Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  During his Easter break from the Art School in 1955, Austin took Beryl to Bardsey Island, off the Aberdaron coast of Wales. The facilities at the rented cottage, shared with Austin’s brother Tony and his wife Zena, were fairly basic: when Beryl went outside to relieve herself, she noted how the searchlight from the lighthouse strayed over the grey stone wall in the garden and turned her shoes white.

  The holiday was ostensibly to mark Austin and Beryl’s first wedding anniversary, but neither seemed to be in celebratory mood. The windswept spot – there were no trees on the island – brought back memories of Beryl’s wanderings in the Formby dunes, but the present seemed to pale in comparison to the past, provoking a wave of bleak nostalgia: ‘Perhaps never again though will it be enough or ever the same joy just to lie in the grass, as it was years ago at home. The sky seems more limited somehow, yet as vast, but infinitely colder.’21

  Austin was reflecting on the past, too, and still seemed to be uncertain as to whether he’d made the right decision: ‘I was married a year ago April 24,’ he noted in his journal, ‘I do not yet know whether I shall regret this.’22 Since the wedding he had been working hard on his painting, though his output always seemed to fall short of his unrealistic targets: ‘I think that during the past year my average must have been about 3 every two weeks, this seems to be rather a small number considering I have four whole days freedom from teaching.’ Equally ‘depressing’ was the fact that the money he made from the sales of his paintings was not commensurate with the amount of time he spent on them – his total sales for the previous year amounted to £500, a reasonable sum in those days, but nowhere near enough to allow him to give up his job.

  Had he been content to continue working as a portrait painter he would no doubt have established a solid reputation for himself over the course of time. His work in the Liverpool Academy exhibition nearly always attracted favourable critical attention, and he had already made some important sales to art institutions. His portrait of Beryl, begun shortly after their wedding, was shown at the Liverpool Corporation’s autumn exhibition under the title Portrait of the Artist’s Wife. It was later bought by Manchester City Council for its permanent collection.

  But like many artists of the period Austin was growing tired of representational art. He wanted his painting to be part of the modern consciousness, to be challenging, to be new. Aesthetically, he was drawn towards a kind of abstract expressionism, but he was continually being dragged back into portraiture as a means of making money.

  Austin’s exhibition at the prestigious Piccadilly Gallery in Cork Street, a month before the anniversary trip to Bardsey Island, was a perfect illustration of his artistic dilemma. Although the exhibition had gone well – he received a glowing notice in the Daily Post which described him as a ‘painter of original and striking vision’ and compared the effect of his ‘strange and powerful’23 paintings to the work of El Greco – most of the paintings that sold were figurative works, not those in his new abstract style.

  Interestingly, and uniquely, Beryl had also exhibited alongside Austin at the Piccadilly Gallery – her first public appearance as an artist. In fact her work for the show consisted not of paintings, but of decorative painted plates, their craft feel presumably appealing to the gallery’s owner, Godfrey Pilkington. How well the plates sold isn’t mentioned, though significantly the experiment wasn’t tried again.

  Austin’s frustration at his lack of commercial success undoubtedly contributed to the tensions between himself and Beryl. His dissatisfaction with the Liverpool art scene, which he felt was too provincial, too ‘narrow and restricted’, was reflected in what he saw as his ‘ultimate aim’ – that he and Beryl should move to London in the near future: ‘Whenever I think of how we (I am even becoming accustomed to this collective term) could live in London. I become almost sick with suppressed excitement to live in a house in Hampstead with a studio overlooking the Heath, to be right in the middle of all that I value most.’24

  But such plans would have to wait. Since the wedding, Beryl had hardly worked at all. She had gone back to the Children’s Hour studios for a couple of small roles on radio – as Hilda in Grizelda Hervey’s Princess of Northumberland, which was broadcast in 1954 and reunited her with Billie Whitelaw, and as Trudie, a lady-in-waiting, in Nan McDonald’s adaptation of the Grimms’ fairy tale The Giant with the Three Golden Hairs a year later. There was also a week-long engagement in Jane Eyre at Warrington in August 1955. But this did little to take the financial pressure off Austin. By the time she was offered some serious theatre work – an engagement for two plays at Windsor Rep, where Hugh Goldie was now resident director – Beryl had to turn the work down. As if to confirm Austin’s fears, in the early summer of 1956, Beryl found she was pregnant.

  FIFTEEN

  The Summer of the Tsar

  Put into words the sense of loss of you and I together

  The firelight shining, and the children sleeping

  The books never read

  The valleys undiscovered, and

  If I had the power I would fill you with enough love

  Enough love for you and I together . . .1

  Having a child was something Beryl had longed for for years, a tangible proof of her bond with Austin. A year before they were married she had mused in her diary about having children, and had already come up with a list of names: ‘When, if ever I have a girl-child I would wish it to be called Francesca. The boy-child of course Paul Aaron, and maybe Simon Peter.’2 A story in her ‘Fragments’ book written in late 1953 abruptly breaks off and devolves into a series of doodles in which Austin’s surname is combined with possible names for children: Paul Hinchcliffe Davies, Manuala Davies, Paul Aaron Davies and Paul Simon Bolivia Davies – showing that Beryl was attracted to the myth of the romantic revolutionary even if she couldn’t spell his name.

  When it finally happened, the pregnancy was not without its anxieties and difficulties, and Beryl’s doctor friend, Cyril Taylor, suspected she might have a weak or ‘incompetent cervix’, as it was commonly termed. As a result, he wouldn’t let her go on holiday – Austin had planned to take her to stay with the Greens at their cottage in Nefyn, North Wales – fearing she might lose the baby: ‘He could not understand how I had even concieved as my stomach is funny,’ she told Judith, ‘and he did not think I could hold it . . . I must stay near a hospital.’3

  Instead, she and Austin spent three weeks in London. The choice may have been dictated by medical reasons, but Austin saw it as an opportunity to visit galleries and to try to arrange an exhibition. In the event it was a less than satisfying holiday. Long-standing causes of tension, such as money and Austin’s exacting expectations, were exacerbated by the physical and psychological complications of Beryl’s condition. As she explained to Judith afterwards:

  London for us was in so few ways suxcessful. I don’t know why, just that it cost so much to get anywhere, it was a bit wet and stormy, things happened. To go for the day into town meant putting on nice clothes, blue and high shoes to feel more dressy and tall, and white gloves in the sunshine, mainly because one was a little spotty and not so nice in the face, an off-day, and A. does like me a little elegant which is never possible: Result – swollen feet within one hour, dirty gloves in 10 minuets, enormous sums of money for the privilage of travelling on a bus and eating even the smallest lunch, and because I caught a glimpse maybe of myself in a store window looking dreadful, or just a small look on A’s face . . . not of distaste but dissappointment in me.4

  The second week was even worse: Beryl spent the whole of it in hospital, ‘with little Willie threatening to move to pastures new’. The final week dragged on, with Beryl, now out of hospital, lying on the couch feeling dreadful and attacking Austin, calling him a coward because he got cold feet at the thought of hawking his pictures around galleries.

  On their return to Liverpool, Beryl made a final attempt to get some acting work. She had read in the Manchester Guardian that Otto Preminger was lo
oking to cast an unknown actress in the role of Joan of Arc for his forthcoming film adaptation of Shaw’s play, Saint Joan. Having already seen countless young actresses in America without success, Preminger had now come to England to hold an open audition, and so on 4 October Beryl sat among other would-be hopefuls in the anteroom of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. It was hardly a realistic plan – already four months pregnant she had to wear a corset to hide the bulge. Unsurprisingly she didn’t get the part, which eventually went to Jean Seberg.

  Now that acting work was ruled out and her condition precluded physical activity, Beryl passed the time at home in writing, using a typewriter for the first time. Prompted by the prospect of imminent motherhood, she began a projected series of children’s stories, the first of which was entitled ‘Ceedy Man and the Bellringers’. The stories, aimed at children of nursery or pre-school age, recount the amusing adventures of the eponymous Ceedy Man as he conducts his group of bellringers at various social events.

  Although Beryl was never an ardent advocate of technology, she decided to submit a tape-recorded version of her story to the BBC. The idea had originated in an evening she and Austin spent at the Greens’ a few years before, after Gordon had acquired a Baird reel-to-reel tape recorder and Beryl was able to listen to her own voice: ‘When it was played back I sounded very clear and well-spoken and a trifle hesitant, most surprising.’5 Austin had been taken with the machine and subsequently bought a Grundig, which Beryl used to record her stories.6

  The first story was submitted to Denness Roylance, head of Children’s Hour at BBC Manchester. In August he wrote back saying he wanted to include it in the Nursery Sing Song programme for September and asked whether she could come over and read it herself.7

  ‘Ceedy Man and the Bellringers’ is not, it is fair to say, a classic piece of children’s literature. The stories were aimed at too young an audience to allow for any depth of characterization or narrative substance that might give them a broader or lasting appeal. One would have to look long and hard to find anything that might be considered an allusion, however distant, to a meaningful event or experience in Beryl’s own life. Almost any passage from the stories gives as good a flavour of the whole as any other. This is the opening of the title story:

  Ceedy Man and the Bellringers lived in a very nice little house next door to the farm. Ceedy Man wore blue trousers and a little red jacket with gold buttons down the front, and on his head a jolly little straw hat with a curly brim. The Bellringers wore blue trousers too, and little red jackets with gold buttons down the front, but on their heads they wore little round, yellow caps. Because Ceedy Man wasn’t actually a Bellringer himself. No, he was the conductor and wrote all the music while the others did what he told them.

  There were five Bellringers. There was Mrs H. who rang the very tiny bell because her hands were so small, and Maison Dixey who was very fat and rang the biggest bell. And there was Mr Ta-Ta who played the next to largest bell, and William Henry and Bluebell who played the duets and had their names on the programme in a special kind of print because they were different from the others. They all played every where on all the great occasions in the village. At weddings and birthdays and christenings, and sometimes when any important visitor arrived at the station and was met by the Mayor.8

  Although the BBC recordings have long since been wiped, Beryl’s distinctive reading style undoubtedly gave the stories a quality that is lacking on the printed page. The BBC seemed happy with the result, and a follow-up story, ‘Ceedy Man and the Christening’, was broadcast at the end of November. Six months later another story was commissioned, and in June 1957 Beryl returned to the studios in Manchester to read ‘Ceedy Man and the Mysterious Visitor’.9 Despite their relatively insubstantial nature, the stories provided Beryl with her first positive experience of writing, showing that it was possible to earn money with her pen: for writing and reading each story she received £7.7s (this was when the BBC still paid fees in guineas), as well as her ten-shilling return fare to Manchester.

  At the same time as she was producing these anodyne stories Beryl conceived another writing project that was a truer reflection of her personal and creative interests. The catalyst was a report in a two-year-old newspaper, about the New Zealand murder case in which Honorah Parker was killed by her teenage daughter and her best friend. The trial, referred to as the Parker-Hulme case after the names of the two girls involved, was the subject of considerable coverage in the Liverpool Echo, after the news broke on 8 August 1954. Beryl was probably drawn to the story not just because one of the girls, Juliet Hulme, was originally from Southport, but because there were a number of parallels between the obsessional friendship of the two murderers and her own intense friendship with Lynda South. Parker and Hulme both kept diaries, and they also wrote letters to each other using adopted personas, not unlike Beryl and Lyn who had written themselves into their own fictional stories and whose letters often blended fact and fantasy. In much the same way that Parker and Hulme’s parents were unhappy at the closeness of the two girls’ friendship, Beryl’s and Lyn’s parents each suspected their daughter’s friend of being an unhealthy influence.

  The Parker-Hulme case may have been the inspiration for ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, as Beryl called the resulting novel, but it is in no way a fictional version of it. In fact Beryl used a procedure that served as a template for a number of her later books, incorporating elements of her own experience or those of people she knew into a plot structure taken from a newspaper story. In later life, Beryl would repeatedly describe the novels that resulted from this process of blending real life and fiction as ‘autobiographical’,10 though they are not autobiographical in any strict sense of the term.

  This is clear even from a casual reading of the text. Leaving aside the murder itself, the book is full of incidents that have no correlation to the actual events of Beryl’s life: she was not locked in the church with George Greggs; she and Lyn did not spy on him and his wife having sex in their living room; nor did George ply her with drink as a child in an attempt to seduce her. Added to which, as Beryl’s diaries show, ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ is not based on her experiences as a thirteen-year-old, but on her and Lyn’s semi-playful, but ethically dubious, flirtation with George in 1953 when she was almost twenty-one.11

  Although a complete manuscript from this period no longer exists, a number of handwritten drafts do, along with some pages from what looks to be a typescript that was sent to publishers. From these it is clear that ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ would have been a stunning debut novel. Although obviously in need of serious copy-editing, the text is in many places almost identical to the book Beryl published under the title Harriet Said in 1972.

  The manuscript of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ also reveals something of Beryl’s working methods. Despite having a typewriter, Beryl preferred to write out sections in long hand, which she would read through again and amend. This draft would then be typed out, in the course of which it would undergo more revisions. Later, when she had children, Beryl would say that she wrote at night because that was when the children were asleep, but this habit seems to have formed early on, as one of the pages of the manuscript contains a note to Austin written late at night and left for him to see in the morning.

  In a somewhat symbolic piece of timing, Beryl finished the manuscript of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ and gave birth to her first child at around the same time – February 1957 – though it would not be until the end of May that she had a clean typed copy to send out to publishers.

  The first publisher Beryl approached, Hodder & Stoughton, turned it down. Hodder must have returned the manuscript sometime in the autumn, as John McDougall at Chapman & Hall, the next publisher on Beryl’s list, wrote to reject it in December, though he at least offered some encouragement: ‘We have read with some interest, and some distress, the typescript of your first novel, THE SUMMER OF THE TSAR. We found much in it to praise and consider it a very creditable effort as a first a
ttempt from an author of your age.’12

  The ambivalence of the letter piqued Beryl – if they thought it praiseworthy and creditable, why did they turn it down? She wrote back, asking them to explain in what way it was distressing and why they thought it an ‘unfortunate subject’ for a novel given the wide exposure in the press that the New Zealand murder case had received. McDougall replied:

  I quite understand that the newspaper case only served to set your imagination on its way, and I suppose that your picture of two girls looking in a sort of existentialist way for experience is a logical development of the theme. But what repulsive little creatures you have made them, repulsive almost beyond belief! And I think the scene in which the two men and the two girls meet in the Tsar’s house is too indecent and unpleasant even for these lax days. What is more, I fear, that even now a respectable printer would not print it!

  If you don’t get someone else to show interest in this book I shall of course be glad to see your next. But you shouldn’t take my word on this one; why not try it on some other house?13

  A few months later she took McDougall’s advice, sending off the manuscript to Anthony Brett-Jones at Chatto & Windus. Despite praising the novel even more fully – he was perceptive enough to pick up on its black humour – and offering some positive encouragement, he too refused it:

  Although we have decided with regret that we cannot make you an offer of publication, we have been distinctly impressed with your novel, which is freshly and audaciously written, has a personal flavour, and contains some effective comic passages . . . We feel that the book hovers rather uneasily between the lighthearted and the grave, between near-farce action and near-tragic, and it would . . . be rather a difficult novel to sell . . . However, we admire the talent you display in this work and should be keenly interested to see anything else you may write in the future.14