Beryl Bainbridge Read online

  During the early 1920s Dick Bainbridge must have felt that he was getting on in the world, a self-made man who, in relative terms, was doing spectacularly well. While most of William and Ellen’s other children worked in some form of trade – Deborah was a tailoress, Margo a dressmaker and James an ecclesiastical lead-light maker, and both John and William Jr had worked their way up to become foremen at the Liverpool Corporation waterworks – by 1921 Richard was listed as a shipping agent with his own company. Richard Bainbridge & Co. had an office in South John Street, part of the city’s mercantile business quarter, and by the middle of the decade it had a second shipping office in nearby Lord Street.

  Richard’s rise was rapid, but it didn’t last. By 1925 there were already signs the business was in difficulty. Beryl’s explanation for the firm’s failure was, as she put it, ‘a decline in the gold standards’.17 Although she muddled the meaning of the phrase – there could be no ‘decline’ of the Gold Standard, only the currencies linked to it – it seems to be based on a genuine recollection, and in it one can hear a faint echo of Richard’s impotent rage against Winston Churchill and the international financiers he felt were ruining him. It was Churchill’s decision as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925 to return to the Gold Standard at pre-war exchange rates (Britain had abandoned it in 1914 to print money for the war effort) that effectively increased the price of exports and caused a massive slump in trade.

  Bainbridge & Co. struggled to compete, along with hundreds of similar businesses at the mercy of global forces. In February 1926 a move was made to wind up the firm and in June liquidators were appointed. Richard was effectively declared bankrupt on 2 February 1931. The years of litigation prior to the bankruptcy no doubt took their toll psychologically and put an added strain on the early years of his marriage. It is easy to imagine that the loss of social prestige and independence that the bankruptcy process entailed was at the root of what Beryl would later describe as her father’s unpredictable outbursts of anger, his bouts of melancholy, and his resort to drink.

  Winnie would later tell Beryl that when she met Richard he was a successful businessman, and it was only after their marriage that everything collapsed, painting herself as a victim of her husband’s financial incompetence. But looking at the timing of Richard’s fall there seems to be a self-serving element to her narrative, an attempt to justify her resentments retrospectively. The first petition to wind up Bainbridge & Co. was presented at the County Court in November 1925, almost two years before their marriage. Nor does there seem to be anything to indicate that the collapse of the business was due to Richard’s poor management rather than the unhealthy economic climate.18

  During his successful period in the early 1920s, Richard had possibly benefited from his business connections as a Freemason. A certificate from the St George’s Lodge in Wallasey affirms he had ‘advanced to the second and third degrees’ by 1922. These connections may also have been of use after his bankruptcy, helping him to start a viable business in 1931, even if it was one of freelance dealing negotiated through personal contacts, rather than the official channels of a limited company. There is little concrete information about Richard’s work as a commercial agent. Beryl’s first public reference to his occupation was in 1953, where she described him as ‘an agent for cork and tin plate’.19 Despite his bankruptcy, Dick Bainbridge remained a recognizable and respected figure in and around Liverpool over the next two decades, and many people recalled seeing him meeting his cronies and doing business in pubs, even if they weren’t entirely sure what exactly his business was.

  If Richard’s life seemed to be a classic story of rise and fall, Winnie could look at her father’s career as one of unqualified success. In the 1911 census, John James Baines was listed as a paint manufacturer’s clerk, but he would work his way up to become a manager at the Liverpool paint giant Walpamur. During the early 1920s, while Richard was at the height of his success transporting goods across the sea, John James had begun prospecting for raw materials underground, having become secretary of the Ridge Hill Barytes Mine. Located near Chirbury in Montgomeryshire and with offices in Liverpool, the mine was a small but significant source of baryte, a mineral used as a white pigment in paint.20

  John James’s commercial connection to the mine also had an unexpected social bonus: it brought him into contact with Charles V. White, the proprietor of the Herbert Arms Hotel in Chirbury. The Baineses, and subsequently the Bainbridges, would maintain a close connection to the Whites for many years, with Richard and Winnie making regular visits during Beryl and Ian’s school holidays.

  By 1926, John James had moved his family to a more substantial house, ‘Lyndhurst’, in Leyfield Road, West Derby. This was a considerable step up from the small terraced house in Ettington Road in which he and his wife Janet (‘Nana Baines’) had spent the last twenty years and in which Winnie had been born in 1903. By contrast, ‘Lyndhurst’ was a large suburban semi, not showy or extravagant but indicative of his new social status. Nevertheless, for all of Winnie’s later posturing about her family’s social superiority, to an outsider there wouldn’t have been much to choose between the Baineses and the Bainbridges in the early years of the century, living as they did in practically identical houses, almost literally side by side. If anything, the house in which Winnie grew up was even smaller than that in which Richard lived with his mother and sisters.

  To be fair to Winnie, the Baineses were a few rungs higher up the social ladder. John James’s father, Albert Baines, rose to become a clerk at a firm of stockbrokers and by the 1880s was sufficiently well off to afford a live-in domestic servant. Clerical work ran in the family, with both John James and his younger brother Thomas starting their working lives as clerks.

  Despite her father’s professional success, Winnie’s childhood was not without its tragedies. Her younger brother, Reginald, died shortly after he was born in 1906, and an older sister, Dorothy (‘Fondly remembered by her Mamma, Dadda and Winnie’),21 died a year later at the age of six. Although her own childhood seems to have passed off without incident, Winnie’s later medical complaints, such as the anaemia she suffered from in the 1930s, may have had an inherited component. With her round face she was not an unattractive child, but she seems to have been afflicted with ptosis in her right eye, a condition in which the eyelid droops or doesn’t open properly. In her youth it resulted in a slight squint that had a certain gauche attractiveness, but as she got older it became more pronounced, giving her an odd facial expression that added to her self-consciousness.

  Winnie’s younger brother, Leonard (‘Uncle Len’), born in 1908, would frequently figure in later Bainbridge family get-togethers. He was also a regular visitor to Chirbury, and along with his wife Lilian (‘Auntie Lil’) and their two children, Hilary and Trevor, would spend summer holidays there with the Bainbridges. Like his father, Len went into the paint business, and in 1934 set up his own company, Colours & Chemicals, which specialized in developing pigments and paints. His success gave Winnie another needle with which to prod Richard over his supposed lack of business acumen.

  In contrast to the frosty relations between Winnie’s father and her husband, Richard and Len got on well. Richard’s letters to Beryl include a number of amiable anecdotes about their sorties and social gatherings, and one of Winnie’s letters captures a flavour of their male bonhomie, describing how Richard returned home ‘in a very peculiar condition’ after he and Uncle Len had been out for a lunchtime drink: ‘They were both very much the worse for it.’22

  It is possible that some of the inter-family arguments that Beryl later adduced to her father’s touchiness were in fact due to Winnie’s difficult relationship with Len. As Len’s daughter Hilary recalled: ‘My father and Auntie Winnie used to fall out quite a lot . . . there was always this sort of conflict. My father was a difficult man, he didn’t tolerate people well. Maybe there was a little bit of looking down. I think Winnie was jealous of my father doing quite so well.’23 One argument b
etween them at Chirbury was so vociferous that Hilary and Beryl got out of bed and sat on the stairs listening to the row going on below.

  According to Beryl, Winnie adored her father but didn’t get on with her mother, being embarrassed by her ‘lowly’ origins (Janet’s father having worked as a gatekeeper at the docks). Insecurity about one’s social standing is often at the root of feelings of snobbery, and Winnie was a classic example. Fearful lest others might think that she too came from a working-class background, she exaggerated the social gap between herself and the Bainbridges, and tried to distance herself from any hint of social inferiority in her own family. But the invariably unsubtle manner in which she did it – her nephew recalled that she would wear ‘a hat with a veil and full make-up if she stepped outside the front door to collect the paper’24 – wasn’t calculated to win friends. Those who didn’t warm to Winnie described her as ‘putting on airs’ and felt that she came across as a snob, her veneer of sophistication being exactly that: a veneer.

  Winnie’s showiness in public gained her the nickname ‘The Duchess’, but her seemingly obsessive concern over her self-image wasn’t just an affectation stemming from social snobbery. While she was pregnant with Beryl, she suffered an attack of pernicious anaemia, a serious blood disorder that prevents the body processing Vitamin B12 and can cause hair, and even teeth, to fall out. Winnie was not, as Beryl claimed, ‘injected with a hypodermic used on horses, full of raw liver’,25 but she was given injections of liver extract, a relatively new treatment developed in 1928.26 The physical effects of the disease – Winnie lost her teeth and had to have dentures, and her thinning hair was cut and replaced by a wig – left her feeling self-conscious about her appearance and she would frequently use heavy make-up. All of which helps explain the distinctly artificial look about her in so many photographs from the 1940s and 1950s. Other symptoms of the disease included fatigue and depression, which may account for the family jokes about her spending so much time in bed, and the fact that Winnie told Beryl shortly before she died that she had ‘tried to do away with herself’27 when pregnant with her.

  Winnie had initially been educated at Queen Mary High School, Anfield (‘Fees £6 9s to £9 12s per annum’),28 a respectable institution with a good reputation, but she was fortunate enough that her adolescence coincided with John James’s commercial success. By the time she was sixteen he was sufficiently established to send his daughter to a finishing school in Eeklo, northern Belgium. Located between Bruges and Ghent, the Institut Notre-Dame aux Épines described itself as a ‘High Class Boarding School for Young Ladies’,29 and during her time in Eeklo, in 1920–21, Winnie was instructed in all the attainments expected of a young lady: deportment, elocution, the rules of etiquette, tennis, speaking French and playing the piano. After her marriage she would have little opportunity to use such skills, which must have acted as a perpetual and irritating reminder of her failure to achieve any kind of social distinction. Nor was Richard particularly impressed: whenever Winnie tried to assert her social superiority he would remark sarcastically that playing the piano and speaking French were ‘two blasted accomplishments essential to a housewife in the North of England’.30

  On her return from Belgium, Winnie seems to have lived a comfortable and sociable life: a photograph album for 1924 shows her and her friends, Doris, Mabel and Joy, in their cloche hats and three-quarter-length dresses doing a passable suburban impression of 1920s Bright Young Things.31

  It is unlikely that Winnie and Ellen Bainbridge got on well, though the anecdote Beryl later offered as proof can be discounted. According to this version, after her parents were married Richard suggested to his new bride that they look after his bedridden mother, to which Winnie responded with a brusque ‘Over my dead body.’32 However, the story seems to be an exaggeration, as it was only after ‘the saintly Ellen’ had died, in early 1927,33 that Richard and Winnie were married, on 6 July, at Holy Trinity, Walton Breck.

  Two years after their marriage, despite Richard’s ongoing bankruptcy litigation, they moved into a large house in Abbey Road, Kirby, an affluent suburb of Liverpool. The house featured a Doric-columned portico, spacious rooms, and a large garden front and back; there was also a twenty-three-year-old live-in maid, Margaret Powell. This was where Ian – or Reginald Ian as his name is recorded on the birth certificate in memory of Winnie’s dead brother34 – was born in 1929.

  But in the wake of the official bankruptcy, reality began to catch up, not just for Richard in purely financial terms, but for Winnie, in the realization of what her life would now become. She seems to have gone through a period of disillusion, almost of depression, that had a lasting effect on her married life.35 At the end of 1931 the family moved to a smaller, less impressive semi-detached property in Menlove Avenue, and it was here, on 21 November 1932, that Beryl was born.

  TWO

  Mummy and Daddy

  Often and often my parents tell me angrily, sadly, I am mad or very young, because my ideas do not corrispond with theirs and they are at a loss to understand it.

  To my parents I show a thoughtless comic exterior, and make them laugh, when I am not upsetting them by my manners and ideas.

  My parents I hurt continually, although I love them deeply. They cause me to despise myself greatly, for my lack of tolerance towards their way of life.1

  Beryl’s birth coincided with what was probably the lowest point in her father’s career. Not only was Richard having to start his working life from scratch, he had to cope with the financial and emotional pressures of maintaining a family. To economize, the family moved again in 1933, to a smaller, cheaper property in Ravenmeols Lane, Formby, a small village some twelve miles up the coast from Liverpool. The money for the mortgage came, it was said, from Winnie’s father.2

  To most people ‘Goodacre’, as the house was called, would have seemed what it was, a new, reasonable-sized semi, albeit a distinctly suburban one. If it wasn’t as spacious as the house on Menlove Avenue, it was by no means unattractive. Beryl’s cousin Hilary found it welcoming: ‘I used to love going round to that house . . . sitting there in that little back room, Auntie Winnie sitting with her feet up on the fender.’3 But in Beryl’s memory the house was always cold, damp and cramped: ‘We spent our lives cooped up in the side-room . . . jostling each other as we took it in turns to get warm at the fire. If anybody called, perish the thought, my brother had to stand out in the hall. It was no use ushering visitors into the front-room; without a fire laid hours in advance, they ran the risk of frostbite.’4

  The notion of keeping the front room standing idle, to be used only for visitors, was a common practice among lower middle-class households at the time. It was certainly not unique to the Bainbridges, and was more a sign of their conventionality than their perversity. Like the idea of a ‘Sunday best’ suit, it belonged to a period when maintaining appearances was considered important.

  Beryl’s childhood memories of cold and damp were in part due to growing up during the war years, when coal was rationed along with food and clothing. To save heating the small boxrooms that nominally served as children’s bedrooms may have been one reason for the family’s unusual sleeping arrangements; Ian slept with his father in one room, while Beryl and Winnie shared a bed in another. A second factor may have been the bout of pneumonia Beryl contracted in 1940, at the age of eight, which left her with ‘a chronic unproductive cough for some years’.5 Over the next decade or so she would suffer recurrent attacks of bronchitis, and Winnie may have felt that sleeping in a damp, unheated room was not ideal on health grounds.

  Beryl would later adduce the sleeping arrangements, which seem to have lasted through the war years, as proof of her parents’ temperamental incompatibility. There was probably some truth in this, though the concern about damp wasn’t entirely imaginary, as a poem she wrote entitled ‘My Little Room’ shows: ‘My little room . . . smells of damp grain and sweet ripe cheese.’6 By the time she left for boarding school at the beginning of 1948 she
seems to have had her own room, which she described as a place of peace with pictures of Lenin and George Bernard Shaw on the wall.

  Although Richard’s bankruptcy had an impact on the family finances, this has to be seen in context. The Bainbridges continued to give the outward appearance of doing well: they had a car and a telephone when the possession of such items was by no means common, and they took regular holidays. No expense was spared when it came to Ian and Beryl’s education: both attended fee-paying schools and both benefited from private, extracurricular lessons and activities – Latin and music in Ian’s case, and piano, dancing and elocution in Beryl’s. Her childhood diaries, with their references to her father buying a diamond ring for her mother’s birthday and numerous entries noting her parents’ trips to the cinema, to the theatre, and to evenings spent playing cards with friends, contain little that would indicate undue concern about money.

  Perceptions, though, are relative, and what would have been seen as necessary economies to a parent earning money and trying to cope with the shortages caused by war, might seem like parsimony or hardship to a child. Among the girls Beryl mixed with at school were many who came from families who were considerably better-off, so it is easy to see why she felt her childhood to be more financially impoverished than it was. Although it filled her with guilt, she couldn’t stop herself being irritated by what she regarded as her father’s thrift, ‘switching off the lights as if liquid gold leaked from the bulbs’,7 or feeling embarrassed when she compared the state of the household, with its scuffed table, cracked mugs and tarnished cutlery, to that of her richer schoolfriends.