What I Learned From Making a Documentary About My Grandmother Beryl Bainbridge

There was a story in our family growing up that every one of our relatives had died at the age of 71. Like many of the stories that my grandmother, the acclaimed British novelist Dame Beryl Bainbridge, told throughout her life, it was hard to know exactly how true it was. Beryl had made a career out of turning her own life into fiction—and then sometimes forgetting what was real, and what she had, in fact, made up.

It seemed to me at any rate like a good starting point for a documentary—and so it was that I began filming Beryl’s Last Year, a portrait of the artist during her 71st year, with the tongue-in-cheek idea that this might in fact be the last chance to document her life, to ask her all the questions one forgets—or is too embarrassed—to ask of a loved one.

I was a budding young documentary-maker at the time, in truth naïve and inexperienced—but what a gift to have a storyteller like Beryl.

Beryl gamely recounted to me how she almost lost her virginity to a German POW after the war; how she was expelled from school for copying out a dirty limerick; how her husband, my grandfather, cheated on her, and how she only discovered this upon returning from the hospital, having just given birth. She told me about sticking her head in her gas oven in North London whilst she was suffering from depression—trying to end it all, despite having young children to care for. She showed me what real writers’ block looked like, as she struggled to get past the first few pages of a book she told her publishers was almost ready to deliver.

(The book was called Dear Brutus, and had a plot that somehow revolved around the death of Lady Diana and a crash in a taxi Beryl herself had recently escaped—but it was abandoned half-way through our filming, only for Beryl to come up with a new idea, one based upon a roadtrip she had made across America in the 1960s, intertwined with the death of Bobby Kennedy. This would become her final novel, The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress.)

I was a budding young documentary-maker at the time, in truth naïve and inexperienced—but what a gift to have a storyteller like Beryl. She took me back to Liverpool, the city of her birth, and we got lost trying to track down the ghosts of the past. She let me film her at her most vulnerable—drinking heavily before publishing industry events that still gave her nerves, despite, or perhaps because of, her reputation as a Grande Dame of the London literary scene, a reliable source of fun and mischief, a woman rarely without a cigarette, a glass of whiskey, and a good story to hand.

I learnt a lot about my grandmother in that year, and the experience certainly brought us closer. But the Beryl I discovered was only a fraction of the truth. When her biographer Brendan King released his astonishingly exhaustive and meticulously researched account of her life, Love By All Sorts Of Means, I was surprised to discover extraordinary stories that I had never heard before—of love affairs with men 30 years her senior, and running away to Paris at a young age; of sexual assault; of near constant love affairs and heartbreak.

Our hope is that Beryl will find a new audience with generations who connect with her singularly female, complex voice—a woman who lived her life voraciously, and whose story deserves to live on.

One impression shone through: that no matter the struggles she faced, and there were countless battles for a woman trying to earn a living from writing in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Beryl had lived her life with an unapologetic fearlessness. She was often called eccentric, with a stuffed Water Buffalo in her hall. But the truth was she was iconic—fiercely self-assured when she wanted to be, outspoken and forthright, capable of holding her own against the great intellectuals of her day. And she was also very much a grandmother, never as happy as when she was fuelling the imaginations of her young grandchildren with a diet of Mary Poppins on VHS, and, perhaps less wholesomely, The Producers.

When Beryl died, she left a hole in our family life so huge that for years none of us really knew what to do next. My documentary had playfully predicted her death, (even though when we finally found her mother’s grave, she tearfully had to confess that the dates didn’t quite match up after all, that her mother hadn’t in fact been 71 when she died). Now the reality of losing Beryl to cancer in an NHS hospital overlooking Camden Town, opera floating down the halls at her request, left us all completely bereft.

The fear of course is that with a writer who was her own best publicist, it might be all too easy for Beryl to become forgotten. And so it is that we have started to reissue her work, with beautiful new McNally Editions in the US (in the UK we’re equally excited to have found the ideal new home for Beryl with Daunt Books).

For the first time, Beryl has a website and an Instagram page to share the mountains of archive their exists from throughout her life. Our aim is to build on the portrait of Beryl that I started in my documentary, to share with the world a writer whose inimitable characters and darkly comic plots feel as fresh today as they did when they were first published. Our hope is that Beryl will find a new audience with generations who connect with her singularly female, complex voice—a woman who lived her life voraciously, and whose story deserves to live on.

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