Lucky Jim and my unlucky grandpa
Twenty-five years after his death, Jenny Bardwell remembers her uncle Kingsley Amis – who mocked her Morris-dancing grandfather
Istill have my copy of Lucky Jim, published by Victor Gollancz in 1953. Turning the dark green, cloth cover, I read on the front endpaper, ‘With love to Mary and Mick from Kingsley’, written in blue ink with seductive loops on the ls and ys. This dedication to my parents fascinated me from a young age.
I gradually learned more about Aunty Hilly (Hilary Bardwell, my father’s youngest sister) and her first husband, the glamorous Kingsley Amis, and their three children, Philip, Martin and Sally. Kingsley married Hilly in 1948. He died on 22nd October 1995, 25 years ago, aged 73. Hilly died, aged 81, in 2010.
Aunty Hilly was 17 when she met Kingsley and told my mother that the daftest girl in Oxford had fallen for the cleverest chap. Older brothers, paying a rare visit to Swansea (where Kingsley taught at the university), remember £20 notes being lavishly thrown around by Hilly – they’d never seen one before.
She also occasionally chucked objects at Kingsley from the top of the stairs as he made his way up with a conciliatory breakfast on a tray.
Lucky Jim, the novel that made Amis’s name, was a hit partly because of its revolutionary setting in a non-oxbridge university. Amis was inspired as he eavesdropped on Senior Common Room chat at University College, Leicester, where his great friend Philip Larkin was assistant librarian.
The novel’s opening words, ‘They made a silly mistake, though’, kick the comedy off. Professor Ned Welch proceeds to tell the young lecturer Jim Dixon that some sloppy journalist has, in his review of a concert, only gone and mistaken a recorder for a flute!
Amis based the Ned Welch character on his father-in-law and my dad’s dad, Leonard Bardwell – our Grandpa Len.
Grandpa Len struck me as the mildest of men, even if he was also one of the few men to not to heed the oft-quoted advice ‘You should try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.’ Len married his first cousin and was an avid Morris dancer.
For over 30 years, Len danced with the East Surrey, Oxford and Abingdon Morris troupes, frequently providing their only music on his concertina. Len gets a mention on the East Surrey Morris Men website as ‘a great enthusiast, if not the world’s best dancer, and the prime mover in getting the 1937 tour going’.
You can imagine Amis’s lip curling in contempt. Len was not as cool, worldly or sophisticated as the jazz-loving Kingsley.
For Amis, the Morris-dancing theme was a gift which in Lucky Jim neatly translated into the arty madrigals weekend hosted by the Welches.
At one point, Dixon prepares to attend a dreaded folk-dancing conference. Dixon takes against Ned Welch so much that he fantasises about squeezing all the air out of his body and carrying him to the staff cloakroom to stuff toilet paper into his mouth.
Dixon resents Welch, his boss, because he needs to keep him sweet to keep his job. This man has a decisive power over his future.
Before the huge success of Lucky Jim, his first published novel, restless, ambitious Amis was strapped for cash. He felt trapped in the marriage and was also beholden to the Bardwells when Hilly inherited £5,000. This provided the money to buy their Swansea home, and it was here that Amis had the space to write the bestseller.
Amis’s behaviour towards the Bardwell family wasn’t helped by his serial adultery. According to a family story, if Hilly looked up at the bedroom window when she was out with the children and the curtains were closed, she knew he was up there with a student and she must wheel the pushchair on up the road.
I was lucky enough to meet Hilly properly when I grew up. She told me her parents had been upset by the Amis lifestyle – what ‘with their values and so on’. She added, ‘We were sandal-y sort of people.’
Wholesome and clean-living, my grandmother bought fabrics at Liberty’s. Our family enthusiasms, recorder-playing and Esperanto, are mentioned in Lucky Jim, just before Dixon collapses during his Merrie England lecture.
Amis was dubbed one of the great, postwar, angry, young men. But the anger directed against such a harmless old pussy cat as Grandpa Len is bizarre in the extreme.
I say this not because Ned Welch is a particularly savage creation. The novel has charm and Amis wouldn’t have wanted to sour that. But, in Amis’s letters to Philip Larkin, he unleashes the no-holds-barred vitriol against Len.
‘I hate him,’ Amis writes. ‘I shall swing for the old cockchafer unless I put him in a book recognisably so that he will feel hurt and bewildered at being so bated.’
I was seven when Len died and so can’t speak too authoritatively of his character. So I rang his daughter-in-law, Begonia Bardwell, 90, who lives in Alicante.
Begonia is the widow of William Bardwell, Hilly’s oldest brother. Bill Senior, as we called him, composed experimental classical music (providing Amis with further inspiration for artist Bertrand and oboe-playing Evan Johns in Lucky Jim).
Begonia said, in her strong Spanish accent with considerable passion, ‘I never met Kingsley Amis, but he borrowed – and I say the word in inverted commas
– Bill’s flamenco records, and we never saw them again!’
She added, ‘Len had his head in the clouds with his various hobby-horses, but was a calm and loving person.’ Begonia recalled clearing out Len’s study to discover ‘some very obscure newspapers in Welsh, Basque and Swedish’.
She wondered if Amis envied the Bardwells’ love for culture – for foreign culture and languages in particular.
Another victim of the Amis pen was Jim Dixon’s colleague and potential girlfriend the passive-aggressive Margaret Peel, who induces feelings of desire, guilt, pity and disgust in Jim.
Margaret was based on Larkin’s girlfriend, Monica Jones. According to John Sutherland, who is writing a book about Jones, there was even concern about a potential libel case because Jones was so unmistakable on the page.
Her ‘minimal prettiness’, ‘silver bells laugh’, spectacles, hairstyle, long neck and choice of lipstick gave the impression of ‘a neurotic who’d taken a bad beating’.
No wonder Larkin was in a state of nervous tension when he sent her a bound copy of Lucky Jim on the eve of publication.
John Sutherland says Jones responded with a ‘2,000-word letter written in a storm of alcoholic rage; Ophelia-like mental derangement’.
Eventually, she talked herself down to dismiss it all as schoolboy japes: ‘She could not allow herself to think he would be treacherous enough to put her even at second hand in a novel,’ says Sutherland. Larkin was forgiven again.
Still, I never heard from anyone that Len was hurt by the Professor Welch character, as Amis once intended.
Unlike with Monica Jones’s distress over Margaret, I doubt Len took much notice. He probably just picked up his concertina and skipped merrily along to the next Abingdon Morris Men’s gettogether.
He missed the May Morning dance in Oxford for the first time a year before his death, aged 81, in 1966. Morris Matters reported, in 2015, how Len’s jig was ‘genuinely missed’.
The other day, I mentioned Len in passing to a neighbour I knew to be a keen Morris man.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘He was very big in the Morris-dancing world. Then he added, as an afterthought, ‘Wasn’t he something to do with Kingsley Amis?’