REMEMBERING BERYL BAINBRIDGE

If this obituary, published in The Economist today, doesn't make you want to smoke a Gitane, wear a chic trenchcoat, take a lover and then brood over it all on your typewriter, I'm not sure what will:

IF THE words really wouldn’t come, she would leave the house for a while. Squeezing past the stiff bulk of Eric, the stuffed bison, in the hall, she would creep down the bullet-pocked stairs and step out into Albert Street. The white Victorian terraces slumbered scruffily in the sun.

If the blockage was not too severe she could sometimes cure it with a coffee and a cigarette at the Café Delancey, before they shut it down. Sometimes a stroll to smiling Germano at the Portuguese deli, to pick up her papers, would shake the plot into place. Or she could pop to the 99p Store in Camden High Street where she had once found, among the giant shampoo bottles and unseasonal Christmas decorations, a plastic model Cyberman exactly right for a grandchild.

At night she wandered farther through North London’s dark, mildly dangerous streets. Few passers-by could identify her then as Beryl Bainbridge, the famous novelist. She was as anonymous as in the days when she would charge out of her parents’ house in Formby, near Liverpool, in much the same old belted mac and her school panama hat, a leggy 14-year-old heading for the shore and the arms of her German lover. She would set off whistling then, joyously abandoning the screams and tears of her family falling apart. Now she walked more deliberately, but with a bone-handled carving knife ready in her pocket.