How novelist Barbara Comyns channelled her struggles creatively

Leading a life as captivating as her narratives, writer Barbara Comyns experienced hardship in her youth and single motherhood before the age of 30, before going on to write a number of seminal novels. She used the darkest episodes of her life as inspiration for The Vet’s Daughter (1959), championed by Graham Greene, which brought her fame with its use of the gothic and macabre.

In Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, the first and official biography of the remarkable author, Avril Horner draws on interviews, unpublished letters and unseen photographs to shed new light on Comyns and how she captured the complexities of life.

In this extract from her book, Horner talks about how a young Barbara channelled her struggles in early life creatively.

Although growing up in a beautiful house in rural Warwickshire might seem the perfect setting for an idyllic childhood, the increasingly volatile and sometimes violent nature of their parents’ marriage did not provide a psychologically secure world for the six Bayley children. As their relationship deteriorated, Albert Bayley’s outbursts were sometimes accompanied by physical attacks on his wife. He was often remorseful after such episodes but the remorse did not last long and his anger was exacerbated by his binge-drinking, which became more frequent during his fifties.

By the early 1920s, when Barbara was entering her teenage years, her parents’ marriage had begun to deteriorate further, fuelled no doubt by Albert Bayley’s worries about his increasingly precarious finances. By the time Barbara was 14, she felt an air of doom about Bell Court; her father was drinking more heavily and would sit in the morning-room biting his moustache in anxiety until roused to fury by a remark made by his wife. Her mother, too, seemed afflicted by depression and apathy, with the result that the house began to look neglected.

Like her sister Kathleen, Barbara was a highly imaginative child whose response to her disturbing home life sometimes took the form of sleep-walking episodes and nightmares. The desire to escape the increasingly toxic atmosphere when her parents argued was also no doubt responsible for Barbara’s conviction as a child that she could perform paranormal feats and literally rise above reality.

There is a moment of apparent levitation in Sisters by a River, when the narrator and her sister Beatrix seem to fly in the air on a “magic stick”. The phenomenon continued to fascinate Barbara and would eventually inspire the extraordinary closing scene of her novel The Vet’s Daughter, in which Alice Rowlands rises above a milling crowd on Clapham Common, an event orchestrated by her abusive father who hopes to make money from it.

A more conventional means of escape when her parents were arguing was to lose herself in the countryside around Bell Court. The Avon, in particular, was a constant and consoling presence in her life. In winter and spring, everyone marvelled at the occasional floods and the children would walk through the water on stilts made by Palmer the handyman; in the summer they spent hours messing about on the river and enjoying family outings on a large green punt.

When, by the early 1920s, the atmosphere at home sometimes became dark and oppressive, the Avon provided a soothing escape. In Barbara’s memoir, Sisters by a River, the narrator often rows up the river very early in the morning, soothed by the singing of the larks and by the sight of gentle cows standing quietly in the shallows: “everything would seem so good and clean, I felt I wanted to cry with so much happiness”.

But despite the growing tension between their parents, life was often enjoyable for the Bayley children. Picnics, tennis parties and Christmas—and especially the food prepared for them—provided happy interludes, as did the twice-yearly arrival of the Fair on the Big Meadow and making “houses” of hay during harvest time.

The other consolation and beacon of stability in Barbara’s life—at least when she was young—was her grandmother, Annie Fenn, who enjoyed looking after babies and small children. Unlike Barbara’s mother, who quickly lost patience with her brood, “Granny” was happy to spend hours playing imaginative games, including “shops” in the garden: “if she said a bay leaf was a humbug, and an oak leaf a pound of tea, the leaves seemed to turn into a humbug and a pound of tea in front of our eyes”.

Granny kept a watchful eye on the children and as an adult Barbara credited her with saving them from danger and drowning more than once. Granny’s strong opinions, jutting chin and apparent ability to hypnotise people made her a formidable individual. She was also highly superstitious, claiming that she often heard restless spirits crying at night.

Proud of her Darby family lineage, Granny would tell the children tales of her childhood years spent in Drumcondra in Ireland, which included stories about the haunted Leap Castle owned by the Irish line of the Darby family. She treasured a corner cupboard and a small carved chair with a heart-shaped hole in its back that she had brought to England and that she claimed came from Leap Castle.

As a child Barbara would go to this chair when she was miserable. She would sit on it with one arm through the hole and lay her head against its curved back; it seemed to give her the comfort she was unable to elicit from her mother. Later, both the corner cupboard and the chair went with Barbara wherever she made a home.

Granny played an important part in shaping Barbara’s imagination as a child. Indeed, she had a great influence on all the Bayley children, who saw her untidy bedroom—full of toiletries, feather boas and strange home-made medicines—as enticingly forbidden territory.

But Granny could on occasion be irritable and unreasonable and grew more so as she aged. She was, according to her granddaughter’s memoir, also fierce with the maids and sometimes fell out with both daughter and son-in-law, on one occasion provoking Albert to such anger that he tried to shove her out of her bedroom window. She was saved only by the width of her hips.

During the last few years of her life, Granny took to her room, her bloated feet and legs probably a symptom of heart disease, her only consolation a glass of whisky. She hated being left alone and members of the Bayley family took it in turns to sit with her and rub her back. During the last few days of her grandmother’s life in 1923, Barbara read Tom Brown’s Schooldays to her and listened to her reminiscences...