by Brendan King
At the time Beryl was too insecure to take anything positive from these comments and became very discouraged about her writing.15 Consequently, it would be a number of years before she tried fiction again and instead she turned to painting as a more immediate creative outlet, though this decision was probably also a result of the difficulty of trying to write while looking after a young baby.
On 5 February 1957 Beryl gave birth by forceps delivery to a boy. Although registered as Paul Aaron, the baby’s first name was quickly dropped as Beryl had always liked the sound of Aaron, which had been inspired by D. H. Lawrence’s 1922 novel, Aaron’s Rod. This didn’t go down well with her father. His objection was in no way anti-Semitic – Beryl always adduced her own empathy for Jews to her father’s influence – but rather stemmed from a feeling that Beryl was being deliberately unconventional in her decision to spurn traditional Bainbridge family names. He felt it was pretentious, another example of her showing off.
Richard nevertheless idolized his grandson, though he persisted in calling him Paul: ‘Come on little chickie, sit on Grandpa’s knee, little Paul. I love you . . . Kiss your old Grandpa, Paul.’16 Despite Cyril Taylor’s concerns during the pregnancy, Aaron was a healthy baby, almost too healthy: ‘He threatens to weigh 3 stone before his 5 month,’ as Beryl informed Judith. ‘His legs are monuments of pillargetic art. Not that he stands squarely on them by any means. You could hold a cigarette in the folds of his knees. Nothing fits him, he has grown out of his 2nd year vests.’17
In July, Austin took the family on holiday to Barcenaciones, a small village near Santander in Spain. Somewhat rashly, he decided to go by car. The previous year he had bought a pre-war Austin London taxi that must have looked extravagantly antiquated even in the 1950s, and thereby joined a growing band of vintage motor-car enthusiasts in the neighbourhood, such as Fritz Spiegl who had a 1924 Rolls Royce, and Mike Pugh Thomas who had a Bull-nose Morris. In a letter to Judith Shackleton four days after acquiring their taxi, Beryl excitedly drew a picture and described it: ‘This is ours. It is a 1935 Taxi, huge with a John Peel horn, and a hood that lets down, and in beautiful condition. It holds about 10 people and is lovely. No more hiring taxi’s, this will carry the Walker Art Gallery. It cost £40, and so far it is running beautifully. Austin is very much the proud Papa, and leans out of the window all day to admire it.’18
But the taxi, christened ‘Leocardia’ by Beryl,19 had its drawbacks. There were no locks, it was awkward to drive, and the driver had to sit in his own compartment separated off from passengers in the rear, the space next to him being used to store luggage. The idea of driving it – with a five-month-old child on board – on a journey of over 800 miles across France and into Spain was adventurous to say the least, but despite a number of scary moments along the way, against all odds the car made it, as Beryl later recounted to the Shackletons:
I do not know how to begin. The sleeping out at night was awful. Such a diving of mosquitos and a crawling of wee and untimerous beasties I have never known. I feel I am scarred for life. My screams and sudden alarms have been heard across France. In France Austin remembered we were in Emile Zola country, ‘Earth, do you know it? Very sensual and bad and sensational.’ One early morning being fast in a ditch in a field I walked to a farm for help, saying over my shoulder to Austin I wondered if they had heard of Emile Zola. Came a big exasperated row, because he thought I wanted to discuss books and he was still in the ditch. We did not speak for a day and a half. We ate loaves and cheese and lemonade for four days, while Leocardia steamed steadily on . . . The villa was horrid, like a brown box with a hat on, and no furniture or carpets, and that is all. Then Donna Catalina arrived to bid us welcome to Spain. She is 79, Irish and delightfully incoherent. She lives in a Palazio across the way, an immense building with a tower of pink stone, and wodern galliries running all the way round the four stories. When we said we thought the villa a little bare she thoughtfully hammered in three nails to hang our somberos on.
We have a bath of spiders, and sort of hot water. The lavabo does not work, and there is a bidet, also broken. We share electric light, which means tonight we have it, tomorrow we don’t . . . Two days ago a lady with a bosem strung with pearls and a pair of tortoishell glasses arrived and sat in our hall for 6 hours. We could think of nothing to say. The next day she returned. Donna C. informed us she was a prostitute and would stay a day and a night for 100 piasetas.
The car, a rare enough sight in rural Spain, caused disruption and amazement wherever they went: ‘The beach we go to is hot and mostly deserted. All the way there we have a triumphant ride. Donkeys race ahead, their riders screaming out a warning to the villagers, children are snatched up, cattle beaten frantically into the ditch, a harsh cry of wonderment and awe. Austin grinning like a fiend honks the horn and doffs his sombero. An old man on seeing us suddenly jumped [into] a hedge and his wife waved her fist at us. Leocardia being covered with a fine white dust is looking superb.’
But even without the car they were objects of curiosity in this pre-mass-tourism era:
Twice we have been approached by civil gaurd carrying bren guns. We have been once to a biggish town Torre la Vega, but the people stood silently in a ring round us and followed us from stall to stall. There is something unnerving about a fleet figure running down a side street and reappearing with several others to stand silently and with disbelieving eyes, to watch us go by. Also there were sheep tied by their feet, lying in the street on their backs, giving cries like desperate hungry children stricken with croup. And a hen with a crushed leg, quite mute, with its face to the kerb. I did try to be aloof and unbritish, but all me instincts were to write a letter to the Times.20
At the start of 1958 Beryl got an offer of a two-week stint in a production of Jeannie, due to open at the Liverpool Playhouse in February. It was a play she had studied ten years previously with Mrs Ackerley in order to practise her Scottish accent. But Austin’s hopes that this signalled a more permanent return to work in the theatre were dashed again. By the time the play opened, Beryl discovered she was two months pregnant. She received a mention for her ‘neat cameo’ in the part of Maggie, acting alongside the future Coronation Street star Thelma Barlow, but it would be the last time Beryl appeared on a theatre stage.
Realizing that the top-floor flat at Catharine Street was unsuitable for his growing family, Austin began looking round for somewhere larger with its own garden. In June he took on a leasehold mortgage for £900 and purchased a terraced house, 22 Huskisson Street, just round the corner from Catharine Street. The new house represented a step up from a flat, with its extra space and garden. On the ground floor was a large living room with a fireplace, its walls covered in Sanderson wallpaper with a Sicilian lion motif, a studio at the back, in which Austin could paint, and the kitchen; upstairs was the bedroom with its large brass bed, the children’s nursery and the bathroom.
There were, however, some idiosyncrasies that took a bit of getting used to. The bathroom contained a tub rather than a proper bath, and the large copper boiler that bulged from the wall was notoriously difficult to light. It made a deafening retort when it finally caught, and the rest of the time it produced a slight but constant smell of gas. The bathroom and boiler would feature in one of Beryl’s paintings of the time, which shows the children playing in the tub. Beryl herself made do with washing in the sink.
Something else that took some getting used to was the fact there was a sitting tenant in a self-contained flat on the second floor, Nellie Zealandia Liddiard, who owned the Liddiard clinic in Bold Street specializing in hair removal through electrolysis. Nellie’s increasingly eccentric attitude – Beryl claimed she had a phobia about electricity and wore rubber gloves to switch the lights on – began to get bothersome and one night she was found in the children’s bedroom waving a torch. Eventually, in an attempt to force her out, Beryl would organize GRON (Get Rid of Nellie) parties, and these finally resulted in her moving out in 1961.
Ther
e were other eccentric characters on the street as well. Just down the road was Dr Kefalas, who lived on the corner at number 14. Beryl referred to him as ‘the mad doctor’. In his late fifties, Dr Kefalas would come round unannounced and in the course of his visits give her graphic details of things he’d seen during his time in practice, such as when a man had stuck his fingers up a woman’s nostrils and tore them apart.21
Huskisson Street was still in the process of gentrification, and it was partly the resulting social mix, the poor living side by side with the newly affluent, that gave the area its dynamic. Brenda Powell, one of Austin’s art students who became a friend of Beryl’s, recalls that in the late 1950s prostitution was still rife in the neighbourhood. On summer evenings she and Beryl would sit with their legs sticking out of the first-floor window and resting on the small balcony, and watch the nightly ballet of policemen trying to chase prostitutes off their beat.22
On one side, her neighbours were the Wenton family, Beryl’s published recollections of whom were a typical mix of misinformation and exaggeration: ‘I lived . . . next door to an albino lady from Scotland who was married to a Portuguese West African. They had 19 children.’23 Beryl was fascinated by their seemingly unruly lifestyle, and her diary for 1959 records an incident in which the Wenton’s oldest son Ritchie met her by chance and proceeded to tell her he’d got into a little bother over an unwanted preganancy: ‘This morning Ritchie ruined my reputation with the butcher . . . We discussed at some length, while I chose the joint, the last paternity order. Said he told the girl’s brother he’d pull a flick knife on her if she bothered him. Butcher fairly goggled at this and charged me half as much again as usual for the modest lump of pork. Ritchie left by saying he was dodging “that coloured bastard me Dad”.’24
By a happy coincidence, Beryl discovered that she already knew her new neighbour on the other side, Maggie Gilby, having met her in September 1956. Beryl had been sitting in the back of the St Philip Neri church, watching Robin McGhie paint a mural, when Maggie happened to come in. The two women started talking and discovered they had friends in common. Maggie had moved into 20 Huskisson Street six months prior to Beryl’s arrival, and the fact that they were both young mothers – Maggie’s son had been born shortly after Aaron – sealed their friendship.
For Austin, the move to Huskisson Street was also part of a larger scheme to make money. Attracted by the large sums that were being made in property development, his plan was to use the house to generate income, renting it out as flats when he and Beryl eventually moved to London. In the meantime he was increasingly involving himself in other redevelopment plans. At the College of Art, Austin had met Sam Wanamaker, who, as the recently appointed director of the Shakespeare Theatre in Liverpool, had come up with the innovation of adding a dining club to the theatre. This idea inspired Austin to set up the Picasso Club, a casual, artist-friendly space in a derelict building in Upper Duke Street, where art students and lecturers could drink coffee and listen to music.
The Picasso Club was short-lived, but another venture soon afterwards offered the prospect of making some real money: Dorothy Green’s 23 Club. Like the Sandon Club, a popular meeting place for the artistic and intellectual community located in Liverpool’s Bluecoat Chambers, the 23 Club had aspirations of catering to a cultured clientele of artists and musicians, as it was located at 23 Hope Street, close to both the College of Art and the Philharmonic Hall. Dorothy turned for help to Austin, who, in turn, readily threw himself into the work, hoping to make enough money from the project to enable him to quit his teaching job and work full-time as a painter. In this, however, he would again be disappointed.
On 19 September 1958, Beryl gave birth to her second child, a daughter called Johanna Harriet, who soon acquired the nickname Jo-Jo. Beryl would later recall that winter ‘with nappies by the fire and Jo-Jo on my knee, breast dripping milk, faces flushed, everything warm and protective’.25 It was a wholesome, homely image, one that belied the growing tensions between herself and Austin. Within a year their marriage would come apart at the seams.
SIXTEEN
Separation
This year has been . . . a mad summer. So much happening. Bren and Fritz, me and Mick, Aus and I splitting, Pugh and Julie, Wendy and Terry Moran seperating, Stevenson divorcing. The whole structure disintegrating. And I so sure we were not like the others.1
The demands of setting up the 23 Club were considerable. Austin was still teaching at the Art College, so the work ate into his free time at weekends, when, in search of items to decorate the Club, he would go to Paddy’s market to buy up antique frames, pictures and small bits of furniture. Time spent at the Club meant time away from Beryl and the children, and inevitably there were conflicts.
In Austin’s defence, his view was that it was only by earning money that he and Beryl could have the lifestyle they wanted – and a successful and lucrative venture was even more imperative now they had a family. Well-intentioned as it may have been, Austin’s relentless work ethic didn’t make the demands of coping with two young children any easier. Brenda Powell, who helped Beryl out with baby-minding and shopping, felt that work on the 23 Club interfered with Austin’s home life: ‘Austin would come home and want to play with the kids, and then the phone would go, and it would be Dorothy Green: “We’ve been here since 5 o’clock, where are you?” Austin would go off again.’2
But while the heavy workload didn’t help, it wasn’t the cause of the problem. In later life, Beryl would give various reasons for the breakdown of her marriage. Sometimes she would lay the blame, half-jokingly, on Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, claiming that after reading it Austin had gone off to live the life of an artist.3 At others she would say it was the result of Austin’s infidelity, that on returning from hospital after the birth of Jo-Jo, she’d found the remains of a breakfast for two on the kitchen table.4 Variants of this account included Beryl peremptorily ordering him out of the house,5 and the notion that their break-up led to her becoming a novelist: Austin had abandoned her with two children, ‘So I started writing.’6
In reality the reasons for the breakdown were both more simple and more complicated than these neat, dramatic narratives allow, being the result of temperamental differences that had afflicted their relationship since its beginning. As far as Austin was concerned, Beryl was incapable of engaging with his interests on a rational, intellectual level: she was too emotional, making discussion impossible and arguments inevitable. He blamed himself for his inability to respond to what he saw as her neediness, but he found her impracticality, her irrationality, and her irresponsibility with money impossible to live with.7 For Beryl, the fact that Austin felt his relationship with her wasn’t enough was a personal reproach, a failure of love.
By the end of 1958 they were effectively leading separate lives, with Austin sleeping in the back studio. Things didn’t improve over the next few months and in July 1959, taking advantage of his extended summer break from college, Austin went to Paris in order to think about how Beryl and the children would fit into his future.
From the Hôtel de la Place de l’Odéon, close to the Jardin de Luxembourg, he wrote to Beryl, telling her he wanted to ‘improve matters and arrive at some understanding of myself. I must, you see, do something to attempt a solution.’8 As in his letters of the past, Austin’s references to beautiful and apparently predatory women seemed unconsciously designed to play on Beryl’s jealousy and confirm her suspicions about his fidelity: ‘Everybody keeps very much to themselves,’ he told her shortly after his arrival, ‘except for a very young and quite attractive American widow who keeps telling me in a most delightful southern accent that she sees no reason whatever for not going to bed with a man she likes the look of. All frightfully dull but think how the Frohlichs would approve!’
A week later he wrote again, telling her that he was having an ‘otherwise idyllic existence’ and hinting he was optimistic that things might work out: ‘I do nothing all day but loll about, write, draw
and occasionally think . . . I feel much quieter and more at peace and all those problems, which at one time appeared insuperable and infinitely depressing, seem now to be at least within range of solution.’9
This was all very well, but while Austin was in Paris indulging, as Beryl saw it, in abstract speculation about what it meant to be an artist, she was having to look after two young children. Irked by his complacent tone, she couldn’t resist the temptation to hit out, and in her reply she made a pointed comparison to Nora, Austin’s mother, likening his flight to Paris to her abandonment of her children in the name of art. The comment stung: ‘Reference to my parent could with sensitivity have been omitted,’ he responded, ‘this does you know, of course you know, torment me.’10 He attempted to justify himself, saying that like Henry Miller – he’d just been reading Tropic of Cancer – he was striving for the ‘quality of loneliness’ essential to him as an artist, even if it caused him ‘to suffer’ in his personal relationships.
As Austin walked the streets of Paris trying to find a ‘solution’, it must have seemed to both of them that things were reaching a point of no return.
Earlier in the year, when Austin was looking to sell the open-topped Crossley he’d acquired to replace the taxi ‘Leocardia’ on their return from Spain in 1957, he didn’t have far to look for a buyer. Hearing that the extravagantly stylish car he’d so often admired was for sale, Michael Green, a solicitor who lived further up the road at 36 Huskisson Street, immediately offered to buy it.
Mick, as he was more familiarly known, must have noticed that things were not going well between Austin and Beryl, and he was not insensible to Beryl’s attractions. He made his move one day in St James’s cemetery, while Beryl was taking Jo-Jo out for a walk. Beryl recalled the scene in an early draft of one of her novels: