When Beryl Bainbridge was created a Dame in the Queen's birthday honours list this year, she was quick to press the self-deprecation button that has endeared her to so many. "I don't even know how to spell DAME," she told one interviewer, "I didn't even get my school certificate."
She flashed her lack of educational credentials again when she was invested at Buckingham Palace this week, but the truth is Bainbridge is fooling nobody. Missing school cert notwithstanding, she is more than equipped to withstand elevation to the ranks of literary grande dame.
Quite apart from her prodigious talents as a novelist, Bainbridge is blessed with an impeccable sense of theatricality, an impish temperament that has got her into more than one scrape.
Last year, as she collected the WH Smith Literary Award for her Booker-shortlisted novel Master Georgie, she brought down the wrath of the tabloids when, in a moment of possibly aperitif-related candour, she appeared to call for compulsory elocution lessons and the eradication of regional accents.
"After much soul-searching as to how and why I came up with such a sensible proposition," she later wrote, "I can only suppose that, it being Tuesday, I was looking forward to the midweek episode of Brookside."
At the time, one suspected her remarks were in part serious comment on the advantages of literacy and articulacy, in part a piece of tongue-in-cheek mischief-making. Having been present at the moment of the gaffe, I recall that Bainbridge also naughtily tweaked arts minister Alan Howarth's tie as he attempted to present her with a cheque and pose for a photograph at the same time. He remained poker-faced, but the assembled company giggled appreciatively.
Bainbridge's willingness to assume the mantle of Lady of Misrule does not diminish her literary achievements. Five times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she has always managed to avoid looking remotely sour in defeat; when the camera fell on her at this year's ceremony, she was grinning cheerfully as Margaret Atwood's acceptance speech touched on the perils of bridesmaid-dom.
One cannot imagine Bainbridge's much-documented eccentricity - encapsulated by frequent references to the stuffed bison in her hallway - will pose a great threat to her career as a Dame. After all, she's in good company. Neither of two recently deceased recipients of the honour, Iris Murdoch and Barbara Cartland, was particularly renowned for her straightforward behaviour.
Even before the onset of Alzheimer's, Murdoch spent most of her days squirrelled away in companionable seclusion with husband John Bayley, emerging only to deliver messy, Byzantine manuscripts to her publishers in a tatty carrier bag. Dame Barbara added to her seemingly endless oeuvre in a haze of pink, pekes and royal jelly before finally being laid to rest in a cardboard coffin.
Nor does an aura of strait-laced conformity surround extant Dames. From her Tuscan diaspora, Muriel Spark, now 82, continues to produce slender works of wickedness, the latest being a fictionalisation of Lord Lucan's later life.
Over the past few years, she has waged a public feud with her son, attacked English hyprocrisy, dismissed a return to Edinburgh on the grounds that it is too provincial and suffered the macabre death of her five dogs through strychnine poisoning. Her latest visit to these shores was delayed by blockading French fishermen; unsurprisingly, she got through.
Perhaps the Dame most closely associated with the literary establishment is Antonia Byatt, whose combination of high-minded erudition and occasional, darting forays into populism led not only to the Booker-winning, bestselling Possession but also to her attendance at the England v Germany match in Euro 96. Only Dame Antonia could describe the progress of Gascoigne, Pearce, Seaman et al with reference to Wagner, Peter Pan and Monet.
Bainbridge's own passions range from Dr Johnson, the subject of her forthcoming novel, to painting, her children and grandchildren and, unrepentantly, smoking. She was apparently much impressed by the provision of ashtrays at the Palace. Quite probably, she didn't have cause to correct their accents, either.
