Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  All the poems, the love songs, the half waking dreams of being in love and loved in return. Is it just an illusion? Cling tight to the illusions . . .

  All these days are very bad. I think too much about Don and I pity myself and I don’t know where to go. I think Austin will let me return but I’ll have to get a job to pay the rent. The thing is not that I want to go, but that I have to go. I love the house, these fields. I love Don, but he doesn’t seem to want to know anymore.

  I try so hard to be cheerful when he comes in. Outside the sheep graze, big black crows come down into the field. The cars go up the road to Holcombe. I look out of the window and the children watch television and then the door slams and they shout – Don’s here.

  He looks at me coolly. He goes off to draw then and I don’t follow because I don’t want to bother him.

  Its so ironic. Don’s not drinking, not staying out, not spending, the children are settled in school, the bills are being slowly paid, I keep everywhere clean, manage on very little, and yet its all fucked up to hell. What happened?29

  Trying to answer that question Beryl flipped between two equally unhelpful, emotionally damaging positions: first she would blame herself, then she would turn her anger and resentment on Don:

  He wasn’t like this in London. Why when I got here? What do I do wrong? Too gloomy, not very pretty, too probing, too wanting words, too much analysing . . . If he doesn’t want me thats his business. Too hell with him . . . If necessary I shall crawl to Austin and beg him to let me come back. I shall pretend its the schools, for the children’s sake. I will sacrifice all for the children . . . If I hadn’t been so vain as to think that Don would always love me I wouldn’t have come. If I hadn’t been so self-centred I would have worried more about the children. Here I am past 3 in the morning half cut on vodka, and all alone in a strange house and Don gone volentarily to a party because he wanted to . . . and he didn’t want me with him. So finally for ever, to hell with it.

  Perhaps the last straw was when Aaron went to London to see Austin and didn’t come back. At the time, Sheenagh, seeing how much Beryl missed Aaron, thought this was the reason she decided to leave Eaves Farm. But Beryl’s journal shows just how strained her relationship with Don had become by this stage, and though she goes over the causes of the breakdown of that relationship in agonizing detail, Aaron’s departure isn’t even mentioned. In any event, by now Don himself had had enough. Living with Beryl when she was in this emotionally paranoid state wasn’t easy: ‘Don said that it was all over and done with’,30 as Jo-Jo wrote in her diary on 26 August, after overhearing one of their arguments.

  The family who had rented Albert Street in Beryl’s absence were given notice to leave, and at the end of September Austin drove the van up to Eaves Farm again. The plants, the bits of furniture and the stuffed owl were loaded up again, and just before they set off Don, who had been unaware that Beryl had decided to leave, returned home from work. It was a sad parting. Beryl stood in the field crying and smoking, not saying anything. Sheenagh recalls being absolutely devastated as she waved goodbye to Jo and Rudi, whom she had grown to love. ‘Sheenagh’s eyes were watering, and she was crying,’ Jo noted in her diary, ‘I felt sorry for her.’31

  As she left, Beryl gave Don the journal she had been keeping. A note pasted into the front tried to sum things up:

  I don’t think this is really for you, more like for me. When communication goes there has to be some way to reach out, to record. When I have been happy it is because of you, when I have been unhappy that is because of you also.

  Here on the Farm, in the North, the six of us, the four growing beautiful children, and you and I, not really grown.

  I came here because I loved you and there was no way of not being with you, no way that is without being sad at losing you, for I would have lost you and indeed I did lose you.

  For a long time I ran round trying to have you and safety and London and everything else, but that came to an end, as it had to, the long days, just you and I, trembling at each other . . .

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Bottle Factory

  On Christmas Eve, somewhat the worse for party spirit, I was trundled home in a pram. My neglectful nurse-maid, summoned by a neighbour to more festivities, parked me by the hedge and went inside. I woke at dawn, rained upon and doubled up, without even a woolly blanket for comfort.1

  Back in Albert Street there were a number of practical issues that needed sorting out, such as organizing schools and redecorating the house. The children of the American family who had rented it for the last six months had left finger paintings all over the walls, or as Jo-Jo put it: ‘Dam tennents just walked out leaving a stinking mess.’2

  Another pressing subject was that of earning money. For some time past Austin had been living in the basement, but now he and Belinda were married and expecting their first child they had moved into a run-down terraced house in Islington. Austin couldn’t support two households indefinitely, so Beryl would have to find work to help make ends meet.

  Although Belinda always got on well with Beryl, there were inevitable tensions over what she saw as Beryl’s over-reliance, both emotionally and financially, on Austin. She found Beryl particularly exasperating when she played on Austin’s guilt feelings about leaving the children. After Austin and Belinda moved out, Beryl would often phone them in the evening, wanting Austin to come over to Albert Street and sort out some ‘crisis’ to do with the children, or what would appear to most people to be a quite trivial practical matter regarding the house. Beryl’s impracticality when it came to money and household expenses was another cause of friction, as Belinda recalled:

  Money was always extremely tight, and we lived very frugally, so when we visited Beryl in the depths of winter to find her wafting about in very thin clothes while the central heating blazed away it was a bit galling, since we were paying the bills. On a number of occasions we found the front door wide open and all the heat escaping. She also refused to let us do a supermarket shop for her to stock up the fridge for the growing children – she said they would just descend like a plague of locusts and it would all be gone. She preferred to pay more at the small shop round the corner.3

  The subject of money was therefore a touchy one. ‘How dare she tell me to get a job?’ Beryl would complain to Austin if ever Belinda questioned her on the issue. Nevertheless, Beryl did find work, though most of the jobs were of a temporary or short-lived nature. One of these was a series of uncredited performances in the television series Doomwatch. The programme, which featured John Paul, Simon Oates and Robert Powell as a team of quasi-autonomous investigators, examining threats from aberrant or misguided scientific research, would become a minor cult classic. It was a kind of proto X-Files, but with hammier, less convincing plot lines and frequently stilted acting, especially from John Paul as Dr Spencer Quist.

  It’s not clear how Beryl became involved, but it may have been through Kevin Stoney, the actor she’d had a crush on in Dundee nearly twenty years before, who starred in the first episode. In any case, these were not acting roles as such, simply extra work: in the surviving recordings Beryl can be seen in the background, as part of a group of customers standing at a bar or as a seated diner in a restaurant. In one episode she appears as a nurse, and in another as a WRAF officer. In all she appeared in seven episodes (two of which were wiped): the first, ‘Tomorrow the Rat’, was filmed on 20 December 1969 and broadcast on 2 March 1970, and the last, ‘Flight into Yesterday’, filmed over a year later on 19 January 1971 and broadcast on 1 February.4 The schedule roughly consisted of a day’s shooting, with the episode being broadcast a month or so later. Although the work was sporadic, it didn’t take up too much time and it was relatively well paid, Beryl receiving five guineas for each day’s shooting.

  It was around this time that Beryl met Pauline Mani, who lived round the corner on Mornington Street and who ran one of the local playgroups. Her son, Johnny, was the same age as Rudi and went to the same sc
hool. Pauline was certainly a character, a larger-than-life figure in many senses. A Scot by birth, she was almost six feet tall and blonde: many people found her an imposing presence. ‘She was large, and she was overpowering,’5 recalled the filmmaker James Scott, who lived further up Albert Street. As one of the organizers of the Albert Street carnival he and his wife had got to know Pauline well and remembered her with affection. To Scott she was ‘Paula’, but to Beryl, fascinated by her abrasive personality and the extravagant stories she told about her life, she was familiarly referred to as ‘Fat Pauline’.

  Pauline was, like Beryl, a single mother and her dealings with men had been, if anything, even more fraught than Beryl’s. Johnny’s Nigerian father had left her and returned to his native country when his son was still an infant, and her subsequent marriage to Moshe Mani in 1967 was short-lived. Her experiences with men had left her embittered: ‘My mother was a very angry woman,’ Johnny told the Camden Journal, and her heavy drinking, which eventually led to her death in 2003, made her a dangerous woman to get too close to. Don’s blunt comment, ‘What the fuck are you doing with Pauline, keep away from her’6 probably represented the feelings of more than one of Beryl’s acquaintances.

  In the early months of 1970, after coming across an advertisement in the local post office,7 Beryl and Pauline started part-time work at Belloni’s, a wine warehouse situated on the corner of Albert Street and Parkway. Although they would only work there for a short time, it was a suitably bizarre experience and Beryl would later turn it to good account in her novel The Bottle Factory Outing.

  Beryl’s job was to stick labels onto wine bottles by hand – this was in a pre-automated era – and most of her fellow workers were Italian immigrants who didn’t speak much English. Although they were congenial enough, the factory itself wasn’t an ideal workplace. For a start it was a large building, difficult and uneconomic to heat during winter. Beryl was so cold she used to wrap herself in sheets of newspaper beneath her jumper to keep warm. Hearing of this, her friend Lili Todes gave her a white woollen coat. The next time Lili saw it, the sleeves were stained in red up to the elbow.8

  The work wasn’t very well paid, but one of the dubious compensations was that you could drink as much as you liked. This aspect of the job was one that Beryl tended to play up in interviews and she would frequently claim that she had to be ‘wheeled home every afternoon on a trolley’,9 or that they ‘had to carry me home by 10.30’10 in the morning. In private, however, whenever Rudi challenged her and said she remembered coming back to Albert Street after school to find her drunk, that she was moody or aggressive, and sometimes even unconscious on the sofa, Beryl would vigorously deny it. Either way, even if it was only a sporadic occurrence, having to deal with a drunken parent would have been a scary and unsettling experience for a six-year-old child, and over the years to come Beryl’s immoderate drinking would be the catalyst for many family arguments.

  Towards the end of 1971 Beryl and Pauline got involved in another temporary job together, this time on one of James Scott’s film projects. Scott had previously made short documentaries on subjects such as Richard Hamilton and R. B. Kitaj, but was now looking to experiment with a longer, less restrictive, format. Shot for the most part in a friend’s flat during November and December 1971, the result was Adult Fun, Scott’s first feature-length film, which he later described as ‘a semi-documentary thriller set in the world of industrial espionage’. Although the main characters were played by professional actors, such as Peter Marinker, Deborah Norton and Michael Elphick, most of the cast were non-professionals and much of the dialogue was improvised on the spot. Scott knew that Beryl had been doing some acting work to earn extra money, so when he was looking round for people to fill the film’s minor roles he asked her and Pauline if they wanted to take part, which they did, despite the modest fee.

  Beryl appeared in a scene playing opposite Bruce Lacey, the experimental performance artist who had featured as George Harrison’s gardener in the film Help!, along with Lacey’s wife Jill and Ken Garland, another Albert Street resident. Pauline played a prostitute. When the film was released in 1972, Time Out compared its parodic combination of genres to Jean-Luc Godard, though Sight and Sound was more ambivalent, its reviewer feeling that despite ‘moments of acute observation’, the film’s satire of the British class system was ‘too heavy handed’, and that its ‘metaphysical speculations . . . ultimately founder in a sea of contradictions and imprecision’.11

  As might be gathered from the title, the film dealt with adult themes, and there is some nudity in it. Beryl later claimed she didn’t know it was going to be ‘a bit mucky’, and that the first she heard about it was when she was talking with the director over lunch and he asked her, ‘Oh by the way, you don’t mind taking your clothes off?’ Always self-conscious about her physical appearance, she hid in the bathroom, petrified, wondering how she could get out of the situation. In the end she did the scene but kept her bra on, though the other actress agreed to go topless. While they were shooting the scene – it involved a struggle between Bruce Lacey’s character and the two women – Jill Lacey’s naked breasts brushed Beryl on the arm, and Beryl screamed involuntarily.12 She was hyper-anxious about physical contact with women and any imputation of lesbianism, which she put down to having to share her bed as a child with her mother.

  Beryl found the film fun, but like television extra work, it didn’t really lead anywhere. The next time she appeared in front of a camera it would be not as an actress reciting someone else’s words, but as a writer reading her own.

  The retreat from Eaves Farm had left Beryl feeling depressed and unable to eat. She went to see her doctor and burst into tears in the surgery, blaming herself for what had happened and telling him that she was responsible for breaking up with Don. He prescribed her amitryptyline, an anti-depressant.13 But if the return to Albert Street was a blow to Beryl’s hope of a lasting relationship with Don, it didn’t mark the end of the affair completely. Absence and distance helped to heal the wounds left by the abortive attempt to live together. By Christmas, Don was once again coming down to London whenever he had a free weekend, and his passion and commitment seemed unabated, even if the practical difficulties of their situation remained unchanged.

  Don felt partly responsible for the way things had turned out, and in January 1970 he wrote an impassioned letter to Beryl to reassure her he was still committed to her and that he would try and move things on regarding a divorce from Helen: ‘I know I could have done a lot more and saved some money & done more with the solicitor & when I get some money I will do it. I love you, I want to marry you and have a baby, I love you. Without you its horrible. This house could be beautiful.’14

  Don often had Fridays free, which made long weekends in London possible, and for the first few months of 1970 he’d drive down the M1, breathlessly eager to see Beryl again after a week’s work: ‘Coming down on Friday, marvellous thinking of you, we will have a nice little talk in the Mornington Arms, I will look at you and think you are beautiful, and mine, make you love me, kiss and love you.’15

  But passionate though they were, long weekends were not enough. The time passed ‘too fast’, it was ‘over too soon’, there was ‘no time to even talk’. No sooner had Friday arrived, ‘then bang its Sunday. Beryl, mince and spuds, and away up the M1’.16 Added to which, the 200 miles between Manchester and London was a wearisome hurdle to have to keep jumping over.

  As the months passed, Don’s trips to London began to get more erratic. Jo-Jo remembered how excited Beryl would be, anticipating these weekends, recalling how she would do her hair and prepare a curry especially for him. And then he wouldn’t turn up: ‘She’d go to all this trouble and he just didn’t come.’17 Something of this is expressed in a note she sent to Don around this time: ‘Why aren’t you here? And you don’t ring and you don’t write. Stuff you. I love you very much. U should be here to stuff me. Your adoring best friend and lover B.’18

  Beryl�
�s sense that the relationship was not working out intensified as the year progressed, and was reflected in the drawings she was doing at the time, most of which used the Eaves Farm setting as a backdrop. One, dated ‘Winter 1970’, shows a naked female figure watching Napoleon on television, while a sombre-faced Napoleon stands in the foreground, staring blankly out into space. The drawing is ominously entitled A quiet evening at Eaves Farm or Hope does not spring eternal. Another drawing from the same period depicts a bleak, post-coital scene: a naked female figure is lying on the floor, with tears rolling down her face while a naked man stands head bowed, eyes averted, avoiding both the naked woman and the gaze of the spectator. On the television set in the corner of the room are the words ‘Do not adjust your set. The fault is permanent’, and the title of the picture reads There is no hope for the future . . . I’m off to the pub. Other pictures in the series feature the same set of figures – Napoleon, a naked man and a naked woman – only this time the overtly erotic motif of the previous year has been replaced by that of death and murder, the naked female figure typically lying dead, sprawled on the floor, impaled on a knife.

  Perhaps the best picture from this period is a large oil showing Don as Napoleon riding a horse, with a naked female figure behind him. The snowy landscape behind them is as cold and bleak as their expressions, and the grimly ironic title leaves little room for doubt as to the picture’s meaning: Napoleon and friend retreating from Ramsbottom.

  It was during the relatively brief ‘bottle factory’ period that an incident occurred which would achieve mythic status in later newspaper accounts of Beryl’s life: her former mother-in-law’s attempt to shoot her. Beryl often had to work a half day on Saturday, and one weekend early in 1970, as she was about to go to Belloni’s, there was a knock at the door:

  My mother-in-law stood on the step, dressed in a grey coat and hat and clutching a handbag . . . She had come she said to get pictures of her children when young; would I please fetch them. I left her in the hall went up one flight of stairs to my living room and hurriedly searched through my photo albums . . . When I came out of the room she was standing one flight down, a little matronly figure digging something out of her handbag. Just in time I realised she was taking out a gun and . . . I jumped forward, jerked her elbow and ducked as a shot was fired at the ceiling. A shower of newly applied plaster fell on us like snow.19