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4 - ‘Unhomely Moments’: The Fictions of Beryl Bainbridge,

Helen Carr
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of English and was Pro-Warden (Academic) at Goldsmiths, University of London
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Summary

‘Being a child lasts for ever; the rest of life soars past on wings.’ So Beryl Bainbridge wrote in 1987, and it is a sentiment she has repeated at other times and in other words. Bainbridge began her career as a writer, she says, in order to try to understand her own often painful and unhappy childhood, starting to write books at the age of nine, though her first novel was not published until she was thirty-three. That childhood was spent in the Liverpool area, and even when her books are not set in Liverpool – though many have been – her unvarnished, alarmingly clear-eyed view of the monstrous messiness, self-deception, mingled selfishness and warmth that form the human condition owes much to her experience of growing up there.

Beryl Bainbridge was born in 1934, and brought up in Formby in Lancashire, on the coast just north of the city. Her father's family had lived in the centre of Liverpool, off Scotland Road, but her father wanted his family to come up in the world. Like many other middle-class aspirants of the period and of the post-war years, who moved out of the city to the nearside seaside resorts of the Wirral or the Lancashire coast, he decided to bring up his family away from the working-class streets of central Liverpool where he had spent his youth. Her mother's family, who had lived, as Bainbridge puts it, in a ‘suburban villa in West Derby’, were regarded as more respectably middle class; her mother had even been sent to a finishing school in Belgium, but their origins too were more dubious – her mother was furious when Beryl's maternal grandmother let slip that she had worked in a lollipop factory in Knotty Ash when she was eleven. She also tried to suppress the fact that her sisters-in-law had done similarly lowering work, Auntie Margo working in a munitions factory and Auntie Nellie as a cleaner. (The aunts appear under their own names in The Dressmaker (1973) – Auntie Margo's usual job was as a dressmaker, though here it's Nellie – a novel set in wartime Liverpool, and the first of Bainbridge's novels to be short-listed for the Booker Prize.)

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Writing Liverpool
Essays and Interviews
, pp. 72 - 87
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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