![]() ![]() ‘What shall I do,’ was her constant internal refrain, ‘ When I Grow Up?’ Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004. The novel centers on Norman Zweck, the son of a Rabbi and is considered the clever, brilliant one in his closely-knit Jewish family. In this delightful evocation of her own life, Rubens escorts us, with a flotilla of anecdotes, away from that armpit through her wartime childhood, her first ‘major folly’ studying English at University to stints as a teacher, lady’s maid and actress before stumbling upon a career that bemused her until the end of her days. ![]() It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to girls born in Glossop Terrace in Splott, the ‘unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff’. She wasn’t quite expecting that but nor, as she reveals in these pages, did she expect to become a writer. In 1970, she became the first woman recipient of the Booker Prize for her novel The Elected Member. Poignantly, the highly acclaimed author, literary bon vivante and celebrated film maker died shortly after completing them. Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1928. In a rare foray outside that natural home, Booker Prize winner Bernice Rubens penned these memoirs ‘while I still have a memory’. ![]()
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