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Published by Hachette Digital

978-1-4055-1370-8

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge 1976

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Introduction copyright © Alex Clark 2013

‘Night and Day’ words and music by Cole Porter © 1932 (Renewed) WB Music Corp.

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VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
587

Beryl Bainbridge 

Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) wrote eighteen novels, four works of non-fiction and five plays for stage and television. Harriet Said… was the first novel she wrote, though it was not published until 1972. Five of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Every Man for Himself and Injury Time won the Whitbread Prize; The Bottle Factory Outing won the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Master Georgie won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Four of her novels, including An Awfully Big Adventure, were adapted for film. In 2011, Bainbridge was honoured posthumously with a special Best of Beryl Man Booker Prize in recognition of her outstanding career. Her final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, was published in 2011.

By Beryl Bainbridge

NOVELS

A Weekend with Claude

Another Part of the Wood

Harriet Said…

The Dressmaker

The Bottle Factory Outing

Sweet William

A Quiet Life

Injury Time

Young Adolf

Winter Garden

Watson’s Apology

Filthy Lucre

An Awfully Big Adventure

The Birthday Boys

Every Man for Himself

Master Georgie

According to Queeney

The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Mum and Mr Armitage

Collected Stories

NON-FICTION

English Journey, or the Road to Milton Keynes

Forever England: North and South

Something Happened Yesterday

Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre

INTRODUCTION

Beryl Bainbridge did not find it necessary to conceal the fact that her early work was inspired and informed by the early years of her life; nor, indeed, to put a gloss on that life. She began the introduction to her Collected Stories, published in 1994, in typically direct fashion: ‘My father and mother bickered a lot, which is why, there being no such thing as television to distract one, or any other room in which to escape from the raised voices, my mother encouraged my natural inclination to scribble in notebooks.’ She went on to describe how she started a novel when she was ten, pasting loose sheets into a book about Livingstone’s travels in Africa using a flour-and-water concoction; when the flour swelled and the book wouldn’t shut, she threw it away, frightened that its ‘in-depth account’ of her parents’ life together would prove a painful discovery for her otherwise encouraging mother.

Decades later, when interviewers came to squeeze past the stuffed bison in the hallway of her higgledy-piggledy house in Camden Town, Bainbridge would cite her upbringing not merely as the source of raw material, but as a reason to put pen to paper in the first place. ‘I only wrote to get out this business about my mum and dad,’ she told Lynn Barber. ‘Once I’d written it down, all those neuroses were gone – it was marvellous therapy.’ Talking to the Paris Review about The Dressmaker, the fourth of her novels to be published and the first (of five) to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she remarked that its ‘sole purpose’ was to chronicle her family. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t want to have written it.’

Bainbridge’s later work – she wrote eighteen novels in all, as well as short stories, plays and journalism; and she was no mean painter – has a noticeable thread running through it. The books are wildly diverse in their settings, ranging from Antarctica to the Crimea to Streatham, from an ocean liner to a tent to a camper van, and from the late 1700s to the 1960s. But in each of them, Bainbridge set herself the task of animating, with her trademark off-kilter, almost unfeasibly compressed prose, an event or a personality that forms part of our history: Doctor Johnson, Scott of the Antarctic, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. She could hardly be described as a historical novelist in any conventional sense of the term. Rather, it is as though she wanted to explore whether the talents that were evident in her smaller-scale fiction – the eye for the macabre detail and the ear for social nuance; the ability to convey confrontation and dysfunction between people; the dramatic intensity – would translate to situations and characters with which we believe ourselves to be familiar. Readers and critics agreed that the shift in focus worked; and when, in 2011, the Man Booker foundation announced the winner of its ‘Best of Beryl’ prize, a posthumous award for the much-loved ‘Booker bridesmaid’, it was Master Georgie, Bainbridge’s Crimean War adventure published in 1998, that emerged triumphant.

There is still, however, a great deal of affection and admiration for the novels of the 1970s and 1980s; and, looked at as a body of work, they reveal an extraordinarily impressive diversity, far more so than her declaration than they were written simply to expiate the memories of a troubled childhood would suggest. Although she had written Harriet Said… towards the end of the 1950s, the first two novels to see the light of day were A Weekend with Claude (1967) and Another Part of the Wood (1968). Both were published by Hutchinson; neither earned Bainbridge – by this time a single mother of three – much in the way of either income or publicity. It was at this point, via one of her small son’s playmates, that she was to make the acquaintance of Anna Haycraft, who was married to Colin Haycraft; together, the pair presided over the publishing house Duckworth. Anna Haycraft, who went on to write novels under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, took Bainbridge on, bringing out Harriet Said… in 1972 and, subsequently, novels including The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and A Quiet Life. Despite the fact that their author didn’t make a great deal of money with Duckworth either, she became increasingly known and widely respected; she was to remain with the firm until Colin Haycraft’s death in 1994.

The background – not only familial, but also social and historical – that she mined in those years was certainly fruitful. ‘I always thought that what happened before I was sixteen was much more important than what happened afterwards,’ she explained, referring to the impact that the Second World War had had on British life. As a schoolgirl she had seen footage from the Belsen concentration camp; ‘What happened to the Jews changed me for ever,’ she said. She also had a youthful love affair with a German prisoner of war, Harry Arno Franz, and continued a correspondence with him for six years after his repatriation; it is sketched, with an edge of passionate danger, in the wayward Madge’s clandestine relationship in A Quiet Life, published in 1976.

Of all her novels, A Quiet Life draws most clearly on the tensions of Bainbridge’s domestic circumstances as she grew up. There was a class difference between her parents: her mother had attended a finishing school, while her father had gone out to work at the age of ten. Despite his lack of a formal education, he became a successful entrepreneur, but was later bankrupted in the aftermath of the Depression. The Bainbridges and their two children, Beryl and her brother Ian, lived in an atmosphere of straitened gentility in Formby, on the coast not far from Liverpool. Much of the detail of their day-to-day lives – furious arguments followed by lengthy silences; the fact that much of the time father shared a bedroom with son and mother with daughter – makes the leap from reality to fiction. Interestingly, however, Bainbridge’s focus is not Madge, who flits across the novel obliquely, flouting the rules of polite society, frequently barefoot, destined for trouble. Rather, it is her brother Alan, ostensibly a far steadier character, who claims our attention as he negotiates – not always very successfully – the competing claims of propriety and individuality. Early in the novel, he imagines how his life will turn out if he ends up marrying a girl whom, as yet, he barely knows:

He knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he could only hope to be an extension of his parents – he’d step a few paces further on, but not far. His progression was limited, as theirs had been… He’d always be polite and watch his manners. Most likely he’d vote Conservative, in rebellion against his father. He would want the house to be decorated nicely. If possible, there’d be a willow tree in the garden.

Madge is never in much danger of conforming; in the brief prologue to the novel, in which Alan and she meet in a tea-room in middle age, her escape from orthodoxy, while not made explicit, is hinted at by the ‘distasteful letter written on thin toilet paper, from some town in France’ that she sends her brother after their mother’s death. During their meeting, she rejects offers of her mother’s jewellery and other booty (‘don’t want the wardrobe… don’t want the china… don’t want the sofa’), save for an ornament that exemplifies their mother’s aspirational taste.

Madge would not be entirely out of place in the pages of Sweet William, the novel that immediately preceded A Quiet Life. In that Paris Review interview, Bainbridge had, with typical candour, described the kind of fiction she didn’t want to produce: ‘When I started writing in the 1960s,’ she said, ‘wasn’t it the time when women were beginning to write about girls having abortions and single mothers living in Hampstead and having a dreadful time? Well, I thought, I’m not going to do that; I’m not bothering with all that rubbish.’

She did bother with ‘all that rubbish’, but only sort of: Sweet William’s Ann, who has fled the claustrophobic family home in Brighton to begin a career at the BBC, does live in Hampstead; her cousin, Pamela, does have an abortion; Ann herself does become a single mother. She also has some undeniably dreadful times at the hands of William, who, to sensible eyes, is anything but sweet: a narcissistic philanderer, he is a man who compulsively plays one woman off against another, appearing and disappearing randomly, requiring utter dependence but supplying zero stability. And yet it is strongly implied that the bohemian, romantic, sexual and creative life that he represents is preferable to the crowded dining room at Ann’s parents’ house, in which ‘the flex for the electric carving knife stretched like a trip wire across the hearth’.

Everything that one knows of Bainbridge’s life and her exceptional, original, near-unclassifiable writing career persuades one that she, too, wriggled free of the electric carving knife waiting to trip her up. Her early fiction frequently dramatises that liberation, reflecting both its bleak comedy and its labour pains. It’s an escape for which her many readers must be all too grateful.

Alex Clark 

2013 