The Novel as Autobiography

Could it be true that if you want to read the biography of a writer, you will find it all as random instalments in a procession of their novels? Why not test this premise with the English writer Beryl Bainbridge? Her works are a model of how factual grain gets ground and filtered to become grist to the fictional mill. Sometimes Bainbridge is called an eccentric—a claim she summarily dismisses:

What they don’t realise when they say I’m a bit eccentric—and that’s the only time I get hot under the collar—is the discipline needed to get something done and get it done properly, and in the early days bringing up a family as well. What you do need is enormous discipline, eccentricity doesn’t count for a flipping thing.

Some of our closeness was due to a certain similarity in the way our lives had begun and progressed. As children we had both felt out of step, told lies, felt we were hard done by. As adults we had loved the men we married and they had walked away, crashing our hopes, after which we had gone in for gentlemen callers. Both of us used fiction to make sense of the past. Both of us believed that had we been happier neither of us would have needed to write.

One essential illuminated all of Bainbridge’s early novels: her conviction that adult lives flew and childhood dawdled. While it was difficult to remember what happened yesterday or last week, whole stretches of the past were remarkable for their immediacy: “I can actually think myself back into a day thirty years ago and recall it in exact detail … Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood. So I go over it again and again.”

Bainbridge was born in Formby, just outside Liverpool, in 1934 and Liverpool remains close to her heart: “I can no longer claim to be a citizen. Yet I am so tied to it by the past, by memories of family and beginnings, that I still think of it as home.” Liverpool’s physical fabric provides the backdrop to several of her novels, and it is always viewed with a blend of historical accuracy, black humour and affection. She was able to give this affection a factual airing in a book published in 1984, called English Journey or The Road to Milton Keynes which chronicled her travels through Britain, arranged by the BBC in celebration of J.B. Priestley’s book English Journey, written some fifty years earlier.

I was not an objective traveller,” she remarked in its preface. Her parents “faced backwards” and in doing so they generated in her a powerful nostalgia for what went before. The very things once so offensive to Priestley —the shabby huddle of little towns, the narrow streets, the smoke and grime, and the overwhelming drabness (all now being swept away by motorways, carparks and supermarkets)—were what Bainbridge was most enamoured of. “There should be a rule against change. Memories have to live somewhere.” In Bristol she found herself on a motorway and huffed: “The authorities might as well put up a notice announcing that pedestrians, as well as trains, have had their day. I wonder they bother with pavements any more

When she arrived in Liverpool, she went straight to the house where she had lived twenty years earlier when she was first married, and where her first two children were born. If the reader needed any confirmation that the past is always with us, we have only to read her account of this visit. “Often in dreams I walk round the house, up the lino covered stairs to the bathroom with the sloping floor and the copper geyser sagging above the bath tub.” She wished she hadn’t gone back. The balcony had collapsed onto the street and in the yard she found one of her dining chairs in the rubble. She remembered the neighbours, “an albino woman from Scotland married to a Portuguese West African”, who unsurprisingly would have been at home in one of her early novels. “They had nineteen children … Once I saw the eldest boy chasing his father round the yard with an axe. In conversation he referred to his parent as ‘that coloured bastard, me Dad’.”

This in turn prompted a rumination on how every life, however modest, is touched—is shaped—by history. When Bainbridge’s father was born, there were ships in the Liverpool dock which carried cotton goods to Africa, exchanged them for slaves, carried their cargo hold of misery to the West Indies, and returned to Liverpool with a fortune in rum and sugar. Everything in Liverpool, from the buildings to the bollards, seemed to be made of granite and cast iron—built to last forever as edifices to the industrial and commercial juggernaut the north of England had become. During the war, her father “in one of his paddies” reversed his car into one such indestructible bollard with such force that his false teeth were shattered. Cast iron (railings, bollards and balconies) and false teeth for that matter, feature in her early novels. The former were everywhere being dismantled to help the war effort, and the latter were symbolically removed in the security of one’s own home, where the social niceties could be dispensed with.

Her father had also loved Liverpool. During her childhood, on the occasions when they were on speaking terms, he would take her around the business sector of town, pointing out various doorways and windows (the sites of his earlier business triumphs) and his office, the Kardomah Café, where his sums were done on the backs of brown envelopes. He had been a working-class product, a self-made man involved in cotton and tobacco who somehow sank back to being a commercial traveller of uncertain status after her mother had, according to Bainbridge, single-handedly engineered the slump of 1926.

He was also a socialist with a strong conscience. Bainbridge remembered how he would walk her around the old cemetery, pointing out the names of boys and girls, orphans of the Bluecoat School, whose deaths had been untimely. “He said they had been whipped to death, or starved, or coughed themselves into that home for little children above the bright blue sky.” Bainbridge herself spent a good deal of her childhood coughing. It may have been a psychosomatic condition—it was certainly useful in keeping her home from school in order to keep an eye on her warring parents.

Everywhere she went, from Southampton to Bristol, from Manchester to Salisbury, Bainbridge fell in with people who seemed to have stepped out of her novels. Take for example this rendering of her meeting with a man living in a suburban bungalow whose house was filled with ornaments, and who had worked as a ballroom dancer at the Savoy before spending some forty years aboard the old Cunard liner, Queen Elizabeth. “I had a great sense of style,” he told Bainbridge:

I held myself properly. In those days two dances were included in the price of afternoon tea. Let me show you my cocktail mats. Very pretty don’t you agree? Those are real butterfly wings. They can be a talking point at parties. I was always being chosen by the ladies. One in particular took a fancy to me. She would collect me in her car and drive me to Surrey. We would have a little drop of gin in a field. Take a close view of this conch shell—it makes a striking table lamp, don’t you think? I’ve moved that elephant’s foot all over the room but still it doesn’t look right.

“What about the lady in the field?” asked Bainbridge.

“I had to flee her … there’s a correct place for everything don’t you think?”

This is clearly factual material but it is also pure Bainbridge—in the timing, in the choice of nuggets from a flood of anecdotes, and in the nose for the faintly ridiculous. This is a past you can see and smell and hear. This encounter prompted a memory of her mother, who had once taken a cruise with the Shaw Savill Line, was asked to join the captain’s table one night, and returned to the cabin a different woman.

In Bristol, Bainbridge, a passionate and unrepentant chain-smoker, found her way to its tobacco headquarters—“swans on the water, clerical staff in the grass”. It was established in 1786 when caskets of Virginian tobacco were hauled from the quay to a workshop, and later became known as W.D. & H.O. Wills, esteemed for its philanthropy to the town. Bainbridge was shown over the factory by a lady called Miss Purchase:

These puritanical days, when people are so hell-bent on telling others what’s best for them, it can’t be easy showing off a tobacco factory. After all, there aren’t any guided tours round germ-warfare establishments or rat-poison laboratories.

Another woman employee she spoke to suggested that her father—and his father before that—had worked there, and they had always been well looked after. In the days when a tooth extraction meant a string attached to the doorknob, or a trip to the barber and occasional blood-poisoning, the firm had a qualified dentist on hand at no charge to the workers.

It is easy to see how these stories, so vivid and immediate, especially to a novelist’s eye and ear, and accumulating their own mythologies over the decades, would eventually contribute to the acuity of Bainbridge’s observations when, in the 1990s, she turned to historical fiction with The Birthday Boys (Scott’s expedition to the South Pole), Every Man for Himself (the fate of the Titanic), Master Georgie (the Crimean War) and According to Queeney (Samuel Johnson’s friendship with the Thrale family).

And so her journey continued, through dockyards, and factories and pubs, ill-treated parks and crumbling theatres. Of the latter she had considerable experience, having arrived in Liverpool at sixteen to join the Playhouse Theatre as an assistant stage manager:

I was provided with a unique form of higher education. I had to choose props for the set … work out the change from the purchase of sausage rolls … coax Mr X from the betting shop and be ready at all times to procure ice packs and aspirins for Miss Y.

Her experiences were eerily assembled in one of her finest novels, An Awfully Big Adventure, where a fifteen-year-old girl is despatched by hopeful relatives to a small theatre company whose members—from the floor supervisor to the director—are all but paralysed by their own fantasies and grudges.

On another leg of her journey through England, Bainbridge arrived in Manchester to find her hotel opposite the derelict front of the old BBC building where, during the war, she had performed on the wireless in the Children’s Hour. “While other children were learning French and Scripture I was being taught to jiggle the halves of a coconut together to evoke the sound of an approaching horse.” Later she played a role in the celebrated Coronation Street as one of Ken Barlow’s girlfriends.

When Bainbridge visited Manchester’s rejuvenated Palace Theatre (dismissed by Priestley in 1936 for being too cavernous—his play Laburnum Grove had “rattled like a pea in a pod”) she recalled her mother’s ambition that she should be an actress: “she had a sixth sense I might prove both scholastically dim and temperamentally unstable … given the choice I would have preferred to run away to sea or else to have worked in some capacity in a mortuary”. She hadn’t registered at the time, she suggested, just how grand Manchester was, especially as much of it had been reduced to rubble by the bombs.

Fleeting and sideways references to the war are everywhere in her early novels, in the form of Spitfires on display in the local park or convoys of tanks on the way to the shore, undetected mines and unexploded shells in the wood, German prisoners of war occupying the front pews of local parish churches, idle air raid wardens, and ration books. It is especially prominent in A Quiet Life, and obliquely so in The Dressmaker, where there are some references to Americans. These are not generally favourable, and possibly echo her father’s belief that it was the Russians, not the Americans, who won the war, and perhaps her own view that the Americans were invaders on English soil, albeit using the jeep instead of the Viking longboat.

One dilemma, confronted again and again in her early novels, can be summarised in the question the fifteen-year-old Stella asks in An Awfully Big Adventure. “If someone takes liberties with you, is it partly your own fault?” This novel, written in 1989, was based on Bainbridge’s experience of the Playhouse Theatre in Liverpool. “I had left ballet school and gone there because my father was on nodding terms with the Lord Mayor.” This precarious acquaintance finds expression in the endless phone calls made by a fictional uncle Vernon to one of his social betters, a fictional Harcourt, seeking reassurance about the career path of his niece: “And you know Stella. Once her mind’s made up …” “Indeed I do,” said Harcourt. Although he had never met the girl he often remarked to his wife that he could take an exam on the subject, if pushed.

Two things happened, suggested Bainbridge, as the end of the first season approached. She was cast as Ptolemy, the boy-king in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and she fell “hopelessly in love” with the set designer.

Though I had been fumbled on trains by middle-aged gentlemen since the age of twelve, and approached by mistake, at a ladies’ Masonic hot-pot supper-night by a business friend of my father’s, I was not prepared for the peculiar sensations provoked by love.

But as it transpired, the set designer proved impervious to—perhaps totally unaware of—her feelings, while another young man, Austin Davies, hired for three weeks to paint scenery, had tender designs on her. They were married four years later when she was twenty. In 1958 they parted ways. Their son Aaron was two, their daughter Jo-Jo, six weeks old.

Her experience of husbands (her second one, writer Alan Sharp, turned up after the birth of Rudi, wandered off to fetch a book and never returned) has given her a sensible and businesslike approach to men, always expecting them, as do the female characters in her novels, to fall short and to disappoint. As Auntie Marge points out in The Dressmaker, the local minister was “naturally limited by his own maleness”. And yet it is invariably her male characters who are treated with the greatest forbearance and sympathy.

When Bainbridge worked in a bottle factory she was followed about and “regularly fumbled” by one of the employees there. She laughed at the recollection. “It seemed impolite to refuse … that’s not normal is it?” She used these events to construct a deliciously macabre novel called The Bottle Factory Outing, in which a compliant young lass is not only put upon by a supervisor, but bullied by her best friend, a ripe overblown blonde, given to dramatics and fantasies, who cannot believe she won’t report him to the boss.

“‘Fumbles?’ repeated Freda and snorted to suppress laughter. ‘Does he feel your chests?’” Brenda described these unwelcome attentions: “He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly”, and ruminated on her upbringing:

As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no … There had been other small incidents that illustrated her extraordinary capacity for remaining passive while put upon. There had been the man on the bus who felt her leg almost to her knickers without her saying anything, until she had to move because it was her stop and then she’d said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry’.

In her writing, young lasses find themselves in the back seats of cinemas, being guided to hold things that feel alive. They oblige with confusion—even a kind of curiosity about what happens next. In An Awfully Big Adventure Stella is taken, not to lunch, but to a matinee by a reporter who “squirmed in his seat”, seized her hand and thrust it into his open flies.

She tried to pull her hand free, but it was held fast … Attempting to bring what Meredith would call a philosophical approach to her predicament, she pondered on the differences in men’s and women’s clothing … [Men] wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.

Bainbridge’s fraught family life with its simmering animosities and physical claustrophobia provided the background to several of her early novels. A Quiet Life (1976) tells the story of a thwarted and angry couple, each determined to keep up appearances, and how their two children—a teenage girl and a younger brother, have their lives deformed by struggling to make endless accommodations.

Bainbridge’s father had become a bankrupt in the 1930s and her middle-class mother was called “the Duchess” because she was “the kind of woman who dressed up to go shopping and decorated rooms for visitors who never arrived”. The household shook with rows and rages. “My brother and I made a pact that we would never be out of the house at the same time, so there would always be one of us around to stop them killing each other.” Bainbridge’s brother had a nervous breakdown when he was eighteen, while Bainbridge suggested she escaped that fate by clowning around as a child and by writing as an adult.

In A Quiet Life, a reserved son, defending his mother, has an uncharacteristic outburst in front of his father: saying: “She can’t stand being in the same room with you … you make her sick. You make her flesh creep.” The father has a heart attack soon afterwards and is put to bed with brandy while the mother stands at the mirror combing her hair and anticipating the arrival of the doctor.

In The Dressmaker, which has a macabre ending, two aunts, Marge and Nellie (these were the real names of Bainbridge’s aunts—her father’s sisters) are trapped by their temperaments and their past in a house which Nellie has turned into a shrine for their departed mother. In this work Bainbridge has made the drabbest domestic routine seem like some sort of forensic miracle of humour or pathos. Everything in the house, from the pudding spoons and a memento from Blackpool, to the cloth embroidered with daisies and the three Woolworth glasses, is sacrosanct:

All my childhood was spent with people who were disappointed … Not for them the rosy view of life … they gave each other labels—fifth-columnist, skinflint, hysterical baggage … dead common, or a cut above themselves.

The notion of class in England—which has animated novels, memoirs and plays from Victorian times, and which continues to provide a reliable scaffolding for many such outpourings in film and television, is obliquely explored in The Dressmaker and A Quiet Life. “That factory has coarsened you beyond belief,” suggests her dour sister Nellie. This obsession with “nice” behaviour and “not going overboard” and “making a show of yourself” was very much the product of a newly emerging lower-middle class in England during the post-industrial phase of Queen Victoria’s England, and was still in place in a postwar England strangled by decorum. Families policed themselves and their neighbours ruthlessly, which for many meant a pinched, sour, narrow life—one that did not admit uncomplicated satisfactions and frowned on frivolity. It has provided Bainbridge with some of her most acutely perceived and sinister characters.

In spite of the urge to acceptable behaviour, her novels are replete with forlorn mistresses and unprepossessing slatterns who seem, against the odds, to be the beneficiaries of enthusiastic attention from the chaps, especially when they drink too much, laugh too loudly and dress inappropriately. In The Dressmaker, despite shepherding by Marge and Nellie, their young niece Rita is exposed to the effects of first love (or what appears to be love) when she meets a dour American serviceman who is stationed in Liverpool. “If there had been less space in her life before his coming, he would not have taken up so much room,” Rita mused.

But it is Marge who finds herself the object of his attentions (although she is middle-aged and he has never seen a shaving brush). “I want Ira to love me,” sulks Rita. “I don’t want him looking at Auntie Marge.” When he returns to the house it is Marge he wants to talk to. Marge can’t help being pleased. “She caught Mother’s eye [a photo] that stern and selfish orb. She stared back boldly. Mother couldn’t use the strap any more, not where she was.”

The novel’s climax, if one can put it that way, has Nellie (guardian of her mother’s treasured furniture, which she has placed piece by piece, out of harm’s way in the box room) climbing the stairs, scissors in hand, to explore some scratching noises. She had once heard of a man in Germany who had stowed a fortune in bank notes under his bed and found it shredded by mice. Marge is there with the young American. The metal buttons of his discarded jacket had scratched mother’s polished table. On impulse, Nellie employs the scissors in an unconventional way.

A particularly poignant romance in Bainbridge’s teenage years produced one of the characters in A Quiet Life. In 1947, on a beach at Formby near Liverpool, she met a young German prisoner of war (Harry Arno Franz) who was waiting to be repatriated. She was fourteen and he was twenty-four. When “her young flame asked if she was worried about liaising with the ‘enemy’; she wondered how to explain that, from her mother’s point of view, all men were the enemy”.

In an interview in 2001, Bainbridge suggested that as a single mother with three children, she never had a shortage of boyfriends. Most of them “were happily married men who could rely on her not to turn into a bunny-boiler”. In one of her liveliest novels, Injury Time, an indignant mistress, Binny Mills, insists it is time her portly, married, middle-aged lover proves his affection by bringing his best friend and wife to her home for dinner. This comic masterpiece won her the Whitbread Prize in 1977.

She suggested that she had signed off sex at sixty:

because I was getting too old—you’d have to do it in pitch blackness … At first I was worried—because all my life I’d believed that the creative impulse was sexual, and if you lost that, then blimey, could you write any more? But it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.

In her tribute to Bernice Rubens in 2005, she remembered a difference of opinion they had years earlier, when Rubens had suggested that it was the brain that governed attachments. “I thought that was rubbish, seeing as neither of us had ever fallen for anyone for reasons higher than the waist. Had we done so, maybe we wouldn’t have ended up alone.”

Bainbridge began writing early, and at fourteen she was expelled from school as “a corrupting influence” after writing and illustrating a “rude” rhyme which, in pure Bainbridge-speak, was “discovered about her person”. Her first novel, Harriet Said, was rejected by several publishers. One wrote to her: “What repulsive little creatures you have made the central characters, repulsive beyond belief!” The novel was galvanised by a newspaper article about two New Zealand girls who had murdered the mother of one of them.

Bainbridge insists that she doesn’t actually write fiction. “I pinch stories that have a strong narrative plot, then put in everything I can remember about my family and friends.” Another historical footnote provided the spark for her 1978 novel Young Adolf. In 1910 Hitler’s half-brother Alois, a waiter who had been arrested and briefly imprisoned for theft, married Bridget Dowling and settled in Upper Stanhope Street, Liverpool. As the flyleaf of the novel suggests: Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother. Adolf soon irritates his family beyond measure by his constant sponging … Surely this is a young man who will never amount to anything. The Observer called it “at once funny and appalling”.

After Harriet Said was roundly rejected by publishers, she put it in a drawer, then wrote two more. Her first published novel, A Weekend with Claude, made less than $50, the second lost money. By the mid-1960s she had more or less given up. Then in 1972, her son Aaron (now an architect) came home with a playmate. He was the son of Colin Haycraft, head of Duckworth Publishing, who promptly published Harriet Said and suggested that she should try black comedy. “It was like taking a cork out of a bottle.” Thus Haycraft and his wife Anna (the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis) had the privilege of discovering Bainbridge, who remained with Duckworth for twenty-five years. Anna was her editor and friend, Colin her mentor and publisher.

Looking over her life, Bainbridge remembered that her happiness dated from the publication of her first novel. At that time she understood that the grotesque nature of her childhood had not been her fault—that she had not been the agent of her parents’ misery. Perhaps some echo of this revelation provided the spark to write According to Queeney. She had come across a letter from Queeney (the daughter of Hester and Henry Thrale, who took in the ageing Samuel Johnson) saying she and her sister had “come to the opinion that the reason they had such damage from a source that you would not expect was because our mother hated our father”.

Bainbridge’s parents’ habit of keeping the radio on to drown their arguments (in those days it boasted quality plays and educational programs) played a part in developing Bainbridge’s gift for a well-turned phrase and a feeling for “the rhythm of the number of words in a sentence”. There was a misprint in her most recent novel According to Queeney that irritated her. “The black dog came into the room and leapt on to his chest”. “Of course I didn’t write that … it should be ‘leapt upon his chest’, otherwise there are too many de-dum-de-dums.”

It is no surprise that someone who brings so many tangibles to her fiction (such as the very smells, textures and cramped spirit of Liverpool postwar domestic life) should ultimately turn to more widely known historical events such as the sinking of the Titanic, the Crimean War and the later life of Boswell for her fictional fuel. Although as Andrew Riemer remarked in his thoughtful review of According to Queeney, it demanded a “cultural literacy of a kind that is, sadly, in rather short supply these days”. In each of these novels she has combined her sharp ear for diction, her eye for the improbable detail and revealing gesture, with meticulous research. “What is more peculiar, more riveting, devious and horrific than real life?” she suggested. The acute yet unhurried narrative pace of The Birthday Boys, Every Man for Himself, Master Georgie and According to Queeney belie the degree of research they required. She suggested that from The Birthday Boys onward, everything was grounded in facts and these determined their direction. All the research was completed before a storyline or characters were conceived.

Her research for one of these historical novels takes about six months:

I get all the old-fashioned books I can find and the letters and whatnot. I’ll even dip into things like Dickens to get an idea of the attitudes towards those people. Then I forget that. Then I step back a bit, and I make lots of notes. Then I lose the notes … I make little maps.

In Master Georgie the hardest part was understanding the military structures. “One minute it’s a regiment, then it’s a battalion, then it’s a brigade. It was awful.”

Bainbridge demands close attention from her readers. They are obliged to be alert to hints, asides and allusions which glance off the narrative like hailstones on a sloping roof. Bainbridge explains this impulse not to spell things out, and referred to some American reviews of Master Georgie which suggested that it needed to be read twice to follow it properly. “That’s because I like using clues, but I hate being obvious.”

Bainbridge can turn a book out in one year—writing unceasingly at night (a habit established while waiting up for her teenage children) and smoking heavily. “I don’t answer the phone or see anyone. I don’t get fresh air. I get heart palpitations.” By the ninth week she has given herself nicotine poisoning and the doctor is summoned in the middle of the night. “Round about this time I know I’ve cracked the book and can spin on to the end.” Nevertheless, when one book is finished there is the anxiety about whether she can repeat the marathon. “I cannot remember how I did it. I get panicky. I think: surely one’s used up all the words. How can I do it again?”

Her writing is pared to the bone. Take for example, the opening paragraph of Winter Garden, when an unlikely group gather for a visit to Moscow. “One morning early in October, a man called Ashburner, tightly buttoned into a black overcoat and holding a suitcase, tried to leave his bedroom on the second floor of a house in Beaufort Street.” This sort of economy is the result of ruthless pruning. She will write twelve pages a night, and perhaps throw out eleven the next morning. The surviving page will be redrafted again and again. “And I can’t go on to the next page until I’ve got the preceding one right.” “Writing can be awful. You are stuck inside every day. People think it’s special … but Christ.”

Bainbridge is not too interested in food; she has a fridge and a stove tucked in the corner of a room and puts about the impression that she lives on fry-ups. She once suggested that she didn’t really believe in eating and that is why she often falls over at parties—alcohol had nothing to do with it. Her lack of culinary deftness finds a fictional counterpart in Binny, the mistress in Injury Time, who finds eating artichokes in a restaurant a waste of time and doesn’t have two plates in her cupboard that match.

Bainbridge has plenty to say about the restrictions on her great passion—smoking. She recalled a quiet church in Bradford where she sat in the dark puffing away.

The lights came on and a very fierce man, a retired colonel perhaps or even an unfrocked vicar, came running at me up the aisle, snarling. He was very angry, quite rightly, about my cigarette, and ordered me out. I tried to tell him that I was very responsible and would be using my coat pocket as an ashtray but he wouldn’t listen … He shooed me out as though I were a hen.

She remembered how Bernice Rubens had loved smoking too. “We smoked as if there was no tomorrow, which of course there isn’t.” Recently Bainbridge had to part ways with cigarettes. “I felt this violent pain in me left leg,” and this has had an unwelcome effect on her writing. It now took days to write journalism, she complained. “It would only take a few hours with a fag in my mouth.”

In 2002 Bainbridge suggested a remedy for that peculiarly English minefield: accents (which suspended their users in a social milieu like a peppercorn in aspic). All children, said Bainbridge (who still uses “me” for “my” when it suits) should have elocution lessons. This would wipe out “ugly” regional accents—and presumably class distinctions. She was made a Dame in the Queen’s Birthday honours list in 2000. According to a writer who was present, Bainbridge was “much impressed by the provision of ashtrays at the Palace. Quite probably, she didn’t have cause to correct their accents, either.”

This essay was first published in When Books Die, a collection of fifteen essays about the fate of books and reading. It is reproduced here courtesy of Finlay Lloyd Publishers of Braidwood.