Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge 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 (“The Birthday Boys”) or the Crimean war (“Master Georgie”). 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 Young Adolf (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.