipling and the thriller writer Edgar Wallace were among his favourite authors.

A more charismatic and somewhat eccentric figure was Pym’s mother, Irena. The daughter of a successful businessman, Irena was from a large, close family. Two of her unmarried sisters, May and Janice, lived next door to Morda Lodge with their mother in a house called Scottswood. The girls would climb over the garden wall to pay regular visits to their aunts and grandmother. Fun and energetic, Irena bought a motorbike to get around during the war, wearing leather gloves and a long leather motoring coat. The Pyms kept ponies and chickens. The girls had little interest in the ponies, though Irena drove one of them, Mogus, around in a trap. Irena would feed the chickens, Barbara remembered, wearing an old tweed coat – a detail that she stored up and used for a portrait of her mother in the novel, Jane and Prudence.

Irena was an avid reader and fond of music. She played the organ at the parish church of St Oswald’s and she and Fred belonged to the Oswestry Operatic Society. She was also an active member of the parish and the local Women’s Institute. A practical person, in many respects Irena was the epitome of the ‘excellent women’ that would be at the core of her daughter’s novels. She loved to compose doggerel, was a good mimic and had a good sense of humour – a trait she passed on to her clever, lively daughters. She had a font of maxims and favoured quotations, which afforded the girls much amusement. ‘It is hardly worthwhile dividing a cherry’ was one of her sayings. And she would often quote from hymns: ‘God works in mysterious ways’ was a favourite.[4]

On cosy evenings, when the family were at home, together with their two cats sleeping in a chair, Irena would declaim: ‘Behold how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity.’ At other times she would burst into song or quote from Walter Scott. More crucially, in terms of her influence on Barbara, she delighted in fabricating stories about people and their lives: ‘See what you can find without asking’, was one of her maxims.[5] She was sporty – a keen hockey player as a youngster, and later turning to golf – a trait she passed on to Hilary, who also played hockey. Barbara, however, was not fond of physical exercise, preferring to read, scribble stories and pick flowers in the garden for her bedroom.

Barbara loved family jokes and nicknames: Irena was ‘Links’ – a reference to her love of the golf links; Frederic was ‘Dor’ and Hilary was Poopa; and she was ‘Buddy’. Barbara was extremely fond of and protective of her little sister, her mother often having to scold her, ‘What are you doing to Hilary? Put her down.’ When Barbara was sent to boarding school aged twelve, Hilary would spend the whole day at the gate waiting in the hope that she would return.[6]

The Pym sisters were close to some young cousins in Hatch End, London, who would come to stay at Christmas and Easter. Hilary recalled sugar mice adorning the Christmas cake and celluloid animals in their stockings. At the age of eight Barbara wrote an operetta called ‘The Magic Diamond’, which she and her cousins performed at Morda Lodge in 1922.

The Pyms were closely connected to the local church: the girls were friends with the vicar’s daughter, Audrey Brown, and they enjoyed Christmas parties at the vicarage. The family would make a habit of inviting the young curates of the parish to tea. Hilary recalled how she fell in love with a handsome young curate when she was fourteen: during a chat with Irena, he had crossed his legs, revealing white combinations under his cassock. This would form the opening of Barbara’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle. It was the kind of detail that the Pym sisters loved; jokes about underwear – ‘combinations’ for men and ‘trollies’ for women – were always good value. They were a religious family, but they were never prudes.

The Pyms were typically respectable middle class and had a small entourage of staff: a gardener and several maids – Sarah (who also acted as a nursemaid to the girls), Leah, Emily, Dilys and Marjorie. Two of the maids lived in, occupying tiny candlelit attic rooms (there was no electricity on this floor of the house). The Pym girls were encouraged to help out with household chores, polishing and washing up, but much of the family’s life depended upon domestic service.

In her diary, Barbara remembered how ‘boring’ she found it to show fifteen-year-old Marjorie around the house: the girl’s fate as a live-in maid would never be her own. Servants would crop up in Pym’s early novels, written during the 1930s, but that changed, as so many things did, after the Second World War. Pym might have felt more sympathy for the young maid had she known about a family scandal that only came to light after her death.

CHAPTER II
In which we learn how a Servant Girl, Phoebe Pym, is seduced by a Gentleman and gives birth to a Baby Boy

Poundisford Park Lodge was a fine English country house in Somerset dating back to the sixteenth century. It boasted large grounds, formal gardens and a medieval deer park. It was home to Edmund Dewar Bourdillon and his wife, Maria. One of their servants was a young girl called Phoebe Pym. She was the second of six children, her father Thomas was an (illiterate) agricultural labourer, and it is likely that her mother, Harriet, worked at the big house.[1] With mouths to feed, Phoebe was sent to Poundisford to work as a maid.

Somehow Phoebe met a handsome young man called Fiennes Henry Crampton, who lived at Sherford Lodge, in nearby Taunton. Fiennes hailed from a connected Irish family from County Wicklow. His ancestor, Philip Crampton, had been Lord Mayor of Dublin. There was a wild streak to the Crampton family, and a history of bigamy and illegitimate children. Fiennes’s father, Henry, having married twice, ran away with his housekeeper and married for a third time leaving his young son with his second wife, Blanche. She was a wealthy woman whose family were farmers and small landowners. She and her mother brought up Fiennes at Sherford Lodge.

Fiennes was only sixteen when he met Phoebe Pym, who was nineteen. In 1879, Phoebe gave birth to a baby boy, Frederic Crampton Pym. No father was named on the birth certificate. When the Cramptons heard the news of the baby, they sent their son away to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. It was an all too familiar story of a vulnerable maid impregnated by a man of the ruling classes and abandoned to her fate. So far so Thomas Hardy.

It is unclear how much Frederic Pym knew of his murky past. Hilary Pym recalled that he never spoke directly of his family, alluding only vaguely to his West Country origins. But he seemed to be proud of his ‘Crampton’ name, which he bequeathed to both his daughters. The brass sign at his office with the double-barrelled ‘Crampton Pym’ was probably an attempt to confer gentility. Barbara also appeared to inherit the family pride of the Crampton name. She seriously considered writing under the name of Tom Crampton and her Oxford novel was given the title Crampton Hodnet.

Phoebe, clearly a girl of energy and courage, decided to emigrate to Canada, leaving her two-year-old son to be raised by her parents. Frederic was evidently a clever boy and was informally adopted by Frank White, a prosperous local manufacturer, and his wife Mildred (who would be Hilary’s godmother). He became a clerk to a prominent solicitor in Taunton and was later articled to a firm of solicitors in Shropshire. It was whilst on holiday in Ilfracombe in Devon that he met Irena. On their marriage certificate he gave the name of his grandfather, Thomas, where he was supposed to put that of his father. Though he would keep the truth from his daughters, he seems to have shared the secret of his illegitimacy with his wife.

Frederic’s father rose to the rank of brigadier-general. His portrait, showing a very handsome man with a curled moustache, hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Although he married in 1901, he never had any legitimate children. There is no mention of Frederic in his will.

CHAPTER III
In which Miss Pym is sent away to Boarding School

When Barbara was twelve, her mother decided that her clever elder daughter should be sent to boarding school in Liverpool. She had ambitions for both daughters: the University of Oxford was the goal she cherished for them.

Founded in 1894, the Liverpool College for Girls in Huyton was a mid-Victorian building set in extensive grounds with lacrosse pitches, tennis and netball courts, a swimming pool and spacious sports hall. It had science laboratories, an art room with a kiln for pottery, a music suite with practice rooms, a domestic science kitchen, needlework room, secretarial training suite, school bookshop and sanatorium. There was also a large school hall with professional stage lighting and a Bechstein grand piano. There was an ample collection of fiction and a large panelled reference library where older girls would study during free periods.

Hilary speculated that Irena may well have been influenced by the boarding school stories of Angela Brazil, with their titles such as A Patriotic Schoolgirl, An Exciting Term, The Jolliest School of All and A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl. Brazil was the first to popularise schoolgirl fiction, written from the point of view of the pupils. Her tales, published in an era of increased literacy for girls, shaped a generation of families, who were encouraged by the Education Acts of 1902 and 1907 to take advantage of better opportunities for their daughters. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of girls at grammar schools increased from 20,000 to 185,000.

Liverpool College was a disciplined school, its motto Fideliter fortiter feliciter (faithfully, bravely, happily). The school was divided into six houses named after female saints. Pym was assigned to St Hilda, who was named after a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon abbess who turned snakes into fossils. In preparation, Pym and her mother went shopping for her uniform at the huge department store, George Henry Lee, in the centre of Liverpool. The winter uniform was a blue Harris tweed coat and skirt, especially woven for the girls in Scotland. Pupils wore felt pudding hats and black full-length cloaks, lined in house colours, to keep them warm from the icy Merseyside winds as they ran between houses. St Hilda’s colour was a dashing red. In the summer months, the girls wore printed Calpreta dresses and straw boaters with house ribbons.

During Pym’s time, the school built its own Gothic chapel.[1] Before then, the girls attended services at the local church. Living in an all-female atmosphere, the students were intrigued by the young curates. As Hilary remembered, ‘they were the only men on whom the impressionable girls could exercise their romantic imaginations’.[2] The school chaplain was a tall, handsome man whose visits were eagerly anticipated. Many of the girls were secretly in love with him. Here began Barbara’s lifelong interest in creating fantasies about the life of the clergy, which she had started chiefly to amuse her friends.

It was during these school years that Barbara started to write poems and short stories. She enjoyed detective fiction and contemporary novels, as well as her father’s beloved Kipling. At school she discovered the joys of poetry: her English mistress, Helene Lejeune, inspired in her ‘a profound and abiding love of our greater English poets’.[3] But it was during one summer back at home for the school holidays that she found a book that changed the direction of her life.

Boots Booklovers Library, part of Boots the Chemist, was a lifeline for many readers who lived in small towns or villages. By the early twentieth century there were 143 subscription lending libraries in Boots stores. Irena was a keen reader of modern novels and had decided opinions on the good ones and the ones she disliked. It was in Boots that Barbara Pym picked out the book that would inspire her to become a writer. Aldous Huxley was a newly fashionable young novelist writing in a very distinctive style which made a huge impact on Pym. ‘More than anything else I read at that time,’ she explained many years later, ‘Crome Yellow made me want to be a novelist myself.’[4]

At face value, Huxley’s controversial novel seems an odd choice for the young Barbara Pym. A dark comedy about a group of intellectuals who gather together in a country house – loosely based on Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the home of Bloomsbury socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell – it is sometimes considered to be the archetype of the modern novel. It certainly influenced a generation of writers such as Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in the years after the First World War, it perfectly encapsulates the disillusion, disenchantment, moral uncertainty, sexual confusion and intellectual doubt of the 1920s. There are frank discussions about sex, love and spirituality between the characters, who seem to do very little except sit around talking, eating and drinking. The hero is a shy poet called Denis, who is fond of literary quotations, much to the annoyance of one young woman who finds his ‘bad habit of quoting’ irritating and humiliating. Several of Pym’s heroes are given this trait.

Huxley was writing in the great English tradition of the country house, which appealed to Pym. She found the book ‘funnier than anything I had read before, and the idea of writing about a group of people … in this case upper-class intellectuals in a country house – immediately attracted me, so I decided to write a novel like Crome Yellow’.[5]

CHAPTER IV
Miss Pym attempts her First Novel: ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’

Pym’s first novel, ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’, was about a group of bohemians living in Chelsea. Later, she (laughingly) admitted that Chelsea was a district that she knew nothing about.

The book was never published. It now forms part of the vast Barbara Pym manuscript collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was written in a blue-lined notebook, which appears to have exactly the right number of pages for her novel. Dated ‘August 1929 to April 1930’, it is a remarkably confident and assured debut for a sixteen-year-old writer.

The opening is an accomplished parody of Crome Yellow. Pym’s first sentence is a direct quotation from Chapter 2 of Huxley’s novel: ‘He took nobody by surprise, there was nobody to take.’ She continues with a subtle acknowledgement of the debt:

Denis laid down his pen to consider the words he had just written. He said them aloud and meditated upon their subtle humour with pride. Then a sudden and horrible thought occurred to him. The words seemed familiar. Where could he have possibly have heard them before? – no relative or friend of his was capable of saying anything like that.

Like his namesake in Huxley, Denis aspires to be a novelist. He has read all the best modern novels and is not ignorant of the classics. Pym pays homage to the writer who had inspired her novel: ‘That afternoon he had read Crome Yellow and had enjoyed it immensely. It seemed to him to be as about perfect as a novel could be. Not actually about anything – of course not – the best novels never are – but full of witty and intelligent conversation.’[1]

Pym maintained this view of ‘the perfect novel’ for all of her writing life. Her own works would reflect this notion – they are novels not really about anything, but filled with characterful people and witty conversation. The hero falls in love (twice), contemplates suicide, hangs out in a large country house and in London flats with poets and aspiring novelists, rejects his middle-class parents – ‘his father had made money in the sausage trade’ is a classic Pym touch. ‘It did not seem strange that the son of a sausage king should have an inclination towards novels and poetry.’[2]

At the close of ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’, Denis has decided he will start writing his own novel: ‘naturally it’s bound to be something in the nature of an autobiography – don’t you think that first novels nearly always are?’ Again, this is an acute observation for a schoolgirl to make. It would be the case for Some Tame Gazelle. There are similarities between Denis and Barbara: their stultifying existence in a small English village, boredom with parents, ‘hopelessly ambitious’ with a desire to be a ‘famous novelist’. At school, they are clever but not brilliant. They admire Aldous Huxley and are keen on poetry. Neither one of them wants to get married, though they long to fall in love.

‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’ shows Pym honing her craft. We see the young writer experimenting with dialogue, jokes, different kinds of characters – though what unites the young men, convinced by their own uniqueness, is that they are all depressingly conventional. At the end of the novel there is a discussion between a young girl and the hero about the creative process and the interface between illusion and reality. Marguerite tells Denis: ‘You can’t write about things unless you have experienced them yourself – Love for example.’ Denis disagrees: ‘I think it’s almost harder to write about love when you have experienced it than when you haven’t. You realise what a complicated sort of thing it is.’[3] Again, this is a remarkably assured reflection for such a young writer.

Pym had proved to herself that she could write and complete a novel of 267 pages. On a seaside holiday to Pwllheli, in north Wales, she met one of the sons of the local pastor, a young man called Dewi Morgan Griffith and she dedicated her book to him with the words: ‘To HDMG, who kindly informed me that I had the makings of a style of my own.’

Her dedication sounds curiously like another fascinating work of juvenilia in the Bodleian, Jane Austen’s ‘Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new’. Though it is unlikely that Pym would have known Austen’s juvenilia, her own reveals an affinity with Austen. There is the same love of nonsense and trivia, the same love of wordplay. What she also shared with her literary heroine was a clearly defined confidence in her own literary potential. She wanted to be a writer and she wanted to write in her own way, in a ‘style of her own’.

CHAPTER V
In which Miss Barbara Pym goes up to St Hilda’s College, Oxford

Pym was happy to fulfil her mother’s ambitions to aim for Oxford. She applied to St Hilda’s, perhaps in tribute to her own school house. It was still rare for young women to gain a place at Oxbridge, though one of Liverpool College’s former head girls had won a place at Cambridge (she was killed in an accident whilst there and in the new school chapel there was a stained-glass window dedicated to her memory).

Barbara Pym’s school career, as her sister acknowledged, was not stellar, but by the end of her time at Huyton she was a house prefect, chair of the Literary Society and a member of the chapel choir. Her headmistress wrote that she was thoughtful and efficient, and singled out her ‘special literary and linguistic gifts’. Her work, she wrote, was ‘original and interesting, showing powers of observation, imagination and independence of thought’.[1] This recommendation helped her to win a place at St Hilda’s to read English language and literature.

Pym went up in the autumn of 1931. In her mind, Oxford would always be associated with that season; the smell of woodsmoke and the picking of wild berries. It was also a place to be forever associated with romance, teeming as it was with young men, dressed not exactly in fancy dress, but in scholars’ sweeping black gowns.

In ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’ the heroine complains of being bored in the company of ‘hopelessly stupid’ girls, who ‘can’t talk about anything but dances, or golf, or tennis – they don’t seem to have read any decent books and if they have – they can’t discuss them with any intelligence’.[2] Whether or not this sentiment echoed her own feelings, Pym certainly was ready to flirt and fall in love. Even before Oxford, she had developed a crush on a young bank clerk in Shropshire. His name was John Trevor Lloyd and she composed two poems in his honour – one of them called ‘Midland Bank’, dedicated ‘to JTL with the author’s fondest love (but without his permission)’.[3]

Eighteen-year-old Barbara was a tall, attractive young woman, with an engaging lopsided smile and thick, wavy chestnut-coloured hair. More than one person described her as having a ‘Joyce Grenfell’ look about her, perhaps because of her height, her ungainliness and her habit of clowning around and making jokes. She was not conventionally beautiful or delicate-looking, but she was always well dressed and well turned out. In one of her early stories, the heroine, Flora, is a thinly disguised version of Pym, described as ‘a tall big-boned girl with a fresh complexion and large, bright, intelligent grey eyes’. She has light brown hair with golden streaks and a broad mouth, ‘always laughing or smiling’.[4]

When Pym went up to St Hilda’s, it was still a small college. She had prepared herself for undergraduate life by reading Oxford novels and the poetry of Matthew Arnold, but none of these was written about the five women’s colleges, or indeed from the female perspective. St Hilda’s – its motto non frustra vixi (I lived not in vain) – had the atmosphere of a girls’ private school. Founded in 1893, the college sits on the River Cherwell, overlooking Magdalen Bridge and Christ Church Meadow. Its location in a tranquil nook of Oxford gave it a cosy, intimate atmosphere. The lawn sloped down to the river, where girls could sit in the summer and read – though they were forbidden to place teapots on the lawn (one of many prohibitions in the undergraduate handbook).

Oxford clung to its old traditions and it must have felt to the young girl from the north of England like another world. Then, as now, colleges were the centre of social life and each college had its own identity. There were divisions and cliques within and between the colleges; northerners and southerners viewed each other with suspicion, as did public school and grammar school undergraduates, hearties and aesthetes. In 1931, the year Pym arrived, an undergraduate poet had his rooms trashed and the following year, another student – with ‘Oscar Wildish propensities’ – had his grand piano smashed up and his clothes thrown on a bonfire.[5]

Rules dated back to ancient times. Black gowns had to be worn, chapel attended, gate hours kept. Most societies remained male preserves. Individual women were allowed to act with the Dramatic Society (OUDS) by invitation only.[6] Male dining clubs flourished and were riotous events resulting in shattered windows, broken furniture and damaged flowerbeds. Undergraduates were treated like grown-up children and lived in an environment that replicated public school life: they were expected to keep to gate hours, allowed to mix socially with the opposite sex only under the strictest conditions and were banned from visits to the public houses. The women were referred to as ‘young ladies’, the men as ‘gentlemen’. Gowns had to be worn when in town, and hemlines were low.

St Hilda’s was a particularly strict college, with firm rules about gentlemen callers. Undergraduates were permitted to receive gentleman friends not related to them on Tuesday afternoons only. The gates closed at 9.10 p.m. As late as the 1990s, students had to write down the name of their gentleman visitors, and if they stayed the night that information had to be submitted to the porter’s lodge. Women were not free to mix as they pleased. It was not until 1935, after Pym had left Oxford, that a female student could visit a male undergraduate in his rooms unaccompanied by another female, and even then she had to leave before evening hall.

Punishment was fierce for transgressions of rules – particularly so for women. The college authorities had three weapons: fines, gating (being confined to college), and rustication (being temporarily sent home). As late as 1961, St Hilda’s expelled a female undergraduate discovered with a man in her room after the gates had closed.[7] At St Hugh’s, if a female student had a male visitor, the bed was ceremoniously wheeled out of her room and into the corridor.[8] But, of course, when young people of the opposite sex are in close proximity, rules are circumvented, codes of conduct are relaxed, especially when alcohol is added to the mix. Barbara Pym was determined to taste, in Evelyn Waugh’s words, ‘all the delights Oxford had to offer’.[9]

CHAPTER VI
In which our Heroine might have said Et in Arcadia ego

Despite its restrictions, St Hilda’s was a warm and friendly college. The dining hall, furnished with long tables and benches, adorned in the evenings with glistening silver and lit by candlelight, overlooked the River Cherwell. Barbara Pym’s room was on the top floor, with her own view of the river and the long, sweeping drive. She made friends easily and would chat with her fellow students long into the night.[1] Her closest friends were Mary Sharp, Dorothy Pedley and Rosemary Topping, always referred to by their surnames.

Compared with her schoolgirl days, there were freedoms to be enjoyed: a room of one’s own, financial independence, no more school timetables or school uniform. Clothes were an abiding passion for Pym and before coming up to Oxford she had planned a whole new wardrobe. Like many young women of her class and era, she sewed most of her own clothes. Shop-bought dresses were a luxury item.

Pym found Oxford ‘intoxicating’.[2] In no small part this was because she suddenly found herself the centre of male attention and, like many girls from single-sex schools, she was ready to enjoy being in the company of young men. As with her heroine, Miss Bates, in her third published novel Jane and Prudence, the male undergraduates beat a path to Pym’s door. It was not only the preponderance of men (the ratio was one woman to ten men) that enhanced her desirability, but also the fact that she was so funny and interesting. She was in particular a magnet for homosexual men, who were drawn to her wit and playfulness.

Barbara never forgot the heady days of her first term at Oxford; the city seemed at its most beautiful in the autumn months. In her novel, Jane and Prudence, she pays tribute to the feelings evoked by her earliest impressions of the university in the Michaelmas term: ‘the new work, the wonderful atmosphere of Oxford in the autumn, the walks up to Boars Hill and Shotover and all those lovely berries we used to gather’.[3]

The first term was spent getting to know her new surroundings, smoking Gold Flake cigarettes and listening to jazz bandleader Jack Payne on the wireless. There was an active social life at Oxford revolving around sherry parties, tea parties, dinners and the theatre. Above all, Barbara loved watching films and took advantage of Oxford’s several picture houses: ‘the Queener’ on Queen Street, ‘the Walton Street’ cinema, which showed French films, and, up a steep hill, the Headington cinema, where the students cycled, storing their bikes in the yard of the nearby fish and chip shop.

Barbara spent most of her studying hours at the Bodleian Library, a prime place for spotting handsome undergraduates. The oldest reading room, the Duke Humfrey’s library on the first floor, was a beautiful room built in the shape of an H. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who was the youngest son of King Henry IV, donated his collection of 281 books to the Bodleian in 1447. At the time, the library had only twenty books and a new reading room was built to house the collection. Readers were compelled to recite aloud a promise not to burn books, a reference to the burning of most of the duke’s collection during the Reformation. Pym would have recited the pledge: ‘I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.’

On the second floor of the Old Library was the Upper Reading Room, which housed the principal collected of printed books published after 1640, in the subject fields of medieval and modern history and English language and literature. The Lower Reading Room housed classics and ancient history, theology and philosophy. It is partitioned into smaller rooms. The central Tower Room had a glass-fronted portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer. Pym used the portrait as a mirror to comb her hair and apply her lipstick – a habit she later gave to the heroine of Some Tame Gazelle, though she edited it out of the published version.

Though she allowed undergraduate men to pay court, she developed crushes on the youthful dons, known as ‘examination moderators’, who set and marked the exams. She invented a game called ‘Spot the Moderator’. She nicknamed her favourite moderator ‘Fat Babyface’. She loved to stalk him through the streets of Oxford. Another was ‘Ruffled Chicken’.

Indeed, Barbara was enjoying life so much that she failed her end of term examinations. It was a shock, and made her resolve to be more diligent and studious. Being home for Christmas only increased her sense of dismay. Oxford was a new world, and back in the wilds of Shropshire she realised that she must not squander her precious gift. She needed to work hard through the holidays in order to resit her exams.

Another resolution was to begin a new diary. Barbara had written a diary as a schoolgirl, which she probably destroyed. From this point on, though, she kept all her diaries. She titled her Oxford diary: ‘A Record of the Adventures of the celebrated Barbara M C Pym during the year 1932 (written by herself)’ – a satirical nod to the picaresque adventurers of eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones and Moll Flanders.

CHAPTER VII
In which Miss Pym returns North

Pym’s first diary entry is short: ‘Up at 9.30. No post at all.’[1]

She was hankering for her university friends – just as in Brideshead Revisited, hero Charles Ryder sits at home, melancholy, after his first term at Oxford, desperate for a letter from Sebastian Flyte. Oxford seemed a long way away. ‘Beginning the year in an excellently one-sex way,’ she wrote, in partial relief after the drama of her first term and the excitement of being the centre of male attention: ‘Went to Blackgate – no thrills there.’[2]

Life back in Shropshire seemed mundane: eating, sewing, flicks in the evening. She was happy to see her sister and parents, but she now felt the slow pace of home: ‘A spot of supper and a domesticated evening. Myself a little desirous of somewhere else.’ She felt ‘vague’ and listless, with a sense of dislocation that was difficult to shrug off. She began to be alienated from her Shropshire friends, who felt that university life was giving her ‘airs’. Even her mother noted a change in her daughter, whose heart was back in Oxford.

In another unfinished novel, ‘Beatrice Wyatt’, Pym wrote about her heroine’s disoriented feelings about being back in her old bedroom. She comes home from Oxford for the holidays and wakes up to the same old schoolgirl’s bedroom. The pale yellow walls are hung with reproductions of Cézanne and Van Gogh. Her white bookshelves are lined with old novels, such as ‘blue phoenix’ copies of Aldous Huxley and books that she has now outgrown and is ‘partly ashamed’ of having once loved. There is a chintz ottoman in the corner of the room in which old essays and stories are stored.

One suspects that Beatrice is also ‘partly ashamed’ of her dull home life and the mother who tries so hard to please but is irritating and vague, obsessed by her bridge parties. Oxford is far more alluring than the countryside.[3] Beatrice has installed a gas ring for ‘private cups of tea’ whilst she works hard at her studies, but is interrupted by her mother, who urges her clever, distant daughter to not work so hard, but to listen to the wireless instead.[4]

There is scarce mention of Barbara’s family in her journal at this time, other than a passing reference to them taking her to the station. Thrilled as she was to be leaving Shropshire, she was mindful of her precarious position, having to resist the temptations of her active social life and resit her examinations: ‘I’m looking forward awfully to going back – but simply must work hard,’ she confided. On 12 January 1932 she packed for Hilary term, taking with her her favourite doll, Wellerina – ‘made presentable to make her debut at Oxford – may she bring me luck’.[5] Like the fictional Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, Wellerina seems to have caused quite a stir amongst her Oxford friends.

CHAPTER VIII
In which Miss Pym returns to Oxford

Somehow, at Oxford station, Pym left the train with the wrong suitcase, which belonged to a boy at Lincoln College, a Joyce Grenfell kind of misadventure.[1]

Despite her determination to work hard, she was ‘goofy with excitement’, her head still full of boys: ‘A new term in a new year – golden opportunities (and how!) to get a Moderator, a peer’s heir, a worthy theological student – or even to change entirely!’ She was determined to find out the name of the moderator who had ‘ploughed’ her (failed her examination paper). She discovered that it was probably ‘G Moore of Magdalen’. Mary Sharp, Pym’s best friend, had also been ploughed, making her feel less humiliated. Could G. Moore be her beloved ‘Fat Babyface’? She resolved to further her investigations. Her female friends were dismayed by her choice of crush, but she found him chatting to an undergraduate in Blackwell’s bookshop, ‘Too sweet, in spite of other people’s unfavourable opinions.’[2]

Pym kept up her other ‘secret passion’ for a boy from ‘Teddy Hall’ (St Edmund’s), whom she had spotted at St Mary’s, the university church. Rather thrillingly, he was not wearing his gown. She felt he had an ‘interesting face … I’m sure he must be worthwhile.’ Back in her room, she consulted the University Calendar, which provided her with a comprehensive list of all students.[3]

The next day, Pym observed Fat Babyface buying a second-hand record, but it was too late to shadow him. Instead, she went to a Bach concert and on the way home saw her ‘pet scholar’ from St Edmund’s Hall, so she ‘traced’ him up the Iffley Road in order to discover his lodgings, so she could eventually discover his name. There were men all around who were ready and willing to be flirted with: Teddy, Trevor, Harry, Bill and Gary, Ross and Aidan, John (‘his hair so beautifully golden and about twice as long as last term’). ‘Ruffled Chicken moderator’ turned out to be Herbert J. Hunt: ‘He has a Lancs accent and one feels that his H’s are more a matter of luck than habit.’[4] She had found out that it was he who had ploughed her: ‘I don’t think I have the heart to murder him.’ Then there was Monkey, ‘a funny old darling’, whose first comment on meeting Pym was: ‘How foul you look.’[5]

And still the men came. A chap called Harlovin asked her for a date. Bill and Stephen walked her back to St Hilda’s. After parting from them at the college gates, she went to her room and undressed in the ‘dim religious light of two candles’.[6] The next day she spotted her ‘pet moderator’. She pondered on whether he was even aware of her existence: ‘Really this is the queerest crush ever – I wonder if he has any inkling.’ She was thrilled to see the suspicion of a red silk hanky peeping out of his top pocket: ‘Who says they [moderators] aren’t human!’[7] Much of the thrill was in the chase. Pym was too self-aware not to see this aspect of her attraction to unavailable men.

Teddy often took her to tea at Elliston & Cavell, known as Elliston’s, the largest department store in Oxford (later taken over by Debenhams). It was lavishly decorated with a sweeping staircase and a mural depicting deer in a forest glade. The ladies’ powder room boasted gold taps and marble basins in the shape of swans. Attendants dressed in black handed out towels. There was even a private entrance for the wives of dons and the heads of house. Though she liked Teddy, Pym still dreamed of the moderators – ‘Mad creature that I am!’[8]

She had started attending the lectures of Herbert Hunt, the man who had ploughed her, and confessed to her diary that he was growing on her: ‘He used rather a delightful expression – he said, “I haven’t finished yet by a long chalk!” – sub human. How mad!’ Hunt was on his way to becoming a distinguished scholar of Honoré de Balzac’s great novel sequence La comédie humaine, which could as well be the perfect title for the sequence of much shorter and lighter novels that Pym would write. At Hunt’s lectures, she sat with her female friends and hoped that her male admirers would not mind. Teddy was becoming tiresome and wrote her a letter addressed to ‘Darling Barbara’. She decided: ‘I’ve just got to be firm with him.’[9]

The fact was that Pym had not yet met a man in whom she had a serious interest. Those she noted appear to be more fodder for her writing than anything else. A man she spotted in Elliston’s called Everard gave her a name for one of her main characters in a novel written years later. Another had ‘a sweet face … and what a provocative little nose’; another had ‘wonderful black patent leather hair’.[10] She was always interested in men’s clothes, as well as women’s, noting a smart brown suit, or a red sweater, or striped tie. But she admitted to her diary that, despite all the male attention, she had started the term with a ‘pure one sex month’.[11]

This state of affairs would soon change. A male undergraduate, Ross, insisted on a kiss (a hard one at that) as a price for walking her back to St Hilda’s.[12] She received the good news that she had passed one of her resits. In celebration, she bought a brass cigarette box with a dragon on it. She also purchased a rose-pink cushion. On April Fools’ Day, she heard that she had passed her other examinations. Then it was home to Shropshire for the Easter vacation.

Barbara’s time there was uneventful and there is a gap in her diary, which is resumed on her return to Oxford: ‘On this day I returned to my dear University.’ She was looking forward to Trinity (summer) term: although she needed to work hard, she was determined to play hard. This would be the time for punting on the river, picnics, and outdoor Shakespeare plays and concerts in the lovely college gardens. And perhaps for falling in love.

During the Easter holidays, she had been told by her tutors to read the works of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. He was to be a lifelong passion. His sexy, romantic poems appealed to Pym’s passionate nature. Her interest in his poetry ran in tandem with her love affair with a dark, handsome man whom she had met briefly in Michaelmas term. For good and for ill, he would become a very important figure in her life.

CHAPTER IX
In which our Heroine meets a Handsome Young Man called Rupert Gleadow

Pym was feeling her way in Oxford. She decorated her room with a self-portrait by Van Gogh in a gold frame, along with the pink cushion and brass cigarette box. Often, she noted, her room was a fug of smoke when she lit Gold Flake after Gold Flake. At the end of April she had her first punting experience with her friend Dorothy Pedley and Rosemary Topping. The pole got stuck, but they were rescued by a group of ‘chivalrous’ Teddy Hall men.[1]

On May Day, at 5 a.m., she set off by punt to hear the choristers singing from the Great Tower on Magdalen Bridge. ‘May Morning’ is a special time of revelry in Oxford; following the dawn madrigals, the church and college bells ring out over the city for twenty minutes. Undergraduates would then decamp to local taverns and restaurants for a May Morning breakfast.

Pym and her friends enjoyed picnics on the riverbank. Oxford was fully living up to expectations. She discovered that Fat Babyface was a theology scholar called Geoffrey Walmsley. ‘Oh Geoffrey, how I love you!’ she confessed to her diary. There were numerous sightings of him; in the street, on his bike, in Blackwell’s bookshop, in St Mary’s church. In his plus-fours he comes across as a Mr Toad figure rather than a truly romantic hero, even though Pym later claimed that he closely resembled the actor Leslie Howard. She went walking on Shotover Hill and picked blue forget-me-nots that were the colour of Geoffrey’s eyes.

But she also knew that Geoffrey was a fantasy love affair. He had barely spoken to her or knew much about her. And she wasn’t entirely serious: ‘I’ll just forget you when you go down,’ she confessed to her diary. She was playing around with the idea of falling in love. This was to change when she became friends with a dashing young man called Rupert Gleadow. They had been introduced in the Michaelmas term, but it was only in the summer that the relationship flourished.

Rupert was in his final year at Trinity College reading classics and Egyptology. He had been educated at Winchester, one of the most prestigious public schools, and had a large and beautiful family home in Surrey, as well as a London home. He was an altogether more sophisticated figure than the men she chased around the ancient streets of Oxford.

In May, Pym spotted Rupert at the cinema. At the Bodleian, he invited her to tea: ‘I accepted – wanting to see more of him.’[2] She kept his invitation, scrawled on the back of a tiny library ticket, all her life.[3] He followed up his first message with a second more expansive note, explaining, tellingly, that there was nobody else coming to the tea. His ‘digs’ were at number 47 Wellington Square, but for the purposes of the tea he would borrow the attractive sitting room upstairs that belonged to his roommate, George Steer. A third note confirmed the invitation, with a hand-drawn map of the house in Wellington Square.[4] Rupert was clearly very keen.

Pym wrote back, expressing some fears about the proctor, who lived in the same house. It was a risk for a female undergraduate to be found alone in the room of a man. Rupert reassured her and told her that the proctor was a good friend and he also thanked her for the ‘flattering suggestion’ that she had been unable to work since seeing him in the Bod.

When she arrived, Pym was impressed with the room, which was covered with books and decorated with animal skins: ‘the leopard skinned couch was to play a more important part later’, she wrote mysteriously. She enjoyed Rupert’s company immensely and thought him ‘far more human’ than she had previously thought. His father had died halfway through his time at Oxford and he might well have hidden his grief and vulnerability behind a veneer of aloofness. She was surprised when he took her hand in his and asked her for a kiss; she refused.

Exhibiting a clear tendency to rush into love affairs, Pym decided the very next day that she was in love with Rupert. But she also remained faithful to the idea of Geoffrey, whom she had not yet met alone and who had not shown any signs of reciprocating her affection. She was a young green girl ready to fall in love multiple times over. She noted her ‘double-love’ in her journal: ‘for Geoffrey – very real – and also for Rupert – also very real’.[5] This trait in her character – of rushing into love affairs without really knowing the recipient – would, in the long term, be damaging.

Rupert was making all the running. Another undergraduate called Bill Thacker was keen on Barbara. The notion of a rival enhanced her charms in Rupert’s eyes. He wrote letters, begging her to drop in anytime, also writing that he would be keen to see her at St Hilda’s, even though he knew that this was forbidden, ‘otherwise they’ll have all sorts of Don Juans getting in’.[6] Rupert was presenting himself as a Byronic figure and Pym was ready to have fun. He told her that he was unable to concentrate on his Egyptian studies, as she was so much on his mind. Pym had joked about the inferior quality of his sherry and he promised better quality in the future. He told her that he longed for a motor car to take her around the Oxford countryside. There was much talk of his ‘wickedness’.[7]

May was rainy and one wet day, Pym and Rupert went for a walk. Soaked through, they stopped off at 47 Wellington Square and drank sherry: ‘I remember putting my arms around him and loving him because he was very wet and shivering and looked at me so sweetly.’[8] She still longed for Geoffrey, but it wasn’t long before her real affair with Rupert took precedence. A photograph that he sent to her reveals him to be a dark, handsome man, with a lean, angular face of the kind that she found most appealing. He wrote letter after letter in different coloured ink to his ‘Darling Barbara’, telling her that he dreamed about her, worried that she might still be seeing other men and hoping that she would drop by whenever she pleased. They were the first proper love letters that she had ever received and she cherished them.

Rupert was clearly smitten with this lively ‘northern’ girl who could hold a conversation and had so many admirers. He found her to be highly original, most unlike any other girl he had met. Her sense of humour and her quick wit made a lasting impression. When one of his eyelashes fell out, she picked it up and granted him five wishes. One of them was to buy his own aeroplane – a wish that was to be fulfilled sooner than he thought.

The pair’s pursuits were still largely innocent; tea at Stewart’s on Queen Street or at Boffin’s, where the cakes and buns were excellent. But it soon became clear that Rupert wanted more from her than an uncomplicated friendship and Boffin’s buns. She went on a date with another boy to see a production of The Constant Nymph, the story of a girl hopelessly in love with a self-regarding composer, but her mind was on Rupert and the unopened love letter that lay in her bag. She felt ‘vaguely depressed and slightly hysterical’ when she returned home from the play.[9] It had only been a couple of weeks since the beginning of the relationship, but her feelings were gaining momentum.

Early on the morning of her nineteenth birthday, 2 June, Pym received a letter from Rupert wishing her ‘a very happy Birthday and lots of happy birthdays and may they all come after one another as slowly as possible, so as to make you stay young and jolly like ever so – and I do hope I meet you again when we’re both far older and I hear that it’s all come true’.[10] He took her to Elliston’s and bought her an orange and royal blue scarf. Later, his best friend Miles joined them for dinner and then they went to the cinema to watch Frankenstein. Miles laughed throughout, so she didn’t feel scared and she stole ‘surreptitious glances at Rupert’s profile’. Miles MacAdam, a large, ebullient man from Worcester College, became part of this close trio. Pym liked the way he talked and the sound of his voice.

The next day, she allowed Rupert to kiss her, though she didn’t enjoy the experience. What she did like was the way he considered her thoughts and feelings. One of her male friends told Pym that he disliked Rupert and thought him ‘queer’ (in the old-fashioned sense of the word), but she was not deterred. They went for a walk on Boars Hill and took shelter under a tree when it began to rain. She expressed impatience with his physical attentions, ‘I got a wee bit sick of it – but tried to please him.’ He had final exams coming up and she wanted to ‘treat him as kindly as possible’.[11]

CHAPTER X
Miss Pym’s Summer of Love

On a lovely June day, Barbara made her first visit to the Radcliffe Camera, the beautiful, circular neo-classical library that stands in the heart of Oxford. Built of golden Cotswold sandstone, it glows in the sunlight and is considered one of the architectural crown jewels of England.

Pym worked in the library, spotting a couple of men, but then on the way out found herself alone with ‘heavenly’ Geoffrey. She thought of a ruse to grab his attention: ‘I longed to crash into him or drop my books – but the incident was over – and became one of those many might-have-beens about which its [sic] so lovely to speculate.’[1] The moment had passed, never to return. These ‘might-have-beens’ would become a refrain to her romantic life and rich fodder for her novels. She was in love with Rupert and yet she still had strong feelings for the remote Geoffrey. It was the first serious case of her lifelong obsession with unattainable men.

Rupert wrote more affectionate letters, telling her how happy she made him and promising that he was ‘quite harmless really’. She consumed his thoughts, making him unable to work; something of a problem as he wanted to achieve a first in his exams. In between sitting his finals, he saw ‘My Darling Barbara’ – his ‘Cara Barbara mia’ – whenever he could.

Pym recorded an evening spent in the darkness of ‘The Queener’ with Rupert and Miles: ‘We sat at the back in the corner and I had two arms around me for the first time in my history.’ After the movie, Goodnight Vienna, they stopped off at a coffee house on the Cowley Road and sipped chocolate Horlicks, toasting one another. This was ‘one of the loveliest evenings I ever remember’.[2]

Following a rainy May, the weather had suddenly improved, heralding Pym’s summer of love. Her diary records riding on the handlebars of Rupert’s bicycle, walking in the woods, kissing in the streets of Oxford. On a hot June day, Miles and Rupert took her punting on the river and then to tea at the Cherwell Gardens: ‘much semi nakedness to be seen on the river’, she noted. Rupert dropped his watch in the river and stripped off his clothes to dive for it. It may have been the first time Pym had seen so much of a man’s body.

There was a sense of sexual awakening in her diary. The next day, she saw Rupert and Miles and they told her the news that they had both won firsts. She was delighted. Now that the boys’ exams were over and she had endured her last tutorial, the trio were determined to enjoy themselves. They hired a punt and went on the river, taking a gramophone with them. Pym spotted Geoffrey. He had a beautiful smile on his face and she bade him ‘Sweetheart goodbye – Auf wiedersehen my dear … I can’t believe that I’ve almost certainly seen his dear face for the last time.’[3] She had another intimate hour and a half with Rupert at number 47: ‘the loveliest time I ever remember spending with anyone … Oh blessed George Steer and his lovely leopard skin – I hope he gets a first! This kind of a Private Lives Love scene was far better in reality than in anticipation.’[4]

These were halcyon days. Rupert had acquired a motor car and they drove around the Oxfordshire countryside, visiting the lovely Cotswold villages of Great Tew and Charlbury, where they had tea; a nosy maid tried to stop them from kissing, but did not manage to succeed. ‘Surely time spent so happily cannot be counted as merely wasted.’[5] Rupert, having heard that an undergraduate had been ‘progged’ (sent down) for the same offence, kissed her in a public telephone box.

Pym had not forgotten her female friends. They went on the river, where Mary Sharp almost fell in. Then had a final tea, with strawberry parfait, at Elliston’s. The next day she saw her friends off at the station as they returned home for the long vacation. In the evening, she had dinner with Miles and Rupert at Stewart’s; she felt sentimental and sad, especially as the radio was playing ‘Auf Wiedersehen’.

On a memorable trip to Boars Hill, Rupert startled her by reciting Andrew Marvell’s beautiful and sexy poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (‘An hundred years should go to praise/ Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;/ Two hundred to adore each breast,/ But thirty thousand to the rest …’). He also recited Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, a sadder, more wistful poem about lovers who are parted. Pym was amazed, and touched. She had never heard the poems before and realised that Rupert was more brilliant than she had thought. In the romantic atmosphere, they had what she described as the ‘best kiss on record’.[6]

They fetched Miles from a tutorial and went for a picnic on the river. Whilst punting, Pym fell in and was rescued by Miles. She lay on her tummy drying out, Miles’s trousers hanging from the paddle. She drowsed in the heat to the rhythm of the punt and was awakened by a gentle kiss from Rupert. They had dinner at the famous Spread Eagle pub in Thame and then drove back to Oxford. Miles’s presence inhibited their ‘love-making’, but Pym didn’t seem to mind very much. There was safety in a triangular relationship. Her friendship with Miles and her love affair with Rupert set a pattern that would be repeated.

She and Rupert had a farewell lunch at Stewart’s: ‘they played Wien du Stadt meiner Traume. I heard it for the first time.’ Then, on the infamous leopard-skin couch, there was ‘a more intimate goodbye’ at number 47. Rupert had bought her chocolates from Elliston’s. Miles joined them later and saw her off at the train station. The trio held hands tightly and Barbara stared into their ‘blue and brown eyes respectively’.[7]

On the train, Pym reflected that her first Trinity term had been so perfect that it had set a ‘perilously high standard’. She mused whether any other could live up to the happiness she had felt. Her instincts would prove to be right. A year later, she returned to her diary and wrote: ‘My second was bloody.’[8]

CHAPTER XI
Our Heroine returns to Shropshire for the Long Vacation and invites Rupert to stay

Pym’s sister Hilary and her biographer, Hazel Holt, played down Rupert’s importance in Barbara’s story. By their account, he played a minor role in her romantic life and good-naturedly gave her up when she fell in love with another undergraduate. This is not the story of what truly happened between Rupert and Barbara. His letters and her journals reveal a deeply erotic and then traumatic experience, which affected Pym for many years.

In the days following their parting in Oxford, Rupert sent letter after letter to his Cara Barbara mia. He described her as his ‘darling perfect one’ and wrote at length about the lingering glow of those final ‘golden days of June’s end! Those golden islands of life.’[1]

That summer, Rupert was back in London in his mother’s new flat in Holland Park Court and worrying about future plans. He wanted to join the Royal Air Force, but his poor eyesight was a problem. He was also thinking about returning to Oxford for postgraduate studies.[2] Miles was with him in London. They raised toasts to Barbara, and Rupert reminded her in a letter of their ‘lovely nakedish times by the Cher’. Like many insecure young men in love with a popular, attractive woman, he felt worried about their romance, concerned that she had feelings for his rival, Bill Thacker. He was also insecure that had she seen Miles first, then she might have favoured him as a boyfriend. There is a risqué hint in his emphasis on the strong bond between the three undergraduates: ‘If I’d been told 5 weeks ago how happy we should be three together I should not have believed it … I think you don’t mind two at once!’[3]

Rupert thanked Pym for her part in making his last term at Oxford so charming, sending her a photograph of himself that he thought made him look like an ‘angry Italian count’. He even made a bold suggestion: ‘Most interesting would be to get married and then see what happens?’[4] Meanwhile, he had plans for trips to Wales, Ireland and possibly Greece. He also thought of going to Germany but was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis: ‘they do seem to be killing an awful lot of people there these days’, he wrote.[5]

By mid-July, Rupert had finally achieved his dream of owning a plane. He had taken Miles up for a flight and joked about the difficulty of fitting him into the cockpit. He wrote of how he missed Barbara and their summer together. If he met the River Cherwell in heaven, he said, it would ‘still have echoes of you on it – mistily golden echoes of you and Miles and me on the green banks among the willows’.[6] He assured Pym that his eyes were much better: ‘I had no difficulty landing an aeroplane!’ Perhaps he could take her for a spin: he must have seemed like a character out of a novel, this clever, handsome fellow who flew his own plane.

Pym invited him to stay at Morda Lodge to meet her family, though she was concerned that her home was not up to Rupert’s high standards. Later, he would chide her about her inverted snobbishness. Rupert had kept the news of his love affair secret from his overbearing mother. Mrs Gleadow had been arranging for suitable girls to come to tea. There is a strong sense from his letters that Barbara would not be deemed the right sort of girl.

That summer, Rupert began what would be a lifelong interest in astrology and the occult. He had consulted a ‘second-sight’ woman about his future and had been reading the works of spiritualist writer Olive Pixley. He had also taught himself to read character from handwriting. He studied Barbara’s letters and composed a fascinating account of her personality: ‘Barbara my dear, you are versatile, original and capable, not always reliable, especially about appointments, but full of variety and you have a sense of humour and some tact … you’re not very emotional or sympathetic and not naturally optimistic … most conspicuously you have a striking and original personality.’ Rupert was astute in seeing a hard edge to Pym’s character: ‘your sympathies do not come flowing out of a soft heart’. He said that they were both ‘hard-headed moderns’ and also ticked her off for displaying signs of an inferiority complex. ‘What on earth or under it made you make yourself out to be such an awful person?’ Mrs Gleadow had asked her son whether he had thoughts of marriage, but he had told her advice given to him by Barbara that a man’s brain was not ripe until he was twenty-five.[7]

Barbara, meanwhile, wrote to him from that hot summer of 1932 to tell him that she had been sunbathing naked. He retaliated by saying that he was writing to her naked. He was also hoping for some ‘alone-time’ during their week together in Oswestry. He went on a cruise around the Scottish fjords during the month of August, before heading to Shropshire in September. Barbara met him at the station in a summer frock and yellow jersey, feeling shy and very excited. She thought him twenty times better looking than in his photo. She took him back for tea and he was clearly a huge success with the Pym family.

Barbara was proud of her charming, handsome boyfriend, with a first-class degree from Oxford and an aeroplane. She wrote in her journal: ‘Here follows a perfect week which must be recorded and remembered as about the best week of my life.’ They were glorious sunshine-filled days, full of long walks and picnics in beautiful, leafy Llangollen and the village of Llynclys. They had a drink at the White Lion pub and then found a secluded spot by the slate stone steps of Jacob’s Ladder, where they lay in the grass ‘half asleep with our faces close to each other for a long time. We laughed out of sheer happiness.’ They walked and kissed and when Pym ran down the hill, he gave her the name ‘Atalanta’. They enjoyed ‘some moments of raptures, most ecstatic madness’.[8]

Rupert confided to Barbara his feelings about his dead father. He also talked to her about Oxford and his plans, and he asked if she would take the relationship further by going to bed with him: ‘We had much fun and a fight about that.’ Then, by starlight, they strolled down a lane and she told him that she thought ‘the happiness one got out of love was worth any unhappiness it might (and generally does) bring’.[9] Later, Rupert took a bath and Barbara sat in the airing cupboard reciting Dryden. He was about to leave for an excursion to the Lake District with Miles. Barbara was so sad to see him go that she wept and he, too, could barely restrain himself from crying at the parting: ‘Even if I hadn’t had a carriage to myself I don’t think I could have kept back the sobs entirely. It was awful.’[10]

In the Lakes, his head full of Barbara, Rupert kept calling Miles ‘Darling’ and saying that he wished he was her, ‘which he didn’t take very kindly’. ‘Thank you for making me fall in love with anyone so charming as you,’ he wrote to Barbara’.[11]

Though the perfect week had cemented the relationship, Barbara was troubled by Rupert’s persistent attempts to have full-blown sex. Often left alone, they experimented sexually. At one moment, she was on all fours, with her dress pushed over her back, revealing her striped underwear. Rupert wrote to her, reminding her of the moment: ‘A very touching and pleasing picture you were, even if not quite fit for publication. – (Did you ever find the hole I mentioned in those striped – er – garments?). It was a lovely sight, that!’ Their relationship had clearly reached a new level of intimacy: ‘My hands send their love to the tropical regions and also to the mountainous regions and my lips send their love to your lips.’[12]

Barbara wrote to Rupert, telling him how foul and miserable she found Shropshire, but he gently rebuked her again, saying that Oswestry was quite fit for her residence: ‘To me, Morda Lodge is the centre of a radiating golden star of happiness and it must always be marked in gold on my mental map.’ For him, it had been a ‘sacred week’. Back in London, he wrote planning a night together before returning to Oxford:

Oh darling how immoral we are! And what a lot we do take for granted! I feel chary of even mentioning all the lovely things we did together, that is the more indecent ones, in case of any evil accident these letters ever fell into anybody else’s hands, who, reading them, would say (quite without justification) ‘Barbara Pym seems to have been a rather free and easy young woman.’[13]

Rupert was still vacillating between a DPhil at Oxford, or joining the RAF, or even the intelligence services. He had applied for a fellowship, though he was worried about the academic life as a career: ‘all the intrigues about the Readership at Oxford have shown me what to expect there and what sort of people academic people are. So that’s not very attractive either.’[14]

Their long talks about going to bed together often resulted in play-fighting and spanking; something they both seemed to enjoy, according to Rupert: ‘I note with a thrill how even you, decent as you are, can’t write a 2 sheet letter without an allusion to spanking! … Sweetheart and most spankable one! You make me all excited.’[15] In October, Pym and Rupert returned to Oxford.

CHAPTER XII
In which Things begin to become a little complicated with Rupert

Barbara was glad to be leaving ‘foul’ Shropshire. At Banbury, she changed trains, the rolling green hills of the Oxfordshire countryside so different from the grey skies and factories of the north-west.

Philip Larkin, later a close friend and supporter of Pym, wrote a semi-autobiographical Oxford novel called Jill. He distilled his own painful undergraduate experience as a shy, lower-middle-class boy who struggles to fit into the Eton-infested atmosphere of the rich Oxford colleges. It opens with a train journey from Banbury to Oxford in mid-October: ‘The air had begun to thicken as it does before a dusk in autumn. The sky had become stiff with opaque clouds.’ As the autobiographical protagonist sits on the train he notices the transition from the gasometers and blackened bridges of Banbury to the ‘little arms of rivers twisted through the meadows, lined with willows that littered the surface with leaves’.[1]

Larkin’s hero struggles with the public school hearties who undermine and bully him, whilst retaining their beautiful manners and sense of noblesse oblige. No matter what he does, he simply does not have the ‘ease’ of the upper classes. Everything is new and intimidating; the black-gowned students, the beautiful quadrangles, the ancient archways with coats of arms and scrolled stones, the Latin at supper and the gilt-framed oil paintings that line the walls of the hall.

Pym had no such fears about fitting in. Her self-confidence, her happy childhood, her sharp sense of humour were all suitable armour for the pretensions, strange rules and poky hierarchies of Oxford. Now that she was returning for a second year, she was determined to enjoy every minute.

Michaelmas term held many beauties for Barbara. Term did not start until October, when the nights were starting to draw in. Her North Oxford novel, Crampton Hodnet, recalls the bewitching atmosphere of autumn in Oxford: the smell of fireworks in the air, the lit street lamps and the Victorian Gothic houses, mysterious and romantic in the misty half-light; gardens with monkey puzzle trees and laurel bushes; soft rain pattering on ancient stones and the church bells announcing evensong.

Pym still had thoughts of Geoffrey. She had heard that he had received a distinction in his theology diploma. Rupert had new digs at number 90 St Mary’s Road, near James Street, in the east of Oxford. She went to see him as soon as she arrived and they strolled down Aristotle Lane, near Port Meadow, towards the canal, ‘talking about life and reminiscing – not contemplating suicide’ (they were standing on a bridge). It was, she wrote in her diary, a happy reunion. Miles had also returned to undertake postgraduate studies. They had tea together in his digs and it was like old times. She spotted Geoffrey smiling his heavenly smile. All was well.

Rupert had discovered that there was to be a student pyjama party and wrote to Barbara to say that he could get tickets, so that he could see her in her pink-flowered pyjamas. Once again, he was putting on pressure for them to sleep together. He reminded her of their steamy embraces in Shropshire, ‘when your intrepid explorer made such extensive investigations into the mountainous regions’, and there was more talk of spanking her lovely bottom and of her tropical regions. She finally agreed that she would like to sleep with him. Rupert was ecstatic: ‘I’ve put down in my diary that you said you’d like to sleep with me! And that document will go down to our posteriors, I mean posterity, as gospel truth, so I’m not the only lascivious one! Goodnight darling and sweet dreams. Make the pillows comfy. If only I could be Jupiter I’d come to you, like Danae, in a shower of gold.’[2]

On 13 October, Rupert’s mother and his brother Edmund came to visit, and they had lunch together at the Randolph Hotel on Beaumont Street. Pym was terrified of meeting Mrs Gleadow, but a new fur coat gave her confidence. Edmund she thought less handsome than his older brother, but with ‘personal magnitude’. They walked to the Sheldonian and then went to Fuller’s cafe for tea. One of Barbara’s habits, when she spoke, was to stretch out her hand for emphasis and Edmund amused her by putting things into her outstretched hand – sugar lumps and copper pennies.

Meeting Rupert’s mother, whom she liked, and his brother cemented their relationship even further. They had now met one another’s families and the love affair was going from strength to strength. The pyjama party seemed to be the designated day and Rupert implored her to wear her pink-flowered ones when she came back to his digs: ‘I think you’d better come in those pajamas, or at any rate leave part of them about you. Couldn’t you wear the top half of them as a blouse?’[3]

In one of his summer letters, Rupert had told Barbara that he found her especially sweet and vulnerable late at night, when her guard was down. That Saturday evening he was insistent that she should come back to 90 St Mary’s for tea. Barbara’s diary takes up the record. She wrote that 15 October must be an ever-remembered day: ‘Today I must always remember I suppose. Went to tea with Rupert (and ate a pretty colossal one) and he with all his charm, eloquence and masculine wiles persuaded …’[4] Here, Barbara has torn out and destroyed pages of her diary, so what happened next must be a matter of conjecture. Nevertheless, whatever did happen caused much damage and pain. How lasting that pain was is difficult to estimate, but the events of this day ruptured the relationship.

Rupert got in touch a couple of days later. Something momentous had clearly occurred. He wrote her an extraordinary letter, in which he admitted that, at the crucial moment, there was a ‘complete lack of passion’ and that there was bad behaviour on his part. The letter has ‘WARNING’ scribbled across the top: ‘This is a long and philosophical letter.’

Dear Barbara,

I’ve given you some time to think over events, by not writing – . I said we mustn’t write too often – have I been cursed for it? Or have you been too busy? … You know our behaviour the other night in bed was really rather extraordinary: such a complete lack of passion! I’m not sure I wasn’t rather unkind to make you come after all, with that nasty threat, but somehow I couldn’t let it all go for nothing when for half an hour I’d used every ruse of science and art to plead as beautifully as I was able. Was I selfish? Say so if you like; that my behaviour was only natural is no excuse. How do you feel about it? I feel at present that if the chance came I wouldn’t be so unkind as to ask you to do it again, (partly, of course, that’s due to our sexless way of occupying our time there); but I expect if (or when) it comes to the point, I should merely say ‘Well, darling, would you like to come to bed?’ – and you would probably say no and there would be an end of it. Were you happy in bed at all?[5]

The remainder of the letter is a combination of panicky rambling and rather incoherent musings about their relationship, adverting to their perfect week in Shropshire: ‘As it might be, under the cloud-free sun to lie hours long on Lynchys hill in the late summer afternoon; it may be the year 2000 and more before anyone sees us there; but for us it will still be 1932; still we shall be happy and still we shall be young and joyful, to perfection.’ He quoted the poet Rupert Brooke: ‘Parting, we flung ourselves upon the hill … our heaven is now, is won! … and laughed, that has such brave true things to say: And suddenly you cried and turned away.’[6] Then he asked her about a romantic time-travel novel with the title Still She Wished for Company that she’d started reading but had seemingly lost interest in.

The destroyed pages of Pym’s diary speak volumes. It would appear that having written about the day of the pyjama party she did not record anything for several weeks. When she resumes, she appears to be suffering from a kind of emotional amnesia:

October 27th I spent the afternoon with Rupert but can’t remember what I did.

Oct 28th Can’t remember at present.

Nov 1st Can’t remember anything about this day.

Nov 3rd, Went back to Rupert’s digs – where we had a pleasant time, I imagine.

Nov 6th, I spent a few pleasant hours with Rupert in his digs … Can’t remember much else.[7]

Her diary then stops and is not resumed until the following year.

Whatever did happen on 15 October, Pym began to withdraw from Rupert. He continued to send affectionate letters and they spent time together, but there was an emotional estrangement from both sides. One of the last happy days was a long walk, where she was ‘hatless and Atalanta-esque in blue’.[8]

In November, Rupert heard that he had not been awarded the coveted college fellowship. A letter later in the month is chilly. He says that he doesn’t miss Barbara as he ought to and refers to his ‘beastly, cold and unsympathetic nature’. He asks: ‘Am I really a villain, as well as unscrupulous?’⁹

Pym went home alone for the Christmas vacation. Rupert went skiing in Aspen.

CHAPTER XIII
The End of the Affair

Barbara dealt with the Rupert incident by burying the memory. They both entered into a tacit pact to pretend that she had retained her virginity. He wrote to her at Christmas, discussing presents: ‘I’m afraid that we can’t add your estimable virginity to the list, as we have agreed that you should have that for Christmas!’[1] It was a lie and they both knew it. A month later he wrote that he had seen that in America a man was sent to prison for seduction: ‘I shall have to look out, if ever I go there!’[2] Joking about the incident was preferable to open confession and repentance.

Barbara told him that she had been having dreams about being in bed with him and another Oxford friend, she wearing red pyjamas. Rupert asked which of the men was the ‘chief attraction?’; later he wrote that if she offered him her virginity for his birthday, he would take it. He told her that he knew a shop in London where he could buy the necessary precautions, and added, ‘with the aid of Freud you ought not to have much difficulty in making out the meaning of our periodic bed-going dream’. He finished his letter with a reference to John Donne: ‘I must confess “When souls mix, tis an happiness; but not complete till bodies too” etc. Not to mention Marvell and Herrick and others who knew the value of mistresses. So do I! But it’s a difficult art, having a mistress and Oxford is one of the most difficult places to practice it in. Hence, darling, your still lasting immunity.’[3]

When Barbara returned to Oxford and resumed her diary, Rupert barely made an appearance. Other men had begun to catch her eye – one in particular, whom she called the ‘pale, Magdalen Man’. She had tea with Rupert and indulged in ‘some very pleasant caresses … but I stuck out against having a real necking party, and got a slight spanking because of it’.[4] By now, Rupert knew that it was all over. He was thoroughly disillusioned with Oxford, describing it as an awful place. He challenged her: ‘Have you ever asked your dear father what he sent you to Oxford for?’[5] By March, he was complaining that if he were killed in his plane, she wouldn’t give two hoots. He added, cynically, ‘a woman must keep up her prestige, even at the expense of truth’. He also wrote about how she might regard him in the future: ‘There was that poor dear Rupert Gleadow – quite mad about me he was, but my dear he really was terribly trying, so lascivious, never would leave me alone. What did I like him for?’[6]

From then on, their correspondence was sporadic. In April, he asked resignedly: ‘Barbara Dearest, Who have you fallen in love with this time?’ The following year, he wrote to her saying that his heart was fairly free, though he had had a couple of love affairs early in the year. ‘How’s your own heart? Pining, I suppose, for some beautiful man, as usual?’[7] He told her that he still remembered their time together in Shropshire: ‘That summer is safely gilded in my memory.’ And he also dropped a heavy hint that he would like her to destroy his love letters. He found the tone of her letters to him ‘colder and more disillusioned’.[8]

By August 1935, Rupert had lost all interest in suppressing the ugly truth of what had happened between them. He referred to his digs at number 90 and that disastrous night. ‘I remember all that too. And that was why I insisted on a second occasion, becos [sic] I felt you had not enjoyed the first occasion and a second would make up for it. Whether I was right I never found out I think you ought to count me among the possibilities – tho’ we both know so well that you did not want it then.’[9]

Pym did not comment on Rupert’s ‘seduction’, and there is no way of knowing for sure whether she was forced, or whether it happened unexpectedly in the heat of the moment, or whether it was simply a lack of sexual compatibility. Whatever else, she had lost her virginity to him in a disturbing way, which she wiped from her diary, if not her memory.

She kept in occasional contact with Rupert, whose life continued to be touched by tragedy: his photograph, taken in the summer of 1932, is preserved in Pym’s papers, alongside a cut-out article from The Times announcing his marriage to a French woman. As telling as the torn-out pages of her diary describing that night of 15 October 1932 is the fact that Barbara Pym, who mined her own life for her books over and over again, never based a character on Rupert Gleadow.

CHAPTER XIV
In which we are introduced to ‘the Saga of Lorenzo’

Pym expunged the memory of Rupert Gleadow in the most expedient manner: by falling in love with another man. There was to be no bottom-spanking and crawling on all fours in this relationship. Barbara fell deeply and passionately in love and it affected her profoundly. He would be the inspiration for one of her best-loved and most memorable characters.

In Hilary term, Pym had spotted a ‘pale, Magdalen man’. She saw him again at a morning lecture on Swift and Pope and then again at another lecture a few days later, where he sat almost in front of her, giving her ample opportunity to observe him closely: ‘He languishes over much and has an affected way of leaning his head back. I like his thick curiously-cut bronzy hair and his pale smooth face and hands.’[1] A languid quality and an abundance of affectation were indeed his leading characteristics. Later that day, she went to ‘the Bod’ and saw him again. One of her tried and tested methods of getting male attention was to stare. She was delighted when he looked back: ‘I am convinced he hates me. Our gazes meet and he half smiles – but it is a cynical sort of smile. His affectation intrigues me.’ This was the very day after she had refused ‘a real necking party’ with Rupert.[2]

She called her new man Lorenzo. She may just have liked the romantic sound of the name, but it is more likely that it was a reference to the Lorenzo of Edward Young’s epic poem, Night Thoughts, written in the 1740s, which she was ploughing through in her studies for the eighteenth-century literature paper. Throughout this rambling meditation on ‘life, death, and immortality’, the poet addresses his ‘Faithful Friend’, the dashing and dissipated Lorenzo, admonishing his faults and exhorting him to moral reform. By a curious coincidence (one of many in Pym’s life), she later discovered that Night Thoughts was one of her very own Lorenzo’s favourite texts.

His real name was Henry Stanley Harvey. He was not a Magdalen man, but was at Christ Church, the richest and poshest of the colleges. Henry’s tutor was C. S. Lewis: Pym had spotted him at Magdalen because that was where the future author of the Narnia books held his fellowship and gave his tutorials.

Henry was tall and movie-star handsome, with dark hair and hazel brown eyes. He had a fine pointed nose, which only added to his seemingly aristocratic look, and was always impeccably dressed. Like Rupert before him, he was fatherless and adored by his mother. Barbara most definitely had a type. Despite his air of superciliousness and arrogance, she detected a strain of vulnerability. Henry was not quite as dashing as Rupert, with his private aeroplane and Winchester background. He was a grammar school boy, whose father had been a surveyor. He was from a similar social class to Barbara, but as a boy with a doting mother and sisters, along with reckless good looks, there was a spoiled quality to his character. She was to capture this trait to perfection in her fictional counterpart.

She set out to discover more about this mysterious stranger. A good stalking ground was the English lecture room. Sure enough, she found herself sitting next but one to him. Perfect for more detailed observation. Barbara saw from the start a quality of cruelty in his demeanour: ‘He doesn’t like being observed but often looks at you in his malicious way.’ He had twinkling ‘(but not pleasantly twinkling)’ eyes, ‘like a duck’. She noted that ‘he walks swiftly, in his effortless yet affected manner’. She even took a survey of his small and mingy handwriting, which sloped to the left. He wrote on plain paper. Above all, she was struck by his mouth. ‘And what a mouth! He is able to curl it in the most fascinatingly repulsive sneering smile.’ She confided to her journal, ‘this diary seems to be going to turn into the saga of Lorenzo’.[3]

By the end of the month, Pym had found out his real name and that he was at glamorous Christ Church. She hoped he would be an entry into a new, more sophisticated circle. She stalked him in the Bodleian Library, observing his herringbone tweed grey overcoat and brown leather gloves, lined with lambs-wool. He made eye contact and passed the occasional sarcastic smile. But no more. She made sure to sit opposite his desk, which was usually littered with books. One of the books was one that she wanted, but she lacked the courage to ask him for it. He had a cold and a cough, ‘also a vaguely hectic flush – or was this my over-solicitous imagination?’[4]

During the last week of January, Pym saw a lot more of him in the library, where he was dishevelled and hectic, finishing an essay before rushing out to a tutorial. ‘We progress not at all,’ she wrote. In February, she saw him at a play in Christ Church, sitting with his friend, Robert ‘Jock’ Liddell, who was a New College man. Henry looked dashing in black flannel bags and a curious striped coat. She noticed his long, slender neck.[5]

Meanwhile another handsome Henry came into her life. His name was Henry (‘Harry’) Howard Harker. He was the son of a miner and a clever scholarship man. He was greatly attracted to the ever-smiling, fun-loving Pym and she might have done better to have chosen him. He invited her to tea and was kind and courteous. But her heart was firmly with the other Henry. She had found out that he was in his final year and she needed to move quickly: ‘In spite of being very conscious of each other, nothing seems to happen!’[6]

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