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CENTRE FOR NEWFOUNDLAND STUDIES TOTAL OF 10 PAGES ONLY MAY BE XEROXED (Without Author's Permission) \ BERYL BAINBRIDGE AND HER NOVELS by Elizabet h Mackey, B. A. A Thesis submitted in partial .fulfillment o£ the requirements £or the degree o£ Master o:f Arts Department o£ English language and Literature Memorial University o£ Newfoundland August 19S2 St. John ' s Newfoundland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. G. Jones for his pro£essional advice and guidance which he has administered punctually with unfailing courtesy, patience and good humour. Thanks to Joe, John, and the rest of the family for support and forbearance. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ii Acknowledgements • • • • • • • • • • • • • • iv INTRODUCTION • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1 CHAPTER I . A WEEKEND \VITH CLAUD • • • • • • • 20 II. ANOTHER PART OF THE WOOD • • • • • 43 III. HARRIET SAID ••• • • • • • • • • • 67 IV. THE DRESSMAKER • • • • • • • • • • 83 v. THE BOTTLE FACTORY OUTING • • • • • 105 VI. SWEET WILLIAM • • • • • • • • • • 121 VII. A QUIET LIFE • • • • • • • • • • 141 VIII. INJURY TIME • • • • • • • • • • 160 IX . YOUNG ADOLF • • • • • • • • • • 178 x. WINTER GARDEN • • • • • • • • • • 201 XI. GENERALITIES • • • • • • • • • • 217 BIBLIOORAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • • 237 v 1 INTRODUCTION Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, on 21 November 1934, daughter of Richard Bainbridge and Winifred Baines. She was educated at Merchant Taylor' s School in Crosby and Arts Educational Schools Limited in Tring Her tfordshire. An actress at repertory theatres in Liverpool, Windsor, Salisbury, Wiltshire, London and Dundee, she performed in such pieces as Tiptoe through the Tulips, The Warrior' s Return and It ' s a Lovely Day Tomorrow. In 1954, she married Austin Davies, a scenery painter from her acting days, whom she divorced in 1959. She has three children, one son, Aaron, and two daughters, Rudi and Jo. 1 Commenting recently on the Liverpool she remembers, 2 she describes the neighbourhood where she spent the first years of her married life. Toxteth Street in Liverpool 8 was considered Bohemian and run down, not ·to say sordid. Mr. and Mrs. Bainbridge were embarrassed to tell their neighbours their daughter' s new address. Bainbridge herself calls it • a slum area with broad streets and monumental houses built a century before by the cotton kings and the 1contempora1) Novelists, James Vinson ed. (London: St. James Press, 196 , p . BO . 2Beryl Bainbridge, ' The lullaby sound of houses falling down, • The Sunday Times, 19 July 1981, P• 36. 2 shipping owners.• The stucco was peeling and the balconies were unsafe; sometimes the basements flooded. On Sunday mornings the windows rattled in their frames as the bells rang out from the cathedral. She describes what her next-door neighbours were like: The house next door to us was occupied by a stoker from Portuguese West Africa, and his wife, who came from Glasgow. She was an Albino. They had nineteen children, seventeen of whom lived in the house. When the weather got very cold you could hear them breaking up the floorboards for fire wood. The older boys in the family referred to their father as 'that coloured bastard, me Dad.' Her son and eldest daughter were born in Tox~h Street and went to a nursery school in Lodge Lane run by a Miss Smith. Bainbridge, with customary fondness for the most disconcert ing details, recalls that Miss Smith died in the middle of the term, sitting upright at the piano playing, 'The Grand Old Duke of York' while the little toddlers still trotted around her shaking their tambourines. In warm weather Bainbridge gave the children their tea sitting on the stoop, under the disapproving eye of her 3 mother, who considered it common to eat anything outside. She did not put up curtains in the windows, or have her children baptized, or even stand up when they played 'God Save the King' at the Rialto cinema. Her shocked mother said it was the beginning of the end. 3 Be that as it may, it is certain that Mrs. Bainbridge has a very unconven tional daughter. It was during the years 1954 to 1959, when her acting career was disrupted by the birth o£ her children, that she started writing, although not necessarily for publication at that time. It was 1960 before she completed her first novel, Harriet Said •••• She talks frankly about her early background experiences, which had a profound effect on her developing creativity. Her working-class father, a self-made man and commercial traveller, met her mother in the top deck of a tram on Lord Street. They were married in 1926, the year of the slump, and moved to a large house on the Wirral Peninsula, complete with living-in maid named Matty. Her middle-class mother, whom Bainbridge describes 4 as an impressive woman, always beautifully dressed and called the Duchess because she dressed up to go shopping and decorated rooms for visitors 3 'The lullaby sound of houses falling down,' p. 36. 4Yolanta May, 'Beryl Bainbridge Talks to Yolanta May,' The New Review, London: December 1976, p. 50. 4 who never arrived, was initially won over by Richard Bainbridge' s success. Two years later, when Father lost house and money and was declared bankrupt, the affection, such as it was, went too. Frustrated by her husband ' s failure and contemptuous of him, she considered she had mar ried beneath her. 5 Her parents stayed together for appearances • sake but their tiny house was full of frightening emotions. 'My father had terrible moods,• says Bainbridge. ' I was so frightened and alarmed by him that I used to scheme plots to kill him.• Her earliest memories of fear and anxiety centre on her father ' s violent moods. She describes him as a bad- tempered and morose man , somewhat schizophrenic. ' He would have a flare- up about some- thing trivial, a lump in a potato, or an unwashed cup, for instance.' The first week would be noisy with swearing, slamming of doors, and Mother and Father running past each other in the hall. Violence was always threatening but it never came . Then the indifference would set in. The tension went out of the house and the worst phase was over. After that Father would fall into a sullen depression and go slinking 5Willa Petschek, ' Beryl Bainbridge and her Tenth Novel, ' New York Times Book Review, 1 March 1981, p. 27. 5 through t he house like a dog that had been muzzled. His dinner would be le£t on the landing in a bowl. Recovering, he would emerge sheepishly one night and join the family at table. 6 Beryl and her brother made a pact that they would never be out o:f the house at the same time, so there would always be one of them around to stop their parents killing each other. Her brother, an anxious individual like Alan in A Q!liet Life, su£fered a nervous breakdown at eighteen, but the young Beryl, it appears, was of tougher fibre. At the age of ten, hearing her £ather' s voice raised against her mother, she would hurl herself through the scullery door and leap on him from behind. With her knee on his back and an arm about his throat, she would bring him, commando :fashion, crashing to the :floor. 7 The radio was kept on to drown out the sound of the quarrels. Bainbridge thinks this may have had a beneficial effect on her future development as a writer. As she lis tened to the fine plays and the civilized talks, she began 6Beryl Bainbridge, •Facing Backwards Family Life-- 7, ' The New Review, November 1977, pp. 14- 15. 7 ' Facing Backwards,' P• 14. 6 at an early age to appreciate the sound of a well- turned phrase and came to know ' the rhythm of the number o:f words in a sentence.' As a child she remembers her mother buying little exercise books and sharpening pencils for her. ' I g was always writing,' she remarks. At 14 she wrote and illustrated a dirty rhyme and was expelled from school for being a corrupting moral influence. 9 Always eager to talk about her work, Bainbridge is pleased by her success but says it cannot change the :fun damental nature o:f her experience. She is not particularly interested in the present or the future, she explains. ' I like the past and everything to do with it more than anything else.' She attributes her passionate attachment to the past to her father' s influence. In ' Facing Backwards ' she observes: There are people who live in the present and those who live :for the future. There are others who live in the past. Early on, life dictates our preferences. All my father' s bright days • • • had ended before I was born. He :faced backwards. In doing so, he created within me so strong a nostalgia for time gone that I have never been able to appreciate the present or look to the :future. 10 8Barbara A. Bannon, ' Beryl Bainbridge,' Publisher' s Weekly, 15 March 1976, p . 6. 9Petschek, p . 9. 10•Facing Backwards,•p . l6. 7 She is an emprical writer and her early wor~ in particular, is an attempt to record the past. She writes about her parents, the sort of childhood she had, and the landscape she grew up in. She firmly believes that childhood is the most memorable part of life because it is the time when feelings are most intense and the mind most impres- sionable. 'Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover £rom childhood. So I go over it again and again,' she states. 11 Bainbridge refers to her turbulent formative years as •an ideal writer's childhood.' That she regards her somewhat traumatic experiences as favour able arises from her conviction that emotional vitality is all-important.

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