TRIBUTES TO BERYL BAINBRIDGE - Memories of Beryl

Published: 22 July, 2010

• “HELLO sweetie, have you seen Rudy? I seem to have mislaid her.”

It was Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl quite often mislaid things, sometimes including her children or herself.

There used to be a series in Readers Digest called “My most unforgettable person”. For me, that was Beryl.

I first met her some time in the late 1960s when I opened a bookshop in Parkway Camden Town.

In common, I suspect, with most people who met Beryl I felt I had known her forever.

I can’t remember how long it took me to find out Beryl was a novelist but I do know that for the 40-plus years I knew her, she never was anyone other than the Beryl I first met.

When my second daughter was about to be born she invited Lucy who was five and I around to Albert Street and gave her a wonderful clockwork tin elephant so she would not feel neglected in the furore of the new baby.

Lucy never stopped talking about Beryl and the magical house with its books and toys and buffalo and Neville Chamberlain statue in the living room.

We will miss Beryl as someone who genuinely made you feel that you mattered.

PETER BERGMAN, NW1