Beryl Bainbridge Read online

  In many ways Ian and Beryl were a perfect example of the diverging character traits seen in older and younger siblings. Parents tend to be stricter and more nervous with a first child than with subsequent children, and if they have social aspirations they tend to push them harder in terms of education. As a result the first child is often more conventional and less likely to challenge parental authority. Ian certainly fulfilled his parents’ expectations: neat, conscientious and an academic high achiever, he went on to university to study Law and became what was once the defining occupation of the aspiring middle classes, a solicitor.

  By contrast, parents are often more relaxed – indulgent even – with a second child, who consequently becomes less disciplined and less willing to accept discipline. As a second child, Beryl was given more freedom, and took more liberties, than Ian, and she was always having to play catch-up, her academic achievements being compared – to their detriment – to his. Beryl quickly realized she couldn’t compete with Ian on his terms so she didn’t even try. Instead, she used alternative strategies to get her way. Where Ian was careful, respectful of authority and academically successful, Beryl was reckless, rebellious, and drawn to non-academic subjects like drama and art. Where Ian relied on knowledge and learning, Beryl trusted in instinct and imagination. In retrospect it was almost inevitable that Ian would be seen as the clever one, and Beryl the artistic one.35

  The difference in their personalities was reflected in the way each was viewed by their Uncle Len and Auntie Lil. While Ian was a frequent and welcome visitor to their house, joining them for games of bridge, Beryl was distinctly persona non grata: Auntie Lil considered her a bad influence on Hilary, and Uncle Len never got over the time he had seen Beryl eating in the street, a terrible social faux pas in his eyes, which he described as ‘appalling behaviour’.36

  In later life Beryl’s relationship with Ian was more distant, especially after she became a published writer. She was not always tactful or discreet in her references to Ian in print. Her comments about him having a ‘breakdown’ when he was eighteen or having suffered from abuse,37 or her depiction of him in A Quiet Life as timid and repressed, may have led to a certain reserve on his part and a desire to keep some distance between them.

  During the 1960s and early 1970s, Beryl would take her family to visit Ian’s at their house in Montgomery, but this gradually ceased as the children grew older. If she was asked about Ian in interviews she would confess to knowing ‘very little about him’,38 and in an article written during the 1980s she admitted to exchanging Christmas greetings with him over the phone, but little else: ‘We never speak to each other during the rest of the year.’39

  After Ian died in November 1987, Beryl retrospectively tried to find some shared ground, seeing a connection between them in the fact that he had become a country coroner: ‘So we were alike after all, in that we both had an interest in death.’40

  Despite the number of Bainbridges and Baineses further up the family tree, Beryl’s childhood revolved round a comparatively small circle of relatives, the most significant of which were her two paternal aunts, Nellie and Margo. Visits to ‘the aunties’ – they were most commonly referred to in the plural – abound in Beryl’s early diaries. Many of Winnie’s references to Margo in her letters are to do with dressmaking, and the two aunts would famously feature in Beryl’s novel The Dressmaker, though for dramatic purposes she made Nellie the dressmaker rather than Margo.

  The two women were very different in temperament: ‘Aunt Nellie was very sweet when I was little. I can remember how cuddly she was; she was the one who did the cooking and the looking after. In the end she annoyed me, though, she was so convinced she was right about everything. Whereas Aunt Margo, who could be an absolute melodramatic bitch, questioned everything, she was curious about things.’41 Of the two, Beryl preferred Auntie Margo, not just for her unconventional attitude but for the tragically romantic story of her brief marriage. In an anecdote that says much about Winnie’s attitude to her daughter, to her sister-in-law, and to the past, Beryl recalled that when Auntie Margo died in 1964, leaving her the contents of the house in Bingley Road, her mother asked her what she wanted to keep: ‘I said I didn’t mind about the furniture, that I was only interested in the letters and the photographs. Before I got there she wangled the key out of the next-door neighbours and took the bottom drawer of the wardrobe into the backyard. Tipping the letters and the snapshots into a metal bin she made a bonfire of the lot.’42

  On the Baines side of the family there were regular visits to and from her maternal grandparents, as well as from Uncle Len and his family. To these actual relatives were added a number of other faux aunts and uncles: most notably Uncle Charlie, otherwise known as Charles White, the proprietor of the Herbert Arms Hotel in Chirbury, and his wife Elizabeth (‘Auntie White’). Beryl, like Winnie, enjoyed her frequent stays in Chirbury. Photographs show games of bowls on the lawn, horse-riding expeditions, and convivial, sociable evenings set against the hotel’s elegantly rustic decor. Other entertainments included plays Beryl had written during the day and which would be performed in the evening. One piece was inspired by the popular song ‘Open the door Richard’,43 no doubt because of its comic refrain, ‘Hey Dick! Open that door!’ Although Richard was an enthusiastic participant in these theatrical performances,44 Winnie was not: ‘She was quite remote’, as Hilary recalled.45

  Chirbury also offered the opportunity for numerous outings, whether to the Sun Inn at Marton, managed by Charlie’s brother Stanley and his wife Elizabella (‘Auntie Belle’), or walks across country. On one of her walks at Chirbury, Beryl met a seventeen-year-old boy, Terry Alderman (no. 3 on her boyfriend list), with whom she had a brief and entirely platonic holiday romance. Terry was staying at Marrington Hall nearby, a magnificent, half-timbered property being used by the British educationalist and psychotherapist, George Lyward, to house a community of ‘delinquent, disturbed or disturbing boys’.46 Terry’s ardent letters (‘I love you very very very much!’)47 give the impression that Winnie didn’t approve of Beryl going out with boys (‘Could you come out with me some time or would your mother object?’),48 though whether this was because she felt Beryl was too young – she was thirteen at the time – or because the boys at Marrington Hall weren’t suitable, isn’t clear.

  The only dark spot regarding Chirbury was an incident Beryl first mentioned in Forever England, some forty years after it supposedly happened. According to Beryl the Herbert Arms Hotel had a staff of three, a land girl called Sybil,49 Mrs Parry the cleaning lady, and ‘Fred the cowman’, who slept in the attic room of the hotel, close to the bedroom in which Beryl and her parents stayed. Fred, as she put it, ‘bothered’ her: ‘When I was little Fred used to come into my room to kiss me goodnight.’50 One evening to deter him she locked the door to the bedroom before she fell asleep, and the resulting drama – a ladder had to be fetched so that Uncle Charlie could climb in through the window – put an end to the visits.51

  In an interview given a year before she died, Beryl was more explicit: ‘When I was about eight I suppose, for at least three years he would come up to bed, wake me up [and] fiddle with me.’ She added that sexual abuse was common at the time – ‘I wasn’t the only one’ – and that the local milkman used to ‘grope’ her brother and other boys in exchange for letting them ride around on his milk cart.52

  There are strong reasons to doubt this recollection – or rather Beryl’s later presentation of it. In the first instance, she refers to Fred at Chirbury a couple of times in her 1946 diary and it is clear she had no feelings of repugnance or anxiety about him: ‘We are going to Chirbury at Easter. Longing to see Fred and the puppies.’53 Secondly, Beryl actually talked about Fred’s attentions at the time, only the way she framed the matter then was very different to her later protrayal of it.

  When Beryl was about thirteen or fourteen she talked quite openly, almost boastingly, about Fred to her cousin Hilary, telling her she was having ‘an affair wi
th him’.54 Even at the time Hilary didn’t believe her – Fred certainly liked Beryl, but then everyone did – and as there were other people sleeping on the top floor aside from Fred, she doubted he had the opportunity. Hilary was also adamant that Ian wouldn’t have let himself be subjected to the things Beryl later claimed – claims that Hilary had never heard before despite having spent as much time in Chirbury as Beryl.

  Did Beryl exaggerate or invent the story for Hilary’s sake, to project an image of herself as an object of male desire and show off to her younger, more impressionable cousin? Or was her later portrayal of it as abuse a belated admission of something she’d hitherto been unable to confront? Both interpretations are possible, but there isn’t enough evidence to be certain either way.

  That Beryl was the subject of unwanted male attention is clear – her diary records several incidents in which men tried to kiss or touch her. Yet one is left with the suspicion that the ‘affair’ with Fred was not unlike those with thirty-two-year-old Jim Palmer or twenty-eight-year-old Jimmy Clunie, older men with whom the fourteen-year-old Beryl flirted, testing social and sexual boundaries in the way pubescent girls often do. That Beryl enjoyed these kind of flirtatious encounters – and felt confident enough to deal with them in her own way – is shown by a diary entry from 1949, in which a man in the cinema sat next to her and started stroking her thigh: ‘I smiled and took his hand away, and we became friendly. He told me all about New York and Chicago etc. He was a sailor. Its funny, people aren’t bad if you behave sensibly. Mummy would be horrified.’55

  It is probably no coincidence that Beryl first published her account at a time when feminism was crossing into the mainstream. Her contrarian response was that there was a certain ‘cant’ in feminist protestations about the predatory nature of male sexuality. She felt that younger women were making a fuss over nothing as regards sexism or sexual harassment, and as a way of making her point she tended to exaggerate her own experiences to show she had suffered things that were as bad, if not worse, but that they hadn’t affected her.

  As with her father’s violent temper and the notion of parental abuse, Beryl knew child sex abuse was a taboo issue and she enjoyed the frisson of shock provoked in an interviewer when she passed it off as commonplace. ‘It was completely natural for men on trains to fiddle with you,’ she told the British Library interviewer in 2008, and when she recounted her story about Ian and his friends being the subject of abuse, she even laughed, adding ‘Well, they didn’t mind . . .’56

  The problem is that most people do mind, and the more Beryl kept trying to insist this form of abuse was normal, the more untenable her position seemed and the more bizarre it was to maintain it: ‘My theory is that as long as there is no violence – no holding a knife to you – it can’t be classified as rape. A husband can’t rape a wife; I don’t think it is possible. As long as you’re not a virgin I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. When I was younger you just didn’t mention abuse, whether it was by strangers or your husband. You just got on with it.’57

  Beryl’s attitude is shocking in its attempt to dismiss what most people would consider a normal response to unwanted sexual attention. Is she really saying that she would be completely indifferent to an act of non-consensual sex? And if that were true, what does it say about her attitude to sex? Mary Kenny was one of many women who were angered by Beryl’s comments. She criticized her for attempting to turn sexual abuse into something that should be submitted to in silence:

  Beryl Bainbridge has also written quite jokily about the number of times adults ‘groped’ or otherwise sexually molested children when she was a child in Liverpool. Her view is that the fuss about this kind of thing is entirely overdone. My reaction to Beryl’s memoir was rather horrified. I am thankful that I never experienced any form of such adult molestation as a child, or any improper conduct from an adult. And I don’t think it a sardonic point of merriment. But that is Beryl’s take on it.58

  Beryl’s attitude was all the more problematic in that she kept the fact she had been raped during the early 1950s a secret. That she had been emotionally scarred by the assault at the time but would later try to downplay its psychological effect seems to be a perplexing paradox. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Beryl was, to use a popular pseudo-psychological term, ‘in denial’, and that in denying that rape or abuse had a damaging psychological effect on others, she persuaded herself that she was unaffected by it too.

  THREE

  Education

  At school I began by being unpopular and then extremely popular. When I was unpopular I seemed small and plain and weak, when I became popular I assumed height and weight and a loudness that I kept till I left school . . .1

  Beryl’s early school years up to the age of nine were spent at the Girls College in Formby. Located on Freshfield Road, a short walk from Ravenmeols Lane, the college was actually a private school run from a large house, with extensive gardens that doubled as a tennis court and croquet lawn. The school’s principals, the Misses Gill, who had been running the school since the 1890s, lived next door in an almost equally large house that accommodated boarders and the ‘fully qualified resident and visiting staff’.2 The Misses Gill promoted the college as a genteel Prep school helping pupils pass exams for a variety of boards – but with the added benefits of ‘foreign mistresses’, ‘individual care’, and ‘country and sea air’.3

  The refined atmosphere of the Girls College – at one end of the garden there was a cart that girls could practise stepping up onto and descending from as if getting into or out of a carriage,4 and French was spoken one afternoon a week – no doubt reminded Winnie of her time at finishing school in Belgium. Mindful of the need to instil in her daughter the accomplishments necessary for a young lady, Winnie also sent Beryl for extracurricular music lessons in Southport, eight miles north of Formby, where she gained her certificate for elementary piano playing.

  The Misses Gill lived up to their advertising: Beryl succeeded in passing the entrance exam to Merchant Taylors’, a fee-paying school for girls in Crosby. In September 1942, two months short of her tenth birthday, Beryl entered Form LII, the penultimate junior year. The academic level at Merchant Taylors’ was considerably higher than she had been used to, and though bright she was temperamentally unsuited to the discipline of scholarly study. As a result, she constantly struggled to keep up during her time there; she would remain at Merchant Taylors’ for the next six years, but it was not a particularly happy period.

  Most of the other pupils came from backgrounds that were more financially comfortable than her own. Faced with peers who were also educationally superior and socially more confident, Beryl’s reaction was to become the rebel, an aggressive defence mechanism that was the cause of her initial unpopularity. She adopted a generally contrarian attitude to school authority and early on acquired the nickname ‘Basher’. In later life she described herself as being ‘loutish’5 at school, and claimed she once challenged the whole of her form to a fight. Her subsequent popularity was simply the flip side of this: as pupils get older and less tolerant of school regulations and authority, the rebel becomes a figure to be admired. It is easy to imagine Beryl’s subversive sense of humour enlivening a boring lesson, and her impudence towards unpopular teachers gaining her the respect of her peers.

  This combative attitude wasn’t quite what it seemed, being not so much an attempt to assert herself as a means of ingratiating herself, and she tended to attack older girls – or bothersome boys – rather than those her own age. Fighting to prevent her friends being bullied was analogous to the way she had attacked her father to protect her mother. This attitude even extended to taking punishment on her friends’ behalf; when a teacher demanded that someone in the class own up to a misdemeanour, Beryl would take the blame even if she wasn’t the culprit.6

  Beryl’s first year at Merchant Taylors’ can be sketched in outline. School records show that she engaged in the usual activities: she acted in the
Christmas tableau; performed in a play called The Tables Turned in the spring term of 1943; and took part in a gym display by the girls in her form.

  A more detailed picture of school life emerges after 1944, as Beryl began to keep a diary at the start of the year. From this it becomes clear that her performance at school was very inconsistent. Her attention was divided sharply between a small number of subjects that interested her and which she would consequently do well in, and the majority of subjects that did not interest her. Beryl’s inability to concentrate on these left her constantly at odds with her teachers.

  Drama was one of her highlights, and though it wasn’t taught as a separate subject, plays were regularly staged throughout the year. Beryl’s diary entry for 10 March, ‘Dramatic’s. Tailor of Gloster’,7 is confirmed by school records showing that Form II put on The Tailor of Gloucester, an adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s story about a tailor whose work on a waistcoat is finished by the mice he rescued from his cat. Beryl played the role of the tailor and the production won a prize in the school’s acting competition. As Beryl put it in her diary: ‘Have competion and win it. Celarbrate.’8

  English, taught by Miss Bertha Peck, was another subject in which Beryl, if not excelled, at least showed a definite talent, even though this is belied by the standard of her handwriting. On the face of it Miss Peck might not have seemed like a typically inspirational teacher – a spinster in her late forties, she ‘wore her hair in plaited coils that looked like earphones’ and was described as being ‘very thin and wizened’9 – but her impact on Beryl’s development is shown by the dramatic improvement in her writing over the next few years. She encouraged Beryl to read books by Dickens, Kipling and Henry Williamson. It was during an English class with Miss Peck, who also ran a Junior Dramatic Society at a Catholic church in Crosby,10 that Beryl first studied Richard II, which she would always cite as one of her favourite Shakespeare plays.11