by Brendan King
‘What would happen if someone found out?’ her friend Alan replied when she asked his advice about Harry. ‘I’ve got nothing against him, but a great amount of people have against all Germans and if they found out in a place like Formby, then as far as I can see it would be awful, life would hardly be worth living.’14 Coincidentally or not, Beryl would use the name Alan for the fictionalized portrayal of her brother, who expressed a similar disapproval in her novel about that period, A Quiet Life. After coming across his sister lying in the dunes with a German, Alan tells her: ‘Do you realise . . . only a few years back you would have had your head shaved?’15 This was a real possibility and other women at the time have testified to the violent reaction their relationships with German prisoners provoked. ‘People were very hostile. They would come up to me in the street and punch me or spit on me and ask “Aren’t our boys good enough for you?”’16
Although she could not have been insensible to the effect her physical appearance had on men, Beryl, like many girls her age, had a negative self-image and was prone to feelings of insecurity about her looks. ‘I wish I had not appeared so ugly to myself,’ she reflected about her time with Harry, ‘white and plump with a poor skin and large pale lips, and the loudness of me.’17 It was psychologically important to her that Harry should find her physically attractive, though his persistent and often tender declarations of affection seem to have done little to boost her self-confidence. This sense of being found wanting in comparison to other girls – and specifically to Harry’s German girlfriend Ilsa – is captured in a poem from this period:
Oh when you walk you only walk with Ilse
And when you talk you only talk of Ilse
And when you dream
Or so it must seem
You wander far from me
For your off high above
Deep in love
With Ilse.
And when you sing
You only sing of Ilse
My kisses bring, only tears for Ilse
I’m dreading it so
Cause you’ll want me to know
Your going back to Ilse.18
Even at this early stage her anxiety about rejection by the love object seems to be particularly acute, and throughout her life she would continue to look to men for reassurance that she was loved, that she was beautiful, even if nothing they said was ever quite enough.
At the end of July 1947 the idyllic period of their secret meetings came to a temporary end when Beryl went on holiday with her mother and brother to Cleish Castle in Kinross-shire, Scotland. Overcome by feelings of insecurity, she immediately wrote to Harry and he tried to reassure her, though his command of English was poor and his vocabulary limited and repetitive:
My Darling Berry!
I received your two very nice letters, and I thank you very much for these . . . I am sorry that I can not write English perfect, but I hope you can read it. In your first letter you did write you are afraid that I find another Girl-friend, I promise I don’t it. My thoughts are only with you, and I wait full longing till you come back to me . . . I know it first now, how much I love you, and I have broken heart, because I can not be with you . . . Three weeks are a long time, but I hope that these are soon over, and you come back to me, that I can again be happy.
With all my love, Harry19
Beryl’s emotional involvement with Harry, genuine though it was, didn’t prevent her engaging in a brief holiday romance with a local from nearby Kinross, Jimmy Clunie, whose age is given as twenty-eight on her list of boyfriends.20 Although the exact nature of their encounter is unclear, Beryl made a couple of cryptic references to him later in her journal, from which it seems she came to a realization that she could arouse sexual desire in men and that it represented a kind of power: ‘I remembered the holiday in the castle and Jimmy Clunie in the bushes and the first hard wakenings of power over men.’21
Despite listing the duration of their ‘relationship’ as three weeks – the length of her stay in Scotland – she seems to have looked on him more as a holiday distraction than anything else. Her romantic thoughts remained firmly attached to Harry and one day she rode on a bike to Rumbling Bridge, a small village ten miles from Cleish, where she wrote ‘I love Harry Franz’ on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle, and ‘threw it over the falls and watched it swirl away between the high gloom green banks, down the years’.22
Beryl returned to Formby on 15 August and her meetings with Harry resumed, though they were not to last long. On 5 September, unable to meet Beryl himself, he arranged for a letter to be given to her, explaining that he was being transferred to Garswood Park Camp, near Wigan:
I’m so very miserable and sad that I can’t meet you not more to-day, because I go this morning already back to Camp 50. I’m so unhappy that I could not see you last night. I have been yesterday in the afternoon and in the night in Formby looking for you in the Street where is your home, but I must go back again with broken heart then I saw only Pedro sitting in front of your home. I hope that you keep what you have promised to me and once more don’t vorget what you did to promise me. With kindly regards, your everlasting Darling, Harry.23
The news of his sudden departure was a terrible blow: ‘Nothing will ever be as real and terrible or choking as the rude parting on the Friday night,’ she wrote, ‘the letter by hand, and the lorry having thundered off in the night to Southampton.’ To make matters worse, as she was walking back down the lane to go home she was the victim of a casual predatory sexual assault, by a ‘blue jowelled man’ who was sitting waiting on a bank of grass: ‘He came down the bank and kissed me, not like Harry, but drowning me with his mouth, and his tongue wet and strong between my teeth. And all like a dream.’24
The next day she wrote to Harry lamenting what had happened: ‘Why did it have to end like that?’25 – a sentiment echoed in a poem she wrote shortly after:
All along the seashore
We used to walk
Overhead the seagulls massed
I hear you say, I love you
My heart still cries, I love you too
What a pity it had to end
What a pity it could’nt last
Day by day we wandered
Together hand in hand
Oh the time would go so fast
Oh I cried, when
You whispered soft, Aufwiedersehn
What a pity it had to end
What a pity it could’nt last.26
A few days later Harry replied from the camp at Sudbury, protesting his love and urging her to keep ‘her promise and not go out with anyone’, and to try and visit him the following Sunday. Across the back of his note, in his neat italic script, were the words: ‘Love once given, can not be recalled.’ Somewhat rashly she said she would come to Sudbury, some eighty miles south-east of Formby, though this was no easy thing to arrange given that she had to keep the journey secret from her parents. But despite Harry’s carefully organized plan – ‘We meet us on the Station of Sudbury and I come to the place there after dinner and I will wait so longing’27 – things went awry. Harry waited for five hours in vain: Beryl arrived too late.
This was to be their last chance. At the beginning of October, Harry was repatriated to Bavaria.
Although they would never meet again, the relationship was far from over. Between October 1947 and December 1949 Harry would write nearly thirty letters and cards to Beryl, expressing his love for her, urging her to be faithful to him, and asking for help in trying to find a job and arrange references that would enable him to return to England and marry her. Beryl’s letters to Harry were equally prolific: she would write over fifteen times in the first six months of 1948 alone, and for years afterwards he would continue to exert a powerful hold on her imagination, especially during periods of loneliness or emotional distress.
From the surviving correspondence – Harry’s habit of quoting extracts from Beryl’s letters verbatim allows us to glimpse her state of mind as well as his – it is clear that both s
eemed to take the relationship seriously and both believed in, or hoped for, its continuance. But it is also true that Beryl came to a realization much sooner than Harry that the relationship wasn’t one that could realistically work. Nevertheless, in the months following his departure her protestations of fidelity and her reassurances of her love seemed genuinely heartfelt.
In November, shortly after his return to Bavaria, she wrote to tell him that she was unhappy, that she missed him and wanted to be faithful to him. In December she was even more insistent: ‘Please promise me Harry that one day you will come back to me and I can see you again.’28 A week later she assured him that she didn’t want another sweetheart, that she had sent her heart to him for Christmas, and that ‘to be in your arms again in a “honeymoon” would be so very wonderful’.29
In the New Year she went so far as to make the impractical promise that ‘if it is at all possible I will try and come to you this summer, only I don’t know if my parents would allow me to go to Europe so young, on my own’.30 A few months afterwards, as a proof of her continuing feelings for him, she wrote him a letter from the special place where they used to meet, ‘in our place in love, in the bushes near the forest’.31
But as time passed her unequivocal declarations were tempered by more ambivalent statements that seemed to offer him a way out should he want to take it, such as suggesting that he should try to ‘fall in love just a little with a german girl this summer and be happy because in summer one should be’.32 More pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that other names were soon added to her boyfriend list after Harry’s: these included Bernard Blundell (‘I want to see you again and take you for a walk to the shore and have a bit of fun together . . .’),33 and Jim Palmer, a thirty-two-year-old married man who developed a crush on her over Christmas and New Year, 1947–8 (‘Little did we think a fortnight ago that we would be so attached to one another . . . I do love you’).34
Another poem about Harry, composed later at Tring, captures both the tenderness of their time together and a sense of her nostalgic melancholy at its passing. Here she uses an image of the sea erasing his message of love written in the sand as a metaphor for the inevitable erosion of her feelings over time. Significantly she also alludes to having found someone else:
They took a stick and he lifting it and pointing it towards the dying sky
Looked at her and smiled, and they stood for but a moment
While the sea tingled against the stars
And the sea-birds sang a melodey in orange bar
And twists of dull green foam.
And then he bent and she watched him
Draw their names together and twine
Them with a kiss, and then he took her home . . .
And then he went away to his own land
And she soon found another and laughed
Again and cried; and never stopped to think
Of his name twined so with hers . . .35
Perhaps the fullest expression of her feelings about Harry at this period is given in a letter she wrote to him in August 1948, but which for some reason she seems not to have sent. Like her poem, a sense of her affection for him is unmistakeable, as is its nostalgic, almost elegaic tone, as if deep down she knew the relationship belonged in the past:
Harry: You have been away a long while now, at least it seems a long while to me. It is summer again, and it was in the Summer I met you, so that our love belonged to the flowers and the sun and to Summer Madness. You were my first real love. I had known agonies over Heinz because he was so God-like, and I was so young. I had even lain awake nights over Terry, because he came after Heinz and I wanted so much an anchor.
But you were different. We had a lot of happiness I think, at least I dream we had. Perhaps you could not understand why I would not be wholly yours, perhaps you were puzzled and unhappy and full of longing for something more, to drown your loneliness for your own country.
Only it did not matter because we both felt that our love was for just a gap in Time, and what had gone before, or what was to come, had no place in our lives.
You arn’t ever by the little forest now, and you don’t ever caress my body with your thin hands till I grow excited and want to live fully. You don’t ever call me ‘Chaste little English Girl’, and laugh with your head on one side to see if I am laughing with you.
And we kissed a lot and made love a lot and together watched the first star come up behind the hills from the sea. And now you are gone. I still dream of you, and wait so lonely for your letters.
All the lovely memories. And lying in the dull green glow with your hands making me think and feel things I once never knew of, and most of all just being with you, and you being so gentle with me, and never impatient.
I don’t love you in the way other people love, you see its all such a long while ago, and I am confused, till you are somewhere in a forest of pine, and wild shores and green seas.
I am very lonely without you.
It is all so long ago . . .
Ich liebe dich auf immer [I love you forever]
Berry xx36
Even so, almost a year later she was still writing to Harry and telling him she was chaste and solid in her virtuous life, and that she wanted to see him again: ‘I would give anything in this world to say to you . . . Harry look out of the window of your train, I am there waiting for you at the station by your home.’37
This prevarication wasn’t coquettishness: her feelings for him were genuine enough, as is witnessed by the number of spontaneous thoughts of him recorded in her diary when she felt lonely or experienced some emotional setback: ‘Oh Harry liebchen. Write,’38 she implored in February 1949, during a period in which she was feeling depressed about her life at Tring and alienated from her schoolfriends. Two weeks later, during a return visit to Formby, she was again going down to the dunes and thinking melancholy thoughts: ‘I went to see Harry and the little place in the forest, but I didn’t find him. The little wood was full of whisperings, and birds were quiet. I felt cold and lonely.’39
Yet whenever Harry implied he might be able to get to England sooner rather than later, she would get cold feet again and try and put him off, using the hostility of her parents as an excuse. Such mixed messages only served to prolong the confusion and add to his distress. To be fair, the situation was a demanding one for any sixteen-year-old to deal with. Caught between fear of her parents finding out and guilt about Harry’s reaction if she were to break with him, Beryl found it difficult to be open, and dealt with matters in an evasive, disingenuous way.
In fact, it would really only be after she started working at the Playhouse in August 1949 that the memory of Harry started to fade from her emotional landscape, and almost a year and a half after that before she would write to tell him the truth – that she had fallen in love with someone else.
The psychological repercussions of her relationship with Harry were considerable. The circumstances surrounding it – its secrecy, its existence outside the bounds of her normal life, the difference in age between them, the barrier of language – all served to keep the illusion of an idyllic love alive in Beryl’s mind: ‘Nothing is ever as sweet again as the first love. Nothing is ever as sweet again as the first love unfulfilled. So gentle was my Harry . . . How shall anything ever be like that again? All the blue-bells picked and garlanded and all the grasses sucked in the mouth, and all the repeated phrases, over and over because of innocence.’40
Had the relationship lasted longer, her romantic ideals might have been tempered a little by reality. As it was, its sudden and unexpected end meant her fantasy was never shattered, never tested against the hard edge of reality the way so many youthful illusions about love are. As a result she would yearn to recreate the same idyllic situation in her later relationships, and when her unrealistically high expectations of romantic fulfilment inevitably unravelled, it would leave her feeling lost and disillusioned.
SIX
Tring
Shortly after
fifteen I left school somewhat under a cloud and went to an artistic boarding school in Hartfordshire. There I became quieter and filled with a sense of how unworthy I was and how I was ugly, but how I should become beautiful.1
Please God make me beautiful . . . and let me be loved.2
As often happens at school, children of a certain age pass round material considered morally unsuitable by their parents. In Beryl’s case, her friend Rita Moody had given her a dirty poem and she inadvertently stuffed it into her gymslip pocket. To make matters worse, Beryl had illustrated it, which only confirmed Winnie in her mistaken notion that her daughter was its author:
It’s only human nature after all
For a boy to take a girl against a wall
To pull down her protection
And plug in his connection
It’s only human nature after all.
Today, it would barely raise a murmur, but when Winnie found the poem during the summer term of 1947, she took it straight to Miss Brash, the headmistress of Merchant Taylors’. In later life, Beryl would always say that she’d been expelled over the incident, though the word was never used by the school, or even by Beryl at the time, because to saddle a young girl with a public expulsion would have caused something of a scandal.
The poem was certainly a factor, but Beryl’s weak academic performance was another. If she’d had a realistic chance of passing her School Cert it is hard to imagine the school would have forced her to leave over such a minor issue.3 As it was, Beryl’s removal suited both parties: the school was unburdened of a disruptive pupil who wasn’t expected to do well academically, and Winnie, under the guise of protecting her daughter’s morals, could place Beryl in a school more suited to her own ambitions for her as an actress.
Although Beryl didn’t finish at Merchant Taylors’ until December 1947, by the end of July she had already written to Harry to tell him she would be going to a boarding school in Tring in January 1948.4 Some girls of Beryl’s age and class, influenced by popular fantasies of boarding school life, would have looked forward to the prospect. But for Beryl the idea of living away from home, however much she may have complained about it, was not a pleasant one. In August she wrote to her French penfriend Jacques Delebassée expressing her fears, but his reply didn’t do much to alleviate her anxiety: ‘Vous n’aimez pas aller au pensionnat! It is not very good. I do not like no more pensionnat!’5