Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Injury Time by Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 661310437b544a80 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Beryl Bainbridge. Dame Beryl Bainbridge, novelist, died on July 2nd, aged 77. IF THE words really wouldn't come, she would leave the house for a while. Squeezing past the stiff bulk of Eric, the stuffed bison, in the hall, she would creep down the bullet-pocked stairs and step out into Albert Street. The white Victorian terraces slumbered scruffily in the sun. If the blockage was not too severe she could sometimes cure it with a coffee and a cigarette at the Café Delancey, before they shut it down. Sometimes a stroll to smiling Germano at the Portuguese deli, to pick up her papers, would shake the plot into place. Or she could pop to the 99p Store in Camden High Street where she had once found, among the giant shampoo bottles and unseasonal Christmas decorations, a plastic model Cyberman exactly right for a grandchild. At night she wandered farther through North London's dark, mildly dangerous streets. Few passers-by could identify her then as Beryl Bainbridge, the famous novelist. She was as anonymous as in the days when she would charge out of her parents' house in Formby, near Liverpool, in much the same old belted mac and her school panama hat, a leggy 14-year-old heading for the shore and the arms of her German lover. She would set off whistling then, joyously abandoning the screams and tears of her family falling apart. Now she walked more deliberately, but with a bone- handled carving knife ready in her pocket. Friends often detected something furtive about her. That glance from under the untidy chopped fringe was bright as a bird's, flitting in an instant from fey to amused to aghast. That voice could be a raucous smoker's or light, fresh and prim, with the intonation of a girl who had gone to elocution lessons and knew to say “lounge”, not “front room”. At literary parties, tiddly in a trice, she could be the life and soul, mistaking the queen for Vera Lynn loudly and to her face, or inviting men to join her under the piano. But she also had a way of lingering near the edge. This was partly because she wanted a smoke, and was seeking a large aspidistra or an agent's well-tailored back to hide her. But it was also because she never thought herself important or worth attention. She produced 18 novels, almost all of them acclaimed. Yet she was perfectly happy with advances of £2,000 from Colin Haycraft at Duckworth, who was her friend. She never felt she deserved more, though her friends and her agent did. There had been far harder times, when she had spent her days sticking labels on wine bottles to earn enough to bring up three children single-handed. That pittance from her publisher forced her to make ends meet by trying journalism, which she enjoyed. Prizes helped: the Whitbread for “Injury Time” in 1977 and “Every Man for Himself” in 1996, the Guardian Fiction prize for “The Bottle Factory Outing” in 1974. Five times she made the shortlist for the Booker, Britain's most famous book award, but never won. Her friends were outraged; she couldn't have cared less. Her damehood pleased her, though it also perplexed her; with her stringy hair and liking for bare feet, she hardly played the part. No superfluous word. The books were not runaway bestsellers. Most of them did respectably. She had started them, after a mixed career on the northern stage, to try to make some sense of her family, her childhood and her struggling, messy, bawdy London life. When that seam was mined out, by the 1990s, she turned to historical fiction, tackling such subjects as Scott in the Antarctic (“”) or the Crimean war (“”). These sold better, and reinforced her fame. Her protagonists were now mostly men facing dreadful deaths, but the voice was still Beryl's, and the beady eyes were missing nothing: a horse's tail “dense as soot”, climbers falling on an ice slope “like flies fluttering against a window”, a jellyfish going out “like a candle” when it was pulled from the sea. This was the same Beryl who noticed, unsparingly, the spray of dead leaves used to decorate a Camden flat, the “sweet smell of decaying apples” from a dirty tablecloth, the slight slide of a body on a stretcher, or the way one heroine “pulled down the foot of her black stocking to cover her naked toe”. Nothing was safe from the most acute observer in the trade. In the lounge of her flat, piled to the ceiling with stuffed animals, tailor's dummies, Victorian etchings and plaster saints, she would receive visitors. The whisky flowed. Every object, she said, told a story. But the key to Beryl lay at the top of the house, beyond yet more stairs, up which she toiled determinedly even when her lungs were failing. This was where she wrote. The room was almost bare. It contained a very old, large computer and a small school desk, with bench attached. Here she typed until the early hours and, after typing, ruthlessly cut what she had written. Twelve pages of draft, she reckoned, would boil down to one in the finished manuscript. No superfluous word was allowed to survive. No sentence could leave her desk until all the “tum-te-tums” were right. Not chaos, but iron discipline, produced her books. That, and an awful lot of Camel Lights, drifting in thin smoke down Albert Street. This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Beryl Bainbridge" Dame Beryl Bainbridge. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Dame Beryl Bainbridge , in full Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge , (born November 21, 1932?, Liverpool, England—died July 2, 2010, London), English novelist known for her psychologically astute portrayals of lower-middle-class English life. Bainbridge grew up in a small town near Liverpool and began a theatrical career at an early age. (Sources differ on her birth year. Although Bainbridge believed it was either 1932 or 1934, her birth was reportedly registered in 1933.) She acted in various repertory theatres for many years before she published her first novel. Her work often presents in a comical yet macabre manner the destructiveness latent in ordinary situations. In A Weekend with Claud (1967), an experimental novel, the titular hero is a predatory, violent man. Another Part of the Wood (1968) concerns a child’s death resulting from adult neglect. Harriet Said (1972) deals with two teenage girls who seduce a man and murder his wife. Other novels in this vein are The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), Sweet William (1975), A Quiet Life (1976), and Injury Time (1977). In (1978), Bainbridge imagines a visit Adolf Hitler might have paid to a relative living in England before World War I. Winter Garden (1980) is a mystery about an English artist who disappears on a visit to the Soviet Union. Subsequent novels include An Awfully Big Adventure (1989; filmed 1995), The Birthday Boys (1991), Every Man for Himself (1996), Master Georgie (1998), and According to Queeney (2001). In addition to her fiction, Bainbridge wrote several television plays, and she published work that underscores what she considered the cultural and ethical disintegration of contemporary life. English Journey; or, The Road to Milton Keynes (1984) is a diary she kept in 1983 during the filming of a television series for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). She also published Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre: Pieces from the Oldie (2005), a collection of reviews and other writings on theatre. Bainbridge was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000. This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen, Corrections Manager. Dame Beryl Bainbridge. She was educated at Merchant Taylors' School in Liverpool and worked as an actress at Liverpool Repertory Theatre. She was awarded a DBE in 2000. She wrote her first novel, Harriet Said , during the 1950s, although it was not published until 1972. Her first published novel, A Weekend with Claud , appeared in 1967 (revised edition 1981), and was followed by Another Part of the Wood (1968), and The Dressmaker (1973), adapted as a film in 1989. The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and Injury Time (1977) won the Whitbread Novel Award. An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) drew on her experiences as an actress working in Liverpool during the 1950s and was adapted as a film. Her later novels, based on real lives and historical events, include The Birthday Boys (1991), the story of Captain Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition; Every Man For Himself (1996), set on board the Titanic ; and Master Georgie (1998), chronicling a young surgeon's adventures during the Crimean War. Every Man for Himself won the Whitbread Novel Award and Master Georgie won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), the WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010. Her unfinished last novel, The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress , was published posthumously in 2011. Critical perspective. Beryl Bainbridge began her working life as an actress and remained an entertainer, as one of Britain's most popular and best-loved novelists. Her work attracted a wide readership as well as critical acclaim, was short-listed for the Booker Prize four times, and won the Whitbread Prize three times, including for Every Man for Himself (1996). Her trademark is the sardonic, even at times macabre wit in her books, usually mercilessly black comedies with eccentric characters. But, by the author's skill, we never lose sympathy with these inhabitants of a peculiarly 'dismal England'. This is partly because of her fine ear for the nuances of dialogue, though what is left unsaid is often as important as what is. Bainbridge is a wonderful observer of human folly and self-deception. The shabbiness of human behaviour, especially in domestic warfare between the sexes, is a constant theme. At its most extreme, she explored the motives of a man and wife pushed to breaking point in Watson's Apology (1984), her re- imagining of a notorious Victorian murder case. Usually her long-suffering women characters/narrators content themselves with being sceptical of male pretensions. But Bainbridge can be unusually sympathetic to men. The Birthday Boys (1991), for instance, shows us the fallible sides of Captain Scott and his companions in their doomed struggle to and from the South Pole, in their fears and foibles, their camaraderie and heroic foolishness. The unpredictable nature of reality is the underlying theme of her first novels, as in A Weekend with Claud (1967) and Another Part of the Wood (1968), which end with sudden death in bizarre circumstances. The latter takes place during a rainy camping weekend in Wales with a mixed group of adults and children wrangling at each other, exploring the woods, and trying to keep amused or at least warm. Joseph's joy with his young son Roland is balanced by arguments with his girlfriend Dotty ('always anxious to put her in the wrong') and the other misfits. All are self- absorbed, somewhat out of step with ordinary life, and have relationships that are deeply disappointing. Interspersed amongst all this are fine comic moments, as when Balfour, 'bloated with excitement', overhears May's husband telling her the erotic story of 'Lallah Rooke' at night. The tragic finale is brought about by Roland swallowing another child's medication. In a typical Bainbridge touch, the news comes as the adults are at last burying their resentments and enjoying themselves with a game of 'Monopoly', his father 'full of fun, holding the paper money in his fist'. A number of her novels are set in Bainbridge's native Liverpool, from the wartime scenes of The Dressmaker (1973) to Young Adolf (1978) which imagines a visit supposedly made to the city in his youth by the future dictator. But she draws perhaps most successfully on local knowledge, and her own early life working for a repertory company there, in An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), which was fairly recently made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. The city's hotels, shops and landmarks are seen in cold grainy images of post-war austerity in Britain. A seasonal production of 'Peter Pan' is the stage set for an ensemble piece of the human comedy, whose sad and passionate characters are, as ever, somewhat at emotional cross-purposes. A sixteen year old Stella is the ingenue who in the course of the production gains (mostly sexual) experience but not necessarily self-knowledge. In her naïve infatuation with theatre manager Meredith, a discreet homosexual, she attempts to make him jealous by sleeping with an ageing famous actor, for whom the affair has drastic consequences. As the plot unwinds, Stella's actions unwittingly reveal adultery, homosexuality (then illegal), and the buried secrets of her own parentage. It ends on an absurd note: death in the River Mersey, and Stella blithely phoning 'The Speaking Clock' to hear her actress mother. In some of her very best novels, Bainbridge specialised in fictionalising Great British disasters; not only Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition in The Birthday Boys but the larger-scale chaos of the Crimean War in Master Georgie (1998). However, her pre-eminent performance within this special self-created genre is Every Man for Himself , which many readers consider to be her masterpiece. The maiden voyage of 'The Titanic' (freighted with millionaires and hopefuls) is presented over the course of several days through it young narrator Morgan, his views of the hedonistic revelry and passions aboard forming a counterpoint to the inexorable progress of the ship towards nemesis. Again, the pleasure of this remarkably concise and haunting book comes partly from its close focus on a group of passengers, enabling us to make their acquaintance, and partly from Bainbridge's skill in orchestrating subplots. The mysterious older man scurra is involved in most of these, in his revelations to Morgan (supposedly the nephew of financier J. P. Morgan), his arguments with him, and his rivalry for the affections of alluring socialite Wallis. In the best farcical scene in the book, the infatuated and jealous Morgan hides in a closet in Wallis' bedroom, and is then forced to overhear her in flagrante with Scurra. As one of the ship's designers, Morgan takes a professional notice of the ship's workings below decks as well, and an increasingly personal one as a fire breaks out in a coal bunker. Bainbridge steers the narrative with a fine sense of pace, building the tension with hints (a casual mid-Atlantic ice warning), and expertly choreographing the last hours. As he waits to jump into the sea, Morgan finds that 'Death is such a lover's pinch that a man can be excused for prising himself free'. Bainbridge's novel, According to Queeney (2001), again features a young narrator commenting on historical events. The subject is Samuel Johnson's misplaced passion for Queeney's mother Mrs Thrale. It largely takes the form of letters replying to enquiries about the events of thirty years ago, each section being ingeniously headed by the definition of a word from Johnson's Dictionary . The portrait of Johnson that emerges, for all his melancholic attacks and jealous rages, is a very sympathetic one. The ageing writer concludes that age 'weakened the emotions owing to a realisation that the light was fading and nought but darkness lay ahead'. Indeed, by the last pages of almost all of Bainbridge's books, however dubious her characters are, by a kind of alchemy, readers know and care about them. They manage to be heart-felt without being sentimental. An essential theme, announced in Watson's Apology and pervasive throughout her writing, is that 'Tragedy, though hard to contend with, was an affirmation of life'. Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge. Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure". In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of "The 10 greatest British writers since 1945".