Beryl Bainbridge Read online

  Lying also served as a self-protective mechanism. When she began meeting a German prisoner of war down by the Formby dunes, she didn’t tell her parents, justifying her mendacity on the grounds that the truth would hurt them: ‘Much better to say I was chased by a Nazi than to say I was friendly with a German prisoner.’

  The fact that Beryl had no compunction about publishing anecdotes she knew to be false in order to provide more exciting or dramatic copy may make the job of untangling truth from fiction in the numerous accounts she gave of her life that much harder, but there was a reason for it. Such myth-making, whether conscious or unconscious, was a psychological necessity, a way of dealing with emotional trauma, a means by which she kept her private self and her public image separate. Like everyone, Beryl needed an element of privacy in her life, a space in which to forget or hide things that were too personal, too painful, or too embarrassing to be part of the story she wanted to tell about herself. As she herself put it: ‘All memory is fiction, which is why autobiographical accounts and historical ones, for that matter, are notoriously inaccurate. We censor memories by recalling only those fragments we wish to remember.’20

  It was an awareness of just how much she had fictionalized her past that made Beryl sceptical of the very notion of a biography: ‘I’m the only one who knows what it was like, so how can anyone else write it?’21 This must have seemed especially true as regards some of the most intimate relationships in her life, which, for the most part, she had never publicly written or spoken about.

  One of the many paradoxes of Beryl’s personality was that despite her casual disregard for facts and the frequency with which she gave misleading or distorted accounts of her life, she went out of her way to preserve the documentary evidence that would undercut much of what she had said in print. Aside from diaries, journals and photographs, she kept a vast archive of contemporary material relating to her life, including hundreds of letters – from her parents, her brother, her husband, her lovers, her schoolfriends, her close friends, her publishers and other writers. Not only did she keep them, she made periodic attempts to annotate them,22 clarifying the names of those involved or giving details about what they had done, as if she wanted the real facts of her life to be understood in the future, even though she didn’t want to talk about them in the present. Using this vast array of material, supplemented by Beryl’s own letters, many of which, dating back to the 1950s, have come to light since her death, it is now possible to present the details of her life accurately and honestly for the first time.

  But the function of a biography goes beyond the simple task of setting out facts or correcting chronology. Its aim is to give an account of a life as it unfolds, to show the impact of traumatic events as they are experienced at the time, not as they might be recounted some thirty or forty years afterwards, reframed in the context of a career as a writer or passed off as an amusing anecdote. If anything, Beryl did herself an injustice by limiting the account of her life to the myths and stories she fabricated, or to the events she retained in her not always reliable memory. The letters, journals and diaries she preserved tell a story that is by turns poignant and heartbreaking, every bit as dramatic and laden with irony as the brilliant fictions she crafted.

  ONE

  Winnie and Dick

  Poor little darling Mummy. Poor little dearest Daddy. The fearful incompatability of human beings, the torture of living together, the crystal glass of true love that shatters and is pasted painfully together with tape, so that in twenty years some of the pieces fuse together again and the clarity is completely forgotten.1

  After she became a published novelist, Beryl attributed a huge importance to the influence of her parents on the shaping of her personality – and more specifically to what she felt was the emotionally destructive result of their mutual incompatibility. Anecdotes about her mother and father can be found in numerous articles she wrote for newspapers and in interviews, and thinly disguised portraits of them appear in a handful of her novels. Inevitably, these representations have tended to focus on moments of conflict or high drama, and consequently our picture of what Beryl’s family life was like is somewhat distorted.

  Beryl herself was aware of this, and would occasionally admit that what she had presented was only a partial truth: ‘I’ve really only shown the bad side,’2 she told one journalist. ‘I’ve maligned my parents in every book I’ve written,’3 she confessed to another. Nor was everything she wrote about them based on fact: ‘Some of it I think I may possibly have made up.’4 She was aware, too, that her parents themselves would not have recognized their portraits: ‘I have spent five or six books giving my version of my own mother and father, which, if they were alive, they would say was lies from start to finish.’5 Even her older brother, Ian, didn’t share her assessment of their formative years: ‘His memories of events don’t coincide with mine. Whenever we’ve met, I’ve said, “Do you remember so-and-so?” And he says, “Don’t be so bloody stupid. You’re mad.”’6

  But even taking into account the necessarily subjective way in which Beryl interpreted her memories, trying to reconstruct an accurate account of her family history from her interviews and published writings is like entering a minefield. The problem is perhaps best illustrated by quoting an article she wrote about her father, in which she sketched a portrait of him as a boy, supposedly in the year 1900:

  An eleven year old boy sits at a table with a pot of ink and a sheet of exercise paper in front of him. His name is Richard Bainbridge and he’s the youngest of nine children. His sister Sally, four years his senior, lies on the sofa under the window, coughing into a piece of rag. Jim, five years older, left Liverpool six years ago and doesn’t write. Mother has the notion he’s enlisted to fight the Boers in South Africa, but Margo holds that’s rubbish. She remembers Jim taking to his heels with fright when a cow escaped from the abattoir and slid in its own blood down the cobbles of Mount Pleasant. John works as a butcher’s lad on the Breck Road and sleeps above the shop. Two other brothers neither of whom the boy knew, sailed away to the New World before he could walk . . . Only Nellie, Margo and Sally live at home with him and Mother.7

  This evocation is clearly an imaginative reconstruction, but it is one rooted in specific and concrete details. Yet every piece of information it contains is false: Richard was not born in 1889, but 1891. Beryl liked the idea of her father being born in 1889, as that was the year of Hitler’s birth and it gave an added frisson to link them in this way. Nor was he the youngest, and there were ten children in the family, not nine. Richard’s younger sister, christened Sarah Ann, was four years his junior not four years his senior; Jim (James) wasn’t five years older but ten years older, and in any case he was a glazier by trade who was still living in the family home in 1900, so their mother Ellen would have been under no illusion he had fought in the Boer War. His brother John was not a butcher’s lad, but worked as a draper’s clerk; it was his son John B. Bainbridge, born in 1911, who became a butcher with a shop on West Derby Road, not Breck Road. Neither of the two remaining brothers emigrated to America: William, a waterman at the Liverpool Corporation, lived in the city until his death in 1931. Finally, following the death of Richard’s father William Bainbridge in 1899 (not three months after Richard’s birth, as Beryl states later in her article and elsewhere),8 Ellen became the head of the family, and in the year 1900, as in the past, the household was bursting at the seams. Not only were John, James, Nellie, Margo, George, Richard and Sarah living with her in the small terraced house in Spencer Street, Ellen was also giving house room to Archibald and Elizabeth Kidd, two of her brother Thomas’s grown-up children.

  Unfortunately Beryl inherited little in the way of documentary material relating to the history of her family. This is frustrating, but not wholly irremediable. Genealogical databases and other sources of information make it possible to cut through some of the morass of misinformation.9

  The Bainbridges, or the line that Beryl descended from at least, origi
nated in Ulverston, Lancashire. Among the eight children of an agricultural labourer, John Bainbridge, and his wife Deborah, was their fourth son William – Beryl’s paternal grandfather – who was born on 26 July 1846 in Flookburgh, a fishing village on the Cartmel peninsula. Although William started out like his father as a farm labourer, working on a nearby farm from the age of fourteen, by the 1870s he had moved to West Derby, one of the many areas around Liverpool that underwent rapid population growth as a result of industrialization and the influx of immigrant labour. Here he found work as a cooper in Threlfall’s brewery, or a ‘brewer’s labourer’ as the census of 1881 more bluntly puts it.

  In the early 1870s William met Ellen Kidd – Beryl’s paternal grandmother – another Liverpool immigrant. Ellen was the daughter of Archibald Kidd, a tin-plate worker from Edinburgh whose life seems to have been plagued by work and money problems. After a short spell in Glasgow where he met and married Margaret Horn in 1840, Archibald and his new wife returned to Edinburgh. As the Kidd household grew – Ellen, born in 1849, was the fifth child in what would become a sprawling family of thirteen – money became so tight that Margaret was reduced to stealing to get by. In 1851 she was convicted of theft and, together with her nine-month-old baby, spent thirty days in Edinburgh prison.

  Following Margaret’s early death in 1865 at the age of forty-one,10 Archibald moved his family to West Derby, where, a few years later in 1871, Ellen began working as a live-in domestic servant, her unemployed father and the rest of the extended family acting as childminders for her two-year-old daughter, Marion.11 It was around this time that Ellen met William Bainbridge, and the two lived together as common-law man and wife for the rest of the 1870s before legally marrying in August 1879. (At the age of thirty Ellen was still unable to write and her wedding certificate had to be signed with a cross.)

  Ellen was nothing if not physically robust: she had her first child at the age of nineteen and her tenth twenty-seven years later. After Marion came Deborah (1875), William (1878), John (1880), James (1883), Ellen (‘Auntie Nellie’, 1884), George (1887), Margaret (‘Auntie Margo’, 1888), Richard (Beryl’s father, 1891) and Sarah Ann (1895). During the 1890s the Bainbridges lived in a small terraced house (now demolished) in Hughes Street, Everton, in conditions it would be an understatement to describe as cramped. The household comprised eleven people: William and Ellen, their eight children ranging in age from two to twenty-three, and their widowed son-in-law, Robert Thompson, who had married Marion two years before she died in 1891.

  The Bainbridges were a respectable working-class family. Most of William’s children ‘got on’ in their working life, though it tended to be in trade. (None went to university or ‘entered the professions’, as it would have been put at the time, and in fact Beryl’s brother, Ian, would be the first of the Bainbridges to go to university.) Richard was baptized in Emmanuel church, just off West Derby Road, a short walk from the family home in Hughes Street. He attended Emmanuel Church of England School in Mill Road, and though, according to Beryl, he wasn’t happy there, he seems to have been a diligent student. It was probably at school that he acquired his love of Dickens, whose works he would later read aloud to his daughter. Beryl would always say that it was her mother who pushed her into the theatre, but her childhood recollection of coming across a photograph of her father, aged about seven, on the stage of Emmanuel church hall ‘dressed in velvet knickerbockers and about to sing Lily of Laguna’12 shows that Richard was not without his dramatic side.

  By 1911 the Bainbridges – Ellen, Richard (or ‘Dick’ as he was known in the family), Nellie, Margo and Sarah – were living in a small terraced house in Sunbury Road, in a working-class district of Anfield. Richard was now nineteen, and on the census for that year he is listed as a shipping clerk. The origin of his connection to the shipping industry isn’t clear. Beryl recalled her father telling her he’d gone away to sea in his teens to serve as a cabin boy on the White Star line, but there is no evidence to confirm this, though his perennial toast at formal occasions – ‘Absent and Sea-faring friends’13 – hints at a nostalgic recollection of sea life. In any event, in the first decades of the twentieth century the Liverpool docks provided numerous opportunities for work: Richard’s older brother, George, worked on the docks as a sheet-metal worker, and his brother-in-law was also a shipping clerk.

  Richard’s war years are as opaque as those of his adolescence: whether he fought, or how he managed to avoid conscription if he didn’t, isn’t known. There seems to be no proof he was in Ireland during the 1916 Easter uprising, something Beryl claims he told her.14 He next turns up on the electoral register in 1921, living with Ellen and Nellie in an even smaller terraced house at 21 Bingley Road, a short distance from their former home. One reason for the move was a reduction in the size of the household following the departure of Sarah and Margo, both of whom had brief, but ultimately tragic, experiences in love. Their twin stories became part of Beryl’s public mythology, a proof that doomed relationships were part of her family heritage, though the form in which she recounted them doesn’t correspond to the facts and she added more dramatically satisfying deaths – poison gas, the heat of battle and a broken heart – to replace the more prosaic one of disease.

  Margo left home first, having fallen in love with James Murray Bickerton, a plumber by trade. After the outbreak of the First World War he enrolled as a sapper in the Royal Engineers and it was while on leave in 1917 that he and Margo married. He was sent to France and returned in February 1919, leaving the army with a Medical Category A rating, meaning he was fully fit. When James was demobbed shortly afterwards it was with a Class Z rating, signifying he was liable to be recalled if it was deemed necessary. However, on 3 November 1919 he died at Bingley Road, with Richard in attendance. Beryl’s version was that it was the result of mustard gas, but the only medical problem listed on James’s army papers was a spell in hospital, complaining of pains in his stomach. Apart from a period of observation no further action was taken, and given that he died from cancer of the stomach and liver a year or so later the army may have accepted that medical negligence was a contributory factor in his death – at any rate the following year Margo received a war pension. After her husband’s death, Margo briefly attempted to escape the family orbit, but by 1925, probably in order to economize on her pension, she moved back in with Ellen, Nellie and Richard at Bingley Road, where she lived until her death some forty years later.

  Sarah’s story was, if anything, even more tragic. In 1922 she married George Ripon Towers, who had enlisted in the Navy as a seventeen-year-old in 1911. During the war he served as a Leading Signalman, receiving a decoration for his service, before being invalided out in April 1919 due to problems with his eyes. Four years later, on 17 December 1923, he died, and within a fortnight Sarah was also dead. Beryl’s account of the tragedy – ‘Auntie Sally lost her man in the battle of the Somme; she died a month later from something diagnosed as a broken heart’15 – was clearly a garbled version of these events. In fact both George and Sarah succumbed to pneumonia, and once again it was Richard who had the grim duty of being in attendance during their final moments.

  By the 1920s, having not only outlived her husband and two of her daughters, Ellen was established in Bingley Road as something of a matriarchal figure. Richard – the only male in the household after his brothers had married and moved out – seems to have felt obliged to remain with his mother and play the role of dutiful son and responsible breadwinner. Even at the peak of his success as a businessman he continued to live at home with his mother and sisters, which no doubt gave rise to a certain tension when he began courting Winifred Baines, sometime around 1925 or 1926.

  Where or how Beryl’s parents met is uncertain. Beryl claimed it was on top of a tram, though in one account it was in Lord Street and in another between Everton Brow and Anfield. In yet another article she says it was underneath a gaslamp, so it is fair to say she didn’t know.16 It may be no coincidence that when Winn
ie and her parents moved from Ettington Road to a new house in the lush suburban environs of Leyfield Road in 1925 one of their close neighbours was George Reginald Bainbridge – though what his connection to Richard’s side of the family was, or even if there was one, isn’t clear.

  The first photograph showing Richard and Winnie together was taken at Leyfield Road shortly after, at Easter 1926. Details of their courtship are sparse, but what is certainly not true is another of Beryl’s stories – that Richard broke off a seven-year engagement to a woman called Annie Mudd (or Ann Moss in another version) in order to marry Winnie. Despite the unlikely sounding name, Annie Mudd was a real person, but her protracted engagement was to Richard’s older brother John some twenty years before.

  Richard remains an enigmatic figure. While photographs of him in later life often show him as stern-faced, not the sort of person you would want to get on the wrong side of, those from the 1930s show him with a sardonic twinkle in his eye, as if on the point of making some ironic jest or quip, his paternalistic rectitude softened by a jaunty pipe or a party hat. Although there are many pictures in which Richard and Winnie feature together, there are few where they are actually side by side, let alone touching. One curious photograph, probably taken at Chirbury in the 1930s, shows Richard standing at the back of a group while Winnie lies on the ground at the front, her elbow propped on another man and an animated grin on her face. That Winnie and Richard had good times is undoubted – many of the photographs capture their laughter and smiles – though whether they were both having the same good time is not so clear.