Beryl Bainbridge | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Beryl Bainbridge

Archive Diary

Beryl Bainbridge

Archive Diary

For almost three decades the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last week, wrote book reviews and diaries for The Spectator. They were, without exception, brilliant. It has been said over the last week that she was the best novelist of her generation, but she was also (though a life-long Labour voter) the best sort of conservative: ‘What a mistake change is!’ she wrote in a diary in 2000: ‘Who needs those ghastly new buildings which have taken over Swiss Cottage? Why was Peter’s bookshop in Camden Town done away with, and the off-licence and the pet shop and the Delancey Café?’ Which Spectator reader would disagree? In one diary she confessed to taking a carving knife with her during her long midnight walks, ‘in case anyone is out there aching to do a spot of mugging.

Beryl Bainbridge

Enjoyer and endurer

Beryl Bainbridge

Enjoyer and endurer

I approached the late David Nokes’s scholarly book with some trepidation, having heard that it had been criticised for its apparent dismissal of James Boswell.I approached the late David Nokes’s scholarly book with some trepidation, having heard that it had been criticised for its apparent dismissal of James Boswell. As I had gained all my previous knowledge of the great Sam from Boswell’s magnificent biography I did not expect to enjoy this new exploration. But I did, very much indeed. Nowhere does he accuse Boswell of falsely creating the character of Johnson; indeed he acknowledges that he portrayed an irritable but very human subject.Nokes’s book, densely academic, provides a sensitive insight into Johnson’s character, and a valuable analysis of his sometimes difficult prose and verse; difficult, that is, because he was steeped in and influenced by the outpourings of such giants as Horace, Ovid, Milton, Euripides, Dryden and Pope.

Beryl Bainbridge

A Literary Life

Beryl Bainbridge

A Literary Life

The days leading up to Xmas are such fun, aren’t they? All those cards and presents to buy and all those charity requests reminding one of starving children, crippled adults and abandoned dogs. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to concentrate on more important things, such as Sight and Time. Obviously the two go together, for both determine a view of the world. In regard to Sight, my bathroom ceiling fell down because the house next door put up scaffolding and the chap in charge stepped on to my flat roof and put his foot through it. He denied doing so, of course. When I now get into the tub there’s a bloody big hole up above and the rain comes through. I’m not too upset because I was brought up to believe that, owing to the cost of heating water, one only needs a bath once a fortnight.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 18 April 2008

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 18 April 2008

Last week several people — well, two to be exact — asked me if I was looking forward to St George’s Day. One of them was a road-sweeper. Apparently it falls this year on 23 April, although in 1861 its date appears to be two days earlier. I know this because I looked it up in the Book of Days. I keep thinking how confusing it would be if one came back from the dead and tried to look things up in newspapers. I visited Liverpool two days later, the road-sweeper’s query still in my head, and inquired of a girl loitering beside the paper stall at Lime Street Station what she thought of St George. She said, ‘He’s a goner, isn’t he?’, and turned away. She was using slang, of course, which is a term meaning secret language.

Beryl Bainbridge

The Liverpool that I loved has gone for ever

Beryl Bainbridge

The Liverpool that I loved has gone for ever

In June of 2003 Tessa Jowell, the then culture secretary, announced that in 2008 Liverpool would become the European Capital of Culture. The city beat five other hopefuls — Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle and Oxford.In welcoming the result, the head of the judges, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, declared that it was Liverpool’s stunning dockside development, its city centre and ‘strong visual arts’ that had boosted its chances. Council chief executive David Henshaw described the win as staggering, although not surprising, as the whole city had been behind the bid. Liverpool, he said, is growing up. We’ve got history and we should be proud of our history, but in the past we’ve been prisoners of our history. He was, of course, referring to the slave trade.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 26 May 2007

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 26 May 2007

This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good film. Charlie Russell is my grandson. ***One day last week I opened something called a Flower and Angel Festival at St Pancras parish church near Euston.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 4 March 2006

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 4 March 2006

I was revolting from a very early age and more than once thought of taking over a radio station and starting a revolution. In those days the wireless exerted far more influence than the newspapers, at least in our house. I can still remember the opening sentence of my call to arms. Rise up, rise up, the moment is at hand. At this distance I can’t recall what particular cause provoked the necessity for an uprising, but I do know I’d been reading Red Eagle by Dennis Wheatley and that in my satchel I had a picture of Marshal Budenny, a man with a moustache straight out of a pantomime. Recently I have again felt a surge of rebellion owing to various issues that occupy both airwaves and press, among them smoking, sex, the amount of water we put in the bath, the emerging Channel Tunnel rail terminal at King’s Cross, and the use of ‘unnecessarily insensitive’ language.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 11 December 2004

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 11 December 2004

I was in Woolworths last Friday when a woman hit her little child across the head. Quite a few of us saw what she did, but none of us did anything. To be fair, it wasn’t a hard blow and the victim didn’t burst into tears, but it was shocking. When young, I was often belted round the ear, once for saying ‘bugger’, but then, in those days, the word was unspeakable and the punishment unremarkable. Returning home I did a little research on the history of spanking, and am amazed — as both Richard II and Frankie Howerd were apt to exclaim — at my findings. For instance, did you know that as late as 1968 a gentleman in Bognor Regis was doing such a brisk trade in selling canes by post that he was running out of trees and contemplating moving to a leafier part of the country? I already knew that Gladstone was into flagellation after going out to talk to ladies of the night — as he was a Liverpudlian it didn’t surprise me — but we were never taught that Swinburne wrote a poem called ‘Arthur’s Flogging’, the last three lines of which read: With piteous eyes uplifted, the poor boy Just faltered, ‘Please sir’, and could get no farther.

Beryl Bainbridge

Scouse honour

Beryl Bainbridge

Scouse honour

I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned to defend their country during the Six Day War. And that, following an unfortunate leading article in last week’s Spectator, is what I am now doing. The city I grew up in, a quarter destroyed by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, had once been a monument to trade and commerce. When my father was born, there were sailing ships in Salthouse Dock. Such ships had carried cotton goods to Africa, refilled their holds with slaves, borne them in misery to the West Indies, and returned in triumph loaded with sugar and rum.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 18 October 2003

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 18 October 2003

The Man Booker Prize dinner was held on Tuesday in the Egyptian room of the British Museum. It’s something of an ordeal for the six on the shortlist who have to wait until the pudding to hear who’s won. I’d only read one of the books, but they send you a disc of readings from them all, so that when I was asked — several times — who I thought might win I was able confidently to announce that it would be a toss-up between Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood. There was one particular extract, read beautifully by Martin Jarvis, which contained a lot of F-words, which I thought was a cheat. In the course of several interviews outside the museum I said Vernon God Little by a young chap called D.B.C. Pierre couldn’t possibly win.

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 1 February 2003

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary - 1 February 2003

I was brought up to pay little attention to vegetables, apart from beetroot, which was served every day, and carrots, of which we had two each on a Sunday, on the grounds that they enabled Spitfire pilots to see in the dark. And then last week I arranged to meet a friend in the bar of the Waldorf Hotel, and while waiting ordered a vodka-and-lime, no ice. After some time had passed, a small vase arrived with an enormous stalk of celery stuck in the middle and a radish floating alongside. Up until this moment, I had been feeling fairly gloomy - whether we are content or in a disturbed frame of mind depends, ultimately, upon the kind of thoughts that pervade our consciousness - but after half an hour spent sucking on the celery stem my mood altered, and I found myself humming.

Beryl Bainbridge

A whodunnit below zero

Beryl Bainbridge

A whodunnit below zero

The more one reads about polar exploration in previous centuries, the more one comes to the conclusion that men were different in times gone by, stronger, wilder, possessed of an almost perverse capacity to withstand cold and hunger. They travelled without the benefit of radios, thermal underwear or light-weight sledges; when things went wrong no aeroplanes would zoom in to rescue those in danger. Captain Scott and three of the four men who accompanied him on the final slog to the South Pole were well on their way to the grave by the time the return journey began. Oates and Scott had gangrene from frostbite, and Taff Evans was losing his mind - he gave up the struggle after the descent of the Beardmore Glacier - but then, he was not a product of the public schools.