by Brendan King
But Mayo remained aloof and despite Beryl’s undoubted physical attraction he seems to have regarded her not as a potential girlfriend but simply as another young, rather naive girl. Clearly ambitious, Mayo had other things on his mind, having already made his name as an innovative set designer. His sketches for two Playhouse productions in the 1949 season, along with those for You Never Can Tell and from a number of productions dating back to 1946, featured in an exhibition at the Bluecoat Chambers in Liverpool in October 1949, which Beryl visited and the programme of which she would religiously keep. But she soon realized he wasn’t interested in her – his Christmas card that year was signed with the impersonal greeting ‘from Paul Mayo’.
Beryl’s intense desire to be loved, coupled with her insecurity about how attractive men found her, was a dangerous combination, leaving her susceptible to overtures by anyone who expressed an interest in her and emotionally troubled by those who didn’t. As it was, she already had three men – Harry, and her two penfriends Jacques Delebassée and Paul Vigo – writing to say that they loved her and proposing to marry her. But these reassurances of her desirability did little to allay her anxieties.
The problem of Harry, especially, continued to exercise her. In August she wrote and attempted to tell him that his scheme to come to England and marry her was not realistic. She tried to let him down gently, suggesting that it was ‘a very big thing to do, to come away from your home and country, all for a girl who was just fourteen when you left her and who did not know much of love’.12 But whether led astray by his feelings, or by his poor grasp of English and his inability to read between the lines of Beryl’s ambivalently worded hints, Harry brushed her doubts aside and ended with yet another outpouring of love:
Darling . . . it is my only wish, that we us, as soon as only possible see again, that will be the more nice day of my life. Dearest, ever and ever again, I remember me on the nice hours in the summer 1947. If we us see again, we must have no fear more, you are not more fourteen years, and I am not more a prisoner. Then you will be not more shy anymore.
Darling, believe me I miss you more as anything in the world. Please, keep on loving me as much as I love you, and think of me every minute of the day, then no doubts will us separate! K.T.M. means Keep true me.13
At the same time as she was confiding her passion for Hugh and for Paul in her journal, she was also writing to Harry saying she wished to see him again. This wasn’t coquettishness, her feelings for him were genuine enough, and Harry’s letters, importunate and demanding as they were, seemed to exhibit such genuine feeling that she found it impossible to put an end to his dreams once and for all.
In September she wrote to Harry again and at the start of October he replied, somewhat comforted (‘Darling, I say thousend thanks for your confidence to our love!’), though still frustrated by the lack of news about jobs and travel permits: ‘Did you get till now still no offer or anything? Have you written since your last letter to a factory and so on again?’14 Nothing if not persistent, he had heard that couples who had been separated after the end of the war could get a royal permission to travel and he begged her to write to the Queen and petition her. She took Harry’s plan to come over to England seriously enough to tell her close friends, and over the next few months they would keep asking for news: ‘How’s Harry? Has he come over yet?’15
One positive thing about three-weekly Rep was that the work was so intense it left little time for dwelling on such matters. For the next production, Somerset Maugham’s The Letter, Beryl was given a proper walk-on part – as one of a group of ‘Chinese Boys, Malay Servants, Etc’ – and her name appeared in the programme for the first time.
Then, after having spent only three months at the Playhouse, her big chance came. Gerald Cross had scheduled the premiere of A. R. Whatmore’s The Sun and I, a play that called for a child actor in the part of David, a young mathematical prodigy. Cross had originally chosen Bruce Moffat, an eleven-year-old boy from Crosby, to play the role, but the local education authority was unhappy with the arrangement. As a replacement, Whatmore suggested Edmunde Stewart, an eleven-year-old he had worked with at Dundee Rep, but four days before opening night the Scottish authorities refused him permission too. Despite the fact that Beryl was understudying the part, Cross continued to look for another boy, but time was against him. The day before the play opened he told Beryl she could have the part if she had her hair cropped. Half an hour later she made up her mind and was sent off to be given a short page-boy cut, the considerate hairdresser draping a towel over the mirror so as to lessen the shock of seeing her long hair being cut off. ‘I don’t know what mum and dad will say when they see me looking such a sight,’16 she told a local newspaper reporter.
The play opened to enthusiastic applause, and immediately attracted good notices (‘A notable success’, The Stage;17 ‘The play has moments of great tenderness, irony and beauty’, Daily Post18). Alongside the reviews there were also numerous ‘human interest’ pieces, revolving around the haircut and Beryl’s transformation from girl to boy, complete with ‘before-and-after’ pictures. Although this certainly made good copy, Beryl didn’t particularly enjoy the extra publicity. Already insecure about her appearance, it added insult to injury that it should be her passable resemblance to a boy and not her feminine beauty that had attracted attention, and significantly she never sported short hair again.
Nevertheless, the numerous plaudits she received for her performance must have been satisfying: ‘The evening was in many ways a triumph for 17-year-old Beryl Bainbridge, who took the part of David at short notice and gave a remarkably faithful portrait of a schoolboy, complete with unruly hair specially shorn for the occasion and half hesitant, shuffling gait.’19
Winnie, too, could hardly have been more pleased by the coverage, and pieces such as that which ran under the heading ‘That Boy David’ hit all the right notes: ‘Nobody watched the performance of B. M. Bainbridge as the boy David . . . more intently than did her mother, for though it was difficult to believe, David, with “his” closely cropped hair, untidily schoolboyish, is a dainty 17-year-old girl, Beryl Bainbridge . . . With the new play one wonders if a new “star” has been born.’20
The more or less constant schedule at the Playhouse of performances in the evening and rehearsals during the day perhaps accounts for the lack of entries in Beryl’s diary. After her description of the first night of The Sun and I on 29 November 1949 there is nothing until a hurried admonition to herself six months later in June 1950: ‘I really must learn to keep a diary properly. I get so behind hand.’21
The first half of 1950 had been taken up with a sequence of very minor performances. Her success in The Sun and I didn’t lead, as she perhaps hoped, to an influx of larger roles. In the productions up to the end of the season, she was given only a series of non-speaking or small walk-on parts: a lady-in-waiting in Richard II, Sherah in Tobias and the Angel (‘. . . a word of praise is due to [one] of the younger members, Beryl Bainbridge for her song sweetly sung . . .’),22 and a tea-house girl in Alfred Klabund’s The Circle of Chalk.23 Low-key though such roles were, it was all part of the training process and over the next few months Beryl cemented her position as a staple within the company.
Beryl’s brief crush on Hugh Goldie had given way to a close friendship that was warmly reciprocated. After he left the Playhouse to go to Sheffield in the spring of 1950, they corresponded regularly and kept up to date with each other’s activities. During this period Beryl’s sensitivity to her parents’ arguments exacerbated, and in June she wrote anxiously in her diary: ‘Things have been getting to a head between Mummy and Daddy. I’m so horribly miserable about it.’24 She confided her worries to Hugh and though he provided a sympathetic ear for her complaints (‘Are you on speaking terms at the moment or is there a current feud?!!’),25 his replies show that even he unconsciously suspected she was prone to exaggeration: ‘How are things at home, darling? Are your people really thinking of separating or we
re you only being unduly pessimistic?’26
Like Les Carr, Hugh was struck by Beryl’s ability to write. He even compared her stream of consciousness style to that of James Joyce in Ulysses, albeit in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, hinting that her misspelled and grammatically incorrect use of English was akin to Joyce’s deliberately unconventional spelling and punctuation. Nevertheless, he was genuinely impressed by her writing (‘you are by far the most interesting letter writer that ever writes to me . . .’),27 and would later counsel her not to let her ‘very real talent for writing blossom unseen’.28
After he moved to Oxford to produce a series of productions there, Hugh wrote a long, effusive letter, ‘wondering what inspiration is eminating from the Fenomenon of Formby’: ‘What about Beryl – alternately looking a tramp and a sweetie, an angel and a little naughty funny cat? Have you learnt to draw yet – and can you speak and is your bottom measurement keeping where it should be? Do burn some midnight oil one night and curl up in bed and write to me and tell me all about life in Liverpool . . . Janet sends her love and so do I with a big kiss (big brotherly of course). Be good. Hugh.’29
Hugh remained an important figure in Beryl’s life over the next few years, and would be instrumental in finding her theatrical work on a number of occasions. But their friendship wasn’t without a more dangerous undercurrent: his attraction to her wasn’t entirely as ‘brotherly’ as he implied, nor had she completely got over her initial crush on him. Their mutual attraction, amusing and diverting though it was when constrained within the bounds of friendship, always had the potential to develop into something more, and would nearly end with disastrous consequences.
Gerald Cross’s penchant for European plays came to the fore at the start of the 1950–1 season, which opened with a translation of Alberto Colantuoni’s I Fratelli Castiglioni (The Brothers Castiglioni), a black comedy in which four unscrupulous brothers compete against each other to find a winning lottery ticket, hidden by their uncle just before his death. For the production a young drama student from Bristol, Kenneth Ratcliffe, was drafted into the company, and it was during the first rehearsal, when Beryl was handing out scripts, that they met for the first time. They got on immediately: ‘I really homed in on Beryl, I had a lot of rapport with her,’30 Ken recalled, and over the weeks that followed he began to hope that their friendship might develop into something more.
Work in the theatre, like film work, is intensive, but also includes long periods of down-time, and Ken and Beryl had many hours to fill in which to talk about their lives, about art, literature and religion. In their spare time they would go to exhibitions at the Bluecoat Chambers or the Walker Art Gallery, and as Ken had an Equity card – Beryl never applied for hers – they could get into matinee performances in theatres and cinemas for free.
Beryl took up painting again. One of her ideas was to paint a portrait of Ken. In the back of her diary for 1950 she scribbled down the sizes of a couple of suitable canvases – one 18 x 14 and another 20 x 23 – which she bought for the job. With Ken posed, seated in his dressing room, Beryl painted a pale and wan figure in a dark jacket. This was the first proper portrait she had painted in oils, but at the time Ken thought it unflattering – ‘it had the look of Hamlet seeing his Father’s ghost’31 – and, somewhat untactfully, decided against buying it.
It was around this time that Beryl’s interest in Roman Catholicism began to be stimulated, and on Sundays she and Ken would go to a Catholic church such as St Peter’s in Seel Street, a ten-minute walk from the Playhouse: ‘At that time I had a religious streak and so did she. We often talked about religion, and she would often drag me to a Catholic church, which she really enjoyed being in, sitting at the back, listening to the service, smelling the incense, getting the atmosphere. The Catholic ritual appealed to her, it was theatrical.’32
They also shared similar tastes in literature, both being avid readers of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene. When The End of the Affair was published in 1951 they would read it out loud, each taking a chapter in turn. They also read T. S. Eliot’s plays, Murder in the Cathedral being one of Beryl’s favourites. Beryl was particularly taken with Eliot’s post-conversion poetry: in her 1949 diary she had copied out part of Eliot’s The Rock, and she would often quote the famous lines from Little Gidding: ‘And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.’
This interest in Catholicism was undoubtedly encouraged by the atmosphere of the Playhouse: Gerald Cross was a Catholic, as were several of the actors. ‘There was a feeling of religion about the place’,33 as Ken Ratcliffe put it. In the autumn of 1950, during rehearsals for a production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Beaver Coat (‘Beryl Bainbridge cuts a quaint figure in flounced knickers . . .’),34 Beryl met its charismatic translator, Eric Colledge, a senior lecturer in English at Liverpool University who specialized in medieval mysticism. His flamboyance (he wore bright yellow or red waistcoats and spats), his enthusiasm, and the fact that he was also a fervent Catholic (he would take religious vows and become a monk in the early 1960s), clearly made an impression on her. When she eventually took instruction about converting two years later in Dundee, Colledge wrote to her as ‘an old chum’35 to say how pleased he was at her decision.
After The Brothers Castiglioni the next production was George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, with Peggy Mount playing Cleopatra’s nurse and Cyril Luckham in the role of Caesar. Once again, Beryl was given a male part, that of Ptolemy the boy-king. The production opened to good reviews, and she gained several favourable notices (‘Beryl Bainbridge deserves mention for her brief but effective performance as the young Ptolemy . . .’),36 though not all critics were convinced by her cross-gendered performance. The Liverpool Daily Post, in a back-handed compliment that reveals the extent to which Beryl’s name had already become familiar among theatre-going regulars, complained that it was ‘an affront to realism to cast a girl as Cleopatra’s young brother, even though she be Beryl Bainbridge’.37
EIGHT
Austin
A year later I had my first love affair, which irrevocably changed me for good. Strangely I became younger, I trusted and loved implicitly.1
Nothing shall be as sweet as the Liverpool days, nothing so hopeless as the time in Hope Street. And when if it happens I should be torn from the warmth and carried out into deepest death, my mouth would open and I would shriek into cry into eternity the name of Austin.2
The production of Caesar and Cleopatra turned out to be more significant to Beryl for personal rather than theatrical reasons. In previous productions Paul Mayo had been assisted in painting sets and scenery by Betty Gow; for Caesar and Cleopatra, however, a local art student, Austin Davies, was drafted in to help with some of the more technical backdrops.
In later life Beryl gave a highly romanticized account of her meeting with Austin: dramatic elements such as coincidence, misunderstanding, and a love triangle in which everyone had fallen for the wrong person, played their part. At the time of her eventual marriage to him, however, three and a half years afterwards in April 1954, Beryl would give a more prosaic version of events to the local paper. In this account, printed under the headline ‘A raffle won him a bride’, Austin was busy painting scenery in the theatre workshop when she asked him an apparently simple question: ‘Do you want a water set?’ Confronted with his blank expression – he had no idea what a water set was – she explained that it was a prize in a raffle and sold him a ticket.3
It is difficult to overstate the impact Austin had on Beryl’s life. In emotional terms he was her first experience of a fully committed sexual relationship – and, equally significantly, her first experience of the crushing humiliation that comes from rejection. But the relationship was also significant in that it influenced the course of her subsequent life and career. Austin not only inspired her to take up painting seriously, he also supported her financially during and after their marriage – thereby allowing her to wri
te – and he was instrumental in her decision to leave Liverpool for London in the 1960s. He even bought the house she would live in until she died.
Tall and handsome with a gaunt bearded face, Austin Howard Davies looked every inch the bohemian artist in his chunky sweater and his black duffel coat. In fact, he came from a relatively affluent Liverpool family, a world away, socially and culturally, from that of Winnie Baines and Richard Bainbridge. His father Harold Hinchcliffe Davies was a renowned Liverpool architect, as was his father before him.
But if Austin’s family was more financially comfortable than Beryl’s, it was also more troubled. His parents had married young in 1917 – Harold was only seventeen at the time – and the decision doesn’t seem to have been an entirely voluntary one. Not only did Harold lie and give his age as twenty-one on the marriage certificate, no relatives acted as witnesses, hinting that they married without parental approval. Suspicions about the reason for his hasty union with nineteen-year-old Nora Winifred Wood are confirmed by an entry in the register of births a few months afterwards – their child, Harold Jr, was born in early 1918.
By chance, Harold and Nora were immortalized through their connection to the Liverpool-based photographer Edward Chambré Hardman. While in Provence on holiday in 1926, Hardman took a picture of Harold, Nora and an architect friend Frank Jenkins sitting in a French jardin. Harold is depicted in a louche attitude, leaning back in his chair, legs crossed, a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. The photo transcends the mundane reality of the experience it records. The sunlight dappling the trees in the background instils it with a romantic, nostalgic quality, presenting an idealized image of how those in the affluent middle class wanted to see themselves. Entitled A Memory of Avignon it subsequently went on to sell in enormous quantities and is still available as a print today. But this idyllic scene belied the reality of life in the Davies household, and what is left out of the photograph is more telling than what is captured by the lens: the couple’s children are conspicuous by their absence. After Harold Jr, a second son, Anthony, was born in 1923, and Austin followed at the beginning of 1926, just six months before the trip to Provence.