Beryl Bainbridge Page 6

  Beryl’s success in English and drama, however, seemed to be the only bright spots in her school career, and elsewhere the 1944 diary records a succession of poor performances and confrontations with teachers:

  28 February: In Miss Martens lesson I have a row about going to pictures in a lesson.

  29 February: Mr Simmons wants arithmetic paper. Can [not] find it. Sent out of room.

  6 March: With Miss Martin an awful row.

  15 June: Trouble at school.

  22 June: History absolutely daft.

  27 June: Rotten day.

  13 July: Awful Geography lesson. No fun at all to-day worse luck.12

  On 27 April she confided to her diary that she was to ‘Go in for scolership soon’, and two days later she noted ‘Exam or scolorship today’. It is not difficult to see why she wasn’t successful.

  Despite her less than stellar school performance, when she moved up to Form III Beryl was put into the academic stream (the other stream being euphemistically termed ‘housecraft’). If the intention was to push her to work harder, it failed. It soon became clear she was never going to be an academic success and her diary for 1946 continued the litany of clashes with school authority:

  15 January: Got in to trouble at school.

  28 January: School once more. How I hate it.

  5 February: School. More trouble. I’ve got to work.

  6 February: Damn it, These Teachers.

  11 February: Oh School how I hate you.

  7 March: Got told of at school today I don’t think Miss Galbraith likes me at all.13

  In February 1944 Beryl’s diary mentions another significant event, one that would set her on course for her subsequent acting career: ‘Go to Crane Hall with mummy and fix up lessons.’14 The lessons were in what Mrs Harold Ackerley termed ‘Dramatic art’, and took place in her studios on the fourth floor of Crane’s Music Hall, a huge five-storey brick building in Hanover Street that housed both a music store and a theatre.

  For the next year or so Beryl would go to Mrs Ackerley’s studios on Wednesday afternoons after school15 for her half-hour lesson, which involved improving her elocution, practising accents, and reciting a dramatic piece or monologue that she had taken home to memorize the previous week. Mrs Ackerley began by correcting pronunciation, stressing the value of certain vowels and consonants: she was not fond of the short ‘a’ sound – one of the characteristics of the Liverpool accent – and would teach her pupils to say ‘parse the glarse’, rather than ‘pas the glas’.16 Although Mrs Ackerley was, as the nameplate on the door of her studio announced, a ‘teacher of elocution and drama’, her lessons encompassed much more. Her emphasis was not so much on ‘speaking posh’ as on appreciating the beauty and harmony of the language, and to Mrs Ackerley elocution and good manners went hand in hand – it was almost like attending a finishing school.

  Mrs Ackerley, who had established her ‘school’ in 1919 and continued as its head until she died, almost blind, in 1964, was a distinguished and distinctive figure. Known as the ‘star maker’ for her ability to spot acting talent, she was easily recognizable in the street, always elegantly dressed with lustrous auburn hair and emerald-tinted spectacles. Her voice was a little on the smoky side – she was a heavy smoker of Craven A cigarettes – but it had a soft richness that combined gravitas and warm friendliness. She kept a bottle of sherry in her studio and would sip at a glass during lessons, occasionally offering one to a student if they got overexcited at having passed an exam: ‘Now dear, have a Dry Fly Sherry and calm down.’ In marked contrast to her feelings about school, Beryl looked forward to her time at Mrs Ackerley’s: ‘A lesson soon. Glad am I’,17 as she noted in her diary.

  Mrs Ackerley wasn’t Beryl’s first contact with the world of theatre and performance. Before the war, at the age of four, she had been enrolled in the Ainsdale School of Dancing,18 just outside Southport. It had been the first step in Winnie’s plan for her daughter’s future, and initially it seemed to pay off. In June 1937 the Southport Visitor reported on the Ainsdale School’s matinee performance of the ballet ‘The Little Dressmakers’ Dance’ at the Garrick Theatre, Southport, and the accompanying photograph of the dancing troupe, whose ages ranged from three to six, marked Beryl’s first public appearance as a performer.

  But there were aspects of dancing that were problematic for a girl who was overly self-conscious about her body. Beryl’s description of an impromptu dance performance at her cousin’s butcher shop, when she and her father called in to buy meat, shows how humiliating and embarrassing she found it:

  I didn’t care for my cousin Jack or my Uncle John. When my Uncle John saw me he made me tap-dance on the sawdust spot because he knew I went to dancing classes. He said I had bonny legs. On a bad day I had to sing ‘Kiss me Goodnight, Sergeant-major’, my cousin Jack in his bloody apron thumping the chopping board with his cleaver to give me a beat. There was the head and shoulders of a pig on the shelf beneath the clock. It looked more like a simpering girl than a porker, with its stiff yellow eyelashes, its coquettish shoulders rounded above its cut-off trotters.19

  The images of dead meat clearly have a symbolic quality, reflecting Beryl’s distaste for what she saw as the physicality of her own body. As a young child this was less of a problem, but when she reached puberty she became increasingly sensitive about her body and its size, especially her legs, and grew to dislike dancing entirely.

  Drama was different: Beryl was perfectly happy to follow the path laid out for her by her mother. She found the business of rehearsing and putting on plays exciting, and success in drama was as important to her as it was to Winnie. Much of Beryl’s 1944 diary is taken up with entries recording the names of plays she had listened to on the radio or seen at the theatre, and almost every Wednesday she noted down a brief précis of the pieces she had to learn for her lesson at Crane Studios, such as Clemence Dane’s Bill of Divorcement or J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways.

  Within a month of enrolling at Mrs Ackerley’s, Beryl began preparing for the London Academy of Music, Drama and Art exams in acting, or as she put it in her diary: ‘Go in for Bronze medle on April 17th. Very excited.’ The staging of the exams was almost a performance in itself. When the LAMDA examiner came to Liverpool to see those taking the exam, candidates would be sent down in the lift to the Crane theatre wearing full stage make-up, which Mrs Ackerley helped to apply. After being called to the stage they would perform their three acting pieces, and when it was over they talked to the examiner, who would tell them, there and then, whether they had passed.20

  Beryl made rapid progress through the grades, gaining the bronze medal in April – along with a ten-shilling bonus promised to her by her father – and the silver in August. In the Christmas examinations of 1944 she received the gold medal, prompting an item of news in the Liverpool Echo with the heading ‘A Liverpool success’: ‘Liverpool once again furnishes a notable recruit to the ranks of dramatic art. The newcomer is Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, who, at 12, is believed to be the youngest Associate of Dramatic Art.’21

  Another piece in the Formby Times featured a photograph of a smiling Beryl with a perm, looking sophisticated and much older than her twelve and a half years.22 Her family were understandably pleased, and the congratulatory letter Beryl received from her maternal grandparents (‘Who knows? You might soon find your way to the Playhouse!’)23 shows that a career in the theatre was already being considered as a possibility.

  A few years later, Winnie took another step in her vicarious plan to advance Beryl’s dramatic career by encouraging her to answer a BBC advertisement calling for child actors. Beryl’s first job came in April 1947,24 after she received a telegram from Northern Children’s Hour organizer Nan MacDonald asking her to play a part in A Cabin for Crusoe, an adaptation of David Severn’s ‘camping and tramping’ novel about self-sufficiency and living in the wild. Other cast members included BBC regulars such as Brian Trueman, Herbert Smith and Fred Fairclough, and another young
child actor, Billie Whitelaw. The novel’s sequel, Wagon for Five, was also adapted six months later, and Beryl reprised her role as Pamela Sanville, a farm girl who befriends the novel’s adventurous hero.

  Beryl’s involvement with Northern Children’s Hour was relatively brief, effectively curtailed by her move to boarding school in Tring in January 1948. Nevertheless, the experience was significant in that it was her first taste of professional acting and it established contacts that would be useful in later life. It was on Children’s Hour in 1956 that Beryl’s first stories would be performed and broadcast.

  Perhaps inevitably given that she grew up during a time of war, Beryl became interested in political and social issues. After her lesson with Mrs Ackerley on Wednesdays, she would go to the Tatler News Theatre, a five-minute walk away, where a typical programme would include a newsreel, a travelogue, an item of Hollywood news, a musical short and a cartoon. She would also listen regularly to The Brains Trust (or ‘the brian’s Trust’ as she repeatedly referred to it in her diary), a radio programme in which a panel of experts explored philosophical and scientific ideas through questions put by listeners.

  Beryl kept up with the progress of the war, noting down important events and battles in her diary,25 so the end of hostilities was a significant event. It formed the subject of one of her earliest surviving poems, entitled ‘I Remember Peace Day’, which she composed after taking her dog Pedro out for a walk on 7 May 1945, the day Germany signed the act of military surrender at Reims:

  I remember Peace Day. There were workers in the fields of corn

  Singing, bekoning. I held Pedro close because

  My chest was growing, and I was [self] concious.

  Italians on the hay, laughing, kind.

  Birds high in the starless wide.

  I remember Peace Day. Warm brown chin

  Rubbing my forehead, impudent teeth,

  More laughter. Confusion, blessed youth.

  Germany has signed, the war is over . . .

  I remember Peace Day. Blackberries warm

  Upon my mouth, Pedro fast asleep across

  My chest. Lazy day, sleep, and hot oblivion.26

  Although the poem as a whole is halting in expression and suffers in terms of clarity as a result, the image of Beryl holding Pedro in order to hide her embarrassment at the burgeoning physicality of her body, and her self-consciousness at the gaze of the Italian prisoners of war working in the fields, is nevertheless revealing.27

  The final lines invoke a complex of sensations, linking the warm brown chin of one of the workers rubbing against her forehead as he tries to kiss her, to the sensuous evocation of the warm blackberries on her mouth and the dog lying against her breasts.

  Beryl’s incipient interest in social issues was stimulated by the school through a series of extracurricular debates and talks, with titles such as ‘Nurseries and Nursery Schools’, ‘Patriotism and Nationalism’ and ‘Careers for Women’.28 In 1946 Beryl took part in the school’s inter-house public-speaking competition, helping her house (Fordham) to come second in the debate, the topic of which was ‘How youth can promote international friendship’. Inspired by this, she began corresponding with a number of penpals from around Europe: Harry Wesseling in Holland, who shared Beryl’s interest in stamp-collecting; Paul Vigo, a twenty-one-year-old Italian studying to become a Catholic priest; and Jacques Delebassée, a student in France.

  Over the next few years she would also be encouraged in her new-found political interests by left-leaning local benefactors. One of these was a Formby woman, the wife of a newspaper reporter on the Liverpool Echo, who sought to broaden Beryl’s cultural education by taking her to classical concerts. It was at her house after one such performance that Beryl met Helah Criddle, the wife of John Frankland Criddle, and she was subsequently taken up by them. The Criddles were committed and active socialists, and meetings at their house, a fifteen-minute walk from Ravenmeols Lane, opened Beryl up to a whole new world of politics and culture:

  Mrs Criddle lent me books to take home. My father was in sympathy with the titles. They were all left-wing book choices dealing with the Russian Revolution and the Socialist Movement and he said he approved. I did a pen-and-ink drawing of Marshal Stalin and he pinned it up on the wall under the Swansea Tin-Plate Company calendar. My brother called him Joe after that. The Criddles lived over the railway line in Wicks Lane in a wonderful house covered in dust, gloomy and full of books and sepia photographs of men with staring eyes under peaked caps . . . The house was always full of people, some of whom must have come on trains from somewhere strange because they all looked like tramps and spoke like teachers and called each other comrade.29

  Winnie was undoubtedly discomfited by Beryl’s political activism, albeit for very different reasons. She couldn’t bring herself to even mention the word ‘communism’ and warned her daughter to be discreet in social situations:

  Darling I do hope you are not letting your little world know of your political views. There is a great deal of trouble going on at the moment in the outside world through certain beliefs (you know what I mean) and your whole career could be ruined through your beliefs. The British C.I.D. have been told to arrest anyone having views in this direction. Be told, darling, through your ignorance of the subject . . . you could ruin all our plans for you. The situation is really serious and the least you have to say in public on the subject the better. So please be sensible.30

  That there was a class element to all this is clear. Richard Malthouse, who went to Uppingham public school and acted as Beryl’s informal boyfriend – one vetted as it were by Winnie – ridiculed her political enthusiasms: ‘After getting your last letter, I rather feel now as if I ought to call you “comrade”, you and all your communism tripe!’31

  Beryl’s diaries for 1944 and 1946 also provide a glimpse of her other interests and activities at the time. She was a fan of the comedian Tommy Handley’s BBC radio programme ITMA, for example, and when Handley died in 1949 she cut out newspaper reports of his funeral and stuck them into her diary. A few weeks later she and her friends held a seance using an ouija board and tried to contact him: ‘We had a wow of a night yesterday night. We tried to get Tommy Handley back, but of course nothing whatever came of it, much to my dissappointment.’32

  Beryl’s diaries are almost as revealing for what they don’t mention as for what they do: while she records her troubles at school, she makes no reference to any disagreements at home, and though her desire to be an actress or an artist is often mentioned, being a writer isn’t. While there are frequent references to the films she saw and the plays she heard on the radio – Beryl went to the cinema either on her own or with Winnie at least two or three times a week, and to the theatre about once a week – there is no mention of books or reading (apart from scenes in plays she had to learn for Mrs Ackerley). This early emphasis on the spoken rather than the written word perhaps accounts for Beryl’s later obsession with the rhythmical qualities of her prose and the way it had to sound when read aloud. It also helps to explain why her vocabulary was so extensive yet her spelling so poor, as she initially learned words through hearing them spoken, rather than reading them.

  Another important feature of her childhood that figures prominently in Beryl’s diaries is her relationship with her pet dog, Pedro, originally one of a litter of puppies belonging to the Whites’ dog in Chirbury. Beryl quickly became attached to Pedro, and her parents agreed she could have him once he was old enough. In February 1944 Auntie White sent news that ‘little Pedro’ was ready to be taken home and during her half-term in April, Beryl collected him: ‘Lovely puppy. Super.’33

  Pedro was more than just a pet, however, and he would play a significant role in two key areas of Beryl’s childhood development. In the first place, he became a character in his own right, and his activities became a frequent topic of conversation in the family’s letters. A spaniel ‘with Labrador overtones’, Pedro was independent and intelligent enough to ride the local
train unaccompanied, going backwards and forwards between Formby and Liverpool, sitting on a seat and looking out of the window.

  Richard was also very attached to Pedro. According to Beryl, her father treated the dog ‘like a kind of hairy child and fed him with a spoon’.34 One Christmas Eve, after a train passenger took Pedro to the police station in Southport thinking he was lost, Richard drove around for hours frantically looking for him. When Beryl was at school in Tring, he would write letters to her that included a series of fantastical stories in which ‘the exploits of Pedro’35 formed a recurring theme, and he would frequently add a postscript as if written by ‘Mr Pedro’.

  The second area in which Pedro came to have an important impact on Beryl’s childhood was the opportunity he offered for liberty. A dog needs to be taken for walks – and for Beryl taking Pedro out meant freedom. By 1946 she was regularly taking Pedro for long walks down by the pine woods and the seashore:

  20 January: Took Pedro out for long walk. Over the hills. Had a wonderful time.

  27 January: Took Peddy long walk. The sea is very blue. Sky blue too but cold.

  3 February: Went another walk. Sea very perculiar.

  10 March: Took Pedro out. Not a bad day. I must swot hard. Must not bite my nails. Wish I was on stage, married or an artist.36

  Walking Pedro provided time and solitary peace for thinking, and the 1946 diary records a succession of musings about God and the landscape: ‘Saw God in the sky today.’37 The sense of liberty that walking alone gave Beryl was reflected in a more mature conception of herself as an individual, and she began to write outside too: ‘Glorious morning. Am writing this in the pinewoods in a small glade. The sun is lighting up the brown and gold on the pine-needles. Its good to be alive.’38