Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  There was no doubt a conventional element to such outpourings of affection – many girls of their age and class addressed each other in similar fashion – but it is clear, too, that at certain points they felt their relationship to be so close that they suspected, or feared, a lesbian component to it. In some of the later letters they both seem to be aware of this danger. After one particularly emotional outburst in which Lyn remarked that she wanted to see Beryl more than anyone else in the world, she added as an ironic afterthought: ‘Hands up those who are perverted, I don’t know. Horrid thought.’14 The only extract that survives of one of Beryl’s letters to Lyn also seems to evoke the line across which they could not go. Drawing a comparison between her physical intimacy with her boyfriend at the time and her love for Lyn, Beryl told her: ‘And I would wish to write this to him not you because it is not ever for us to lie together in such love, and wake cool beneath the open window.’15

  The correspondence between the two was something that even at the time was a self-conscious sign of their relationship. Both Beryl and Lyn had special places where they kept each other’s letters; this was partly for the practical reason of hiding them from the prying eyes of their mothers, but it was also symbolic, indicating how important they were to each other. While Lyn used her grandmother’s old sewing box, which after a few years was stuffed to overflowing, Beryl kept her letters in a large metal ammunition box, an old olive-green cartridge case from the war inside the lid of which she pasted this warning:

  Berry Bainbridge

  Think before you look inside. The contents belong to me and are private. In case of death please give untouched this box and its contents to Miss Lyn South, Fyfield, Ravenmeols Lane, Formby Lancs.

  Important.16

  Equally significant is the fact that after the friendship ended, Beryl kept all of Lyn’s letters whereas Lyn destroyed all of Beryl’s. There can be no greater indication of Lyn’s desire to completely reject her own past than this attempt to obliterate the relationship that was so emblematic of it. Beryl’s long and intimate letters to her, written over the course of the eight years during which they were such close friends, would have thrown light on many aspects of her adolescence and the troubled periods she went through, so her story is considerably the poorer for their loss.

  Given Beryl and Lyn’s shared interest in literature and art, it was perhaps only a matter of time before they collaborated, though the impulse behind ‘Us Versus Them’ seems to be less a desire to create a work of literature than an expression of their joint defiance of the adult world, the novel being ‘an account of Us (Bash, me and our dogs) versus everyone else’.17

  It is clear that Lyn was, and saw herself as, the more dynamic and dominant of the two. She was more literate than Beryl and her drawing was more technically proficient: at the time most people would have judged that Lynda had more chance of becoming a writer or an artist. It was Lyn who wrote the opening chapter to the new joint novel and Lyn who did all the illustrations. The story, such as it is, proceeds by way of Lyn and Beryl each taking turns to write a chapter. It opens with Lyn finishing her school homework and in the process of leaving home in search of adventure, armed with a Swedish sheath knife and accompanied by her two dogs, Pan and Captain Scott: ‘A soft rain was falling and the road was glistening golden in the rain. I raced down the road, Captain Scott and Pan gaily prancing after me, grinning all over their doggy faces. They knew what was afoot all right, dogs always do. Well, anyway, we came to rest outside Basher’s house and whistled three times (I did, not the dogs). I heard Basher’s cheerful shout “Goodbye Mum, Cheerio Dad,” little did they know that she was gone for ever.’

  After they commandeer a boat down at the docks – Lyn dispatches its sole occupant, the drunken Captain Toofpooste, by slitting his throat with her knife and throwing him overboard – the narrative baton is handed over to Beryl, who sets the tone of what is to come as they embark on a series of fantastical, tenuously linked escapades: ‘Our world, Lyn’s and I’s, [is] a world made up of Magic, beautiful green magic.’

  Beryl’s subsequent chapters shift the setting to ‘Juppiter’ and Saturn, with its ‘rattling houses, cold, all-powerful hurricanes, and men and women with large, bubble like eyes that held strange evil powers and unfilled lusts’, and then to an imaginary ‘Planet of Fiction’. The range of authors alluded to is interesting: Arthur Conan Doyle, R. D. Blackmore, Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Peter Cheyney, as is a dig at James Barrie’s most famous literary creation: ‘A regular Sissy of a little twerp spoke next on behalf of the Temperance Society, that curly haired saccahine pill of the Nursery world Peter Pan.’

  Beryl’s chapters are distinguished not only by her erratic spelling, but by flowing passages that are undercut by comical turns of phrase and incongruous images:

  Daffodil was a darling boy of some 10 and 20 years, very dapper and cynical. He told us his history one night, very sad it was. Full of errors and dissipointments, how his love of minced dough-nuts had been frustrated early in life, how his 9th wife Holly had left him for a New York jail bird. Oh very sad it was. Lyn wept bucketfuls over the deck, which was a very good thing for it was my turn to scrub it.

  On we sailed, and then we reached the edge of the night, and our ship grew little pink wings and we floated about as gently as an elephant into the dawn. Dawn was a lovely place, full of cherubs and weepin’ willows and Imperial Palaces. Up and up we sailed, up into a world of blue, blue as an artic sea, triumphant as a set of teeth.

  The book was probably more fun to write than it is to read, but it nevertheless reveals something of the interests and personalities of its two authors. In Beryl’s case, her descriptions of voyages into space and sea landscapes mirror the fascination she expressed in her diaries about the physical world, her wonder at the expanses of infinite sea and sky encountered on Formby beach. On a more prosaic level, her secret, almost guilty fascination with boxers and boxing, a result of having listened to the sport on the radio with her father, is captured in her enthusiastic description of a fist fight and her expert use of the sports commentator’s jargon:

  We landed among them. South dancing neatly round Stanley. A lovely uppercut to the nose. South is covering up, her chin well in, dancing airly round Hyacinth. A beautiful smash to the solar plexus. Cedric is landing wonderful blows. Oh well done. A nice smash to the head. Stanley is appealing to the crowd. Bainbridge once more appears. She tears in, tears out, tears in, stays out. South slams two shaking lefts, Stanley takes it on his gloves. Oh he’s regretting it. He calls a halt while he takes off his gloves, and lays them carefully in a hedge. Then Bash wades in, swims out, Lyn nips in, gives one wild yell and the fight is over.

  In one sense ‘Us Versus Them’ represented a backward step for Beryl, its subject matter and style are just a bit too childish, even for two fourteen-year-olds. But its significance lies not so much in its literary qualities as in the simplicity of its form. Its casual, write-the-first-thing-that-comes-into-your-head mode of production put an end to the formulaic and derivative pastiches of Victorian literature Beryl had produced up to that point. Writing ‘Us Versus Them’ allowed Beryl for the first time to inhabit her own prose, to imagine herself as a fictional character and use fiction as a form of self-expression, albeit in a fantasized and self-conscious way. This was undoubtedly a vital lesson; there would be no more literary pastiches from now on. The next thing she would write would be about herself, her life, her experiences and her feelings.

  FIVE

  Harry

  At fourteen I met a german prisoner of war, whose face I can no longer fully remember, who filled all my life for one brief summer after the war. I was filled with guilt and happiness and a dread of being discovered . . .1

  Since the arrival of Pedro, Beryl had been in the habit of spending her evenings taking the dog for walks in the woods, or along the dunes at Formby. Turning right out of the drive, she would head towards the sea, a good fifteen-minute walk down R
avenmeols Lane, past Lynda’s house, past Mr Greggs’ house with its strange gothic tower, its roof pointed like a witch’s hat, and past the railway crossing. Eventually the road petered out; straight ahead were the woods, and to the left a lane that led to St Luke’s church and the graveyard. Here, she would take off her shoes and socks, and walk the rest of the way barefoot, not just because she liked the sensation of the cold sand beneath her feet, but to avoid ruining her shoes and getting into trouble with her mother.

  The sense of liberty she felt is captured in a poem from this period:

  I liked to wander with my feet devoid of shoes

  And my elder brothers trousers rolled way up past my knees;

  And an old old shirt so ancient that my skin was showing through

  And though my mother wept for me, nothing else would do.

  She used to think me slightly mad, and I would catch her

  Looking in a patient way to see

  The frequent signs and habits

  Of a mental faculty.

  But when the lane was empty, though I knew folks

  Were watching sly, I’de dance and twirl and laugh aloud

  And toss the scarlet lines of blossem trees

  And hope the crowd of women behind their curtains

  Would think me slightly gone,

  And wonder in their beds at night

  While I danced wildly on.2

  The poem is revealing not so much for its flouting of conventional values, but for the fact that Beryl needed other people to see her acts of rebellion. Despite its metrical flaws, the poem also demonstrates an impressive concision: within the space of three lines Beryl manages to convey the sensual liberty of casting off her shoes, the blurring of gender roles in the wearing of her brother’s trousers, and a hint of sexual exhibitionism in the worn shirt that reveals her flesh. Given how conscious Beryl herself was about the transgressive liberties her beach-walking offered her, it was no wonder her parents frowned at it.

  Beryl wasn’t the only person who enjoyed the liberty the woods and sand dunes offered, and the area became not just the haunt of courting couples, but also of prisoners of war, who were held at a nearby internment camp at Altcar but who were free to leave its confines during daylight hours. As early as January 1946, Beryl had been aware of their presence on the beach: ‘Saw some German soldiers’, she noted in her diary.

  Another memorable figure she occasionally encountered was a ‘recluse who lived in a lean-to arrangement of odd planks and boxes in the sandhills, with his dog’.3 His name was Billy Tasker, an ex-soldier who had been decorated in the First World War but who had abandoned civilized society on his return to Liverpool. By 1947 he had lived his hermit-like existence on the Formby shoreline for nearly thirty years: ‘My life has been solitary,’ he told a reporter for the Formby Times, ‘but I have found here what I was seeking – peace and people who understand.’4 Beryl would later give him a walk-on part in her first and her last novel, as Perjer in ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ and as Billy Rotten in The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. In both, he features as a child-molester, though there are no suggestions elsewhere in her writing that he tried to take advantage of her, and he was always well regarded by Formby locals, who nicknamed him the ‘Holy Hermit’.

  Due to post-war fuel shortages, British Double Summer Time was in effect during 1947, which meant that evenings were much lighter than normal. It was while out walking through the pine woods one evening in late spring that Beryl met Harry Franz,5 a twenty-four-year-old prisoner of war, who was awaiting transferral to his native Bavaria. Harry wasn’t the first prisoner Beryl had spoken to among the dunes of the Formby shoreline. The previous year she had become friends with another German in his mid-twenties called Heinz, from the Ruhr valley. On Beryl’s list of boyfriends his name appears before Harry’s (numbers 5 and 6 respectively), along with a note that the ‘length of time’ of their relationship was three months. Beryl wrote little about Heinz, but in a letter to Harry she later described how he had seemed ‘God-like’6 to her because of the difference in age. For the same reason – she was just thirteen at the time – Heinz probably didn’t take Beryl seriously as a girlfriend, though he may have tried to take advantage of her. Harry, who was more sensitive and less assertive, made a point of comparing himself to Heinz, saying that unlike him he would remain faithful to her, that he was not a ‘bad man . . . like Heinz’.7

  Harry was by far the most important of Beryl’s early boyfriends. In physical terms the relationship didn’t venture much beyond kisses and cuddles. Beryl may have looked more mature than her years, but she was still only fourteen and a half when they met, nearly ten years younger than Harry, and this probably prevented him from trying to take things any further. On an emotional and imaginative level, however, the relationship was hugely significant: thoughts of Harry would preoccupy Beryl for the next two or three years, and his memory left a lasting, idealized image of what the experience of being in love was like. Harry would also inspire the next stage in her writing. After his return to Germany, she began to write about her experiences and feelings in prose, instead of poetry, and their relationship formed the basis of an autobiographical novella entitled ‘My Song is Done’, which she began at Tring in 1948 and finished in January 1949.8

  As with many young men caught up in the war, Harry’s experiences had left their mark, physically and emotionally. He recalled witnessing brutality on both sides: drunken SS officers executing their own soldiers; English soldiers shooting wounded Austrians. He himself had been shot at, and a ricochet had caught him a glancing blow, leaving him with a white scar beneath his eye. In the portrait Beryl drew of him on the cover of ‘My Song is Done’ she captured his distinctive Germanic features, his gaunt, scarred face and his closely cropped blond hair.9

  Before being transferred to Formby, Harry had already spent over a year in an internment camp in America. It was here, as he later told Beryl, that he discovered that the sixteen-year-old brother of his German girlfriend, Ilse, had been killed in the Russian offensive. He had also learned for the first time about the concentration camps, from a Jewish officer from New York.

  These experiences had left him nervous and withdrawn, something reflected in Beryl’s portrayal of him as Franzi in ‘My Song is Done’: ‘He was utterly twisted with shot nerves inside. When he laughed he shook and could not control himself.’10 This nervousness allowed the relationship to develop at a slower pace: Harry’s lack of confidence, and the fact that he was less sexually predatory than most of the other men Beryl encountered down by the seashore, meant that for the first time she could experience physical contact with an older man in a relatively unthreatening context. For his part, Harry benefited emotionally from her affectionate sympathy and her simple romantic passion for him. Walking hand in hand with her, he felt calmer: ‘He did not jerk so much now, his nerves were well under control, he was quieter and he loved her very much.’11

  A warm intimacy quickly developed and the element of secrecy that necessarily surrounded the relationship gave it an added frisson. In another autobiographical sketch written in London a few years afterwards, she captured both the tenderness of their relationship and the constant nervous tension that she might be found out:

  Walking to meet Harry in the dreamy summer evenings, and the passionless mouth-lovely kisses under the white beach leaves in the pine woods. I cannot remember clearly except . . .

  He laughed uncontrollably and frantically the first evening rolling a ball for Pedro to chase.

  The white woollen socks and the black diamond on his back.

  Oh just suddenly it is painful. The wide eyes and the ernest talking, the promises, and the smell of the grass. And the way he thought my legs were made of pearl, dappled under the leaves, and the dark growing and the ships winking in and out far away in the Mersey. And when a rustle was heard and it was a noise of an animal or bird, not a prying woman, I would cry out as he had taught ‘Keine men[s]ch, keine men[s]ch.’ [It’s no one.] />
  It was such an exciting restless summer, surely the wheather has never been as good. Holding hands tightly on the cindar path going home in the dark, the heart beating terribly with fear as a car came, and the headlights would surely show my half averted face to the occupants, and all would be discovered. The meetings in the bushes so pityful almost. If I was there first I would lie down and sit up and rearrange myself a dozen times for the best affect, rubbing my lips to make them red, sweating in the warmth. And then the movement beyond the gorse, then the crackling and trampling of twigs and the stooping figure. Very shyly we would look again through the dictionary for words, and only after an endless breathless time would he place his hand on my cheek and turn my pale mouth to his. And I cannot recall the sweetness of it, though it exsisted.

  If he was there before me, I would creep and surprise him, putting my arms round his neck from behind and then laugh on his neck. And never never did I shiver with an unusual feeling, nothing disturbed me except the desperately real joy of school over for the day and tea in the sullen house, and then Harry and I alone under the leaves, and him kissing me.12

  Beryl seems to have known that what she was doing had potentially dangerous repercussions and took care to keep the relationship quiet, telling only a few close friends at school like Lyn. ‘My Song is Done’ includes a scene in which a young English soldier discovers that Loo – Beryl’s alter ego in the novella – is going out with a German and tries to strangle her, shouting ‘a lot about bitches that played innocent and gave bloodey all to bleeding jerries’.13 This may have been a fictional embellishment, but it shows that Beryl was aware of the risk she was running.