Beryl Bainbridge Read online

  If the move to Ravenmeols Lane represented a backward step economically speaking, the house did have one positive advantage in Beryl’s eyes: its proximity to the sea – and more specifically to an expanse of pine woods that bordered the dunes on the shoreline. As she grew older, it was to the pine woods she would go in order to escape the tensions of home life (though the late evenings she spent walking down by the dunes as a teenager were themselves one of the causes of that tension). The seashore was a space in which family rules and regulations didn’t apply, it was where Beryl would develop a sense of her own independence and could let her imagination run free. It would also be where she first started to write seriously, and where she would fall in love for the first time.

  The precise extent to which Richard and Winnie’s marital problems constituted an actual breakdown in their relationship isn’t easy to determine. Beryl’s diaries for 1944 and 1946 contain no hints of a troubled home life, nor do the letters her parents wrote to her when she was at boarding school. Nevertheless, there were periods when the tension between her parents was almost palpable. One of Beryl’s early memories of childhood, written in a notebook in the 1950s, recalls how a peaceful evening could quickly descend into an almost literal struggle for mastery:

  My mother and father . . . used to play a game, or so I believed. They would sit reading by the fire, their feet on a chair between them. And quite suddenly in the safe seeming kitchen with the warm fire they would begin to push hard at one anothers feet. Sole to sole they put their feet and pressed with all their might to bend their knees. And quite suddenly my fathers face so white always would break across into a scowl and then he would fling his feet away and the words would begin, and my mother weeps in her chair.8

  Perhaps the most expressive of Beryl’s agonized reflections about her parents’ marriage is a diary entry in January 1949: ‘Why don’t Mummy and Daddy love each other?’ It is followed by another entry a few days later, after she had returned to school: ‘Oh God poor little Mummy left among the dishes and his everlasting bad temper.’9 But as in most relationships there were ebbs and flows, and shortly after one flare-up Beryl noted in her diary: ‘Daddy and Mummy are happy again.’10 A memory of her parents during a period of calm – ‘I’d come back from school one day to find my mother in the bath with my father scrubbing her back’11 – implies the bond between them hadn’t broken entirely. By her own admission Beryl had a tendency to misjudge the state of her parents’ relationship. At one point she was so convinced her mother was about to leave her father that she booked a room for her at the Aber House Hotel, in Falkner Street, but when she told her what she’d done Winnie was ‘absolutely horrified’.12

  Ian’s assessment was certainly less fraught than Beryl’s. Being a few years older he seems not to have been unduly perturbed by Richard and Winnie’s arguments, seeing them as a normal fact of life. When he and Beryl stood ‘huddled together on the landing and listened to our parents seemingly bent on murder in the kitchen below’, Ian would tell her soothingly: ‘It’s just an argument, Face-ache . . . We won’t be orphans. They don’t really hate each other.’13

  But such reassurances had little effect. Beryl’s view of her parents’ marriage seems to have been conditioned by a deep feeling of insecurity. A clue to its origin is a recurring image of abandonment – not of herself being abandoned as such, but of being forcibly separated from her mother. This was based on an incident in which her father, irritated at Winnie’s tardiness while shopping in a fruit store, drove off with Beryl, leaving her mother behind: ‘I felt I should never see her again . . . I mention this because from that time onward I retained, at least from time to time, a dreadful feeling of ugliness and worry inside me.’14 Beryl saw her father’s impatience as an expression of ‘hate’, and this fed into her anxiety about the state of her parents’ relationship, as well as her perception of him.

  The reverse of this anxiety was the sense of security she felt in her mother’s presence. The contrast between these two states is highlighted by a childhood recollection of an argument between her parents at her aunties’ house, during which she had ‘cried and cried’: ‘Next I am in bed at home in the light and Mummy comes upstairs and says “And haven’t you had your bath”, [in] the most beautiful kindly voice . . . And then Mummy puts her two cool arms round me and strokes my face and already I have forgotten why the door slammed and why I have been waiting and crying, crying and waiting for Mummy to come in and for me to have my bath.’15

  As Beryl grew older, recalling this maternal security affected her with an almost inexpressible emotion. She was ‘unable to put into words exactly the feeling of safety and love’ her mother gave her, and the loss of this feeling coloured her view of the present: ‘Even now at moments of near suxcess,’ she wrote shortly after leaving home for London in 1952, ‘like a new job or being happy on a train with money to buy food and a new white coat, my mind suddenly recalls the security I knew, and nothing comes up to the complete happiness of that moment.’16

  The childhood fear of abandonment and the corresponding desire for security would shape Beryl’s experience of love in her subsequent relationships. In reaction to what she saw as the antagonism between her parents she formed an overly idealized conception of romantic love, and determined that when she grew up she would not be like them: ‘I shall never marry, not like that anyway.’17

  Beryl would write more about her father than about any other member of her family, though it is not always easy to square the tenderness of one anecdote with the hostility of another. One of her most affectionate and nostalgic portraits is an early recollection of being with him on one of his trips to Liverpool, during the course of which he would regale her with stories and bits of local history or invent elaborately imaginative games with her: ‘He was very fond of playing a game called Departures . . . He would take me down to the pierhead and put me on the ferry boat to New Brighton. I would stand on the deck of the Royal Daffodil and watch him dwindling on the landing stage. Sometimes he waved his pocked handkerchief and sometimes he raised his homburg hat in a last emigration gesture of farewell.’18

  But there are other recollections of a more confrontational nature, often provoked by what Beryl felt was her father’s unfair treatment of her mother, with whom she identified and whose side she took in disputes. The petulant and violent outbursts that Beryl directed at him – she recalled jumping on his back and wrestling him to the ground during one of his arguments with Winnie – were prompted by a desire to protect her mother and hurt him for making her unhappy. Another childhood memory of an argument that erupted during a car journey shows that money was sometimes a factor in these domestic disputes: ‘I can remember my father in the front with my grandfather, and my mother beside me on the seat. I was jubilant I remember because it seemed as if all the shouting was to be over. And they talked quietly together, till my mother raised her voice and my grandfather said “Winnie you can’t get blood from a stone you know.” And then I raised my two fists and beat my father on his back, quite hard many times.’19

  Beryl’s sense of despair at her parents’ marriage – and her hostility towards her father in particular – seems to have reached its peak in the two or three years immediately prior to her leaving home for London in 1952. She would later recall this period in her diary: ‘The foul language, the raised voices, the curses, the unnutterable misery year upon year till I left home. The wireless turned up to shut out the noise from the neighbours, the tenseness, the coarseness, trying to think of ways to kill him.’20

  In her later journalism, when seeking to present a portrait of her home life, Beryl frequently drew on this difficult period. But genuine though her feelings might have been, they were not representative of Beryl’s childhood as a whole, or of the full extent of her relationship with her father, especially given the fact that this was a period in which she went through a number of emotional crises of her own that undoubtedly contributed to the escalation of misunderstandings and tensi
ons between them.

  Admittedly, treading a path between the extremes of tenderness and hostility that characterize Beryl’s recollections of her father isn’t easy, and it is certainly difficult to convey in a newspaper profile. Journalists tended to focus on the darker, more dramatic side of their relationship, and the myth of Beryl as a writer forged in the emotional disturbance of a dysfunctional family served as the prominent narrative to explain why she became a novelist and account for the dark subject matter of her novels. Beryl herself was aware that such dramatic portrayals made good copy, with the result that she deliberately represented her father as an unrelenting monomaniac and her childhood as one in which his verbal violence and threats, his ‘shouting and swearing’,21 set the prevailing tone. As she succinctly put it: ‘From a writer’s point of view, it was an ideal childhood.’22

  There was at least an element of exaggeration in all this and, as has been seen, Beryl was not above fabricating ‘proofs’ of an antipathy between herself and her father. Although none of Beryl’s letters to him have survived, there is one early postcard, written in the late 1940s, which gives an idea of the playfulness that existed between them when things were going well. Written as if to give her father news while he was away on a business trip, the card relies on family in-jokes, and the comical nickname for Beryl and her mother alludes to Richard’s habitual complaints about Winnie’s indolence:

  Darling Daddy,

  Another up to date epistle from the Dundonothins. It is now 11.30 in the morning. Mummy is still in bed watching the wardrobe.

  All love, Beryl xxxxxxx23

  Richard’s letters to his daughter are similarly playful, and though they aren’t without a certain patriarchal formality, they are tender and considerate. He reassures Beryl she is loved, takes her requests seriously, and tries to deal with her problems at school. He addresses her with extravagant pet-names, ‘My darling little humbug’ or ‘Darling cherry blossom Berry’, and spends hours writing to her. He would send her long, fantastical stories in an attempt to amuse her – often adopting a comic, mock-Irish accent as part of his narrative persona, which was a shared joke between them – and sign himself ‘Your fatty daddy’. The image projected by these letters bears little resemblance to the portrait she later painted.

  This is not to say that Richard couldn’t also be moody, irritable or depressed, or that Beryl wasn’t deeply affected by his behaviour, just that it is misleading to leave out the counterbalancing feeling of affection she felt towards him and only see his influence on her in negative, one-dimensional terms. Her recollection that ‘he might be full of fun for weeks at a stretch – listening to the wireless in the dark; taking us for runs in the car; treating us to afternoon tea in Southport’,24 betrays an affection that belies her caricature of him as a domestic tyrant.

  Richard was undoubtedly a key figure in Beryl’s psychological development. His significance can be seen by the fact that he stalks so many of her novels as a recurring figure, that of the homburg-wearing older man, a symbol of vague threat but also, importantly, one of attraction and fascination. After his death in 1961, Beryl would attempt to explore her contradictory feelings for ‘my little Dad’ in a radio play, ‘Another Friday’. She would continually rework this piece over the years, turning it first in 1967 into a television play, ‘I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering’ (revised and retitled as ‘O My Darling’ in 1973), and then incorporating elements of it into Words Fail Me, a television adaptation of A Quiet Life, broadcast in 1979. The thread running through them all is a primal memory about her father (‘Once he was all love for his little girl . . . sacrificing his all for her’),25 and the loss of the love she knew as a child, symbolized in his rejection of her attempt to hold his hand, as if he was repelled by her touch: ‘And once we went for a walk . . . and I tried to hold his hand and he pushed me away, like I was making advances to him.’26

  This sense of having been physically rejected by her father had a long-lasting effect, and the fear of rejection would haunt her, undermining her feelings of self-worth and leaving her fundamentally insecure about her relationships with men. Ironically, it was her almost pathological anxiety that she was no longer loved, often expressed through an obsessive jealousy, that would be a contributory factor in the very rejection she most feared.

  Beryl herself recognized this, seeing a connection between her fear of rejection, her low self-esteem and her desire for love: ‘A very early rejection of love or withdrawal by ones parents, a repeat of this later on in puberty, and everything is a pattern afterwards . . . For some perverted form of self hatred I go on making messy relationships, fail and fling myself into a fresh one. I seem to have an intense craving for narcissistic gratification. I have to get love by all sorts of means.’27

  During much of her childhood Beryl’s attitude towards her mother was almost one of idolatry: ‘I adored her, I thought she was the most wonderful person in the world. I was always hugging and cuddling her.’28 This is borne out by the handful of surviving letters and notes that Beryl wrote to her, the earliest of which is a postcard from the early 1940s addressed to ‘Miss’es Mummykin Bainbridge’.29 A verse written in a birthday card a few years later gives some idea of the typically effusive outbursts of which her mother was the focus:

  To my little mummy

  The pride of my heart

  I know t’would kill me

  If we were to part30

  Extravagant expressions of love between a child and a parent are not uncommon, but the notion expressed here – that the loss of the love object would result in one’s own death – is a convention more commonly used between lovers, as is the symbol of the red rose, which Beryl had drawn on the card’s cover.

  That these outbursts were more than just simple effusions of childhood affection is evidenced by an extraordinary letter she wrote to her mother shortly after going to boarding school, at the age of fifteen:

  For my own Mummy,

  Mummy darling you don’t know how much I love you. I’ve been writing this for weeks, ever since I came here, and I’ve written it with the day grey outside, or blue and blind with sun. Mummy, when I grow up I’m going to be great, and I promise, oh so much that you will be proud of me. I don’t want you to laugh at this, because I love you, and I miss you with a pain so great. I’ve dreamt of home and you and Dad and Ian, and I know you understand. Its very hard being young, and aching to be old and wonderful. I lie awake and scheme and dream and fashion all the wonderful things I’m going to do one day with you down there so happy with Dad, and a great love within my heart swelling and hurting, because I love you. And I know, because if there is a God, he knows too, that I am going to be all that you are praying I will be. Mummy, please believe me and be happy, because as I write this I am crying with all I hold and want to tell you. It is so lonely here, not because there are no friends, but because I feel as if there is a hundred years of space and time all laughing at me, because I want to do so much. To act and grow and feel the wind in my throat, and know that I am getting somewhere, and that I have you both so happy made. Oh Mummy, Mummy, please read this and believe what I am writing. I want to cry so much, and that is foolish, but I love you so, and my heart is spilling out words and thoughts as fast as it is able, and I am lonely.

  Mummy, darling Mummy, I do love you so. When I am older and my dreams are all coming true I want to see your eyes come happy in your face, and all my love is pouring at your feet. I love you so. Oh Mummy, listen to what I’m writing, and believe, because I’m crying now, and oh I want you to understand so much.

  Please love me always Mummy, because you don’t know how much I love you, and how I am crying. I want to be more famous and more wonderful than you have ever dreamed, and one day Mummy, it will come true . . . Oh darling Mummy please please believe in me and think me wonderful, because the world is going to be lovely for me, and you and Daddy are going to be so proud.31

  It would be hard to imagine any response that would reassure
the writer of such a letter that they were loved. But aside from an almost obsessive need for affection, the letter also reveals Beryl’s anxiety about being unworthy of love in her mother’s eyes, and – significantly – her assumption that worldly success was a way of earning that love.

  Beryl would refer to Winnie as ‘Mummy’ until she was in her mid-thirties, hinting that their relationship had an infantilizing effect and that at an unconscious level she continued to see herself as a child. As an adult, this would find expression in her habit of pouting and adopting ‘a funny little girl’s voice’,32 as A. N. Wilson put it, whenever she was accused of wrongdoing or confronted with difficult emotional situations in which she thought she was being criticized.

  After her father’s death Beryl went through a period of reassessment. She came to a realization that her own psychological make-up was similar to his and that she shared his depressive moods, which as a child she had naively attributed to meanness or emotional coldness. In that peculiar geometry of family relationships, affection for one parent is often in inverse proportion to disaffection with the other, and Beryl’s view of her mother went through a corresponding reversal. She began to see Winnie’s manipulation of those around her with a more censorious eye, and the idealized love she once felt turned to irritation and even dislike. By the 1960s her antagonism to her mother’s visits was such that she warned a friend, ‘my reverend Mama is arriving, so don’t be cross if I am somewhat strained. The thought of it strikes chill to my heart.’33

  Confronted by the dramatic emotional triangle formed by Beryl and her parents, it is easy to forget there was a fourth member of the household: her older brother, Ian. He was a significant figure in her childhood and fulfilled many of the roles of the older brother: ground-breaker, mentor, protector and occasional bully.34 If at times he treated her with the condescension that is a cliché of brother and sister relationships, there was nevertheless a deep, unstated affection between them.