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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
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Beryl Bainbridge pictured outside her home in Camden Town
Bernice Rubens
Writers in Majorca 1991: (from left) Jacqui Koven, Bernice
Rubens, Nan and Beryl Bainbridge
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BERNICE Ruben’s last book before her death was the story
of her life. The Booker prize-winning 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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