Today I have been reading the first tributes to Beryl Bainbridge, the great novelist and defiant smoker, who has just died of cancer.  Her first books, for which she was paid a pittance, were published by Duckworth, which was run by the notorious agent-hating Colin Haycraft, together with his wife Anna, the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. (You can see their original Covent Garden offices in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy).

Colin also published Jane’s first books, starting with the original version of A Stitch in Time, which is how she, and eventually I, got to know Colin, Anna and, luckily, Beryl.

Twenty years ago, preparing our book on the Blitz, I went to Beryl’s extraordinary house in Camden Town, squeezed past the stuffed buffalo in the hall and recorded her memories of spending long solitary hours as a seven-year old girl, playing war games in the pine woods of Formby, up the coast from Liverpool.

You couldn’t go to Woolworth’s and get toys in those days, so I made my own gun. My father was quite proud of it.  It was like a wooden rifle, with another bit of wood at the front for a barrel and a piece of knicker elastic at the top on a nail with a cork on the end, ‘cos my father was a traveller in corks. So that when you pulled the trigger you let go of the cork and it snapped out on the elastic and went off like a bullet.

I also had another huge piece of driftwood. I tied a piece of string round it and that was my dog, ‘Blaze’.

There was so much time to play after school, with it being double summer time. I’d go out barefoot, then cross the road to where I kept my brother’s old cast-off trousers hidden in some bushes, take my gymslip off and change into the trousers.  Then I’d be away, dragging the dog in one hand, with my rifle in the other, and just go ‘Bang! Bang!’ at anything in sight; hour after hour , it was lovely.

I used to go all through the pine woods, which were pitted with bomb craters, past great notices saying ‘Keep Out!’ because of the unexploded bombs, then down to the shore, which was covered with rolls of barbed wire. And it was littered with exciting objects washed up from all the ships which had been sunk. I didn’t worry about the signs, I’d just wriggle under the wire or walk round the end of it and see what I could find. I’ll always remember the log books, great saturated ships’ log books I’d pick up. And I once found half a horse, all bloated; I don’t know which end it was, it can’t have been the top end, I’d remember that.

Beryl’s memories and experiences were recreated in her fiction, to the delight of her many readers.  In fact, the Formby sands, where she played as a seven-year-old, were (according to the obituary in yesterday’s Guardian) where - six years later - she met and fell in love with Harry Franz, ‘a German prisoner of war waiting to be repatriated. [...] The pair went on meeting “night after night”, hidden in the bushes; her father, hearing her sing Lili Marlene in German, was so impressed that he sent her to study the language in Liverpool. Then Harry was suddenly returned to Germany; they did not meet again’.   Beryl was 13 when she met Harry, the age of the protagonist of ‘Harriet Said’, her first novel, with the shore at Formby as its setting.

I’m sad that she didn’t quite live long enough to finish her final book, but am glad that she lived four years longer than 71, the age at which 11 of her relatives had died, and  I feel privileged to have known her.

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ps  A version of this entry is appearing in today’s Guardian (Thursday 8 July)  For all of the Guardian’s coverage, go to

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/berylbainbridge