BERYL the PERYL
If they’d dropped your mother on Berlin in 1939, there would have been no war – any fool can survive an atom bomb, but no one survives
‘She was funny, but she could turn into Mr Hyde’
‘Who do you want to live with, Mum or Dad?’
Brexit was the last straw for aspiring English author David King. So he emigrated to Kerry – just in time for Covid. However, the pandemic would be a godsend, affording him time and space to take Mark Twain’s advice and ‘write what you know’. Which, as David reveals here, could only mean one thing: his debut novel would be inspired by his larger-than-life late mother!
‘Write about what you know’ Mark Twain is supposed to have said, a piece of doubtful advice repeated relentlessly to first-time writers ever since. Of course, I always knew that, with a mother like mine, any account of her life would yield a story rich in human and historical drama, riven with plot twists and peopled by vivid characters. But the advantage of such a shake-and-bake novel came with one enormous catch, as I discovered when I began wrestling with the manuscript more than a year ago. Not only did the drafting dig up nuggets of family history I remembered fondly, but along with them came the unwelcome ghosts of buried fears and the spectre of childhood neglect. While my mother could be playful - creative, witty and full of joy, her journey through life beyond that covered by my first book, American Bombshell, brewed a temper that could transform instantly from a gentle maternal breeze into a full-on Category Five Hurricane.
Mother’s childhood nickname of ‘Beryl the Peryl’ proved prophetically accurate. She was, as any man who crossed her path could tell you, ‘a bit of a handful,’ and they weren’t talking about her 36in chest. As my father confided to a preteen me one day: ‘Dave, if they’d dropped that woman on Berlin in 1939, there’d have been no war. Any bunch of fools can survive an atom bomb, but no one survives a Beryl’.
When I sat on my bed contemplating a bottle of Aspirin at the age of 13, I reflected that in terms of her effect on my life, he could be right. Repeated uprootings including apparently random periods in foster care and children’s homes had left me an anxious and confused adolescent. But fortunately I was interrupted by one of the many great friends I’d made, and the suicidal moment passed, the bottle staying in the top drawer.
The problem with mum was that growing up, security, certainty, peace of mind were impossible. When she’d walk into the room, you never knew who you’d be speaking to. She might begin a conversation with one of the hundreds of movie script lines she was so adept at remembering, complete with original accents, like this one by Groucho Marks, ‘This morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know’. She was funny, but she could turn abruptly into Mr Hyde, deliver a stinging slap and chuck furniture further than the finest shot-putter could throw.
Mum’s life story was told, as I grew up, through spontaneous anecdotes from mum herself and the gossipy confidences of relatives. But I also found things out myself, through the odd archaeological finds I unearthed among her belongings: a ration book, a US Green Card (actually a white form), a pack of matches from the Empire State Building and a mink coat. There used to be a goldmine of an album too; rich in pictures of 1950’s and 60’s American life, from images of gleaming Cadillacs to Hollywood parties where a few ‘B’ list celebrities could be glimpsed. There were shots of a group of young men gathered around a four-engined plane, the imposing image of the Queen
Mary and even a couple of Black and Whites snaps of JFK on his 1960 election tour. It was from these fragments, and my own imagination, that the story of a young girl jitterbugging and drinking rum and coke with grinning American flyers, flying down uncomplicated English Lanes on a motorcycle and experimenting with love and sex was eventually crafted. Here, in my book, she is bright, young, intrigued by everything, full of hope and naive enough to believe whatever a good-looking man, or good-looking woman, said to her.
Writing the book then, can partly be explained by my having been gifted a fabulous story, told with humour and vivid in detail, the direct result of Beryl’s life. This might be true, but the gift came with a catch. Having worked as a model in Beverly Hills, and helped Kennedy’s election campaign in 1960, mother returned to the UK just after the Cuban Missile crisis, where in 1960’s London she met my father, an Arthur-Daleyish business man from the East-End who kept two sets of books and was flush with wads of crinkly blue £5 notes. By this time her character had morphed from a bright young woman into a far more troubled soul in her late thirties. She needed help, and a refuge, but while Beryl was with my father, although she could still be quirkily funny, helpful, even kind, it became clear to that the brighter elements of her character were mixed with some inner mental agony that could express itself violently. When the mood took her, the outbursts could indeed, as my father later claimed, create the flattening devastation reminiscent of a nuclear bomb, if only psychologically. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to take her on a camping trip.
Mum’s fourth marriage, to my Dad, ended when I was five. One otherwise happy and carefree day I was abruptly hoisted onto the counter top of our family’s haberdashery shop to be asked, ‘Who do you want to live with, your Mum or your Dad?’ I don’t remember what I mumbled in reply, but five minutes later a small child was walking rather surprisedly away from what
he had thought was his home, dragging an over-large suitcase beside a muttering and all to obviously incandescent mother. The reasons for this, and what it actually meant, were never explained, and it would be 36 confused months before I saw my father again. However, that proved to be a mere excursion in my mother’s mysterious itinerary, because for the next six ragged, itinerant years we moved home on average once every eight months. By the time I reached adulthood I had been dragged through 10 schools all over England, witnessed the formation of a cat’s cradle of unstable relationships and been caught in the shrapnel of half a hundred break-ups and one divorce.
There had been periods of relief, such as staying with my cousin and her amusing actor-cum-antiquesdealer father, or living in his spare flat with a half-detached balcony that overlooked Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. To my childish delight the balcony would pull away from the wall whenever I stepped upon it, revealing the street many feet below, while the flat itself became a meeting place for artists and musicians, fascinating, kind people who appeared randomly, their arrival accompanied by an odd sweet-smelling blue smoke, the chink of glasses and some bohemian music from the record player, or someone’s badly played guitar. But there was low points. Like pulling nit-infested clothes to wear from black bags on a council tip, and scrabbling for fallen vegetables after the market closed because, without them, there would be nothing to eat for dinner.
After my father re-made contact he funded two spells in boarding schools, where despite harsh discipline and the kind of bullying that would not have been out of place in a sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, there was at least regular food and geographical stability. Another marriage and divorce followed to a truly ghastly step father, and it was only as a young adult, finally having escaped to University that the real effects of my mother’s odyssey showed themselves in me in terms of acute anxiety, panic attacks, OCD and finally the grey snake of depression that has taken decades, numerous therapists and anti-depressants to wrestle into submission. As a child I had unquestioningly loved her as any child does their mother. But as an adult I came to realise that the person who had taught me to read at the age of two, who had given me my sense of humour and love of stories, had also destroyed my sense of security and my confidence. After so many moves, and so many prospective, but transient fathers, I hardly knew who I was or how to behave as a man.
But back to the book, and my mother’s earlier story. From the World War and its robot flying bombs to her arrival in New York on the Queen Mary and on through her time in Hollywood where she was involved in car wreck that left her holding half the brain of a Cherokee Indian, Beryl certainly lived an extraordinary life. She married at least five times and left in her wake across the American continent three or more marriages and at least one known child, a sister named Rita I have never met. And yet, her story might not have been written at all save for two accidents of history. The first was the calamity of Brexit, which so exasperated my pro-euro sensibilities that I left the UK for good and moved to the county and people I’d come to know and love in over 20 years of holidays – the island of Ireland, with its 1,000 shades of green. I found a house in blissful solitude on west Kerry’s rugged coast and the move enabled me to become mortgage free. However, the real enabler proved to be the biological nightmare of Covid, which unexpectedly provided the time, isolation and, frankly, the income from benefits, to be able to afford to reduce work and write it.
But how to actually write my mother’s story? It was hardly necessary to rachet up a drama already so intense it might not even be believed as fiction. The period setting I had through 30 years of haphazard but extensive wartime research.
But what to include, and what omit? I knew names had to be changed, characters had to be removed and invented, the timeline needed a tweak. I went through half a dozen outline drafts before I found the basic idea (a coming-of-age tale) and the tone, hopeful, upbeat and romantic in an old-fashioned but passionate and hopefully teenage way.
There were too many deaths, too much destruction to avoid a fair amount of grit, and the psychological damage of those exposed to war remains unhidden also. But where it came to the very worst of human character, or the gruesome nature of blast injuries, I followed the advice contained within the Bing Crosby and Andrew Sisters 1945 Hit Accentuate The Positive, skipping the most grisly or traumatic parts and giving the story a happier ending than it had in life. It was something I felt both my Mum and me deserved. As Crosby crooned so persuasively:
‘You’ve got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative/Latch on to the affirmative/Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.’
The result (I hope) is that, while containing a few episodes of bloody
‘Holding half the brain of a Cherokee Indian’
violence, from exploding V1 cruise missiles to death-filled American bombing raids over Germany, it’s chiefly a story of survival and the search for love against the odds: an upbeat tale of strength of character and luck beating ill-fortune, prejudice and perhaps fate itself.
As my first novel, American Bombshell has its faults, the Hollywood ending perhaps being one of them. But the book is not just a story based on my mother’s life. It’s also an attempt, some years after her death, to achieve at least in my own mind an understanding, perhaps even a reconciliation with her adventurous early life and later descent into something perilously close to madness. It may even be a semi-conscious attempt to bring something positive out of the wreckage of broken marriages, lost friends and wounded minds. It definitely an attempt to find personal peace. It may not be perfect, but, as Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s playwright character in Annie Hall says to camera just before the closing credits, ‘What do you want? It was my first play. You know how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life’.
From my limited experience to date, I would have to agree.