Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  In pursuit of Watson’s past we tracked down the resting place of his butchered wife in Tooting Bec cemetery. At no time did Colin have any sympathy for the battered Mrs W. Ever the publisher, he would groan, ‘What a tragedy! All the poor devil wanted to do was get on with his Life of the Popes.’ The gates were locked when we arrived . . . but I managed to jump over the railings and find a ladder for Colin to ascend. Athletic though he was, being a chap he was sensibly anxious of hurdling spikes . . . We didn’t know that we’d been spotted by a caretaker/gravedigger who had promptly rung the police.10

  The incident was picked up by the gossip column in the Evening Standard, though Colin’s participation was tactfully airbrushed out:

  Difficult moment for Beryl Bainbridge. She was just leaping over the railings into Lambeth Cemetery at around seven one evening when she was spotted by a passing security man. She assures me she utterly charmed the man by explaining that she was a novelist in search of background for her next book about a Victorian clergyman who murdered his wife.

  ‘I’ve only just started this research and got carried away tramping around looking at this man’s house and combing the libraries for information. In the evening I tootled off to find the cemetery closed so I legged it over the railings.’11

  In hindsight, Anna’s response to the escapade was extraordinary, seeming to hint at a knowledge of the affair and a simultaneous desire to turn a blind eye to it: ‘There was the occasion when she and my husband were apprehended trespassing in a cemetery. I think they were researching epitaphs but I’m not clear about the details, for when they tried to tell me about it I closed my ears. I have the same reaction when my children try to explain their various misdemeanours. On the whole I prefer to be left in ignorance. Life is difficult enough already.’12

  Beryl had been thinking about and planning the novel since the autumn of 1980. Writing it, however, turned out to be harder than she imagined. While Colin’s close involvement had been beneficial and even fun at the start, as the novel progressed she felt daunted by his expectations, and increasingly worried that her portrayal of Watson and his wife had too much of Colin and Anna in it.

  When, in 1983, Beryl was invited to take part in Anthony Clare’s series of televised interviews, Motives, an early incarnation of his subsequent radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, one of the first things she admitted was that she was finding the novel difficult to write: ‘Actually to be honest, I’ve got a kind of a small writing block at the moment.’13

  As she approached the end of the book her confidence in it seemed to sag:

  Dear Colin,

  I’ve done a lot of work on Watson and I think its stronger. I’m a bit confused about chapters. You did say you’d ring on Tuesday, but I expect you forgot – so I’ve done the chapters as best I can.

  Love, Beryl xx14

  It was around this time that Michael Holroyd happened to call round to Albert Street and, noticing the manuscript lying on the table, he asked what it was. ‘That’s my new novel,’ she replied, ‘for what it’s worth.’ He asked whether he could take it home. After reading it he immediately rang to say it was the best thing she had done. Following the book’s publication Beryl would say that if it hadn’t been for him she would never have finished it.

  Finally, on 6 June 1984, nearly four years after she had first started working on the project, she scribbled in her diary: ‘Finished Watson.’ But this wasn’t the end of her problems with the book. A meeting round at Gloucester Crescent to discuss the manuscript degenerated into a slanging match. Colin’s initial response to the book had not been positive, and Beryl was annoyed by his seemingly intrusive and pedantic editing – he had crossed out lines of dialogue and changed occurrences of ‘he’ to ‘Watson’ and ‘Watson’ to ‘he’ – and she told him he had no right to alter what she had written. Colin, seeing in Beryl’s depiction of the pathetic, emotionally stunted Watson a veiled critique of himself, lost his temper. He accused her of turning Watson into a caricature15 and began kicking the manuscript around the room. Picking it up, Beryl told him: ‘If that’s what you think then you can just fuck off.’16

  Shortly afterwards she flew to New York on a publicity tour of America. Still angry, she wrote to Michael Holroyd to tell him what had happened the day before she left. The disagreement over Watson’s Apology was the first serious rift she’d had with Colin, and it upset her so much she even considered the possibility of leaving Duckworth:

  I was called round on the Wed to see to a semi-colon and he was grouchy etc. Also the manuscript wasn’t available. He said I could’nt see it. I sent the au pair to get it (while he was at lunch) and she had a fight with the office. It was something of a misunderstanding but I lost my temper yet again and stormed out . . . but I stopped at the pub on the way, then rang [him] an hour later and said I hadn’t signed any contract and was withdrawing the book. He said, ‘Fine,’ and slammed the phone down. When I had sobered up I waited till 9 at night and spoke first to Anna who was like whipped cream and then to himself who said he’d sent it off and when he saw it in proof he was sure he would like it and that he was sorry etc. He would ring me in the morning to say goodbye. Needless to say he didn’t. He said the proofs would be ready in 10 days. So that’s that . . . I don’t think I’ve ever spent one day in such a bad temper in the whole of my life, let alone 5 days, and I must say it was an eye-opener, and had the effect of making me sleep without seditives from the time I got on the plane till I got off 9 hours later.

  I don’t know what to do when I come back. I have got to fix up my life in some way. In many ways I wish I had quit Duckworths. I find the whole buisness rather alarming and had’nt (until now) seen the extent of the game between the 2 of them. I always knew I coluded etc, but I had’nt quite grasped the depth of it. Still don’t, really.17

  By the time she returned from America Watson’s Apology was already in proof, and things began to calm down between them. Despite the flare-up and Colin’s initial hostility, Beryl recognized that his input and enthusiasm, his assistance in areas such as classical references where her knowledge was weak, and his careful copy-editing of the text, had helped to improve the book. On the top page of her final proof, beneath one or two last-minute corrections, she held out an olive branch of sorts: ‘Thank you for getting it ready so well and so quickly. Everything seems fine except for above. Pity you don’t like it. Love, Beryl.’ On 2 October, just two days before the book’s official publication date, a contract was finally signed.

  Colin may have had his reasons for feeling disappointed with the book, but other friends saw it as a striking achievement. Michael Holroyd thought it extraordinary, full of sadness and tragedy, and it became his favourite of all her novels.18 Brian Masters, who was then working on a biography of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, read it with such terror and amazement at her perception of the human condition that he felt weak: ‘You paint a dark, true picture, but you do it with the heart. One learns more from Watson’s Apology than from any chapter on philosophy.’19

  The press response to Watson’s Apology was also overwhelmingly positive. In The Spectator Harriet Waugh evoked comparisons with Muriel Spark and concluded: ‘Watson’s Apology is Beryl Bainbridge on top form and no other novel has given me as much pleasure in the last six months.’20 Humphrey Carpenter was equally enthusiastic: ‘The result is that old cliché “a small masterpiece” – small-scale in that Bainbridge presents the story for what it is and doesn’t try to enlarge on its tragic possibilities, masterly by virtue of the credibility of her reconstruction of the contradictory emotions that accompany the case.’ Carpenter was particularly struck by the presentation of Watson’s relationship with his wife: ‘The marriage was in many ways a failure from the start. Neither partner was capable of achieving love, though both wanted affection. What the book succeeds in showing is the element of failure in all relationships.’21

  Aside from her ‘small writing block’, there was another reason for Beryl’s delay
in finishing Watson’s Apology: work on the television series English Journey. With the fiftieth anniversary of J. B. Priestley’s book drawing near – English Journey had originally been published in 1934 – the BBC had approached Beryl in 1983 about presenting a documentary series that would retrace his route around Britain. The plan was for eight forty-minute programmes, together with a book tie-in, which would be a co-production between Duckworth and BBC Publications.

  The project necessitated a considerable amount of time-consuming travel. Between August and the end of October 1983 Beryl’s hectic filming schedule included Southampton, Salisbury, Milton Keynes, Birmingham, Bradford, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Presenting a television programme was a fresh departure for Beryl. It would introduce her to a new, much larger audience, most of whom were unfamiliar with the tragi-comic novels by which she was known among the London literary set.

  Beryl faced a number of challenges in writing and presenting the series, not least of which was dealing with Jimmy Dewar, the executive producer. For one thing she found his physical resemblance to Colin distracting. Dewar had chosen her because he thought she was an admirable eccentric, and initially at least he treated her in a high-handed and condescending manner. When Beryl said she wanted to end the journey in a field above a nuclear bunker in Thetford, he dismissed her suggestion with the words, ‘Yes, yes, dear, what a cheap idea.’ To make matters worse, Dewar’s marriage seemed to be on the point of breaking up and his wife was finding it difficult to cope. The emotional fallout from this tension-inducing situation seeped over into work meetings. Beryl described one particularly fraught occasion to Michael:

  Things are getting v. interesting here. Imagine the scene – me, the camera man, director, assistant, sound man, PA etc, plus the head of TV in Bristol, the immortal Jimmy. A man so like he who shall be nameless as to defy description. And tonight he arrives back with his wife who is having a nervous breakdown, and it becomes obvious why – he has caused it, even she can’t speak as she’s so cut-up, and he attacks me because I disagree with him. His wife starts to cry. The crew tip-toe out. Me and the director are left. It is a very rum do. If only you had been here to witness the scene. I cannot write it down as I am totally incoherent.

  I have been on the road now for months, still covered in mud. I come home on the 1st Nov to write the bleeding thing. He who shall be nameless seems alright – though the novel [Watson’s Apology] has never been mentioned again. I don’t think this is a good year. Some upheaval is happening in me. I am in Lincoln I think, or maybe Hull. Tomorrow I’m up a tower, bellringing, and then to Norwich to Malcolm Bradbury or maybe thats in Milton Keynes. Two days ago I was on a beach somewhere picking coal, and discussing the cod war somewhere. I can hear the wife sobbing through the wall. Dear God.22

  The early months of 1984 were interspersed with frequent trips to the BBC studios in Bristol, to assist with editing and dubbing, and writing the text for the book. After handing in the manuscript, Beryl told Colin: ‘I’m glad you are pleased with the book and I hope it does well for both of us. I think we deserve it – you for being a good publisher, and me for having the sense to know it.’23

  Before the series aired, Beryl had lunch with the ageing Priestley and his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. It wasn’t an entirely satisfactory occasion – Priestley’s deafness and his bluff manner made conversation difficult and misunderstandings frequent:

  When we were alone for a few minutes, I said to him: ‘It’s confusing, isn’t it . . . this television business?’ He said, ‘What?’ a shade tetchily, and beckoned me to sit closer to him. ‘What are you on about?’

  I didn’t want to shout, so I wrote on the back of my chequebook, ‘I’m a bit in the dark, too,’ and showed it to him. He looked down at it, baffled, and at that moment people came back into the room, and I snatched the chequebook away. God knows what he made of it.24

  The programmes, which ran from 26 March to 21 May 1984 on BBC2, divided public opinion and the letters page of the Radio Times was initially swamped by a storm of protest: ‘Beryl Bainbridge shows neither the verbal technique of an interviewer nor any descriptive ability,’ one viewer complained, while another felt she ‘lacked both personality and enthusiasm’. A third took her to task for the unreliability of her information: ‘After her visit to Salisbury I began to wonder how long she spent there; I am now rather sceptical about the accuracy of the rest of her journey.’25

  Those who doubted Beryl’s suitability as a presenter of such a programme had a certain point. In the same way that she was not an academic, she was not adept at serious political or social analysis. One of her ideas for solving unemployment, which she put forward in all seriousness to a slightly dumbfounded Terry Waite a few years later, was to reopen the shipyards of Liverpool and Newcastle and start building ships again – not for use, but as a job-creation scheme: ‘You could build a ship one year and take it apart the next year and start all over again.’26

  Such an approach to the economic problems facing Mrs Thatcher’s Britain at the time – unemployment was running at over three million – was hardly likely to satisfy anyone looking for a politically astute commentary: ‘Good writers are not necessarily competent reporters’, as the literary editor of The New York Times Anatole Broyard put it in a withering review, ‘there’s something intrinsically absurd about a highly regarded author of 10 novels describing a machine that makes cigarettes, or a chocolate factory.’27

  But if political analysis wasn’t Beryl’s strong point, people, their relationships and how they lived their lives, were. She had an easy familiarity with people across all classes, and her sympathetic tone, the fact that she never came across as condescending, endeared her to her interviewees. Perhaps the most telling moment of the whole series was in Liverpool, when she went back to her old house in Huskisson Street, which was now a boarded-up crumbling ruin. Visibly moved, her voice cracking with emotion, she picked her way through the backyard and found one of her old dining chairs rotting among the rubble.

  As the series progressed, the number of her supporters soon outweighed that of her detractors, and also drew praise from those within the BBC. The controller of BBC2 wrote to tell Dewar that it had been a ‘totally rewarding series’ and Roger Mills, the executive producer of Forty Minutes, considered the programmes to be ‘witty, intelligent and perceptive . . . the best networked documentary series ever to come out of the regions’.28

  The following year Dewar proposed a companion series to English Journey, again with Beryl as presenter, and they met to discuss ideas. During the course of English Journey Beryl had been struck by the differences she saw between the north and the south. In her outline for the project, provisionally entitled ‘Living with Ourselves’, she recalled Harold Macmillan’s warning from 1962 about Britain becoming two nations, ‘a poor north and a rich and overcrowded south’, and decided to make this the focus of the series: ‘I want to find out through the medium of television what the differences are, if any, between the people of the north and the south . . . in an attempt to confirm or refute the suppositions of Macmillan’s speech.’29 The idea was to do this almost literally, in a series of programmes that would concentrate on six families, three in the north and three in the south.

  Once again the schedule was intensive, and between August and October principal shooting was completed in the six locations, Hastings, Barnsley, Liverpool, Birmingham, Northumberland and Hampshire. ‘I have no idea where you are,’ she wrote from Barnsley to her friend Psiche, ‘and even less where I am. I’m among brass bands and miners, being frightfully militant on film and defending Arthur Scargill. You’d be proud. I’ve been in Oxford, Liverpool and now here, among some lovely families. I come home in another week or so and then go to Hastings or Northumberland or both.’30

  Working with Dewar had not got any easier since the previous year, and his behaviour seemed to be a reaction to the death of his wife. Two weeks into the run of English Journey, she had committed suicide by throwing hers
elf off Clifton suspension bridge. Jimmy was now drinking heavily and had developed something of a crush on Beryl. Consequently, she had to spend her time in between shooting trying to fend him off, as she reported to Anna midway through the filming:

  Darling Anna: Went for a walk at six this morning because I had a hangover from last night. Bit difficult being with Jimmy. He’s very proper and all that, but its like being perpetually bathed in a sweat of adoration – jolly boring. He’s nervous of me till opening time (mid-day) then maudlin till opening time in the evening, then over the top with excitement until midnight . . . Still, for some reason he’s scared of me, so its all right.

  Thinking of death a lot at the moment because I’m always in a car with our Jim and he’s usually pissed out of his mind.31

  Unlike words, which Beryl could endlessly move around and manipulate to achieve the dramatic effect she wanted, the raw material of her documentaries – people – were not so compliant:

  It’s so frustrating – you do an interview with some total nonentity who can’t get a word out, and then as soon as you’re off the air they tell you the story of their real life and its stuffed with drama and intrigue. One lady says she’s visited at night by a ghost in a raincoat, a sort of spiritual flasher. She’s very serious about it, and her husband says its causing a rift between them, but I mustn’t mention it on the tele, because her boss wouldn’t like it. I’m off in a minuet to go a walk with the accountant whose wife has had cancer. We’re to talk about the differences between north and south but he only says things like ‘I’ve nowt to say, Beryl’, so I’m not hopeful.

  Both the series, now titled Forever England, which ran from 7 May to 18 June 1986, and the book, published in April the following year, elicited a more muted, less partisan response than English Journey. ‘It’s a modest book,’ as Bea Campbell noted in her review, picking up on the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of reportage: ‘It doesn’t pretend to engage with the problems of power, or economics, or politics. And it’s forever forgiving. You might not share her pessimism or her nostalgia, but as an anthology of “common-sense” it makes strangers seem familiar. And that’s what Beryl Bainbridge is good at.’32