by Brendan King
Be confident and happy at Duckworths. You’ve made the right choice and whatever private feelings I may have about Hill, he does seem to be behaving very well. I wish you all the luck in the world.6
As a postscript, she gave an appraisal of the existing Duckworth staff – Deborah Blake, Ray Davies, William Haycraft (Colin and Anna’s eldest son), Christine Halstead, and Colin’s former secretary, Nicky – all of whom she recommended unreservedly. The only exceptions were her comments on Anna and Stephen Hill, though as Beryl was not in the habit of bad-mouthing people behind their backs, her doubts about them had to be read between the lines. Anna, she said, had ‘a real genius for spotting and nurturing talent’, but was ‘not a copy editor’. In a hint at what she saw as Anna’s lackadaisical approach to work, Beryl explained that she was ‘deeply depressed at the moment and will need pushing if she’s to get down to the buisness of reading manuscripts’.
As for Stephen, she alluded to his sense of his own self-importance (‘Wants to be thought a heavyweight in the Colin Haycraft sense’), and described him as ‘a maniac’. Beryl had always distrusted the ethics of the very wealthy. The fact that the company Stephen was a director of, LICA Development Capital, made its money out of offering tax-avoidance schemes to the rich, and dealt with engineering firms that included military hardware among their products, was not something that endeared him to her: ‘Personally, I find it hard to trust anyone who has apparantly made a fortune out of “nice” tanks, even if the money has saved Duckworth.’
But Robin wasn’t going to let Beryl slip through his fingers without a fight. He wrote to Andrew to say that Beryl was key to Duckworth’s plans for the future and reassured him that the new Duckworth would be ‘something so different’ it would satisfy Beryl’s desire for a break with the past. He added that he had previously negotiated a direct deal with Penguin for Muriel Spark’s paperback rights and envisioned the same kind of lucrative deal for Beryl, one which would cut out the share Duckworth had previously taken.7
He also wrote to Beryl: ‘I am going to do everything in my power to persuade you to stay with us.’ As if to hammer the point home about his own independence, Robin stressed that he was ‘the managing director and publisher of Duckworth (not I repeat not Stephen Hill)’.8
Negotiations continued, however, until October, when Andrew wrote to tell Beryl that Clare Alexander of Viking had now upped her offer to £35,000 per book, but that a decision had to be taken soon in order to meet the printing deadline for the catalogue. What happened next was typical of Beryl. Embarrassed at the idea of letting Robin down, she arranged to meet him in a pub off St Martin’s Lane, and when he told her he would match the Viking offer she agreed to stay at Duckworth.9
At the beginning of January 1996 a contract was prepared and Robin wrote hopefully to Beryl: ‘Happy New Year. For both you and me, this is going to be our annus mirabilis.’10
With the birth of Jo-Jo’s first son, Charlie, in December 1980, Beryl had become a grandmother at the relatively early age of forty-eight. During the late 1980s and early 1990s her public image consequently underwent something of a transformation.
Readers of her column in the Evening Standard were regaled with anecdotes about her escapades with Charlie and ‘Darling Bertie’, his younger brother, and vicariously enjoyed her unconventional attitude to childcare. In a conscious act of rebellion against the normal routines and practices of their parents, Beryl would let her grandchildren play with toy guns, watch television, eat sweets and stay up late. This approach did have its downsides, as Beryl confessed to Michael Holroyd on one occasion when it turned out that giving lockable metal handcuffs to a young child – in this instance Rudi’s four-year-old son, August – wasn’t such a good idea: ‘Yesterday, phone goes. “Mum, mum, this is serious.” August, four, chained to chair by handcuffs. (I gave him them.) Can’t call the police in case he’s taken into care. Friend rushes round with cutting tools. Prisoner released. Me in “Coventry”.’11
Nevertheless, Beryl involved herself in her grandchildren’s education in a way that she hadn’t done with her own children. Now she was not only unencumbered by romantic attachments and obsessions, she could also afford to take her grandchildren out regularly to museums, exhibitions and plays. As Kate Kellaway put it in an Observer profile, ‘The relationships which now most occupy her are with her grandchildren.’12
Beryl’s role as drama critic for The Oldie,13 a magazine set up in 1992 by Richard Ingrams to cater for the over-fifties as a corrective to what he saw as the youth-oriented obsession of the media, also had an impact on her public image. She was now increasingly seen as one of a group of celebrity figures who took a generally anti-PC stance on social issues and who embraced the caricature of themselves as being out of sync with, and antipathetic to, the modern world.
In truth, Beryl wasn’t really part of this vogue for what came to be known as ‘grumpy old men’ (and women). She didn’t consider her comments as being knowingly ironic, as many of the other celebrities did, with the result that her unguarded remarks about certain social issues led her into controversies that, for the most part, others managed to avoid.
One of the most public of these was the furore over regional accents and ‘the importance of talking properly’, controversial statements that she made during the course of a dinner, in 1999, to celebrate winning the W. H. Smith Literary Award. ‘Have you ever listened to the kids on Brookside? They don’t speak the English language,’14 she had complained. But it was her comment that ‘uneducated regional accents’ such as Scouse should be ‘wiped out’ that provoked the most anger.
Some of these controversies were simply storms in a media teacup, such as when a reporter asked her what she thought of ‘Chick Lit’: Beryl had never read anything that might be considered Chick Lit, but it didn’t stop her dismissing the whole genre as ‘froth’. On other occasions, however, her off-the-cuff pronouncements came across as crass or ill-considered rather than refreshingly contrarian, and were more damaging to her reputation. Into this category fell her views on what constituted rape and child abuse, which betrayed a serious lack of understanding of the issues involved and a curious lack of empathy with those affected.
With Colin’s death Beryl lost the centre of her emotional life, and the whole web of social interaction that revolved around Duckworth began to dissolve too, including her friendship with Anna. Inevitably, they now saw less of each other. Anna already spent several months of each year in Wales, and when the house in Gloucester Crescent was sold in 2001 the distance between them became literal as well as figurative.
Instead, as the 1990s progressed Beryl developed a compartmentalized network of friends whom she would see on a semi-regular basis, usually in the course of evening dinner parties: Mike and Parvin Laurence; Derwent and Yola May; David Swift and his wife Paula Jacobs, who had acted with Beryl at the Liverpool Playhouse back in 1951; Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble; Melvyn Bragg and his wife, Cate Haste; Robin Baird-Smith and Mark Bostridge, whose guests frequently included other writers, such as Blake Morrison, John Bayley, Francis King and Penelope Lively; and Brodie Taylor, a theatrical agent whose soirées included actors such as Ian McKellen.
Beryl’s increased public profile and the numerous invitations she received to attend lunches, dinners and other media events brought her into contact with a large number of celebrities, film stars and politicians, including David Tomlinson, Dirk Bogarde, Woodrow Wyatt – the pools boss otherwise known as Lord Wyatt of Weeford – Timothy Renton, Neil Kinnock, Mo Mowlam and the union leader Rodney Bickerstaff.
It was during this period that Beryl got to know Terry Waite, who she had first met in 1986 as a guest on his short-lived interview show, Terry Waite Takes a Different View. Shortly afterwards, in January 1987, Waite had been taken hostage in Beirut, where he was held for nearly five years. On his release, he began writing a book about his experiences and rang Beryl for advice, often late at night, leaving long messages on her answer machine. H
e would later testify to her willingness to spare the time to talk and offer suggestions.
Although she was not a huge reader of contemporary fiction, Beryl was always amenable to those who solicited her opinion about their manuscripts. However, as A. N. Wilson recalled, this was sometimes the result of embarrassment rather than any conviction as to literary quality: ‘She was the worst person in the world to do that to, because she would always say “yes”. There are various people who used to do it to her all the time, and she’d then get into terrible stews by lying to them, saying that she’d really liked the book.’15
The number of books that carry ringing endorsements from Beryl on their covers testifies to her unwillingness to let people down. However, this seemingly positive response was belied by Beryl’s habitual practice of telling the author – or in some cases the marketing department that had solicited the quote – that they should simply write what they wanted and put her name to it, the implication being that she had neither read the book nor agreed with the opinions attributed to her.16
Shortly after completing An Awfully Big Adventure, Beryl had begun another novel, originally intended to be called ‘Kiss Me Hardy’, which opened with the words: ‘At half-past ten on the morning of 29 September – the weather was mild and the leaves still stuck to the trees – a madman died in Hardy’s arms.’17 After writing the first chapter, however, the story ran out of steam and she abandoned it,18 though she would later reuse this image of a man dying in a stranger’s arms for the opening of her book about the Titanic.
Originally, the first novel in the three-book deal was going to be about the Crimean War, but Beryl quickly realized she ‘didn’t know enough about it’19 and the subject would need more time to research. The sinking of the Titanic, by contrast, seemed to be on more familiar territory: not only was the disaster contemporaneous with Scott’s expedition, she also felt an affinity with the subject because of her father’s connection to the sea and to the White Star Line, the ship’s owners.
Furthermore, the idea of writing about the Titanic was partly inspired by Beryl’s experiences as a babysitter to a growing band of grandchildren: one of the videos she would watch with them to keep them amused was A Night to Remember, the classic 1958 film of Walter Lord’s book about the sinking of the ship.20 In 1990, four years before she started Every Man for Himself, as the novel was called, Beryl had written a Christmas playlet for her grandchildren to perform. Directed by ten-year-old Charlie and with special effects by seven-year-old Bertie, ‘The Last Battle’ was based around the Titanic, although with a cast that included Winston Churchill and Prince Albert, and scenes involving helicopters, Nazis and ‘scoober divers’, it had scant regard for historical accuracy: ‘It was the worst of days, it was the best of days. The S.S. Titanic, pride of the British passenger fleet was cruising close by the clifts of Dover. At three oclock on a wintery afternoon the German Navy made a dastardly attack on this noble ship . . . (Noise of seagulls).’21
Writing a novel about the Titanic was obviously another matter altogether, but even here the grandchildren were occasionally roped in. Bertie assembled a model-kit replica of the ship that was over two feet in length and which helped in visualizing its physical layout.
Many of those who had known Colin recognized him in the character of Scurra. Beryl had originally got the name from a textbook acquired during the course of her Latin lessons – Philip Corbett’s study The Scurra, about a stock figure who appears in a number of classical satires. Kirk Freudenberg’s description of the scurra shows why Beryl was drawn to the name: ‘The scurra is associated with the city (Corbett calls him a “Townie”), and he seems to specialise in upbraiding those who fall short of community standards. His wit may earn him a place at the table of those who are better off; but his sharp tongue causes unease among his potential targets . . . The scurra is thus the close counterpart of the satirist, especially the convivial satirist.’22
Every Man for Himself effectively marked the end of Anna’s editorial input into Beryl’s novels. Although for many years her role had been limited to providing initial encouragement, confirming that a book was going in the right direction, and rubber-stamping the novel once it was finished, Beryl still nominally considered Anna her editor, and always went out of her way to credit her as such in interviews. But now – perhaps because this was Beryl’s first book since Colin’s death – Anna didn’t simply offer general comments about shape and tone. Instead, when Beryl sent her the first ten pages, Anna sent them back marked up with numerous minor textual amendments, changing Beryl’s carefully phrased and balanced sentences into something that more resembled her own idea of ‘correct’ English. Significantly, Beryl ignored her changes and suggestions completely, indeed the final manuscript was published with very few editorial changes at all.23
Shortly after finishing the novel, Beryl went to New York to meet Kent Carroll of Carroll & Graf, her American publisher since The Birthday Boys.24 In the course of her visit she was introduced to Robert Ballard, the man who had spent years searching for the wreck of the Titanic and was instrumental in finding it.
Every Man for Himself received extremely positive reviews when it was published, making it onto the Booker Prize shortlist and winning the Whitbread Novel of the Year. Ironically, the first novel Beryl published after Colin’s death would be the one that sold the most and made her the most money. This was not just a reflection of the book’s quality. Its success also owed something to chance and to Robin Baird-Smith’s marketing, as its publication in hardback coincided with numerous media reports about an attempt to raise the Titanic, and a month after it appeared in paperback James Cameron’s hugely successful film opened. Whether it was a result of the sudden increase in popularity of the subject, or whether, as Beryl suspected, that some people actually thought the book was connected to the film, the paperback sold over 100,000 copies, the first time one of her books had reached such a dizzying figure: ‘Popularity is such a shock at my age,’ she told one interviewer. ‘For years I had a kind of cult following, but my books didn’t actually sell. I think it’s only because of Titanic that things have gone a bit mad – even a rotten book about the Titanic would sell . . .’25
In the 1970s there were already signs that Beryl’s drinking was becoming a problem, but its more serious effects were mitigated during this period by other counterbalancing factors. Not only was she still relatively young and her tolerance for alcohol higher, her children were still living at home, so the opportunities for drinking alone were minimized. Her rapid critical and commercial success as a writer had also, perhaps for the first time in her life, given her a sense of self-worth, and consequently she was less prone to the feelings of negativity that give rise to the desire to drink.
But by the 1980s these restraining factors had begun to evaporate. Jo and Aaron had already left home, and when Rudi followed suit in 1985 it became harder for Beryl to resist the temptation to drink on her own. Her relationship with Colin went through a number of crises during this period, provoking in her a pervasive sense of emotional insecurity, and the subsequent bouts of loneliness and depression fuelled her desire to drink. Not only that, the illicit nature of the affair gave rise to feelings of guilt and betrayal which she sought to assuage through drink. Nor did fiction provide the same sense of creative satisfaction it once had. Indeed the act of writing had become a struggle in itself, and the alcohol provided an easy short-term solution, albeit an illusory one. Paradoxically, the older Beryl got and the more she drank, the lower her tolerance to alcohol seemed to be and this began to have increasingly negative consequences when she drank in public.
The potential for Beryl’s social drinking to get out of hand was often exacerbated by her urge to drink before she went out. Part of the reason for this was her feeling that alcohol helped her get through the ordeal of socializing, as she explained to an old friend in Liverpool: ‘I am about to go off to a posh do at a posh hotel and I loathe going out. In order to function I have been at
the vodka.’26 But even when she was meeting friends, the temptation to drink beforehand was often too strong: ‘She was quite nervous before coming out to dinner,’ Derwent May recalled, ‘and she would drink quite a bit before she came.’27 This was a habit that A. N. Wilson also noticed: ‘Quite often, if she was feeling depressed, or if I called on her before a party, she’d get through half a bottle of whisky before going out.’28
In certain situations, where hosts were sensitive or congenial, such as with Derwent and Yola May in their Albany Street home, the effects of an excess of alcohol were minimized, though even here it could lead to potentially dangerous situations. After a dinner party at the Mays’ in 1993, Beryl and Colin left together as they tended to do, but as Colin was feeling ill Beryl insisted he return straight to Gloucester Crescent. As she drunkenly made her way to Albert Street alone she got into an altercation: ‘Have got a black eye – man hit me on way home,’29 as she later told Derwent. A contrite Colin apologized to Beryl the next day: ‘So sorry to hear about your contretemps after Yola’s do. You’re right, I should have walked you home. I wasn’t well, but no excuse.’30 On another occasion, again after an evening round at Albany Street, Beryl insisted on walking home despite being obviously very drunk. Shortly after she left the house, she sat down on the kerb in Park Village West and passed out, only waking up several hours later.
But even when she was in the company of friends, her drinking would occasionally result in aggressive or antisocial behaviour. A. N. Wilson recalled one dinner party he had attended with Beryl at Bernice Rubens’ flat, which provoked such embarrassment that he subsequently resolved to meet Beryl only in alcohol-free situations. Beryl had already been drinking before she came out and at the table she became confrontational:
She started showing off, and the more she did it the less attention anybody paid, because she was already being incredibly silly. She went on hands and knees to the front door and came back with two or three wellington boots [it had been snowing earlier and guests had left them at the door to prevent dirtying Bernice’s pristine carpet]. She plonked them onto the neat little dinner table, and started scooping first her food and then other people’s food into them. People did get jolly cross actually.