The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

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]