Excellent Women - Book 48

Rereading Excellent Women by Barbara Pym was a trip down memory lane for me.  I first read it when I was 22 years old or so and it was my mother who first introduced me to this author.

I had just graduated from college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life.  I had no plans, so I moved home.  I was happy to do this for I was sick and tired of dorm life and I missed my mom.  At that time there were a lot unhappy circumstances ongoing in our loving but dysfunctional family and my mom was often struggling with depression about them, or so it seemed to me.  I liked to be with her to keep her company and help her when I could. She couldn't drive because she was partially blind in one eye and had no peripheral vision.   I liked to go shopping with her and run errands for her and sometimes we'd go out to lunch.  Somehow through the turbulent days of my high school and college, we had grown to be very good friends.

I was lucky in that when I got home there was a job waiting for me.  I had worked for the Military Traffic Management Command for two summers and two Christmases, during college.  I had a contract with them as a part-time, temporary employee and my contract wasn't up, so I was able to go back to the same folks I knew and had become friendly with and work there for a few months until my contract was up.  And, luckily, a friend of mine was planning to go to graduate school.  She had a job as a secretary of a women's art club that was headquartered in an historic house (one of Abraham Lincoln's sons lived there for while).  She asked me if I would job share with her.  So I started working there on Tuesdays and Thursday and at the MTMC on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

I liked working.  I liked having to dress in clothes suitable for an office.  I would get up every morning and get myself to the bus stop.  I had to be careful not to get on the wrong bus.  The days I was working downtown, I got on one bus which took me to the metro, I rode the metro into town, got out and walked about 4 or 5 blocks.  On the alternate days I took a different bus, but from the same bus stop.  And this bus very conveniently took me almost directly to MTMC after about a half hour ride.  These buses came within minutes of each other and I remember the bus drivers got to know which day of the week I would get on their bus.  It was funny.

It was a very social time for me.  I had old high school friends I sometimes hung out with.  I had friends from work I often went to happy hour with, and there were office functions and parties to attend.  I had a good friend from college who had moved to DC.  She had a really cool, quirky apartment in the basement of an old townhouse in Dupont Circle.  We'd go out, to a movie, or to dinner and I'd wind up spending the night at her place because it just took too long to get home via the metro.  I also had a long distance boyfriend.  He lived just outside of Philadelphia.  We'd gone out for a year our junior year in college.  Then he'd gone to another college his senior year (his father tried to break us up!  Oh the drama!) but we'd continued to go out.  And we were still going strong when I moved back home.  So about once a month I'd either take the train up to Philly or he'd take it down to DC and we'd spend a weekend together.  We wrote lovely long letters to each other and often talk on the phone (though that was expensive).  So my life was very full.  I kept contemplating moving to the Philly area but I was hesitant.  I was afraid of his father and while I convinced myself I was terribly in love, there were certain aspects of the relationship that made me uneasy, so I didn't move.  And then he decided to go to law school up there.  We lasted almost 5 years together with 4 of the years being this long distance thing, but the last year was very rocky and finally we kind of mutually broke up.  But at the time I discovered Barbara Pym that hadn't happened yet and I was still happy.

I decided that I needed to have more ambition than just being a clerical worker in some office somewhere.  So I lit on the idea of getting a Legal Assistant certification from Georgetown University's Continuing Ed.  That way if people asked me what I did, I would have a definite answer.  I applied and attended classes there and after a year got my certificate.  Then I got hired as a receptionist for a small law firm in DC.  After awhile I moved up from receptionist to legal assistant.  I loved working there.  I got along with everybody.  I loved working downtown.  I got to do things up on the Hill and even go to receptions there.  I loved the pulse of the city.  I went out dancing a lot, and to concerts and the theater.  My aunt got season tickets to a certain playhouse and we'd go regularly to see great plays.  Sometimes she'd take me out to lunch (she's my aunt who is currently living with me).  I also liked to take classes.  I was enamored with Georgetown and their continuing ed program was lots of fun.  I took a writing course (where I discovered that as much as I loved to read I wasn't really cut out to be a novelist) and a wonderful Italian class and a music appreciation class there.  I thought the Georgetown Continuing Ed program was paradise.  I used to look over all its catalogue of offerings and try to figure out how much I could afford.  I was planning to work my way through pretty much all of them.

But even in this time of busyness, I enjoyed quiet evenings at home with my mom.   I just enjoyed being with her.  I miss her so much.  She was one person I just enjoyed being with.  She was a great conversationalist.  She liked to watch Jeopardy and Masterpiece Theater and I watched them regularly with her.  She also read a lot and always had good recommendations.  I read lots of books at her suggestion; Muriel Spark, Anthony Trollope, R. F. Delderfield (my mother was an Anglophile!).  One of these recommended authors was Barbara Pym.  So I went through a Pym phase where I read all her books.  I had a lot of time to read riding the buses and subways to and from work and then all those train rides up to Philadelphia and back.  I identified with the women in the books.  Although at the time I thought I would marry my boyfriend, I was living a single life and sometimes I wondered what would happen if I didn't marry.  I thought I would probably be very comfortable with it, as long as I kept busy.  However, I longed to have my own children one day, a longing Barbara Pym characters never seem to succumb to.

Anyway, about this book, Excellent Women: It is set in London in the 1950's.  The British are still getting over World War II, things are still tight and buildings are still bombed out.  Everything is told from the point of view of Mildred Lathbury, who is the 30 something spinster daughter of a clergyman.  She lives alone in a small flat.  She works mornings at the Care of Aged Gentlewomen and in the afternoons she helps out at her Anglo-Catholic parish.  She is good friends with the pastor and his sister.  Her life is thrown into a tumult of sorts when she gets new downstairs neighbors, a married couple who are much more worldly and sophisticated than she is used to.  The book is very funny in a quietly amusing sort of way and the little awkward social situations and the comedy of manners revealed there, really do remind you of Jane Austen a bit, (just as the blurb on the cover says).  I don't know how Pym did it, but her books about these quiet, ordinary spinsters are hard to put down.  She really creates an atmosphere that is absorbing and somehow charming, even though one senses the drabness of postwar England.

So I highly recommend this book and all of Pym's works.

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