Beryl Bainbridge’s funeral took place on Monday, and was packed with the great and the good; it was, no doubt, an occasion rich with reminiscence: she was one of those people about whom stories are told. I knew her only slightly: but each occasion I met her was indelibly stamped on my memory by its wonderfully eccentric flavour.
The first time was in the great farmhouse-like kitchen of the house of Anna Haycraft, who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis and under my editorship had started to write for the Catholic Herald again, having been sacked by a predecessor for her allegedly excessive frankness. On her return, Anna was our host at a series of wonderful Catholic Herald lunches (she was a superb cook). We were all pleasurably eating and talking away when there was a desperate knocking at the door. Anna and a few of us (in case of difficulty) answered it: there was Beryl. “Quick, quick,” she said, “for God’s sake let me in. Jonathan Miller’s coming”. There, indeed, at the other end of the street, was the long, loping figure of the renowned polymath. “The thing is,” she said, now safely in the sanctuary of Anna’s fragrant kitchen, “if you get stuck with him, you never get away: he just talks and he talks and he talks.”
