Footnotes Page 18

  Next to me there is a young man trying to secure tickets to see Pakistan at the Cricket World Cup. He alternately shouts into his phone or flails at its screen. ‘All gone! All gone!’ he wails, ‘Bangladesh … Old Trafford … Afghanistan … Edgbaston … Australia, gone, India, gone … Platinum tickets … no … over £200 … no … all gone …’ His unhappiness fills the square and bounces off the hoardings with their neurotically optimistic fantasies. The future city of Birmingham, as it is drawn, will apparently be peopled (but sparsely) with elegantly suited thirty-year-olds, most of them white, with purposeful jaws and powerful strides. And here and now, in today’s city, it is a Friday, near the end of the working day, and the square is filling up with hurrying people, most of them in small, happy, voluble groups. A young woman with an artificial leg bounds past on crutches, gasping with laughter at her two friends. Unlike the people in the posters, we are all smoking.

  When Beryl was here in 1983 it is likely that Birmingham was at its worst. At least, that is the hope. She hated ‘the terrible streets’ of the centre, but was even more dismayed by her terrifying car ride round the flyways and into the surrounding estates. She was born in 1932, the year before J. B.’s journey, although she claimed, from a surprisingly young age, that she had been born in 1934, and exaggerated how young she was when she hit the major landmarks of youth: leaving school, first job, moving to London. I don’t know why she bothered – God knows she was young enough – but by her own admission she always was a compulsive ‘auto-fictionaliser’, although, as her biographer Brendan King puts it, everything she ever said or wrote about herself was at some level ‘existentially true’.

  Like Jack, Beryl was already a successful writer by the time she made her English journey. She had written a dozen acclaimed novels and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, but there was still a sense (we can see this now, but even then it was somehow known) that her career had yet to take off. After the trip there was a sharp change in Beryl’s profile (the TV exposure certainly helped), and there would be many more books, including several increasingly ambitious and high-selling novels, collections of short stories and non-fiction, and a further three Booker nominations – but never the prize itself.

  Beryl was chosen to follow Jack the Yorkshireman around England, I suspect, because she was ‘a bit of a character’, with her ciggies and booze and forthright views, but also because she was northern, or at least northern enough for a befuddled southern BBC commissioning editor. She had been born in Liverpool, and grown up just outside, and had her first job at the Playhouse, where she soaked up J. B.’s works, and had lived in the city for a few years with her young family. She had trained herself out of her Liverpudlian accent at some point (Jack rumbled pure Yorkshire all his life), and had lived in London, on and off, from her twenties, and in fact Beryl seems to have regarded her native city with a mix of claustrophobia and regret, but she was still slotted into the box that read ‘working-class northerner (female)’.

  Initial reaction to Beryl’s TV programmes, at least in the letters pages of the Radio Times, was hostile. R. E. Lamb from Southwold spluttered: ‘Whatever induced the BBC to choose Beryl Bainbridge to make the series English Journey (Mondays BBC2)? [She] shows neither the verbal technique of an interviewer nor any descriptive ability … Even to link her name with that of J. B. Priestley is an insult …’ Meanwhile, (Mrs) Rose Woodford from Exeter wrote that ‘having looked forward to watching English Journey I am writing to say how very disappointed my family and I were. The narrator lacked both personality and enthusiasm, and indeed, seemed bored with the whole thing. We shall certainly watch no further instalments …’ And Hugh Homan (from Sudbury, Suffolk) was furious that ‘smoker’ Beryl should have castigated ‘a hideously littered shopping precinct’ only to stub out her cigarette on the front drive leading to ‘the factory that manufactures the cigarettes she so much appreciates’.

  Two weeks later, the letters editor of the Radio Times fielded a gentle backlash. Beryl was ‘a perfect guide, enthusiastic and angry as appropriate’ (V. G. W. Welland, Clevedon, Avon); she is ‘a lovely human being, cigarette butts and bloody hells notwithstanding’ (R. Wardrop, Lytchett Matravers, Dorset); and, according to Frederick Warren from Twickenham, ‘the economic depression in the thirties engendered unemployment, poverty and general demoralization in many urban and industrial areas, and the fact that those features have recurred in the eighties is a tragedy, properly highlighted by Beryl Bainbridge’.

  In Beryl and Jack’s day, controversies played out slowly in the letters pages of fortnightly or monthly magazines, or stretched over several days in the newspapers. I wonder how either of them would have coped in the age of the below-the-line comment. Both of them had to endure vicious reviews. Beryl’s plays were rejected. Jack had a ‘stinking’ review of his biography of Thomas Love Peacock in The Times. His friend Horace Walpole wrote to tell him not to worry because the reviewer had always been prejudiced against everything Jack had ever written. But over the years he had his novels praised and savaged, his plays sent back, he stared glumly at empty seats in the theatre, danced on stage to joyous shouts of ‘Author! Author!’ and lamented early closures. Most of all, he was patronized by a literary class that he had once yearned to join, and then learned to loathe. Virginia Woolf sneered that he and Arnold Bennett were ‘tradesmen of letters’. God, the snobbery. They hated his vast success, of course, and immense output. Both he and Beryl were prolific – and that is always suspect to some. And for years Jack struggled to swallow the contempt he felt for these same people (editors, agents, officers, interchangeable Oxbridge dolts) who had led all of his friends (and nearly Jack himself) to bloody slaughter in the First World War. Even though, let it be noted, Jack also loved a good literary cocktail party, and the chance to leave early with someone else’s wife. Anyway, to sum up (because we need to get back to the streets of Birmingham and will return later to the wives, husbands, lovers and wars): I am sure Jack and Beryl would have coped just fine in our age of online vitriol and under-exercised inadequates #justsayin.

  Beryl is not happy.

  Everywhere we walked buildings were either going up or coming down, or else the roads were being widened to take yet more motor-cars. An endless process of construction and destruction. It seemed there was neither time nor room for pedestrians. We were literally a dying breed.

  And Jack has leaped on a tram and headed for the outskirts. Jack be nimble! He was a short man, and broad of beam, but startlingly quick on his feet.

  I only know that during the half-hour or so I sat staring through the top windows of that tram, I saw nothing, not one single tiny thing, that could possibly raise a man’s spirits. Possibly what I was seeing was not Birmingham but our urban and industrial civilization.

  Like I say, perhaps Beryl was seeing Birmingham at its lowest ebb. And Jack (who fought depression all his life, ever since he emerged scarred, gassed and deafened from the trenches of the First World War) had a tendency to despair. Some people have suggested it’s why he wrote so much, and kept so busy, and yet for most of his writing life he only ever skirted around what happened to him in the war. He wrote, said his friend John Braine, to forget.

  I think that sounds a little too pat. But what we can say (and I guess will always be able to say) is that Birmingham is still being knocked around and put back together. It is thirty-five years since Beryl was here, and if anything the scale of construction is even more frenetic. At least the cars and trucks have been shuffled a few roads out from the very centre of the city, but you can still hear them from Victoria Square, revving and clattering up and down Queensway. There are car parks, too, at every turn, multi-level underground vaults and great stacked concrete cubes reaching to the sky. Temporary parking lots fill the spaces where buildings recently stood.

  Jack was here in a year when car ownership was spreading fast, despite the miserable economy. There were two-and-a-half million motor vehicles on the UK roads by 1934 (up from 300,000 in
1920), including Jolly Jack’s capacious Daimler, which he had been using to get around England, along with various coaches and trains. It was expertly driven by his new chauffeur, who had been taken on when Jack had shown himself incapable of getting behind a wheel without provoking a rolling tide of destruction.

  Charles Montgomery has written in Happy City about how the motor car was forced into the pedestrian- and horse-friendly cities of the US. Over 200,000 people were killed in motor accidents in the 1920s, as people were moved off their streets or mown down. The same thing happened here, although some of our cities proved harder to repurpose. Narrow medieval or Georgian streets cannot be so easily transformed into superhighways. Sometimes plans were delayed long enough for the public mood to turn against the new model of a cascading hierarchy of motorways and roads carving into the heart of the cities. Sadly, that was not true of Birmingham, especially because much of the centre had already been blitzed in the Second World War. In fact, it seems likely that the leaders of Birmingham, and other Midlands cities, and many cities of the North, positively welcomed the arrival of the American vision of the shiny new city of the future, with its free-flowing roads and central business districts and dormitory suburbs. It must have been tempting to set themselves against the smaller, fussier cities of the South. And anyway, as Jack wrote, ‘the number of important inventions, from the steam engine to gas lighting and electroplating, that either first saw the light or were first brought to perfection in this city, is very impressive.’ Birmingham had always led the way … so bring on the Bullring and the flyovers. But it also occurs to me, as my random wanderings bring me up against yet another queue of idling cars stuck in a reverberating canyon, or inching their way up a clogged slipway, that it could just as easily have been some vindictive Whitehall bureaucrat who was responsible for pressing ‘Go’ on the whole sorry mess.

  The annual Conservative Party Conference is about to start, so as well as hoardings and building sites there are also armed police and new temporary barriers and single-file walkways blocking the views. I follow Beryl along Paradise Way: ‘what must it be like in winter when the rain sweeps down and the wind blows the refuse through the concrete tunnels?’ People (Jack and Beryl, for starters) have always taken pleasure in kicking Birmingham, but I read what Beryl wrote thirty-five years ago and I think it’s likely that the place may actually be getting better – in spite of the interminable improvements. Beryl nearly got into a fight in the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral with the Clerk of Works and his architect, who were desecrating the tombs with their latest scheme, but she decided she couldn’t have an argument on television. So she took it out on them in print. ‘We all know’, she wrote, ‘that architects and planners spend their lives contriving and plotting to eat up the land with their rotten office blocks. And what on earth did they mean by development?’ It is hard not to grumble in Birmingham (no wonder Jack was so energized), but if you feel yourself giving in to a weary unhappiness with everything modern, head for the revamped canal, but most especially make haste to the glittering new library, its interlocking outer discs now glowing with soft radiance in the low golden sun on this heavenly Friday evening.

  I decide I need a drink. There’s a bar in the cellars of the Midland, where Jack stayed, although the hotel has since been rebranded with a pompous new name. Jack would have recognized this as an example of ‘Admass’, his description of the relentless corporatization of everything, the American-led over-production of pointless goods and the irresistible marketing of glossy, empty lifestyles. Well, he blamed the Americans (as did Enid, you may remember). It is much harder now, almost ninety years later, to remember what differences really exist between them and us. Our different world vision – and people really did feel there was one – was swallowed long ago.

  I find a seat in a booth. People are crowding in with happy shouts, spreading out into the low-vaulted rooms. Jack loved a hot fuggy pub. Not being able to find one was something that depressed him about Birmingham. At night in 1933 the city centre was empty, although it blazed with light, and even once he found them, he said, the people were extraordinarily ugly: ‘nearly all looked as if life had knocked them into odd shapes, taken the bloom out of their faces, twisted their features and dulled their eyes’.

  He was quick to add that nobody had ever called him handsome, but many women would have disagreed. He could talk you into bed, said one, with his insistent low rumble. Jack was scornful of his literary contemporaries who got into an angst-ridden tangle about sex. He was, he felt, uncomplicatedly available … and that was something, he also felt, that his first two wives, Pat Tempest and Jane Wyndham-Lewis, had to learn to live with. Or maybe feign ignorance. Jack was mulish on this point. I don’t think – in mild mitigation – that he was an especially jealous man, and perhaps he would have been happy for his wives to carry on affairs just as he did. But his first wife, Pat, died of cancer in 1925, just a year after giving birth to their second child – and presumably aware that for the past year Jack had been sleeping with Jane, who was already pregnant with Jack’s third child (and Jane’s, for that matter, from her own first marriage). Confused? Jack and Jane were married soon afterwards and remained so for twenty-seven years, despite Jack’s affairs, having two more children together, until he met the famous archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes and married her in 1953. And then, possibly, he came to heel.

  So, quite apart from all the novels and plays, Jack kept himself busy. Not long before this trip he had fallen hard for the twenty-four-year-old actress Peggy Ashcroft, trailing her moonily from theatre dressing room to restaurant, pleading with her to leave her husband, Rupert Hart-Davis (they’d only been married for a few months), telling his wife Jane to get ready for a divorce. Before things went any further, Ashcroft told him she was leaving her husband, but was in fact going to marry Theodore Komisarjevsky, a visionary theatre director. Jack rolled back to Jane and other, less incendiary affairs. One inspiration for Jack’s English Journey may have been an attempt to forget all about Peggy Ashcroft.

  The city had changed by 1983, and however much Beryl was disgusted by Birmingham’s appearance, she was amazed and entranced by its happy crowds of drinkers. ‘We had lunch in a noisy pub beneath an Insurance block. Plastic grapes hung from the ceiling and there were hundreds of people, sweating and laughing and knocking back the beer as though they were on holiday in some Mediterranean resort. Everyone merry as crickets, and hungry.’

  My bar doesn’t have any plastic grapes, but it does have an eye-catching collection of Roman murals, naked satyrs and gilded cupids on the ceiling. The tempo of drinking is picking up (mine included) and a Friday night spirit of fiesta is gusting through the low rooms. In the absence of anything more substantial than a small packet of nuts, I am earnestly chewing over this idea of shifting baseline syndrome and wondering how we can ever know for sure if things are better or worse than they were before. Take Birmingham, for example. Not many people alive today can remember Tolkien’s leafy lanes and mill wheels splashing in the river under the old elm trees. We’re just happy that the Bullring is slightly less of a shit-heap than it once was. But millions of people also yearn for Tolkien’s fantasy life in the bucolic villages of the Shires. The orchards and the water meadows. The carthorses lumbering to market. They must do! That’s what the books and films are all about: holding back the destroyers of forests, saving the hobbits’ village, defeating the horrors of Mordor/Birmingham. Although I do have to ask: if that’s what we really want, then what the hell do we think we are up to in Birmingham? And how come we can be nostalgic for something we’ve never known, and much of which never even existed?

  By the end of the third drink I have convinced myself that Enid Blyton, with her cobblestoned villages and heathery hills, and her profound distrust of strangers, may have had more influence on the thinking of the British than any other twentieth-century politician, writer or philosopher.

  A hot and hearty crush of people has pressed into the booth
and swept me up into their fast-flowing rounds. I am at the bar, talking to a short eager man with a large and immaculately bald brown head. He asks me what I’m doing in Birmingham and I say I’m researching a book. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘I’ve always thought I should write one. I’ve had such an interesting life.’ This is not the first time I’ve heard that. But anyway, what? I don’t know, because I’m outside, smoking, and a woman yells down the street, ‘What’s happening in the Shakespeare?’ and someone else shouts, ‘Later’. I am surprised to see how early it is.

  I am back in my booth. Apparently the beer is fine, but we also need something stronger. Spirits! ‘The great thing about Birmingham’, I am being told, by a slobbery man whose thick earthy thigh has me kettled in the corner, ‘the great thing about Birmingham is the people.’ ‘Do you like the new library?’ I find myself asking, God knows why. ‘The what?!’ he roars. ‘The library.’ He heaves his face towards me, glistening nose just an inch from mine. ‘The library? I fucking love it.’

  More cigarettes in the loud Birmingham night. Beryl would understand. She liked a drink, maybe not so much when she was younger, but later she’d drink before going out and would collapse under the table at dinner, or fall out with her friends, or stop and sleep in the street on the way home. It was because she was so slight, people said, that the alcohol just took her away. You can see her singing in the pub in the Newcastle section of English Journey, belting out the old tunes, fag in hand. She looks like she was a lot of fun. People fed her drinks because that’s what they thought she wanted, or just to hear her talk. But, really, that kind of determined pull towards oblivion is troubling to watch and – for those who love us – almost impossible to stop.