The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

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.