Beryl Bainbridge

For almost three decades the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last week, wrote book reviews and diaries for The Spectator. They were, without exception, brilliant. It has been said over the last week that she was the best novelist of her generation, but she was also (though a life-long Labour voter) the best sort of conservative: ‘What a mistake change is!’ she wrote in a diary in 2000: ‘Who needs those ghastly new buildings which have taken over Swiss Cottage? Why was Peter’s bookshop in Camden Town done away with, and the off-licence and the pet shop and the Delancey Café?’ Which Spectator reader would disagree?

The days leading up to Xmas are such fun, aren’t they? All those cards and presents to buy and all those charity requests reminding one of starving children, crippled adults and abandoned dogs. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to concentrate on more important things, such as Sight and Time. Obviously the two go together, for both determine a view of the world. In regard to Sight, my bathroom ceiling fell down because the house next door put up scaffolding and the chap in charge stepped on to my flat roof and put his foot through it. He denied doing so, of course. When I now get into the tub there’s a bloody big hole up above and the rain comes through.

Last week several people — well, two to be exact — asked me if I was looking forward to St George’s Day. One of them was a road-sweeper. Apparently it falls this year on 23 April, although in 1861 its date appears to be two days earlier. I know this because I looked it up in the Book of Days. I keep thinking how confusing it would be if one came back from the dead and tried to look things up in newspapers. I visited Liverpool two days later, the road-sweeper’s query still in my head, and inquired of a girl loitering beside the paper stall at Lime Street Station what she thought of St George. She said, ‘He’s a goner, isn’t he?’, and turned away. She was using slang, of course, which is a term meaning secret language.

In June of 2003 Tessa Jowell, the then culture secretary, announced that in 2008 Liverpool would become the European Capital of Culture. The city beat five other hopefuls — Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle and Oxford. In welcoming the result, the head of the judges, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, declared that it was Liverpool’s stunning dockside development, its city centre and ‘strong visual arts’ that had boosted its chances. Council chief executive David Henshaw described the win as staggering, although not surprising, as the whole city had been behind the bid. Liverpool, he said, is growing up. We’ve got history and we should be proud of our history, but in the past we’ve been prisoners of our history. He was, of course, referring to the slave trade.

This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good film. Charlie Russell is my grandson. *** One day last week I opened something called a Flower and Angel Festival at St Pancras parish church near Euston.

I was revolting from a very early age and more than once thought of taking over a radio station and starting a revolution. In those days the wireless exerted far more influence than the newspapers, at least in our house. I can still remember the opening sentence of my call to arms. Rise up, rise up, the moment is at hand. At this distance I can’t recall what particular cause provoked the necessity for an uprising, but I do know I’d been reading Red Eagle by Dennis Wheatley and that in my satchel I had a picture of Marshal Budenny, a man with a moustache straight out of a pantomime.

I was in Woolworths last Friday when a woman hit her little child across the head. Quite a few of us saw what she did, but none of us did anything. To be fair, it wasn’t a hard blow and the victim didn’t burst into tears, but it was shocking. When young, I was often belted round the ear, once for saying ‘bugger’, but then, in those days, the word was unspeakable and the punishment unremarkable. Returning home I did a little research on the history of spanking, and am amazed — as both Richard II and Frankie Howerd were apt to exclaim — at my findings.

I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned to defend their country during the Six Day War. And that, following an unfortunate leading article in last week’s Spectator, is what I am now doing. The city I grew up in, a quarter destroyed by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, had once been a monument to trade and commerce. When my father was born, there were sailing ships in Salthouse Dock.

The Man Booker Prize dinner was held on Tuesday in the Egyptian room of the British Museum. It’s something of an ordeal for the six on the shortlist who have to wait until the pudding to hear who’s won. I’d only read one of the books, but they send you a disc of readings from them all, so that when I was asked — several times — who I thought might win I was able confidently to announce that it would be a toss-up between Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood. There was one particular extract, read beautifully by Martin Jarvis, which contained a lot of F-words, which I thought was a cheat. In the course of several interviews outside the museum I said Vernon God Little by a young chap called D.B.C. Pierre couldn’t possibly win. Of course, it did.

I was brought up to pay little attention to vegetables, apart from beetroot, which was served every day, and carrots, of which we had two each on a Sunday, on the grounds that they enabled Spitfire pilots to see in the dark. And then last week I arranged to meet a friend in the bar of the Waldorf Hotel, and while waiting ordered a vodka-and-lime, no ice. After some time had passed, a small vase arrived with an enormous stalk of celery stuck in the middle and a radish floating alongside. Up until this moment, I had been feeling fairly gloomy - whether we are content or in a disturbed frame of mind depends, ultimately, upon the kind of thoughts that pervade our consciousness - but after half an hour spent sucking on the celery stem my mood altered, and I found myself humming.