To a young girl coming straight from boarding school, Oxford in the early 1930s must have seemed like total freedom – a room of one’s own, no more timetables, self-expression in one’s clothes and the opportunity, after living in a one-sex community, to meet Men. The old chaperone rules had gone and the remaining restrictions (signing the book if you wanted to be out after 10.30 and never being allowed to entertain men in your room) seemed negligible. Barbara went up to Oxford in 1931 eager for a lively social life as well as for academic achievement.
She planned a whole new wardrobe of clothes (an abiding passion), many of which she made herself, and evolved a decorative scheme for her room at St Hilda’s which featured checked gingham and a doll called Wellerina, of a kind then very fashionable.
Her cushions were embroidered SANDRA, which was the name she had given herself, and the name she often uses in her diaries to indicate the more dashing aspects of her character. This name may have been (as her friend Robert Liddell suggests) short for Cassandra, but it seems possible that it was simply a name she considered glamorous and sophisticated, being short for Alexandra and thus having overtones of Russian and Central European aristocracy.
She was a tall, good-looking girl, very extrovert and entertaining, and she had many admirers – the ratio of women undergraduates to men being quite disproportionate. These early diaries are written with a kind of breathless vivacity and a vibrant enjoyment of everything that Oxford had to offer, both intellectual (her love of ‘our greater English poets’ – a source of comfort as well as pleasure in later years – was born here) and social. There was an endless round of dinners, tea parties, sherry parties (a newly fashionable form of entertainment), theatres and, above all the cinema, to which she went several times a week and even, amazingly, on Christmas Day.
All these activities she recorded with enthusiasm but also with style. There is no doubt that she was a born writer. The fluency of her writing, the vividness of her descriptions and the sharp observation of comic detail are all present from the beginning. The style had to be polished and the craft learned, but the fundamentals were there, bright and true. Her first attempt at novel writing, Young Men in Fancy Dress (1929), was dedicated to a perceptive friend who kindly informed me that I had the makings of a style of my own’.
After her meeting with Henry Harvey (Lorenzo), a deeper, sadder theme develops and the writing becomes more mature and introverted.
She had always had a passion for ‘finding out’ about people who interested or attracted her. Tracking people down and looking them up were part of her absorbing interest (that continued all her life) in ‘ research into the lives of ordinary people‘. Her researches ranged from looking people up in Who’s Who, Crockford or street directories to the actual ‘tailing’ of the object of her investigation. She was very resourceful at this and often said that she would have made a good detective. Her powers of observation and research were certainly of great benefit to her as a novelist.
Barbara noticed Henry Harvey at lectures and in the Bodleian Library and had thoroughly investigated him (tracking him around Oxford and asking a friend to look at his pile of books in the Bodleian to find out his name) long before she actually got him to speak to her. Henry was two years older than she, and he and his friend Robert Liddell (Jock), who was then working on the staff of the Bodleian, seemed very much her intellectual superiors. ‘I was inclined to be rather aggressive in my ‘‘lowness’’, talking about dance music etc. I think I did this because I felt intellectually inferior to them.’
In 1934 she went on a National Union of Students’ tour of Germany and in Cologne she met Hanns Woiscknick and Friedbert Gluck, who were officially entertaining the student party. Both young men were attracted to her and she and Friedbert had a love affair which continued for several years, both by letter and when Barbara visited Germany again in 1935 (when they went to Prague together) and in 1937. These were the early days of National Socialism but Barbara was far more concerned with the language, poetry and the general romanticism and Stimmung of Germany than the politics, which interested her not at all. She was really rather naive:
There was much merriment – shouting and singing too – English and German songs. We sang God Save the King and Deutschland Uber Alles – that rather worried Friedbert, although I couldn’t understand why. He and Hanns had an animated talk about it in German.
She found Friedbert glamorous (‘The Germans are glorious to flirt with’) and good for her self-confidence (‘ The Germans appreciate me even if the English [i.e. Henry Harvey] don’t).
In 1934 Henry Harvey took up an appointment at the University of Helsingfors and in 1937 he married a Finnish girl, Elsie Godenhjelm. Barbara was badly hurt, though characteristically, she wrote them lively, satirical letters (some in the styles of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith) and even some to ‘My darling sister Elsie’.
She divided her time between Oswestry and Oxford, with occasional visits to her relations at Hatch End, living on a very small allowance from her family. ‘I wrote home [from Oxford] for some books to try to sell them’ and ‘I want so terribly to go to Germany again and I am 12/ 10d overdrawn.’At that period there was no pressure on girls to take up any sort of job or career, many of her social class simply remained at home until they married or as ‘ the daughter at home’ if they did not. Barbara already knew that she was going to be a writer. In 1934 she wrote:
Sometime in July I began to write a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish. Henry and Jock and all of us appeared in it. I sent it to them and they liked it very much. So I am going on with it and one day it may become a book.
This was Some Tame Gazelle, ‘my novel of real people’. It was, in fact, the only one of her novels whose characters were taken directly from life: Belinda was Barbara herself, Harriet was Hilary, Henry was Henry Harvey, Agatha was Alison West-Watson, Lady Clara Boulding was Julia Pakenham, John Akenside was John Barnicot, Dr Nicholas Parnell was Robert Liddell, Edith Liversidge was Honor Tracy and Ricardo Bianco was Count Roberto Weiss.
She finished the novel, revised it and had it typed by November 1935 and sent it to Chatto and to Gollancz, both of whom rejected it. She then sent it to Cape. In August 1936 she had a letter from Jonathan Cape himself, saying that if she would make certain minor alterations ‘I may be able to offer to publish it.’ She made the alterations and returned the manuscript but in September it was sent back to her with a letter from him.
It is with very great regret that I do not find myself in a position to make you an offer to publish your novel. There is not here the unanimity of appreciation of the book’s chances that I feel is essential for successful publication. Personally I like your novel, but fear that if I were to offer to publish it, we should be unable to give it all the care and attention which I feel are necessary if it is to be successfully launched.
This rejection distressed her very much, and she put the novel aside.
(After the war she revised it and sent it to Jonathan Cape again. This time he ‘read it with interest and pleasure’. It was accepted and published in 1950.)
Some Tame Gazelle, even in its earliest form, was a considerable achievement. It was unusual enough for a girl of twenty-two to choose to make her heroine fifty years of age, but to have created such a believable middle-aged world was quite remarkable. The observation and language were already mature, the cadences of speech were idiosyncratic and the handling of character wholly assured.
In December 1937 she had a very consciously Romantic encounter in Oxford with a young undergraduate six years her junior. ‘Oh how absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself! everybody should try it.’
This theme, the love of a woman for a younger man, occurred again later in her own life and she used the experiences with great delicacy in several of her novels, The Lumber Room (an unfinished novel started in 1938), The Sweet Dove Died and An Unsuitable Attachment.
In August 1938, realising she had to leave Oxford, she went to Poland to teach English to the daughter of Dr Michal Alberg in Katowice, but she had to return to England after only a few weeks because of the worsening political situation. She enjoyed the experience and noted, as always, the unusual:
Went into the town by myself. Saw a large animal like a wolf hanging up outside a provision shop. After supper a Polish cavalry officer and his wife came in. They were sitting drinking tea and eating Kuchen. A lovely picture.
Went to Czestochowa by car with Mme A. Forests and barefoot peasants. Saw a wonderful church – turquoise marble, pink, grey, white fawn, green crochet work around the pulpit and altars in green and puce. Virgin Mary portrait with doors sliding over it.
Went into a dark romantic forest (belonging to the Prince of Pless). Had tea at a deserted Beergarden – great Stimmung. Walked in the forest and visited a Golf Club. Very nice clubhouse, all notices written in English.
Back in England she and Hilary, who was now taking a secretarial course, moved into rooms in London in Upper Berkeley Street (‘ Hilary paid £1.5s. 2d. for my rooms’). Hilary got a job as a secretary with the BBC and Barbara worked hard at her writing.
The war was coming nearer. There were ‘ territorials, with rifles but no uniforms, in the streets’ and she met again Dr Alberg and his family, now refugees from Poland. ‘ One almost thinks how comforting to be in the obituaries … ‘‘in her 93rd year’‘.’
In July she returned to Oswestry to make black-out curtains and kelp to prepare the house to receive six evacuees from Birkenhead.
H.H.