by Brendan King
It was also while out walking Pedro that Beryl first became friends with Lynda South, and where she would later meet Harry, the German prisoner of war with whom she had her first serious teenage romance. During her formative years, from the age of twelve till she left home for boarding school at fifteen, Pedro not only provided her with an excuse to leave the house and spend hours down by the seashore or in the woods, but also acted as her chaperone, it being deemed safer for Beryl to be out with the dog than out on her own. For Beryl, Pedro was a symbol of her childhood, and when he died in 1953 it struck her as the end of an era.
FOUR
Us Versus Them
Us Versus Them
Being an account of Us (Bash, me and our dogs) versus everyone else. By Basher Bainbridge & Lyn. South. All the characters are not fictitious by any means an’ if they recanise themselves an’ try an’ prosecute us they can just see what they will bloomin well get.
Yours truly Us.1
Beryl’s 1944 diary represents her first appearance as a writer, but one would be hard pushed to see in it any incipient signs of the novelist she would become. Indeed, its entries are so poorly written – almost all of them contain basic errors in spelling and grammar – it seems impossible that the writer of them would, in the space of two years, be capable of attempting a full-length novel.
Although the ability to spell is hardly an indicator of intelligence – or even a prerequisite for a successful writing career – it has been regarded as such in the past, and if Beryl’s spelling at school was anything like that in her early diaries her English teachers must have despaired. She writes repeatedly of going to the ‘picartures’, she goes to see the ‘Phampton of the opero’, and she could never quite get the hang of Mrs Ackerley’s name, referring to her variously as ‘Miss Ackerly’, ‘Mrs Ackely’ and ‘Ackaly’. However, the kind of errors she made, as well as their consistency, hint at a more systemic problem than mere inattention or carelessness – though this undoubtedly also played a part – and today she would almost certainly have been diagnosed as dyslexic. Her most common spelling mistake was transposing letters, a typical feature of dyslexia, especially the letters ‘i’ – in ‘panio’ (piano) and ‘buisness’ (business) – and ‘e’ – in ‘minuet’ (minute) and ‘quite’ (quiet). She also persisted in various other quirks of orthography, invariably writing ‘noone’ rather than ‘no one’, ‘loose’ when she meant ‘lose’, and misplacing apostrophes in contractions such as ‘could’nt’ and ‘did’nt’.
Despite these problems with articulacy, Beryl’s literary development between 1944 and 1946 was remarkable, and her diary for the latter year shows a considerable improvement both in spelling and in expression – though her level of attainment would still be considered under par for someone of her age and schooling.
Although Beryl had probably written stories from an early age, as many children tend to do, it was for poetry rather than prose that she was initially considered to have a precocious talent. The first public reference to Beryl’s writing is in relation to her poetry – the Formby Times noted in 1945 that she ‘was blossoming out as an extremely youthful poet’2 – and her enthusiasm can be seen in the number of poems she would write and keep over the next few years, as well as in her 1947 and 1949 diaries, into which she copied out verses by her favourite poets, such as Rupert Brooke and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed, poetry would continue to be the form in which she expressed her most personal feelings until she left home, and even in later life she would resort to it at moments of extreme emotion.
In February 1946, during half-term, Beryl began a short novel called ‘The Medvale Bombshell’,3 which she wrote out in pencil in a school exercise book and which ran to a little over 6,000 words. Set in London – which she had visited a few months before to collect her LAMDA award4 – the novel has a vaguely Dickensian air, concerned as it is with issues of work, poverty, convoluted family relationships and unexpected inheritances. It opens with Sam Medvale, the reclusive patriarch of a dysfunctional family, turning up one evening at their ‘outrageiously victorian’5 house to make the unlikely proposal that he will leave the entire Medvale fortune ‘to the person who makes the most improvement in the next 6 years’. The rest of the novel follows Anthony Medvale’s misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make his way in life and win his uncle’s fortune, before it ends abruptly and inconclusively part way through Chapter Seven.
In terms of characterization and narrative the story is all over the place, and it is practically impenetrable as regards plot. But what is noticeable is a certain facility in adapting the clichés of popular literature – one or two expressions are copied from Kipling’s Stalky & Co. – and in pastiching the convoluted phraseology of the nineteenth-century novel:
Nina, was the half sister of Anthony, a higly colourful young woman of 8 and twenty 30. Her bright yellow hair was swept startlingly and not altogether unbecomingly to the top of her well shaped head. A man of about 40 sat reading in the armchair by the fire. He was a handsome dry looking person, with hair, somewhat grey at the temples, and a rather natty way of dressing. This was Godfery, Nina’s husband. At the last remark of Nina’s, he raised his head and said, ‘Considering also, my dear wife, that you yourself are always making uncalled for statements, it must be rather a change for you to hear Anthony make one.’
Although there is not much in the way of obvious autobiographical representation, there are echoes of the tensions of home life and of Richard’s feelings about his in-laws. Sam Medvale’s criticism of his niece Nina and her husband Godfery – ‘Look what a mess your marriage is. You do nothing but bicker, bicker, bicker’ – seems to be directed at Winnie and Richard, while an early scene that takes place in the kitchen, in which Sam admonishes Godfery to ‘be a man and stop living on Stuat’, has parallels with Beryl’s recollections of fractious family conferences in the front room and her father’s reliance on money from John James Baines.
Beryl’s next attempt at a novel showed more promise. Despite having been begun during her summer holiday in June 1946 just a couple of months after ‘The Medvale Bombshell’, ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle and Martin Andromiky’6 already shows a much firmer grasp of character and narrative line, and is more mature as regards style and expression. Its themes are similar to those of ‘The Medvale Bombshell’, involving family connections, issues of inheritance and the threat of poverty, but this time they are handled more lucidly and the characterization is stronger and more consistent.
Although Beryl didn’t find out about her father’s bankruptcy until after his death in 1961, she seems to have picked up something of the murky current of financial failure surrounding his past. ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle’ not only revolves around the ruin of a business, it makes a number of references to failed stock-market speculations and bankruptcy. The central character also happens to be called Richard.
Ironically, given the novel’s subject, the manuscript was written in a large notebook that Beryl had originally given to her father for Christmas in 1944, and the inside front cover bears her gift inscription:
To Daddy
From Beryl
Year 1944
I hope this book will useful be
And when you write in it remember me.
This inscription had nothing to do with the novel itself, yet when Beryl came to publish the book in 1986, under the title Filthy Lucre, she nevertheless copied out the final rhyming couplet, but left off the reference to ‘Daddy’, and by changing the last line to ‘When you read it remember me’ made it seem as if it was the infant writer’s message to posterity rather than a daughter’s affectionate note to her father.
‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle’ is essentially a pastiche of the Victorian popular novel, and while Beryl’s familiarity with the clichés and conventional expressions of popular literature is again evident, there are flashes of individuality. Her descriptions are rarely copied directly and it is impressive how many of the distinctive
turns of phrase that feature in the book are unique to her. Take the opening paragraph of Chapter Two:
We will leave now dear readers, the bright Ledwhistle parlour and like a bird pass out into the dark november night. We will journey down to a wharf where the slimy Thames moves like some loathsome reptile, and the houses huddle together in squalid ruins. Here the lamp light falls on wasted limbs and quivering hands. It shines on sin and filth, while all aware the cruel river pursues its fitful course.7
While individual phrases sound like borrowings from other writers, and indeed ‘like some loathsome reptile’ is an adaptation of Dickens’s description of Fagin in Oliver Twist, the evocation of the murk and gloom of the Thames is brilliantly achieved through the construction of her own newly minted clichés. The novel marked a significant improvement over its predecessor, though it is still flawed in terms of its narrative structure. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island while writing the book seems to have distracted Beryl from her original intention, for its middle section turns into a wholly redundant subplot, involving murderous pirates and a treasure island.
Although much of the text of Filthy Lucre is identical with the manuscript of 1946, there are nevertheless some distinct and deliberate changes that go some way to altering our perception of it as a piece of juvenilia. In the first instance the text has been thoroughly copy-edited, certain infelicities of style have been smoothed out, and spelling and grammatical errors have been corrected, making it appear much less childish than the original. The manuscript of ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle’ also contained a number of painted and drawn illustrations, for the most part either simple portraits or general landscape scenes, none of which were reproduced in the published book. Despite Beryl’s statement that the drawings in Filthy Lucre were ‘copies of those done at the time’, they were in fact a new set that had no relation to the originals, being not only more technically competent, but also more ironic. The drawing to illustrate the line ‘a queer friendship sprang up between the two men’ hinted knowingly at the modern meaning of the word ‘queer’, for example, something entirely absent from the original.
At the end of the manuscript of ‘The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle’ there is a hastily scribbled outline for what Beryl planned to be her next novel. It shows that at this stage she was still more interested in fiction as a way of exploring genuinely imaginative stories and plots, even extending to the realm of the supernatural and the fantastical, rather than as a means of expressing her own feelings or life experiences: ‘Story of a man who was in a London Blitz. Looses his memory and finds himself in another world. He comes back an old man but time has stood still for the rest of the earth. John Answelwain.’
Beryl got as far as listing a cast of potential characters – ‘Leslie Bishop, Carrie Wesly, Jasper Corely, Tod, Busty, Dr Anselwain’ – showing that her talent for names was already well developed, but the novel was never begun.
The most significant influence on Beryl’s desire to write was her friendship with another pupil at Merchant Taylors’, Lynda South. Although they lived only a few houses down from each other on opposite sides of Ravenmeols Lane, the two girls don’t seem to have become friends immediately, possibly because Lyn’s birthday was in February and she was a year above Beryl at school. According to a story written in 1949, in which Lyn appears thinly disguised as a ‘confident looking girl’ called Christie, and in which Beryl portrays herself as Loo, they first got to know each other while out taking their respective dogs for a walk, probably in the spring or early summer of 1946. ‘The lane to the sea was to Loo the lane to everywhere. It was there she met Christie and the yellow dog, and that was the begining of her youth.’8
Beryl and Lyn quickly developed a close, secretive friendship, one that allowed them to recreate themselves outside of what each considered to be the restrictive and oppressive confines of their home life. The significance of the friendship for Beryl can hardly be overstated: for the first time she had met someone of her own age whose passion for art and literature matched – or even surpassed – her own, someone she looked up to and whom she wanted to emulate. She even modelled her handwriting on Lyn’s, so much so that it is difficult to tell the two scripts apart. Nevertheless, in spite of their similar interests and enthusiasms, and despite their shared sense of dissatisfaction with and growing alienation from their parents, the two girls were very different in temperament and personality.
Lyn seemed older than her years, more disciplined and more focused on what she wanted to do in life, which was to be an artist like her older sister Maureen, who had also attended Merchant Taylors’ and was now studying at the Liverpool School of Art. Lyn was academically gifted in a way that Beryl wasn’t. Not only had she won a Junior School Scholarship to attend Merchant Taylors’, she featured among the school’s annual prizewinners for good work, which Beryl conspicuously failed to do. Not that Lyn was a swot or deferred to school authority. But unlike Beryl, whose rebelliousness was instinctive, Lyn’s rebellion had its origins in her sense of her own intellectual superiority. She was also fearless, with a kind of devil-may-care attitude that impressed her peers – she once climbed out of the library window on the upper floor and scaled down the drainpipe, a feat that remained in the memories of her fellow pupils and may have inspired Beryl’s description of the vertiginous escape through a church window in Harriet Said.
Lyn shared Beryl’s sense of humour, but was daring enough to take it to extremes that Beryl never would on her own. The two travelled to and from school together by train, and in the winter, coming home in the dusk ‘with the rain heavy on their cheeks, and their legs damp’, Lyn would pretend to heave inside and begin to cough very loudly. Beryl would put her arm round her, as if she were helping a ‘staggering consumptive’, and though the two girls found it difficult to suppress their giggling, ‘old ladies would stop and watch them worriedly’.
Lyn also took the lead in other areas: the year Beryl met Lyn was also that in which she ‘learnt about boys’. Together they would discuss the merits of the local boys vying for their attention, in Beryl’s case Don Dean and Lionel Barras. They would flirt with the porters who worked at Formby railway station, Eric, Ivan and Frank, inventing fantastic stories about them and giving them equally fanciful nicknames. While out together in the pine woods, they would encounter an assortment of male figures – respectably married men, German prisoners of war, local lads up to no good – with whom they would talk, tease, insult or lead on, according to humour or circumstance. In 1947 Beryl started to keep a list of all the boyfriends she’d had, dating back to when she was twelve. Along with their names, she included their nationality, their age, her age when she met them, and the length of time their relationship had lasted. The last name to figure on it dates from 1949, by which time her tally had reached seventeen.
For the next few years the two girls would write effusively and copiously to each other, Lyn addressing Beryl as ‘Darling Lickle Girl’ or ‘Dearest Bashie’, to exchange advice or relay news about various boys: ‘Your letter came a bit too late because I’d practically (with a few exceptions) finished with Sandy. Geoff is wolfing after me in full cry.’9 Inevitably there were occasional conflicts: an early letter from Lyn hints at a falling out between them after Beryl started going out with a boy that Lyn fancied: ‘Dear Kid, I told you once I would always love you. I wasn’t kidding either and I always will but please don’t ask me why I have broken. It’s harder for me than it is for you.’10 The break didn’t last long but it left its mark: though there was no more poaching, Lyn’s letters are sporadically dotted with injunctions to Beryl about certain boys, reminding her that ‘he’s mine’.11
Winnie viewed Beryl’s friendship with Lynda with suspicion, feeling that her daughter was being led astray and made yet more unmanageable by Lynda’s bad example. The Souths similarly felt that it was Beryl who was an unhealthy influence on their daughter. This mutual parental disapproval only sealed the bond between the two girls.
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br /> Lyn’s letters and Beryl’s diaries are scattered with passionate outbursts of mutual love and adoration, and neither seems to have been immune from the tendency to form what were then called ‘pashes’. A poem Beryl wrote during her last year at Merchant Taylors’ and entitled ‘To Lyn’ expresses an envious yearning to be the object of her affection:
When we found the horse, it rolled
Its yellow teeth and danced for you.
I was jealous. My teeth were yellow too.
I could’nt dance. You were coarse
And hit its shining bottom with a stone.
I was jealous then. I felt that I should bear
The pain you gave, and I alone.
You knew a lot about flowers. You called them
Dear Latanic names, you never called me such, and I was envious.
The tree with the house upon its bough
Received you as a child, glorious,
And pleased it danced again beneath
Your body. It should have been passive.
I will always be.12
Here, as in her willingness to win the affection of her peers by taking on their punishments, Beryl seems to identify passively with each of the objects on which Lyn lavished her attention, even to the extent of masochistically envying the horse’s pain. Nor was this sensual element, subliminal though it may have been, absent on Lyn’s side, as is clear in one of her letters to Beryl, urging her to return home from school: ‘When you come back dear we’ll go down to the shore and the night will be sort of grey and dark and warm. And the frogs in the tadpole pools will croak all the time and we’ll smell the pines and the wet grass and sand and then we’ll lie on our backs in the sand and watch the channel lights go up and down and we’ll love each other and be terribly happy, and we’ll talk and talk and laugh like we used to, dearest. I can’t wait to see you once more.’13
