Sides to Middle and Barbara Pym
July 6 2010
- After I’d written “Children of the Great Depression” for the Ruth’s Neighborhood section, my friend Lib Kennedy wrote me about how her mother had torn worn-out bed sheets in half and stitched up the sides into a center seam. “It made the sheet smaller,” she said, “but still usable.” I quoted her description in a Mailbox piece called “More Frugalities,” and when we next got together she showed me one of the sheets she still had and still used.
Last month when I was rereading Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle, first published in 1950, I reached a scene in which the seamstress has come to the home of Belinda, the main character, and Belinda is telling her the things to be done:
“I think the chair covers are the most important, and then there are the new bathroom curtains and some sheets to be put sides to middle . . .”
I immediately shot off a note to Lib, telling her about this. It’s probably been twenty-five years since I first read the book, and back then I didn’t know what “sides to middle” meant, so the term went right past me and I forgot it. Now, thanks to Lib, I do know.
There was a later reference to “sides to middle” in the novel, when these sheets have to be put on the bed of an important houseguest:
“And in addition, although the Archbishop had not personally made the bed, he knew that there were sides-to-middle sheets on it, for Florrie had come into his study that morning, very agitated because all the whole sheets were still at the laundry.”
Awfully funny, as of course Barbara Pym always is.
Her attitude toward life. When I finished the book, I found myself locating in my quotes file a couple of quotes I’d noted when reading A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym by Hazel Holt. During Barbara’s correspondence with Philip Larkin, they exchanged their different experiences with memories.
Philip Larkin wrote, “. . . has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always unhappy? I don’t mean really unhappy, as of blacking factories, but sudden stabbing memories of especially absurd or painful moments that one is suffused and excoriated by . . . I suppose if one lives to be old one’s entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect! Why can’t I recall the pleasure of hearing my Oxford results, having my novel accepted, passing my driving test—things such as these? Life doesn’t work that way.”
Barbara Pym replied, “I’m not sure that I agree about memories always being unhappy or uncomfortable ones. I find as I get older that I tend to steer clear of any kind of memories or push them away, unless I want to call them up for any special reason. But when I’m unhappy or depressed I do find myself remembering ‘better times,’ those good reviews of my novels, etc. , but that doesn’t make one any more cheerful—on the contrary, Nessun maggior dolore [I had to look that up; it’s from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “There’s nothing more painful/ than remembering the happy time/in bad time"] and all that jazz! But now I want to pass my driving test and I want to publish another novel, and even to write another novel to my own satisfaction, so perhaps my mind is filled with all that, and I am lucky.”
From this exchange I turned to my copy of The Barbara Pym Cookbook by Hilary Pym and Honor Wyatt. It’s full of quotes from her novels, for as Hilary Pym says in her introduction, besides the recipes the book supplies “references or reminders for Pym readers who are more interested in the idea and the associations of food than the actual preparation of it.” I’ve had the book for many years and I haven’t yet cooked from it, but I reread it occasionally, smiling over every Barbara Pym turn of phrase, and I always resolve to make Toad-in-the-Hole and such. On this occasion I read the recipe for Pain de Chou-fleur, the cauliflower cheese lunch that Belinda served Miss Bede, the seamstress, with unfortunate results that, however, didn’t prevent Miss Bede from completing her tasks, including the sides to middle.
© 2010 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved
