Archive Diary

For almost three decades the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last week, wrote book reviews and diaries for The Spectator. They were, without exception, brilliant. It has been said over the last week that she was the best novelist of her generation, but she was also (though a life-long Labour voter) the best sort of conservative: ‘What a mistake change is!’ she wrote in a diary in 2000: ‘Who needs those ghastly new buildings which have taken over Swiss Cottage? Why was Peter’s bookshop in Camden Town done away with, and the off-licence and the pet shop and the Delancey Café?’ Which Spectator reader would disagree? In one diary she confessed to taking a carving knife with her during her long midnight walks, ‘in case anyone is out there aching to do a spot of mugging.’

Here is one of her best diaries, from 15 January, 2000.

On approaching the side entrance to my high street Marks & Spencer — I needed sausages for the following day — I was confronted by the usual sight of an apparently homeless person slumped on the kerb alongside his well-built and far from dozing Alsatian. I would have given a coin to the unfortunate but for the fact that he lives in rented accommodation nearby — I know that because I’ve often seen him swigging from either a bottle of turpentine or Sparkling Vimto while letting himself into a flat on the ground floor. Besides, he should have leapt up and tugged at his forelock as I passed by. In the old days there used to be a more courteous sort of con-merchant, my own grandmother for one. Partial to a drop of the hard stuff paid for by innocent bystanders, she took to going into town and coming over all faint, particularly outside a better class of public house.