Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913, the first child of Frederic Crampton Pym, solicitor, of Oswestry, Shropshire, and Irena Spenser Pym, who had been married at Oswestry Parish Church on 26 October 1911 when he was thirty-two and she was twenty-five.

Frederic Crampton Pym’s father is stated on the marriage certificate to be Thomas Pym, farmer, deceased, but this is not in fact the case. Frederic was the illegitimate child of Phoebe Pym, Thomas Pym’s daughter, a domestic servant, of Poundisford Park Lodge, Pitminster, Somerset, and no father’s name is given on the birth certificate. (This information only came to light after Barbara’s death in 1980, and, alas, she never knew about it.) The name Crampton, which he in turn gave to his two children, suggests to me that his father’s name was Crampton. The following is a brief summary of my research and speculation up to date:

Poundisford Park, Somerset, was in 1879, the year of Frederic’s birth, the home of Edmund Bourdillon and his family, and Phoebe Pym was presumably a servant in their employ. At Fosgrove House nearby lived the author A. W. Kinglake. He and his friend the Irish author Eliot Warburton, and members of the Bourdillon family, were all at Cambridge and were later called to the Bar. It is quite likely that at Cambridge they would have known members of the Crampton family, also from Ireland and also connected with the legal profession; and it seems not impossible that a Crampton could have been staying at Poundisford Park during the period in question. Phoebe Pym emigrated to Canada (information from her father Thomas Pym’s will) some time before 1900; she had already left Poundisford by 1881 (census returns). Frederic was educated in Taunton and then articled to a firm of solicitors there, through the generosity, I imagine, of public men in Taunton, like the Badcocks and the Whites, who were also friends of the Bourdillon family. He met Irena Thomas on holiday at Ilfracombe in Devon about 1910.

Irena Spenser Thomas was the daughter of Edward Thomas of Oswestry, who founded an ironmongery business in the town in 1865. She was the youngest of ten children. The Thomas family were originally farmers in the border country round Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and traced their ancestry back to the early Welsh kings and beyond.

I imagine it was the fact that Irena Thomas came from Oswestry that made Frederic Pym decide to set up in practice there, once she had agreed to marry him – and he was already practising in Shropshire, in Wellington and Shrewsbury, when they met – but by a strange coincidence there is an Oswestry connection further back in the Crampton family: in 1857 George Ribton Crampton, barrister-at-law of Dublin, married Helen Roden Croxon, daughter of the banker John Croxon of Oswestry.

Their first home in Oswestry was 72 Willow Street, where Barbara was born on 2 June 1913. Then they moved to Welsh Walls where I was born in 1916; but the house which was to be our real childhood home was Morda Lodge, a substantial, square red-brick Edwardian house with a large garden on the outskirts of the town on the way to Morda. Next door to it was Scotswood, where the Thomas relations lived, grandmother and Aunts May and Janie. Visiting them (which was often) was just a question of climbing over the garden wall.

It was a happy, unclouded childhood. In those days there was domestic help, two maids who slept in a candle-lit room at the top of the house next to the ‘box-room’, with a picture of an apple-cheeked Victorian child; one of them took the role of Nanny. Our father was extremely good-tempered, undemanding and appreciative. He walked to his office every day in the middle of the town, and came home for lunch. Sometimes we would visit him there, at the Cross, up a narrow flight of stairs to the small book-lined rooms, where he had a clerk and a girl typist. He was not called up in the first world war because he had a stiff knee as a result of an injury while running (in his Somerset days). This didn’t prevent him from becoming a very good golfer later on. Our mother was athletic too – she had been a keen hockey-player in her youth and rather regretted, I think, that neither Barbara nor I showed much enthusiasm for games or energetic things like cycling (though I did well at golf in my teens).

We had a small paddock in which we kept a pony called Mogus, not for riding but for driving in a governess cart. Morda Lodge had a stable (which later became a garage) with a harness room and a loft above it where we used to play games. We kept hens, too, somewhere this region, so there were sacks of what used to be called ‘Indian corn’ and other things.

I can’t remember when Barbara made up nicknames for our mother and father, or why, but they stuck and were soon taken for granted. She was ‘Links’ and he was ‘Dor’. Our favourite Aunt Janie was ‘Ack.’ I suppose this could be taken as an early example of an original mind at work! I soon became part of her stories and scenes, perhaps as ‘little fishy’ or ‘a fierce drowdle’. She had a very protective attitude towards me, and an early remark, often quoted later by our mother, was ‘What are you doing to Hilary? Put her down.’

Church was a natural part of our lives because our mother was assistant organist at the parish church of St Oswald, and her family had always been on social terms with the vicar, curates and organists. Having curates to supper was a long-established tradition; and for Barbara and me there were children’s parties at the vicarage. Our father, too, sang bass in the church choir. Barbara and I started our church-going with the children’s service on Sunday afternoons for which our mother would be playing. One might sometimes sit on the organ-stool with her. Music and acting were important to both our parents: they were members of the Oswestry Operatic Society in the 1920s, the heyday of amateur productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and they both took leading roles. I suppose it was this influence that was responsible for Barbara’s first (publicly recognised) creative work, an operetta called The Magic Diamond, which was performed at Morda Lodge in April 1922. The ‘ Morda Lodge Operatic Society’ consisted of us and our Selway cousins. Our mother’s sister Nellie was married to C. J. Selway and lived at Hatch End in Middlesex. Their four children were our favourite cousins and used to come and spend Christmas and Easter with us. Family ceremonials evolved, rituals like the sugar mice on the Christmas cake and celluloid animals in our stockings (nowadays they would be considered too dangerous!).

Apart from Gilbert and Sullivan (which of course we knew by heart) our mother taught us songs like ‘ Oh Oh Antonio’, ‘Going to School’ (both quoted in Less than Angels), ‘The Poodledog’ and the first-world-war song ‘We’re going to tax your butter, your sugar and your tea’. One of her favourite books which she would read to us was The Adventures of a Donkey, a translation of La Comtesse de Ségur’s Memoires d’un Ane. We always liked animals better than dolls. There were also many family jokes and sayings: it was she who encouraged Barbara to write and me to draw, and I’m sure it was her determination that sent us away to a boarding school rather than continue our education in Oswestry. Barbara was twelve when she went as a boarder to Liverpool College, Huyton. I missed her very much, just as I had missed her when she went to her first school and I had (apparently) spent the whole day waiting at the gate for her to come home!

I can’t remember that we ever asked about our father’s family in Somerset – we seemed to have plenty of relations and a very full life. There was a biography of John Pym in the house, with the name ‘ Harriet Pym’ on the flyleaf (my father’s grandmother, I think). The story we were told, regarding the name Pym, was that we were descended from the brother of John Pym the Parliamentarian – but I’m sure we never checked it. (I don’t think there’s any evidence that John Pym ever had a brother.) There was one Taunton connection that we did know about: Frank and Mildred White were great friends of our father and one gathered that he had been brought up in their house during part of his youth. Mildred White was my godmother.

At Huyton Barbara had an average career, not being particularly good at anything that counted; but she was chairman of the Literary Society. (The senior English mistress was Helene Lejeune, sister of C. A. Lejeune, the film critic.) During this period she wrote poems and parodies. Huyton was a very disciplined school and there was a lot of local churchgoing – this was before the dedication of the School Chapel, recalled by Mildred and Dora in an episode in Excellent Women – and her friends remember her amusing observations and fantasies about the different clergy and other characters who appeared on the scene. During her school years too, influenced by our family interest in golf and the fact that our cousin N. C. Selway was a Cambridge blue, she started the Hartley Book, a detailed record of the achievements of the two famous golfing brothers, Lister and Rex of the jam-making firm. It goes up to 1931 and includes autograph letters from them both. Meanwhile, her early reading of Edgar Wallace and Kipling (both admired by our father) and a lesser-known sleuth from The Scout, Frank Darrell, ‘the man of many faces’, had given place, when she was sixteen, to poetry and the novels of Aldous Huxley.

In 1931 Barbara went to Oxford to read English at St Hilda’s. From 1932 we have her own account of those days. I followed her there three years later (to Lady Margaret Hall to read classics). Being younger, I was rather in awe of her circle of friends at first, but we gradually began to have friends in common. It was never our particular intention, in spite of the prophetic circumstances of Some Tame Gazelle, which she had started in 1934, to live together, but it somehow turned out that from about 1938 right up until the time of her death in 1980 we were never apart for more than a year or so at a time. In 1946, when I left my husband Sandy Walton, we started sharing a flat in London, then in 1961 we bought a house, and eventually, in 1972, a country cottage in Oxfordshire.

We didn’t necessarily do everything together – our different jobs after the war (Barbara worked at the International African Institute and I was already in the BBC) gave us a variety of interests and friends and holidays – but the bond between us was strong enough to keep us always on good terms. As we both got older, our lives did come together more. There never seemed to be too much argument about who did what in our domestic round: we both genuinely liked housework, but Barbara was by nature better at cooking and planning meals (a fact borne out by the interest in food in her books). I never got the feeling that she shut herself away to write, as she always seemed to be available and enjoyed social life and entertaining. I suppose I was in some ways more practical and down-to-earth; I also earned more money, but this never caused difficulties or came between us. As our salaries were the only money we had, it was there to be used.

We had a saying that Barbara used to make things happen by writing about them. It seemed to become increasingly true, and could sometimes work in reverse. Or it might produce rather alarming results, as for example when a church that she had brought into a book might become redundant or be demolished. Not so with the shared life of ‘Belinda and Harriet’, which started well and ran a good course.