In 1946 Barbara started to work with Daryll Forde, Professor of Anthropology at University College, London, and Director of the International African Institute. He was a brilliant, often impatient and difficult man, but with great energy, efficiency and enthusiasm, who had, immediately after the war, revitalised the Institute, founded in 1926 by Lord Lugard for the study of African languages and culture.
Barbara was his Assistant Editor on the Institute’s journal Africa and on the series of Ethnographic and Linguistic Surveys of Africa. She also helped to edit volumes of Seminar papers and prepared for press the various monographs published by the Institute. She was a capable and conscientious editor but had no real interest in Africa as such, being far more fascinated by the anthropologists and the linguists than by the subjects they were studying.
She created a comic world around them, embroidering the few facts she knew about the various authors and reviewers into a splendid fantasy so that it was often difficult to remember what was real and what was not. (‘I couldn’t ask W. if his Mother was better because I couldn’t remember if we’d invented her.’) She was quick to pick out the ridiculous phrase (anthropological and, especially, linguistic studies are very rich in these) thereby making what would have been a tedious task of proof-reading or editing a constant delight to those who worked with her.
Giddiness continually hurls my goat to the ground.
The hyenas have broken the beer strainers of the women.
Travel with a bicycle in the rainy season is not easy.
No personal diaries other than the briefest entries exist for the years 1946-8. This can most easily be explained by the changed circumstances of her life at this time: the illness and death of her mother in September 1945 which led to more domestic responsibility; the end of the war and demobilisation; the remarriage of her father in 1946; and the completely new experience, for her, of starting a full-time job in London which must have taken a great deal of her concentration. When she did feel able to turn her mind to something else, it was to the revision of her novel Some Tame Gazelle.
In 1949 Jonathan Cape accepted Some Tame Gazelle, now revised for the third time. It was published in 1950 and had a general critical success. ‘Delightfully amusing,’ wrote one critic in The Guardian, ‘but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell.’ Between 1950 and 1961 six of her novels were published by Cape: Some Tame Gazelle, 1950; Excellent Women, 1952; Jane and Prudence, 1953; Less Than Angels, 1955; A Glass of Blessings, 1958; and No Fond Return of Love, 1961. They were praised by the critics, enjoyed a modest financial success and delighted an ever-growing circle of admirers and enthusiasts. Excellent Women, the most generally popular, was a Book Society Choice and was subsequently serialised in the BBC’s Woman’s Hour.
In February 1950 her only broadcast radio play, Something to Remember, was produced by Hugh Stewart, with Grizelda Hervey playing the archetypal Pym heroine Edith Gossett.
Barbara always said that she was glad that she could never be a ‘full-time novelist’ and that she had to earn her living some other way. It was fortunate that she was able to do so in a world as rich in comic material as the I. A.I. Because the Institute was classed as a charity, salaries were very low indeed and Barbara was lucky that she was able to share a home with Hilary, separated from her husband in 1946 and now a BBC producer. Since 1946 they had lived together in great amity (as they did for the rest of her life), thus making the fictional situation of Some Tame Gazelle, projected all those years ago, come true. They lived first in a flat in Pimlico (the setting for Excellent Women) and then in Barnes (the suburb in Less Than Angels and No Fond Return of Love).
From 1948 Barbara had kept notebooks – partly diaries, partly ideas for novels, or simply observations. At the back of each one are detailed shopping lists that may one day provide invaluable source material for social historians. These 82 small, spiral-backed books form the heart of this section. Such was her dedicated professionalism that even in the 17 years when her novels were not published, even when it seemed unlikely that she would ever be published again, she still made notes for novels and recorded observations. In a way these notebooks were her most precious possession, the real raw material of her writing.
In 1961 Hilary bought a small house in Queens Park (the district described in An Unsuitable Attachment). There they had a garden and were able to keep cats. Tatiana, the original of Faustina, a beautiful but highly neurotic tortoiseshell, had a short, tragic life, but Tom Boilkin (sleek, black and white, President of the Young Neuters Club) and Minerva (also known as Nana, another, more amiable tortoiseshell whose preferred diet was fried tomato skins and custard) lived long and happy lives. H.H.