Harriet Said...

Book 38: Virago Modern Classics

by Beryl Bainbridge

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Harriet Said is a highly plotted horror tale that turns the "Obstinate Questionings" of puberty into deadly weapons' NEW YORK TIMES

'An extremely original and disconcerting story' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'A sharp, chilling novel . . . The ending has real shock effect' SUNDAY TIMES

A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.

Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences.

A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.

Release date: January 1, 1973

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

I first met Beryl Bainbridge not at a literary party but in a minibus en route to Essex in 2002. Also present were her great friend Bernice Rubens, the biographer Michael Holroyd and our publisher Richard Beswick. We were driving to a day for library members to meet authors. At lunch, Beryl ate a few salad leaves and drank a third of a bottle of Scotch, which did not appear to impair her in any way. I was perfectly well aware that I was in the presence of greatness. She was a novelist of a generation before mine, whom I had been reading since my early twenties. She had burst out of some territory where the English middle classes seldom went, and her books had nothing to do with sociology. There was a black heart to them, in a comic chest.

On our return, as we sat in the minibus in the car park waiting for the engine to start, Bernice announced that she was looking forward to getting home and having a cup of tea, which Beryl responded to by shouting, ‘What a boring thing to say.’ Beryl then turned to Michael and asked, ‘Any nice soaps on tonight?’ Anxious to make a contribution and a good impression, I pointed out that it was Saturday so it was Brookside day. Everyone brightened. The conversation turned to EastEnders, Kat Moon and sexual abuse; Michael confessed he had shed a tear the previous week. We all agreed that we liked soaps. We drove back into London; Beryl had no idea where she was but seemed delighted by all of it. ‘Look at the lovely fruit and vegetables,’ she cried as we drove down Turnpike Lane.

Beryl and I both grew up in Liverpool, both of us were subject to the then-fashionable elocution lessons intended to free us from what were seen as the career limitations of our accents. But her Liverpool was specific to her imagination: she remade it in her own image. Bainbridge fans divide into those who prefer the later historical novels and the ones who, like me, believe the earlier books were where she revealed her genius. I was sorry when she turned to real people, but she said herself in later life that she had run out of her own experience to write about.

The chronology of her early work is a little confusing. Harriet Said … was the first novel she wrote and submitted for publication, but it was rejected and did not appear until 1972. Her first published novel, A Weekend with Claude, which appeared in 1967, was later substantially revised and reissued in 1981, so this new edition is not the one which its first readers saw. Neither of these are apprentice works, there was nothing for her to be embarrassed about; she was a fully formed writer from the start.

Harriet Said … is set just after the war in a Liverpool suburb near the Formby sand dunes where Bainbridge grew up – an unknown part of England, rarely visited, on the outskirts of the port city. Two girls of around thirteen years old make their way to the beach during the school holidays where they become friends with a group of lonely, disappointed middle-aged men. The degree of freedom the two girls are allowed is unimaginable today, but reflects the day-to-day life of the war when enemies were not strangers but aerial bombers, parents were focused on the war effort on the home front and children were expected to be self-reliant.

From the first chapter, we understand that there has been ‘an incident’. The territory of sexual abuse of children has been worked so hard in fiction and memoir for the past decade or so that it is startling to see such an early novel which undermines what has come to seem a genre. The story turns out to be considerably more complicated than the usual kiddy fiddlers in the guise of uncles scenario. The unnamed narrator’s friend is a girl who is knowing, clever and manipulative and with the chilling disdain and ignorance of youth for the complexities of adult life. The men are targeted, even groomed by the girls: ‘We took to going for long walks over the shore, looking for people who by their chosen solitariness must have something to hide.’

Bainbridge understood the minds of young girls in the confusion of puberty, but she also understood, through acute observation, the men whose marriages, jobs, homes have led them to the beach, to look out to sea with hope, longing and despair, their backs against the land. Part of what they have lost is their own youth, life has slipped past under bowler hats and heads rested against antimacassars. They are lost and lonely, the girls encourage conversation. Harriet’s friend wants to be admired by Mr Biggs, whom they call the Tsar.

The girls have a hunch that there is something in it for them, but they are not sure what it is. Perhaps it is just a desire for transgression; they are flirtatious and innocent at the same time. Harriet’s friend is the weaker party, she appears merely to obey Harriet’s instructions, but she leads one of the men on to destruction. When the novel was first offered for publication one editor found the characters too repulsive for fiction. Nearly half a century later, they still shock because of their subversion.

On the last page of A Weekend with Claude, a photograph is described in which a group of people are posed, two on the ground, a third scowling on a wrought-iron bench and a fourth, ‘isolated, hunched … not looking into the camera. The sun had gone behind a cloud. The three friends posed on, marooned in a summer garden.’ Photographs like this, of strangers, incite tremendous curiosity. They freeze time in the moment before or just after a row, or a failed pass, or an opened letter imparting news. Even if we are in the pictures ourselves, we examine them and can no longer remember why one person is not smiling, or looking away, the faces seen only by the eye behind the camera.

Two people have come to buy a desk from Claude, an antiques dealer. They notice a photograph and a letter pushed into the back of a drawer, which Claude reclaims. He tells them a brief version of the story of the people in the picture, which is intercut with first-person accounts of the same events by Lily, Victorian Norman and Shebah. These very disparate characters in both age and background have come together for the weekend. Lily, who thinks she is pregnant by a boyfriend who has abandoned her, is determined to sleep with Edward and fool him into thinking he is the father of her baby.

Victorian Norman, so nicknamed because of the high collars he affects, is a working-class autodidact Communist. Lily has inherited a run-down house in Liverpool in which several of the characters seem to have lodged. She has, according to Victorian Norman, ‘left home very early, in a stampede of open revolt, splintering in the process the whole framework of her background, so that now she is sad to find there is nothing to return to but ruins’.

Shebah is a sixty-year-old former actress, tiny, Jewish, resentful and paranoid, filled with fantasies of her own persecution, in exile from her community: ‘… one of those people who once seen are never forgotten. She wears bright red lipstick and her upper lip is quite hairy. Most people refuse to walk down the street with her.’

Apart from Claude, the characters move in a tight orbit around each other, intent on their own minute sensations, grievances and plots for their advancement. It is a claustrophobic novel set in a year, 1960, when the Sixties was still a date, not an era half-buried under social commentary. The poverty of the post-war years, of unfit houses filled with Victorian furniture, bathrooms before showers, sex before contraception, is a bleak dream-like glimpse into life on the undocumented margins.

On the novel’s republication, the Sunday Times described Bainbridge’s genius as lying in ‘the comic evocation of the flat and mundane life in which her characters are in perpetual and ineffectual revolt’. The weekenders at Claude’s might end up as the hopeless cases on the Formby shore thirty years later, tormented by juvenile girls in Spice Girls T-shirts. Beryl Bainbridge was original in detecting what was unusual in the ordinary and overlooked. She did not think like anyone else; perhaps her early years as an actress gave her a heightened sense of the dramatic, but she kept it under control by writing within a limited dimension. There was always comedy in those margins.

The last time I saw her was at the Booker Prize dinner in 2009. I did not know she was ill. She would struggle to complete her final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, and she died a year later. Rereading these early novels, I realise that she was a great writer from the very start, often overlooked by prize judges, and part of neither a circle nor a movement. She was sui generis, one of the greatest.

Linda Grant

2012

Harriet said: ‘No you don’t, you keep walking.’ I wanted to turn round and look back at the dark house but she tugged at my arm fiercely. We walked over the field hand in hand as if we were little girls.

I didn’t know what the time was, how late we might be. I only knew that this once it didn’t really matter. Before we reached the road Harriet stopped. I could feel her breath on my face, and over her shoulder I could see the street lamps shining and the little houses all sleeping. She brought her hand up and I thought she was going to hit me but she only touched my cheek with her fingers. She said, ‘Don’t cry now.’

‘I don’t want to cry now.’

‘Wait till we get home.’

The word home made my heart feel painful, it was so lost a place. I said, ‘Dad will have got my train ticket back to school when I get in. It will be on the hall table.’

‘Or behind the clock,’ said Harriet.

‘He only buys a single. I suppose it’s cheaper.’

‘And you might lose the other half.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

We stood for a moment looking at each other and I wondered if she might kiss me. She never had, not in all the years I had loved her. She said, ‘Trust me, I do know what’s best. It was all his fault. We are not to blame.’

‘I do trust you.’

‘Right. No sense standing here. When I say run, you start to run. When I say scream, you scream. Don’t stop running, just you keep going.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll do that, if that’s what’s best.’

‘Run,’ said Harriet.

So we ran over the last stretch of field and Harriet didn’t tell me to scream, at least I didn’t hear her, because she was really screaming, terrible long drawn out sounds that pierced the darkness, running far ahead of me, tumbling on to the road and under the first street lamp, her two plaits flying outwards and catching the light. I hadn’t any breath to scream with her. I was just wanting to catch up with her and tell her not to make that noise. Somebody came out of a house as I went past and called to me but I did not dare stop. If I couldn’t scream for her then I could run for her. A dog was barking. Then we were round the bend of the lane and there were lights coming on in the houses and my mother on the porch of our house with her fist to her mouth. Then I could scream. Over her head the wire basket hung, full of blue flowers, not showing any colour in the night.

I did notice, even in the circumstances, how oddly people behaved. My mother kept us all in the kitchen, even Harriet’s parents when they arrived, which was unlike her. Visitors only ever saw the front-room. And Harriet’s father hadn’t got a collar to his striped shirt, only a little white stud. Harriet could not speak. Her mother held her in her arms and she was trembling. I had to tell them what had happened. Then Harriet suddenly found her voice and shouted very loudly, ‘I’m frightened,’ and she was. I looked at her face all streaked with tears and I thought, poor little Harriet, you’re frightened. My father and her father went into the other room to phone the police. My mother kept asking me if I was sure, was I sure it was Mr Biggs.

Of course I was sure. After all I had known him for years.

When I came home for the holidays, Harriet was away with her family in Wales. She had written to explain it was not her fault and that when she came back we would have a lovely time. She said that Mr Redman had died and that she had spoken to him only a few days previously. He had enquired what she was going to do when she left school. She said she might go on the buses. ‘Likely you’ll get more than your ticket punched,’ he had replied. It was a nice farewell thing to say. Harriet said we should bow the head at the passing of landmarks.

His was one of the earliest faces Harriet and I remembered patrolling the lane down to the sea; in company with the Tsar, Canon Dawson from St Luke’s and Dodie from Bumpy field.

Mr Redman, to be specific, never went into the lane. In winter he stayed in his bungalow and waved from the window, in summer he bent down to his garden. We talked to him a little, either over his hedge or his gate, about his nice flowers or his nasty weeds.

The Canon rode a bicycle, a big one with two back wheels and no crossbar. Typical, as Harriet said, seeing he was such a Child.

Dodie always walked down the lane, swollen ankles in apricot stockings, dressed forever in black. She would cry out to us as she passed our fence, ‘Hallo Pets … How’s my Pets?’ She lived in a bungalow next to the lunatic asylum, handy for Papa, her husband, as Harriet said.

The Tsar had been walking down to the sea the first evening that Harriet and I had gone to collect tadpoles from the ponds below the pine trees. Slightly unsober, slightly dishevelled, always elegant, he swayed moodily past us through all the days of our growing up. We acknowledged him briefly, as indeed we acknowledged the Canon whom we detested, and Mr Redman a. . .