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A tale of two authors
Beryl Bainbridge tells Dan Carrier how the memoir of her friend and fellow writer Bernice Rubens has helped her come to terms with her friend’s recent death
When I Grow Up – a Memoir by Bernice Rubens, with an introduction by Beryl Bainbridge.Little, Brown. £17.99 order this book
BERNICE Ruben’s last book before her death was the story of her life. The Booker prizewinning novelist, who lived in Belsize Park, turned her pen to fact rather than fiction and the result is a memoir that sheds light on and celebrates what made her the writer she was.
And for her friend and fellow author Beryl Bainbridge, who first met Bernice in 1977, reading the memoirs have helped her come to terms with her friend’s death – and will not only keep Bernice’s memory alive for those who knew her, but introduce the writer behind the fiction to those who never knew the novelist.
“We first met in 1977,” Beryl recalls. “We were taking part in a writers’ group who were going on a tour to Israel. it included Melvyn Bragg, Iris Murdoch, William Trevor, Fay Weldon and Ted Willis.
“It wasn’t like we got on amazingly at first – and if Bernice had not been the way she was, it may not have developed like it did at all. I had insisted on visiting the Holocaust museum Yad Visham and had asked her to come with me.
“She refused, and I could not understand her attitude.
“She told me afterwards that she couldn’t because it was too much, too brutal for her. I couldn’t understand that – I suppose looking back now I should have done – but I was interested in her reasoning.
“When I returned from the museum she told me: It was comparatively easy, she said, for a non-Jew to feel emotion at man’s inhumanity to man, but for Jews tears are not enough and can never lessen the pain.”
After they returned from the trip, they stayed in touch. Living close by to each other, with Beryl in Albert Street, Camden Town, and Bernice in a variety of flats across Belsize Park – she liked to move home “every time my oven got too cruddy for me to be bothered to clean, which was about the time it took for me to write two novels”, they would occasionally meet for coffee.
But it took a coincidence regarding Bernice’s brother for them to become really close.
“In the 1950s I was married to a painter called Austin Davies,” she says. “Cyril Rubens, Bernice’s brother, was a musician in an orchestra in Liverpool and they met, so Austin painted him. He did not mention he had a sister who was a writer because she was not really writing then.
“Years later, when I realised they were siblings, we became closer and I began to get to know her family.
“We were alike in many ways. We both smoked like chimneys and we were also addicted to soap operas.
“Both of us had grandchildren of the same age. This was another bond – we would say to each other: my grandsons are so clever…they are cleverer than yours...etcetera…It went on for hours and hours, and we would meet in Cafe Delancey in Camden Town at least once a fortnight for a good gossip, although we would rarely talk about our work.”
And they would also spend time giving tutorials at writing schools to which Bernice refers in her memoirs. “The idea that creative writing can be taught is faintly preposterous and crazy enough for American universities to give it a whirl,” she writes.
While driving round the country to festivals and courses, Bernice slowly revealed to Beryl how her books were created.
“They were all hand written,” Beryl says. “She wrote in pen or pencil and she never went back and re-wrote anything. One envies someone who can do it that way – it makes it hard to go back, and it means she had thought about her words before she committed them to paper.”
And she was just as unconventional when she was planning her stories.
She adds: “The only time she ever really revealed a plot to me was after I had been waiting in a queue with her at the Post office in Camden High Street. There was a man in front of her and she was getting some stamps and when we got back in the car, she said to me: what would happen if the person in front of you has left a letter on the counter, and you took it instead of giving it back? I said: you didn’t! Of course, she hadn’t, but it set her off and later it became a TV show. She was terrific at plots.”
So what would be her friend’s literary legacy?
“Most authors are remembered for at the most one or two books,” Beryl believes.
“William Golding, for example, will be remembered for Lord of the Flies. Bernice Rubens will be remembered for ‘I Sent a Letter to My Love’ (her bestseller about a Welsh brother and sister who in their old age fall in love with each other after answering personal ads in a newspaper).
“I think she is a good proper English writer with flashes of brilliance. You can’t really expect for any more than that.”
She adds: “My favourite bit about her memoirs are the passages about her childhood. This was a Bernice I did not know. It fascinated me.There are these beautiful pictures of when she was young and I felt close to her.”
But she hasn’t been inspired by Bernice’s story to write her own.
The memoir has helped Beryl come to terms with her friend’s passing.The Jewish faith requires people to be buried as soon as is possible, normally within 24 hours after their death.
It meant Beryl never made it to Bernice’s funeral.
“The silly thing about death is when she died I could not get to the funeral,” she says. “I was at a literary festival somewhere and it meant I did not think of her as having died.
“And now it has sunk in. I miss her much more now than when I heard she had died.”
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