Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Shortly afterwards she told Mick that she was pregnant. His response was hardly effusive, though he tried to reassure her he was prepared to do the right thing: ‘You must become official so to speak with no more furtiveness at home . . . In the meantime I want you to cease worrying and, despite all that has happened, begin to believe that I love you and am to be trusted.’35

  But she continued to feel ‘incredibly panic stricken at the thought of the future’.36 What would happen to her if she went through with the pregnancy and Mick abandoned her? She already feared Austin’s reaction to finding out she was pregnant when her relationship with Mick was so precarious. How would she cope if Austin withdrew his financial support?

  Overwhelmed with anxiety, at the end of January 1960 she took matters into her own hands, as Maggie recalled: ‘One morning Mrs Taylor, the Irish woman who used to come and help Beryl, was screaming in the street that she couldn’t get in. Eventually she got in and the children were in their bedroom, and Beryl must have been lying in the other room, pretty out of it: she tried to abort, and Mrs Taylor was quite, quite het up, quite frantic, so she rang Beryl’s doctor and she was taken to hospital.’37

  In her diary Beryl wrote about the incident in muted terms: ‘I have been in hospital with a 16-week miscarriage, and felt very ill.’38 The miscarriage was most probably brought on by the same method Austin had tried to procure for Anne Lindholm: ‘slippery elm’. This is a type of elm bark that is inserted into the cervix, where it absorbs water and expands (and becomes slippery, hence the name), dilating the cervix and triggering contractions. Before abortion was legalized it was commonly used to terminate unwanted pregnancies, but it was a risky procedure to say the least, and infections could be life-threatening. In Beryl’s case she haemorrhaged and required a blood transfusion.39 Cyril Taylor took her to Liverpool Stanley Hospital where ‘an incomplete abortion was cleared out for her in the theatre’,40 after which she made a good recovery and was discharged.

  While Beryl was in hospital Brenda moved into the house on Huskisson Street to look after the children. She remembered Mick coming round one night and asking where Beryl was, but she refused to tell him. Winnie, too, wanted to know where Beryl was – she seems to have sensed something was going on but didn’t know what. Brenda, aware that Beryl didn’t want her mother to find out, fobbed her off whenever she rang by telling her: ‘Oh she’s just gone out for ciggies . . .’41

  But the end of the pregnancy didn’t mean an end to Beryl’s worries, and the process involved in instigating a divorce did little to help matters. Once solicitors were hired,42 she had to prepare a Petition of Divorce, which meant going over everything that had happened in fine detail. Meetings with Austin to talk about it not only stirred up bitterness and resentment, they also brought to mind memories of the person she’d fallen in love with:

  Austin came at four to discuss divorce. Wanted to shout and break things. He looks at me as if he actually dislikes me. Such distaste in me. The love I held deep in me for him. The warmth in the long nights. As if it never happened. Oh God why does anyone get born? His worn face when he said he had a girl now who would do for hotel evidence. The lines on his forehead. The gentleness when he held Jo-Jo on his lap. The invisible wall between us. The cancellation of beauty, truth, such a young love, since I was sixteen. Oh Austin, Austin, where are you?43

  Beryl began to wonder whether she’d made a mistake, and friends told her things that seemed to hint that Austin regretted the break-up. Ronnie Armstrong said he knew Austin still cared for her, but that ‘his pride would not let him admit it’, and he had been ‘shattered’ by Beryl’s interest in Mike.44 She started to see their relationship through the nostalgic lens of the past, and mourn for what she’d lost:

  If one could pretend that time was returnable, that all these years could be got back. The time we went the Good Friday walk . . . ‘I need you Beryl, don’t ever let go’. The running through the streets in the rain with his birthday book, the crying in the basement, the beauty of him. Darling Austin, so much of one is you, and you find me so hateful now. All the talking we did, the future in the taxi, the two unborn children, the house for us and the Greens, my heart will break. For all love lost, all dreams gone, all hope spilled away . . . I wish I was someone else. Someone less born to be made miserable. I wave my tiny fists helplessly, hitting out so futilely against destiney . . . But the pain of it all. Oh god deliver us. Never to know any peace. Austin sleep please. Children grow up, me grow old, die quickly. Stop all this nonsense.45

  Despite the ongoing divorce proceedings, as Beryl had foreseen months before, Mick got cold feet on the question of marriage. He confessed as much to her during a long weekend away in Cemaes, a small village on the north coast of Anglesey. Beryl would refer to the incident a few years later in her novel A Weekend with Claud:

  Four days on a windy beach, a drink of coffee in a shop at night, some drinks in a garden. ‘I can’t, after all, marry you,’ and up the road goes my love with thirty shillings of mine and the bowler on his head . . .46

  By this point, though, Beryl, had come to a similar conclusion herself: ‘I don’t feel I should marry again. It seems a little foolish. Like being caught in a thunderstorm and jumping into the sea for safety. And me not able to swim.’47

  But Mick’s next decision came out of the blue. He told her he’d been offered a job as a legal consultant to a mining firm near Mount Isa in Australia and had decided to accept. He tried to sugar-coat the pill, saying that he was going in order to earn enough money so they could afford to set up house. But he could hardly have chosen anywhere further away, and the distance he was putting between them seemed symbolic as well as literal. At the end of the summer Beryl accompanied him to Manchester airport, and he stepped onto a plane bound for Sydney. It would be nearly three years before she saw him again.

  SEVENTEEN

  I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering

  To be frank it would have been almost impossible to find a time when Maggie would not be placing herself in a position of unfaithfulness, her affairs came so thick and fast. Any breathing space between lovers was in the matter of days, and those ritualistically taken up with grief and sobbing, and such pronouncements as ‘God, I’ll never go through that again Norman. If you knew how it hurt . . .’1

  There is nothing like a night shore under flying stars in a flying world to make one ask questions out loud to oneself. One in particular keeps cropping up. Who are you, Beryl Bainbridge?2

  With Mick away indefinitely in Australia, Beryl was effectively living as a single woman for the first time for as long as she could remember. In some senses the period between his departure and his eventual return in 1963 was one of relative calm – if only in comparison to the fraught two years that had preceded it. This was partly due to the social support network that Huskisson Street provided, a diverse group of friends, lodgers and neighbours who would call in at all hours, gathering round the kitchen table with its blue oilcloth ‘stained by the ringed indentures of dozens of mugs of tea’, drinking and ‘endlessly talking . . . talking’.3

  One of these Huskisson Street regulars was Leah Davis, a Jewish woman in her sixties who, despite her abrasive qualities and eccentricities, Beryl befriended in the late 1950s.4 They had probably met through Cyril Taylor, whose family, like Leah’s, came from Russia; and like Cyril, Leah had ties to the Unity Theatre and the Communist movement. In an unpublished television play Beryl wrote during this period, ‘I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering’, she drew a portrait of Leah under the name Esther: ‘Jewish. Very. Heavy spectacles. Grey hair with a bit of a pigtail under a black beret. Stout. She keeps her coat on and has several heavy bangles on her wrists, and scarves about her throat. She has a big handbag full of letters, cuttings of newspapers. Her voice is cultured, even theatrical.’5

  Leah was an acquired taste. There were many who, finding her too loud or too confrontational, couldn’t get on with her and actively avoided her – whic
h only increased her already overdeveloped sense of paranoia. She was given to vituperative outbursts, both in person and in her letters: ‘I wish I never saw a living creature again,’ she once complained to Beryl. ‘Everywhere I turn, disillusionment & hypocracy. How I hate them all.’6

  Nevertheless, Beryl was fascinated by her, feeling that Leah was like a version of herself ‘taken to extremes of Jewish disintegration forty years hence’.7 ‘She has such a lovely way with words,’ Beryl would say, even if her habitual expressions were typically doom-laden and full of resignation: ‘There is a moment when everything is too late’ or ‘Sometimes the book closes for ever.’8

  Another Huskisson Street regular was Stanley Haddon, the bass clarinettist of the Liverpool Philharmonic. Fifteen years older than Beryl, he had been married twice and was in the process of divorcing his second wife. He had something of a reputation as a womanizer, so when he and Brenda started seeing each other Beryl would keep Judith informed of the state of their fractious relationship in her sporadic round-up of local gossip: ‘Brenda and Stanley are still together in shingle nail biting harmoney, which is no harmoney at all,’ she wrote at one point; and again a few months later, ‘Brenda and Stanley still bickering.’9

  By mid-1961 Austin’s money problems had necessitated a number of changes in the living arrangements of the house, with Beryl vacating the first floor, which was now let out to Austin’s stepbrother and his wife, Bruce and Edna Parry. Whether as a result of the GRON parties or not, Nellie the sitting tenant on the second floor had also left (‘Nellie, not cherished, but gone, leaving a table and one light bulb’),10 to be replaced by a more sedate couple who paid a proper rent. In order to maximize the rental income, it was decided that the back studio should be let and Beryl set about finding a suitable candidate. Someone mentioned a man they knew who was ‘quiet and clean and did not like meeting people’, so she arranged for him to come round:

  When I opened the door he was small and Victorian, and straight down trousers without a turn-up when everyone else had turn-ups, and a high collar with round edges like my Father wore, and under the flat peaked cap a face like Harry had, eyes turned down at the corners and a nose with wide nostrils and a long thin lip . . .

  There was a fire in the living room, which was a nice room . . . and I felt very like a landlady, which I was, and very formal. I started to say that I did like to be quiet, but he did not stop at a distance to listen but advanced closer and closer, neck stuck out like a tortoise above the wing collar, head inclined slightly, till we were nose to nose and he squinted at my mouth . . .11

  When the prospective lodger started smacking her on the bottom with his cap she at first thought it was some kind of sexual advance, before realizing that she’d been standing too close to the fire and he was beating out her burning skirt. Or at least that is the version of events given in A Weekend with Claud.

  The new lodger’s name was Harry Mohin,12 a thirty-one-year-old compositor who worked on the Daily Post. Born in Liverpool but of Irish extraction, Harry lived and breathed politics. He had early on been drawn to the Communist Party and was active in the trade union movement. He seemed to have a knack for getting on with people instantly, to connect even with those holding opposing viewpoints to his own. Harry was also very particular in the matter of clothes, frequenting a gentleman’s tailor at the back of Lord Street, where he would go to have his suits made to measure in real Harris Tweed.13

  Harry and Beryl got on immediately, and they would sit up late, talking into the early hours. She would confide in him about her feelings, about the ‘unbearable meloncholy sadness of her supposed world, a private globe in which she lies impossibly mangled with unending imagined conflicts’.14 Although the issue of sex was taken out of the equation early on and she refused him ‘the solace of her bed’,15 she would embark on long and detailed discussions about the state of her love life and about her current lover, ‘his minute perversions, his vast inhibitions’.16 Like Leah, Harry would feature in A Weekend with Claud, where he appears as ‘Victorian Norman’, one of the novel’s three narrators.

  It was on one of the evenings drinking and talking round the kitchen table with Harry, Leah and Stanley that a telephone call came through from Winnie, ringing to tell her that Richard had just had a coronary thrombosis and was being rushed off to hospital. The prognosis didn’t look good – ‘He’s going, Beryl’ – and indeed he died in the ambulance on the way to Southport infirmary.

  Her father’s death evoked a confusion of feelings in Beryl, varying from the sentimental ‘my little Dad . . .’17 to the bitter ‘Oh the hate I bore for him so many years ago.’18 During his final years her relationship with him had deteriorated again, probably the result of her separation from Austin: Richard considered it unseemly for both Austin and Beryl to be carrying on with other people while they were technically still married. Years later, in an article recalling the year 1959, Beryl wrote that when he and Winnie came to visit her father wouldn’t come into the house and stayed in the car, and that he was patently uncomfortable meeting Mick when she brought him to a Christmas party.

  The funeral was held at St Peter’s in Formby on 20 December 1961. When the priest recalled how ‘cheerful he always was’ and how he had ‘a zest for life’, Beryl’s immediate reaction was a bitter one: ‘God forgive those years and years of never speaking, take all that unhappiness away . . . did they think his eyes looked like that because he was a cheerful man, a merry man?’19 But as the funeral cortege left the church the image of her father as a child onstage about to sing ‘Lily of Laguna’ provoked a more tender response: ‘One foot after the other we track the vanishing body . . . going now my Lily of Laguna, out of the door, O he’s my lily and my rose, gone, carried by four strangers towards a millennium of sleep.’20

  Frustrated by the latest failure of ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ to find a publisher (‘Very sorry to have to tell you that it is not quite right for Weidenfeld and Nicolson’),21 Beryl began to take her painting more seriously. With Austin in London she could paint more freely, without feeling her work was being constantly inspected or criticized. Painting during the day when the children were at nursery school,22 she began to develop her own style, using thick layers of paint and dark ochrish colours. She concentrated on domestic scenes – the back yard of the house, the children playing on the sofa, in the bath – or on portraits of the people around her, including Leah, Harry, Stanley and the children. A group portrait from this period, entitled Three Friends, features Leah, Beryl and Harry seated at the kitchen table in Huskisson Street.

  Beryl may have made a small amount of money from selling her paintings, but for the most part she seems to have given them away. Acting was more profitable, even if with two young children it was difficult to commit to the demands of theatre work. Instead, she took small roles or walk-on parts for television, which paid well and wasn’t too time-consuming. Her first job was a small part in the Granada television series Biggles, in an episode entitled Biggles on Mystery Island, which aired on 22 July 1960.

  This led to a part in the long-running television series Knight Errant Limited. The episode, in which she played Elspeth Walker, was entitled ‘Baker’s Dozen’ and broadcast on 22 December 1960, though it was later wiped, as were all but two of the others. Even the series producer, Denis Forman, seems to have been embarrassed by it: ‘the memory of it still makes me shudder’.23

  Shortly afterwards Beryl got what would become her most famous television part, playing Ginnie, one of Ken Barlow’s girl friends (rather than his girlfriend), in an early episode of Coronation Street, then in its first season. The creator of the series, Tony Warren, had, like Beryl, been a child actor on Children’s Hour, though this doesn’t seem to have been a factor in her getting the part, and she featured in only one episode. In it, Beryl is ostensibly helping to prepare posters for a ‘Ban the Bomb’ march, though in practice she spends most of her time lounging on a sofa doing her make-up. It wasn’t a great performance – be
ing more experienced at projecting her voice to theatre audiences, she wasn’t used to the more intimate, natural delivery needed for the television camera – but she looked every inch the part, with her tight slacks, bobbed hair, pouting expression and rebellious attitude.

  Her next television part was in the Granada Television series Family Solicitor, which starred Robert Fleming and Geoffrey Palmer. In an hour-long episode called ‘Slander’, broadcast on 14 September 1961, Beryl played the role of Linda Baxter: ‘Quite a nice little bit, small but eloquent with repressed meaning’, as she told Judith.24 This would, however, be her last television work for nearly ten years. Although Beryl succeeded in getting into a series in which she featured as a returning character, her briefly raised hopes of earning some serious money collapsed when Sidney Bernstein, the head of Granada Television, pulled the plug: ‘My TV job, like so much else, has dissolved like so much milk on the cloth, spilt . . . I did five, and was paid well, but then they scrapped the whole series. It cost Mr Bernstein 20,000 pounds, so I suppose he may be suffering more than me.’25

  Although Beryl would later come to realize that her affair with Mick had effectively ended when he bought his plane ticket to Sydney, they had not broken up formally and for the moment she still retained a hope that the relationship would resume once he returned, or even that she might go out to Australia to join him. The latter option was hardly realistic and when she mentioned it to Austin, now working as an art lecturer at East Ham Technical College, it immediately provoked a scathing response. To him it seemed as if Beryl’s emotional over-dependence on men was leading her to make unwise decisions that threatened to take his children out of his reach: ‘Perhaps if you can understand more,’ he told her: