The Reader Online » Obituary

In Memory of Beryl Bainbridge

angie100 — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:30:36 +0000

We were saddened to hear of the death of Beryl Bainbridge last week. In November 2008, Formby-born Beryl was a guest speaker at our Readers’ Day in Liverpool Central Library. It was fantastic to hear her talk at length about her distinguished career and her literary output.

Beryl could be incredibly funny as this extract from a column she wrote years ago about her writing day bears out:

When I’m rushing towards the end of a novel, like I am now, I get up at 5am. I wander around the house for a bit; if I know I’ll have to go out during the day, I’ll wash my hair and half get half-dressed, so I’m half way there. Then I go upstairs to my laboratory, which is knee deep in ash, and write on a huge VTR 2000 computer. It’s so old that its prototype is in the Science Museum. I write until about 8.30am, then I print out what I’ve done and run round in circles wailing because it’s so rubbish. Then I go downstairs and have a fried-egg sandwich and a cup of very strong two-bag tea. By this time I’ve smoked about 12 cigarettes and feel absolutely terrible. Then I’ll go to work again. At 12, I take off my dressing gown, put on a long mac, and go to the newsagent’s to get more cigarettes and a bottle of still water to make me healthy. And then I write again until about 5pm, when I come downstairs and put on some sprouts – I read somewhere that they’re good for you. I lie down on the sofa with my sprouts on my chest and watch Neighbours and moan inside: “I’m never going to do this book, its rubbish.” In between soaps I’ll ring my children and grandchildren. They ask me how I am and I say “terrible”, and they say, “You’re very naughty, and that’s final.”

Then I’ll decide that I’ve got to go to bed early, so I can get up at 5am. I drop off instantly, but then wake up at 11pm, which is horrific. So I get up, and try to write again… I look at what I’ve written and it doesn’t make any sense, and so then I’ll put on the TV and watch a film. Last night the film finished at 3.45am. And then I’ll go to bed, and get up at 5am.

The Reader Recommends: The Bottle Factory Outing.

Stanley Middleton, novelist, dies.

Chris Routledge — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:13:07 +0000

We are sad to record the passing of Stanley Middleton, novelist, who died on Sunday morning, aged 89. A provincial writer, who lived in Nottingham, for many years Stanley taught English at High Pavement Grammar School, where one of his pupils was Philip Davis. Some of his teaching passed into this Reader project and shaped it. Stan was an encouraging supporter of The Reader magazine since it was founded in 1997.

Some of Stan’s poems appeared in The Reader 34, where, of the dead crowding his memory he writes,

I join them gladly, see myself

As nothing special, hardly mark

Remarking, but dust again, ash

A hapless pinch on the surface of the earth

And in another poem, of prayer, he writes

It is as if

God begged me to speak

To Him, say anything, anything.

Who’d ask a frog to croak?

No frog’s croak, his careful observant writing recorded in more than forty novels how it felt to be that ‘nothing special… hapless pinch’ .

He will be missed by a loving family and by many friends, ex-pupils and readers.

— — —

EDIT 30/07/09:

Phil Davis, editor of The Reader, who was taught by Stanley Middleton at school in Nottingham, has written a moving obituary of his old teacher in the Guardian.

Vernon Scannell 1922-2007

Jen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:08:58 +0000

The poet Vernon Scannell died last weekend aged 85. He was a prolific writer: eight novels, autobiographical memoirs, works of criticism, children’s books and several collections of poetry and yet it seems he was not as well known or as highly rated as he certainly deserves. My fellow Reader editor, Brian Nellist is a long time admirer of Scannell’s poetry, likening him to the school of Thomas Hardy finding in his work something of Hardy’s consciousness of cruelty but with a warmth and tenderness. Brian points out that he is an active rather than a reflective poet though led to the reflective by particular incident as in his poem ‘Incendiary’, which we chose as one of the poems for discussion in The Reader’s Food For Thought event earlier this month:

and frightening, too, that one small boy should set
The sky on fire and choke the stars to heat
Such skinny limbs and such a little heart

Or in ‘Ageing Schoolmaster’ reflecting on the huge inevitability of his own death:

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

He was, like Hardy, a craftsman poet. Language fits and operates in harmony within the tight framework of his verse and he was concerned with and interested in form. Extraordinary physical images spring out at you from the poetry. Even so it is still surprising to learn that he was once a boxer, earning a living in fairground fights. This was following a deeply troubled army service in WWII. After witnessing the results of a massacre in North Africa,

Disposed in their scattered dozens like fragments of a smashed whole, each human particle/ Is almost identical, rhyming in shape and pigment, /All, in their mute eloquence, oddly beautiful (‘Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit’)

he deserted, only to be caught and imprisoned. He was later released to take part in the D.Day landings where he was wounded and once again ran away. While on the run, he changed his name from John Vernon Bains to Vernon Scannell but in 1947 he was caught and sent to an asylum as an alternative to prison. He was a man who lived life to the full and much of that experience of love, violence and death is reflected in his verse. Perhaps his most famous poem and one of the greatest poems of the Second World War is ‘Walking Wounded’:

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.
In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;
The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane
Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,
Their green and silent attics sprouting now
With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes
And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst.

To hear the rest of the poem read movingly, in gravel voiced seriousness by Scannell himself, visit the Poetry Archive.

If you would like to read more of his work, Collected Poems 1950 – 1993 is available from Amazon.

On the back cover of this collection, Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory says: ‘you actually want to go back and revisit the poems many times. Their shrewd structures hold their elements firmly in place and they resonate also with the kind of humanity time is generous to…’

I can think of no better tribute.

By Angela Macmillan