Fellow Writers in a Cotswold Village

Abstract

My first meeting with Barbara Pym had nothing to do with the fact that we both happened to be writers: it belonged to the small beer of social observances of the kind she so much appreciated and from which she could extract so much humour and unexpected significance. The news of the arrival of the two sisters who had bought Barn Cottage reached us by the village grapevine (just ahead of a postcard from a mutual acquaintance linking us up). After my wife (having already experienced the rigours of moving in to the small village of Finstock) collected milk and some newly-baked bread, we walked the few hundred yards from our own cottage to welcome the newcomers. Barbara’s sister Hilary and I quickly discovered mutual ties, because she had recently retired from the BBC and I had myself worked there for sixteen years before leaving to become a full-time writer. But for some reason I had missed out on Barbara’s novels of the 1950s and I knew almost nothing of her work, though as I was currently enjoying a modest success she knew something of mine. I shall never forget how very gently, indeed almost diffidently, she said, ‘I, too, write novels’, when, after all, she might well have been hurt by my ignorance.