Life Class 1967 Chapter 6 First Trip

 Chapter Six   First trip.


   The tutor in charge of our trip to north Europe thought the best way to

 make us keep up was to run from one tram to the next and not give us

an itinerary and we didn’t think to ask for one. He took the whole trip at a

breakneck pace, probably the third year he’d done it. Once at an 

 exhibition we had some time to look but he hardly bothered to discuss

or instruct beyond occasionally covering labels with his hand and asking

who we thought a painting was done by.

  Van Gogh in Amsterdam was followed by Warhol in Berne, the silver

floating pillows and the Brillo boxes, and Brancusi in Paris. Bryony

and I saw the famous studio through  slightly blurred vision as we’d

shared a bottle of wine in the lunchtime sunshine but at least we didn’t

knock over the endless column. In a museum of Impressionist works

Chris sat looking French while two English tourists talked about him

disparagingly and then he spoke in English to embarass them. He

always made us laugh.

  Some of them sat playing cards on the train and never even saw the

alps. One of the tallest of the young men was ill and I made everyone

laugh by saying ,’its always the big ones that wilt’

   We hardly remembered what country we were in. We refused raw

looking beef, coped with all the changes of currency and bought no

 books to keep our luggage light and were home in Nottingham in no

time.

  Now the course diversified to give a taster of various departments so

 the pre - diploma students could make up their minds where to apply for

 next year, not having our luxury of being safely ensconced for another

 three.

  One of the tasters was photography. We were isued with enormous

twin reflex cameras with square ground glass screens and two inch

negatives and we wandered  around the city to take pictures feeling

important. In the darkroom I found myself next to a technician

developing prints of Derek, the body building model. Life drawing had

now stopped and would not be referred to again. The technician looked

over a female students shoulder at a picture of her lean spindly

boyfriend magically appearing in the dish. ’Call that a man?’ he said

 with contempt, motioning to his muscle bulging Derek.

  Printing was another section, lithography on an offset machine with an

 eight foot wide roller that with the tiniest push rolled beautifullly along

oiled cogs to take up the image from the plate onrto the roller and then

 to the paper. We were warned not to inhale the toluene used for

cleaning as it was halucinogenic.

  I didn’t seem to have the time to take the other hallucinogenic

substances that were around. I took it quite seriously, read about Aldous

 Huxley and decided that unless I could put aside a couple of days and

have a friend to take care of me I wouldn’t take the chance.

 
  The Head of the Royal College of Art came to visit, Peter de Francia,
 
and chose a few students to talk to. I was one of them, but I hadn’t a

 clue how to make any use of this opportunity. I didn’t try to get his

phone number.

 Stuart Brisley came and staged a bizarre ‘happening’. We had to do

some concrete poetry using a word. I chose ‘sticky’ and wrote it in honey

 and flies walked into it and died. I exhibitied in college a warped comb

 I’d left on a radiator and called it ‘metamorphosis’

  We learnt nothing about how to survive as artists, how to make

 contacts in the art world or how to exhibit outside the college.

  It was time to move on from the cramped rooms in Burns Street and

 we found an unfurnished flat on Forest Road, with huge high rooms on

the ground floor and a garden. The shared bathroom was upstairs, very

 chilly and with three dining chairs opposite the bath as if for spectators.

 The gas boiler exploded into life dangerously.

  The question of buying beds came up. Bryony’s boyfriend had told her

mother that single beds only forced people to sleep on top of one

another. My parents looked askance put didn’t protest when I said the

only bed available at the auctions was a three quarter one.

 I painted my room entirely blue except for an orange door and  on the 

other side I cut out an elephant from the green and painted it pink. A

visiting child pointed to it excitedly and I told the parent that they were

 quite correct, there was really an elephant there.

  The landlord dropped in every month without warning for the rent and

to see what we were up to. Bryony had a red haired youth often there

with her. I had a round table top just on the floor so it was 4 inches high.

I had an enormous old sofa also from the auctions, a big mahogany

 wardrobe with mirrored doors for my satin and velvet secondhand

 gowns and a moleskin fur coat, way before anyone made objections

 about being clad in the skin of a dead animal.

  Upstairs the old lady that had lived there for years didn’t mind us. We

didn’t play our music very loud. Occasionally a few fancy dressed folk

 turned up and stayed for hours but there was no real problem. One of
 
these groups was actually the members of a band called ’Principal

 Edward’s Magical Theatre’. We were preferable to the skinheads with

 shaved heads and tattoos, big boots and threatenening behaviour. The

 two subcultures were uneasily side by side, hippy flower children versus

 bother boots.

  One hazard was venereal disease. It turned out that the Milky Bar Kid

 had dumped me because he thought I’d passed on to him crab lice, but

 it was the other way about. I made more than one miserable visit to a

 concrete clinic where one of the young doctors making their intimate

 inspections said,’It looks fine to me.’ Pills were given out to stop non

 specific infections. Examinations always hurt the urethra, a needle like

  a knitting needle was passed up it and afterwards to pee hurt for a

day.

   It was however between the time when syphilis had been incurable

 and the discovery of chalmydia and the start of Aids. It was a brief

window when a cheerful, uncomitted promiscuity could be tried by those

intelligent enough, or maybe just lucky enough, to avoid pregnancy. This

 serial monogamy gave experiences without learning anything about

 love or even about love-making.
 

Chapter 5 First real danger

 Chapter 5 First real danger

Meanwhile, what of the art?

  Everyone at the annexe had to stretch a canvas, three by four feet, 

using those corrugated steel bits you bash in with a hammer to secure a

butt joint. This is a very poor way to make anything and there was no
 
instruction or help provided. I felt a failure as my corrugated bits shot

 across the room or bent pathetically. Somehow the canvas was

 attached and primed.

 A tutor gave each of us at random a tiny snippet from a newspaper. This

 was to inspire a work of art. Mine said ’ summit could be disastrous’. I

wrote it out, it was longer than that, all about ice pitons. I then took

 orange and blue and yellow and green and worked with very diluted oil

paint around the writing so you could still see the shapes but not really

 read it. No one referred me to research other artists who used script,

 and no one called it text. I stood back a lot and waited for a feeling of

rightness and necessity before each mark. The colours reflected those

 used in fashion and interior furnishings at the time. No one came to

 really discuss it. There was no group discussion. Each student coped

 with their own encounters with the staff and were left unaware of how

 they were seen to be doing.

 

 

 Up at the Unviversity chronological progress through the history of art

 continued. Everything was justified with reference to something else.

 Seminar discussions took place, essays were marked with spelling

 mistakes indicated. I wrote about art nouveau and about Duchamp. I

read huge quantities of art history books. Beginners Italian trundled on.

  I attended a demonstration against the Monday Club, a right wing

 organisation that met in a local pub. As the police came in to break up

 the demonstration I saw one bobby thump each protester he passed on

 the stairs in the stomach and I managed to get out of his way.

   Otherwise politics wasn’t a huge concern. Everyone was against the

 US war in Vietnam and against apartheid. I would vote Labour but I

 didn’t join the party. The Swiss girl demonstrated against the

 exploitation of women in a beauty contest and joined the Socialist

 Workers a bit later, but mostly we were absorbed in college life, in going

to see groups play music, in meeting new partners, and, despite warning

 notices at the University that claimed hashish would ruin your genetic

 heritage, trying marijuana. I didn’t smoke and found it hard to inhale.

 We generally, the women, had nicknames for the blokes we fancied.

 Bryony was beginning to resent her steady’s assmptions and took up

 with someone with a double barelled name who couldn’t really be

 bothered to make love, then a man who played water polo and ruined

 her best velvet dress by clutching her with a sweaty hand during

 Engineer’s ball.

  I met The Milky Bar kid, who abandoned me without explanation,

Walter Raleigh, who worshipped me without my reciprocation and The

Persian who only exchanged looks and smiles. I went to Indian evenings  

where only the white people ate the brightly coloured swimming in fat

Indian sweets and a Sikh explained to me that what made a spoon shine

was the alignment of the molecules. Someone fell onto me in the

Playhouse bar and we both fell spectacularly through a door onto the

floor.I was in love at a safe distance with a man with big hands who
 
never spoke to me.I liked the way the room span round after a few

drinks.

  A man from Thailand asked me round and offered to show me dirty

 postcards and I laughed at him and left.

  A south American said he had to stay the night because the police

 would pick him up if he walked home.

  Bryony brought a tutor home who kept his trousers on so as not to be

 unfaithful to his wife, not realising Bryony would tell everyone the next

 day.
 
 I threatened Bryony not to bring home another tutor and Bryony

 told one she wouldn’t ask him in because I didn’t like him.

  A tutor asked me if I was a cork on the ocean and when I said yes said 

what difference could a cork make to an ocean and I said an ocean with

 a cork was different from one without one.
 

 Arthur Brown performed with a candle on his head. The Kinks came.

 People were still dancing, most still drinking, before the time when

everyone sat on the floor stoned or missed even going out because they

 were giggling and sleepy.

  At college we all wore yellow and had a party with yellow food and it

was filmed but no one had a copy afterwards. Everyone’s mouths were

 very red next to the yellow. “Yellow Submarine’ came out and ‘I am
 
curious Yellow’ and ‘Girl on a motorcycle’.

  And now was the time of the visit to the North of Europe to study art

 history, which the BA students took as part of their course. We were

 only able to take £50 cash each because the Wilson government had to

 impose a limit on taking currency out. Bryony’s Dad wrote to the home

 secretary claiming that she needed extra for books and she was able to

 take £100. This came in handy as all Chris’ money was stolen from

 under his bed in the Amsterdam youth hostel.
 
So how was it that I never met up with the others on the train to

Harwich? I failed to get up and look for them, then I failed to get off at

the station because I thought it had a slightly different name, and then  

the train was going back the wrong way. I got off at the next stop and

found there was no train to take me to Harwich in time for the boat. I had

to phone my Dad and wait in the signal box.
 
My Father arrived as soon as he could and drove as fast as he dare but

we arrived to see the ferry departing, only yards from the quayside.
 
Dad took me to a workmens’ cafe, carrying my little blue case, both

becoming aware that they were a middle-aged man and a young girl

only old enough to be his daughter but neither of us said anything.
 
 I caught the next ferry in the morning and arrived with only the address

of the first destination from which our group would be leaving in one

day’s time. If I didn’t arrive there were no mobile phones, I had only a

few hours to catch up with them.
 
The ferry was almost enjoyable. I succeeded in catching the night train

to Amsterdam. I was going to be fine.
 
 A young black man asked me in good English where I was going and

kindly offered me a lift to the hostel, and I accepted because I did not

want him to think I was racist.
 
 He drove out beyond the station quite a way into the suburbs and said

he just wanted to stop at his flat to pick up his post and then he’d take

me to the hostel and to come in.

    I went in and he said to sit down and why not have a coffee first?

Something finally kicked in below the not wanting to appear to be racist.

I refused coffee and demanded he take me to the hostel at once. He

said no one knew I was coming, they weren’t expecting me now. I

had my hand on the door handle and he was saying I had no idea where

I was, it was dark, no one would help me and I must sit down. I said I

would leave at once. He looked at me considering, he turned over the

situation. He agreed to take me now, I was being so silly, he meant no

harm. I almost thought he was right and I was being silly, he had not

touched me, but I stuck to it that I had to go at once, and he dropped me

at the hostel.
   
It was right next door to the station.
   
I staggered upstairs and into a room with my little suitcase and called

out,’Bryony, I’m here, its Mary’ and a voice replied, ‘We’re all men in

here darling’ and a room full of men laughed and I went up to the next

floor and found Bryony at last and a bed, I was shocked, upset, but

alive, unmolested, slept, and surprised the others by being there for

breakfast, which was oddly ham and cheese slices.
   
I never told my parents about this.

Chapter 4 First Sex

 First Sex Chapter 4

 The BA course was a most unusual one in combining the efforts of

 two separate institutions.

  Up at the University it was all history, influences, who saw what where,

which period came before which, all sitting in darkened rooms looking at

slides that clattered round a carousel projector. Next to the art history
 
library, separate from any other library and at one end of the student

 union lounges was an art gallery with changing exhibitions. Each of

these began with a private view held at tea time, before anyone had

eaten, where inexhaustible supplies of sherry were served free in

enormous schooners. One of the girls managed fifteen one Friday

before collapsing into a taxi someone called for her. Everything was very

 polite, the staff did not fraternize with the students beyond a few

nervous remarks and everyone knew their place.

   Down in town at the art college it was precisely the reverse. The

almost exclusively male staff came up from London each week and

mostly sought a friendly student bed whenever they could. Something

cautious kept me from this but others were less careful and a couple of

abortions resulted. Parties included staff and students alike and

everyone might be found down at Yates Wine Lodge sampling five kinds

of port and listening to the trio of ancient musicians upstairs under the

twinkly chandeliers in faded splendour while the hoi poloi stood on

sawdust and milled about below.

   The University demanded attendance, punctuality and work to

 deadlines, whilst at the art college students could drop in now and

again but were called to account at termly crits where ten tutors

 surrounded one student and apparrently thought reducing them to tears

about their general shortcomings was a good basis for learning.

   In the second week at university I met George, an electrical engineer

 who fancied himself a fine dresser and stylish dancer to soul music.

 He had no interest in or respect for art but he took a fancy to me and

set out to win me over with steak and beaujolais in a bistro on

wednesdays and outings on his velocette motorcycle to motorcycle

 races at weekends. My Dad had had a motorcycle and a more or less

 total indifference to art, and I hadn’t read Freud.

  I was absolutely amazed at how ardent George was in trying to seduce

me. Could he really think I might succomb in the tunnel between two

 buildings on campus or down an alleyway in town standing up? Or on

 the grass outside his hall of residence? He was it seemed ever ready
 
and so keen, like a puppy wanting a walk. He couldn’t believe I’d never

 done any of this before, the touching and groping, it was only a matter

 of time, a few more meals, dancing, a discreet return to his tiny room

 and narrow bed, he’d take care, he’d use the withdrawal method, I’d be

 o.k. He knew what he was doing and he wanted so very much to do it

so how could I not?

  One afternoon I gave way. George, triumphant but hampered by his

 own caution, withdrew almost at once, leaving us both as

 unsatisfactorily on edge as could possibly be.

  I took myself off to a local doctor to request the pill. The first refused, in

 fact the receptionist refused for him by telling me he was a Roman

 Catholic. The second told me to go away and think about it and when I

 returned the next day wrote a precription. I took them every day, but

 George never quite trusted me and always withdrew so I always

seemed to be insatiably wanting more.

  We got into certain habits, Wednesdays a steak house, Sundays if it

 wasn’t raining roaring off on the motorbike. It remained a relationship

 totally separate from my artistic life but was consuming emotionally.

 Even so I was afraid when he gave me a box containing jewelry,

 relieved it was a brooch not a ring. When I bought a new satin dress in

chocolate brown he said I looked like an usherette. He never saw my

drawings, never heard me sing, never discussed the future.
.
   One day I was on a bus and he got on with another girl. My heart was

 pounding with misery at once but he left the girl to come over and say

 he could explain. He told me the girl pracrically forced herself on him to

 go into town. His masterstroke was that she was a Roman Catholic and

 therefore would not have sex anyway. I tried to believe this. She had

 very red lipstick and black eye liner and a big nose. She was like the

 Cretan woman in the Knossos frescoe known to art hitorians as ‘the gay

 Parisenne’. Bryony said in my place she’d have been sorry she’d slept

 with George. Her boyfriend at home was faithful and true, got on well

with her parents and she missed him aa lot, at first anyway.

  I was trying to forgive George when a letter arrived, he did not love me

 any more, we were finished. Through my tears I felt mostly glad of the

  ‘anymore’ as he’d never said he loved me at all. I knew he wasn’t ‘the

 one’, he was an experience, unsuitably mod rather than rocker. He took

 me ten pin bowling to try to make sure I wouldn’t embarass him when

 we went with his mates, but I did.I couldn’t aim straight and I didn’t want

to learn. I danced more fluidly and oddly than his precise routines

allowed for. I didn’t like beer, I was going off at Easter to study art in

 Europe with my year group, and we had nothing to talk about. The

relationship as well as the sex was always unsatisfactory and

 interrupted. He didn’t want a hippy chick who liked Dylan, wore

secondhand silk floaty things and velvet trousers and a bell round her

 neck, ten colours round her eyes and twenty tiny plaits flying. He’d

 never heard of any artists except Picasso and Leonardo and he didn’t

 want to spend time at private views and listen to clever art students with

 money who bought everyone drinks and then entertained them by using

one of those conical wicker chairs to make themselves into a totoise. He

 wanted to roar out to Grantham for a thrill, have coffee at a service

 station and then roar back. He wanted somene who wasn’t me and I’d

 begun to see he wasn’t that beautiful, his cashmere overcoat was

 ridicuously conventional, he’d never heard of Rimbaud and

 Baudelaire, and he didn’t like French films with subtitles or sitting in the

 park.

   It was done. I was free again, lighter, more fun, more parties, more

 dancing. Bryony and I had moved into new digs, nearer the University.

 The women of the house, Mrs Grundy, accounted for every cup of tea

 or biscuit and was upset that we didn’t like tinned tomatoes as she’d

bought a big catering tin of them. She didn’t understand that we needed

to revise for first year exams with no interruptions. Callers were not

allowed so young men had to wait at the end of the lane. One day when

 we got back late the husband informed us we would have to leave at

once, it was outrageous that we were untidy and we weren’t welcome

 any more.

    In the morning I went to the police station with Bryony to ask for

 help. They assured us  it was not o.k. to throw us out and gave us a lift

 home in a police car, making the neighbours curious. We were assured

 we could stay the week until the end of term and then we planned to get

a flat together in the city.

   When we came home the next night the husband was cutting logs in

 the garden with an axe. It was scary. Neither he or his wife spoke to us

 for the last week and we stuck together for safety.

   On the last day Bryony’s parents came to collect her, and were given

 a tirade of criticism. I was upset. Bryony was quiet. Her parents just

 listened, nodded, said they knew she could be difficult, and left.

   My parents arrived an hour later. This was when I saw that they were

 for all their apparent indifference not so bad. My Father said they were

 not going to listen to this, they knew their daughter and there was

 nothing wrong with her. We swept out with it clear that they were on my

 side.

  Two weeks later it was up to me to secure a flat as I lived so much

 nearer to Nottingham. I couldn’t find a decent one and in desperation

 took two rooms in a house that had a red light in the hall. I’d have to

 sleep in the kitchen with the gas fire. John Tagg, the quiet man on the

 course, was across the landing.

  Bryony’s parents delivered her with a shudder ’Come away Ruth, lets

 leave her to her squalor’ her father said. My parents were as nice as

 pie. They did not allude to the red light and seemed to have no idea that

it went withthe district. My Dad gave me an extra five pounds as he left.

They probably took a very deep breath but they said nothing except to

wish me well for the new term.

Chapter 3 First advice about men.

 Chapter 3   First Advice

  If you go to a single sex school, you can reach the age of 18 and

hardly exchange ten words with the opposite sex. I came from a home

where there was no discussion of love, of relationships, of sex - there

was simply no reference to these subjects unless they forced

themselves into view.

   During my Saturday forays into town I had met a young man, over six

feet tall, with long curly hair and a strange poetic way of speaking, called

Wolf. He’d talk to me and let me accompany him to a job interview if he

  was made to attend one by the dole office, although he had no

intention of being chosen for a job. He lived in a large, spare bed-sitter,

And he took me to a ‘spade’ party where black men of all ages were

dancing. He actually took no real interest in me. He held court in the

Wimpey Bar as he cut his matches into two, slicing them lengthways

with a knife, which years later I heard was something men did in prison.

A group of us went into a little room provided to listen to records in a  

shop in town and made requests for various long-playing records all

afternoon until we were asked to leave with the complaint that we came

in every week and never bought anything.

   Wolf was no danger to me, he sort of tolerated me. Danger came from

a man who offered me £5 as I waited for my bus, a boy who jumped off

a scooter to demand attention as I walked home from another bus stop,

and a young man my Father thought so polite because he called Dad

‘Sir’ when he drove me home, but somehow I remained unscathed.

   One day I took Wolf and his friend John home for tea. My Dad was

out. We all sat down with my Mother having ham on plates with  a bit of 

lettuce and tinned peaches after. Then we three young people went up

to my room and sat on the floor to listen to Elgar on the dancette record

player. They didn’t even smoke. When my Dad got home he sent Mum

up. She knocked on the door and told me my Dad said we were to come

down at once. ‘What does he think we’re doing? There’s three of us’, I

said, so innocently unaware  that three people might do anything that

one of them’s Father could object to.

   Afterwards my Mother gave me what were her only ever words of

advice on the subject of men. “He’s good-looking dear [she knew it was

Wolf not the chaperone I liked] but don’t get too fond of him will you, he

hasn’t a job or any money’ That was all, no references to her

experience, to examples in the family, no discussion, no questions, one

remark, never forgotten because it stands out in the sea of nothingness.

   With this background I approached Freshers Week with my main

worry would any boy ever ask me out and would I die before I

experienced sex, was I too unattractive to be ever happily settled like

 Bryony? I did not ask myself how to be selective, how to avoid harm,

what qualities I wanted in a man, what precautions to take to suss

someone out. It was as blank a subject as Italian, to be started next

week as a subsidiary to art history.

  The thought of entering the Union Buiding for the first evening, where

all sorts of films and talks and music was going on, and thousands of

young people, over half being men mostly studying five different kinds of

engineering, was a bit daunting.

   I walked in and up the stairs and approached a large room with rock

music blaring out, and as I crossed the threshhold a red-haired boy said,

‘Do you want to dance?’

  Evidently it was as easy as that, as easy as breathing to meet a man,

And later as easy as sitting in the arboretum for five minutes, it was a

problem to fend them off, to develop a sufficiently haughty exterior, an

unconnecting, uncomprehending distance, a sharp retort, but I could

start on that tomorrow.

  I left that first evening with another kiss and a promise to go out but still

not an inkling that I was attractive, my long brown hair, green eyes, my

liveliness, my youth, no one had led me to suspect that I was nice -

looking in my whole family. The only attention was from the Uncle I

hated, so some useful warding off scorn had been developed there. My

parents were always nervous lest the children got too big for their boots,

too uppity, too sure of themselves, too obnoxiously self-confident, a sort

of working-class protection against making any sort of fool of yourself, or 

any wild success either.

Singing in competitions got by because it came from a teacher with an

academic purpose. Ballet lessons were not allowed, probably for lack of

money, but money was another taboo subject. What did we talk about?

  There were less communicative families, later I knew a man who had

never had any sort of discussion at home, no you speak and then me

and then you in turns all on the same subject. He did not expect me to

reply or to ask questions. At home yes they had sat around a table to eat

and now and then someone spoke, but it was like a stone thrown in a

pool, everyone watched the ripples intil it was quiet again and the stone

fell to the bottom and no remark was made, no questions, no maybe or if

you, or why.

   On meeting the red-haired boy again I was able to see, just the

passing crowds behind him made this clear, that he wasn’t very good-

looking. His skin was too pink and his eyelashes pale and flickery and

his way of speaking was from another world, from the south. It was

scarcely worth investigating, an instinct as strong as hating something

you’re offered to eat, like suet pastry, drummed in my ears. I took a deep

breath. ‘Its no good, I’m not attracted to you’, a moment of awkwardness

as he turned away and walked off sullenly, and I was free and happy 

again with a thousand possibilities and tomorrow the Art School and the

Art School dance.

  In town the Art School was a beautiful old Victorian buiding with

classical arches and high ceilings. The new recruits, whether the many

pre-diploma students or the ten BA oddities, were in a room up the road

in a dilapidated annexe. We stowed the required kit in our lockers. My

big tin of cow gum was the wrong way up and it leaked, suspending my

pastels  in a disgusting gunk.

  The first term was a simple diet of drawing, a skeleton, a caste of a

male torso, and morning, afternoon and evening one of two male

models, alternating between John the Baptist, long-haired and shivering,

or a compact body buiding muscle twitching to music in nightclubs

specimen of manhood, or a middle aged amply built woman. In the

corner was a Bob Dylan look-a-like with a bush of black hair who didn’t

take up a drawing board but hung about and rarely spoke. We drew,
 
with pencil, ink, paint, charcoal, pastels, torn paper, endlessly.

Eventually I learnt that the nervous young man in the corner was the

tutor, straight from the Royal College of Art for a couple of days and then

back to London.

   At this point Victor Burgin was already making conceptual art, 

photographing a parquet floor and attaching the photo to the part of the

floor it was a photo of. Somehow he’d got this job in the provinces where

in 1967 they still drew from a life model and maybe he didn’t have

anything to say about it. He just let us get on with it.

  After the first session somehow someone knew to not go to the

canteen but to s stylish little cafe called ‘The L-shaped room’. It had low

coffee tables and plastic cups.

Similarly at lunchtime I was swept along with Bryony and the others to

‘The Empire’. It was down a few steps into a hot dark room like Van

Gogh’s night cafe, full of navvies and other workmen. The food was

written up on a board, you asked for it, paid for it, sat down all squashed

around large tables and they called out,’breakfast one extra sausage’

and if it was yours you shouted ‘here’ and it arrived swimming in grease.

I had never been anywhere like it but it was The place to go and also the

Nottingham working class accent was The way to talk.

  Then I was up a bus ride out to the University campus  the other two

days.

 One girl was from Nottingham, the one whose Father was a Doctor, one

had a Father who was a Swiss Gnome, one had a Father who was a

Professor at Edinburgh University, one had a Dad with a successful

haulage business, and there was me, whose Dad was an insurance

collector. So I was the only one who had lived in a house with an outside

toilet and no bathroom but a tin bath kept in the cellar and brought up

once a week to  the kitchen. I was afraid every day in French oral at my

grammar school that this shame would be found out, never considering

that I could lie.

We’d moved the next year and I went to school from one house and

back to another, from terraced to completely detached. From the house

near the Tuckers’ chaotic life within sight and hearing and their pigeons

circling every night, from being the house they came to in emergencies

to shout into the phone as most people didn’t have one, to the never

really meeting neighbours either side of a busy road and all behind

laurel hedges.

  There were four young men on the BA, one older student who mixed

very little, but once pointed out that drawing a woman was not in fact

much like drawing fruit in a bowl, two working class boys from the North,

one charming and amusing with a girlfriend called Plum, the other rough

and rude who hardly worked at all until the end when in a master stroke

he made a full size canvas the size of Gericault’s ‘The Raft of the

Medusa’ and just stenciled this title in the middle, and passed with 

homours on the strength of that one bold gesture. One was quiet with a

Newcastle accent, thoughtful and unusual and he knew a lot, with a

girlfirend who visited most weekends. The last was a bluff folk singer

from Dorset who copied his essay not realising that the tutor would

know. Mr Pickvance let him read the essay in its entirety brefore asking

him why he’d copied it from a book in the library. He left or was made to

leave. And then there were nine.
    
   At the Art School dance, held in town at a nightclub, I found myself in

the queue for coats in front of a slightly older man who asked me what I

did. ‘Very little’ I said, ‘I’m one of the BAs’ This was received with a wry

smile from Steve Willats, who turned out to be another of the tutors.

Chapter 2 First Kiss

 First Kiss

The first interview for a place to study art was for the BA course at

Leeds, chosen from a Sunday Observer guide because it was a

University, therefore offering the chance to meet all sorts of people, and

right in the town to be more interesting than out on a campus.

       I set out by train on a wintry day, a large portfolio under my arm,

made at school with bookcloth and card with tapes to tie it up with and

decorated with flung white paint a la Pollock, on a turquoise ground.

      I was a slightly built girl, insubstantial, only seven stone of me, and

the fierce wind blowing across the bridge threatened to blow me into the

river. How could I one day be three more stones of flesh, so many more

cells, not one the same as on that day, but still the same person?

     I arrived exhausted, to find myself put to draw in a large grand old

studio with a fancy plaster ceiling and a huge mirror, where all that day’s

interviewees were gathered. Eventually I was called in to see Quentin

Bell, an old bearded professor who seemed to be sketching me as I sat

there, maybe as an aide memoir or to ward off boredom.
     
     I must have been keen because I was keen, but a few weeks later a

rejection arrived. My teacher, Mrs Roberts, my champion, the

unconventional one who had a lemon yellow board and blue chalk when 

everyone else had a black board, who encouraged me to work large, to

stay in at lunchtime enjoying myself when everyone had to be outside,

the teacher who saw that I had talent, was angry. ‘He’s the last and the

least talented of the Bells’ she said, ‘I’m going to write to him and tell

him he’s missing a very good student’.

     Places on art and art history degrees were very few. At Nottingham

University they took only ten. I went along in a brand new suit, mini

skirt four inches above the knee and jacket only two inches shorter, in a

loose weave multicoloured hound’s tooth  tweed with wide reveres. My

Father took me there by car and waited in the huge lounge overlooking

a lake, sitting on a big mustard coloured leather settee. Personally he

 thought art a bit of a waste of time, why couldn’t I study science and get

a good job and ‘keep your daubs for weekends’. So bloody insulting.

My storm of protest struck him silent, he had to accept it, at least I was

 not getting married and having children like my Sister, at least it was a

University, I would get a degree, the world would be my oyster, the first

in the family to go away to study, as he would have liked to.

     My Dad was clever but was forced to leave school and at fourteen go

and work in the Co-op, where he almost severed the top of a finger in

the bacon slicer and where at nightschool he learnt the geography of the 

Empire from whence the groceries came and by day he mastered how

to wrap loose sugar in a piece of blue paper to make a sugar-tight

bag. He’d met his wife, my Mother, when delivering groceries to the

door, another secret, for some reason shameful, which I would not find

out for years and years despite asking. 

 

The war gave my Dad the opportunity to travel,

 work he loved as a despatch rider on a motorcycle

in Ireland and then as a fitter on the tanks in India, where he loved the

climate, to be hot rather than too cold. He always made it sound so

interesting that I formed a vague longing to visit India. He left out all the

rotten stuff, the worst of Burma, and there he was, smiling in the photos

with his mates, lean and fit and brave. My Mother told me once she’d

have liked to live in India, I think as an officer’s wife, going up to the hill

stations to avoid the heat and waited on by servants like in Kipling.

    My Mother would have liked to have been a nurse but her Mother told

her that she was too small, not tall enough. This was untrue but worked,

kept a chance of keeping her at home, dashed by the romance of

meeting Frank, who followed her and her girlfriends down to St.Ives to

The Nook, friends from the punchcard job on the railway, and there she

was, in love and married at twenty-three, a baby on the way when he

had to go off to war, not volunteering like her Father had, but forced to 

go, called up, and only a couple of photos of him, so young, smoking a

pipe, his wife in an elaborate deluge of white tulle with a massive bush

 of roses and ferns dripping down, all carefully arranged by the

photographer, and then the honeymoon in a stylish checked jacket, dark

hair curled in a perm and that lovely, lovely smile.

   So I was the only hope of some education, of a good job, of moving

upwards, of mixing with better people, as my Sister married a boy from

 a poorer street who spoke with a more common accent and shook his

 head nervously, maybe nice enough, but Anne was now lost to

domesticity and childcare, just as my father had in a way thrown aaway

his chances by marrying, settling down and having responsibilities.

   The postwar child, conceived almost as a celebration of the National

Health Service, was another opportunity. She was not so introverted,

 more confident, she sang on stage in competitions, she could have

done English at Liverpool, they offered a place but by then she was

decided on art. He wanted her to take elocution lessons but she refused.

 She wouldn’t apply to Oxford or Cambridge because they didn’t do the

 right courses, she was somehow strong willed and fearless, able to

stand her ground. He admired me and stood back a little in awe, unable

to get what he wanted, unable to say much more, but hoping for so 

much.

     Professor Smart wore suede shoes and danced round me to get to

 the door first to open it for me. He asked me if I’d like to remove my

coat and despite the central heating being so hot, I explained I was

wearing a suit and kept the jacket on. He asked me if I thought I’d be

able to cope with using wood or sculpting stone, being a girl with no
 
experience of these things, and I replied that if Barbara Hepworth could

 do this so could I. He asked me what art I’d seen and I replied with

something about a South American artist in a provincial gallery,

 someone he had never heard of and therefore could not rank or place. I

plainly had not been to Italy, but I did know my local gallery, I knew

about Wright of Derby, there was a spark there, I was somewhere on

his list. However, I wasn’t high enough up the list and another rejection

 left me with only the local art college and living at home another year

before the chance to apply elsewhere for the diploma.


    For the Derby Art College interview I had to make an object ‘reversing

its properties’. I made a six-foot folding polystyrene tuning fork, brightly

 multicoloured, held together with elastoplast. Bill couldn’t help smiling at

the multiple points of logic that I came up with - lighter, larger, not  

vibrating, quiet, folding not rigid - it was ingenious, I had a place.

   Next then, faced with staying  at home for another year before I could

escape, I wrote off to Wales and secured a summer job as a

chambermaid and left on a fine morning with a girl I didn’t really get on

with, for six weeks in a hotel in Llandudno.

   We slept in a depressing basement room and shared the unremitting

toil with two Welsh girls who wouldn’t speak English except the swear

words, and two irish girls who spoke Irish sometimes to each other and

thought God put out the stars at night and chattered in mass when they

 took me along to the church.  Helen and I were reduced to speaking in

French to retaliate with an extra language.I almost fainted with fatigue,

from hard work, and almost screamed from the repetitive noise of

clattering cups as one fitted into another. I almost got my head split open

when the boy chased me with a broom and hit me on the head with it

and for the first time I met girls so crude they tried to stick a finger up

you as you brushed the stairs. I accidentally burnt out the element in the

washing up machine. I took a day trip to Liverpool and saw both

Cathedrals but not the Beatles.  One day I took myself off alone to an

Acker Bilk concert and met a boy.

      We walked out to Conway Castle the next night and stood for some

 hours under its floodlit splendour with the moon shining on the sea,

 talking and talking and talking, and holding hands and eventually

kissing, so long that my head swam and my whole body felt weak and

wild, and he couldn’t tell that I had never done this before.

   Then he was gone, one night of kisses and gone.

   In Llandudno there was a sort of nightly passagiato up and down to

eye the talent, to be seen, and then a calling in at the coffee bar and

then up and down and round again. This was how I met Bryan, a bus

conductor. We lay down together in a bus shelter, clothed and chilly and

he shook all over. He was all trembling and respectful and kind and nice,

 and wrote to me for a year after I left, sending large flowery cards, and

we never met again.

  So, that was the summer – no harm done but a beginning made on life

beyond home. Nottingham University phoned and offered me a place

 after all. I still phoned Leeds to see if they would also change their

minds, but they would not, so I was off to Nottingham, only sixteen

miles from home, but my Mum and Dad promised not to visit. When I got

there I found the new head of the art school was Bill, Bill English who

had taught the life class, so maybe he remembered me?

     The college placed first year fine art students in digs, not on the 

campus, because they spent half their time in town at the art

school. Rooms were shared and I was placed in the home of a Mrs

Careless, who really wanted boys not girls, and who would keep putting

off the one bar electric fire which was all we had, when we left the

room, even if we were popping to the toilet. It was a spartan room with

green patterned linoleum. She cooked us good Sunday lunches, shared

with her two sons but we didn’t appreciate them until it was too late, the

lunches not the grown up silent sons. We girls never offered to wash up,

 believing we would not be wanted in the kitchen, but when we left she

berated us for never washing up, to our complete surprise.

    Bryony was a tall girl with wavy blonde hair like Veronica Lake and a

boyfriend at home in Gateshead that she’d been going steady with. She

was easy to get on with and we took the bus into college together,

laughing and taking bread and dripping as a snack. Both slim as

anything, clever as paint and giggling at everything.

Life Class 1967 - a memoir chapter one, 'The Life Room'.

 1. The Life Room

     The first naked woman. Thirty teenagers nervously converged from

the city’s sixth form art rooms, arriving by bus, eventually finding the top

floor of a huge glass building with views over the hills. All, without

conferring, never having met before, have contrived to pop home or

 somehow else change from their hated uniforms into something in

which they hope to pass as art students, like transvestites out for a walk

at twilight, getting a thrill from merely not being challenged as illicitly

assuming a false identity.

     She doesn’t come out immediately - she’s sitting near a screen

wearing a sort of long embroidered wrap around chinesey satin thing.

 Bill introduces himself - tall, bearded and smoking a cigarette. Evie will

sit for twenty minutes at a time with five minute rests. They will draw with

a huge fragile stick of charcoal on a lavishly large sheet of paper on a

board bearing the marks of generations of students. This week

drawing pins - in future bring your own set of shiny drawing board clips -

possession of which, like the scaffolder with his special spanner swinging

from his belt, confers a new status.

Bill is the first male teacher most of the girls have encountered. Later

he’ll come to squat down uncomfortably close to each one, bright blue

eyes scrutinising the charcoal marks, smelling of beer and smoke. After

a few minutes sorting out the model, who seems very large, very old,

enormous breasts subsiding unsupported, Bill leaves the room. The

students don’t even talk, they work, they use all their art teachers have

 already taught them, using some sickly child excluded from games,

bony and tiny in artex shirt and thick serge shorts, with only the feet

naked after much persuasion. Evie tells them she’s often been on the

point of resigning her post as model, but when Bill looks at her with

those big deep mediterranean blue sparklers she can’t tell him. She

never goes out without a hat.

     The charcoal makes slight scratchy noises and marks that can’t be

rubbed out easily. Bill can tell if we’ve been working. He returns briefly at

the end to encourage, to breath alcohol over us and then makes us

display our work. We are the best A level material. We have just

encountered a naked woman, almost a different species from the slim
                                                              
shy girl who wonders if she will ever be attractive, just pre-Twiggy who

made that shape exactly fine, just when cigarette cards showed Gina

Lollabrigida, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, all ample, hourglass, 

 fleshy, their faces plastered, eye lashes darkened, a look Evie has in the

way her face, her eyes, her lips are painted, contrasting with the loose

heavy folds of her body in repose.

     We need to roll up our work, sprayed with that pungent fixative spray,

and by next week I have a red plastic quiver to carry the drawings on my

back nonchalantly as I hang about the college library looking at books

and out of the corner of my eye seeing a boy, a real art student, all

existentially black polo necked with long hair and stubble, also reading,

but unlike me able to take books out, to be part of the place.

     On holiday in St.Ives I saw the beatniks on the wall, all day to sit

around, someone with a guitar, like the one I played in my bedroom,

being Joan Baez, in front of the newspaper photo of Peter Sellars as

Richard the Third reading the words of the Beatles ‘Its been a hard day’s

night’  - and  when I get home - will there ever be someone to come

home to?
                                                       
   Some families do not speak of love, of sex, of fear - what do they talk
                                                              
about? - so many secrets because one topic could set off another? Will I

ever be considered old enough to receive all the secrets? - so far, that

Nana’s mother died soon after she was born and Nana was brought up

by her Uncle, brought up to think her father was her Uncle and her
 

Uncle was her Father, so that’s why she hates her Sister? the one that 

isn’t really her Sister? Oh no she doesn’t, how could you say that, she

loves her Sister, who isn’t her Sister, the one that is really a Cousin, who

lives in a big house with a harp and lodgers and dogs and they have no

children, but cages of birds and two big dogs and she wears a fur coat,

whereas Nana lives in a council house with an outside toilet and the

house overlooks the clanking goods railway that goes up to the Red Mill.

My Sister who was there in the War heard the grown ups say the Uncles

in the army were ‘over there’ and she thought therefore that the War was

at the Red Mill, and why didn’t they come home at night to sleep?

     Some families might have talked of this, of the goodness of the Sister

who took over the child when her Mother died, of the sorrow that

Beattie’s Mother died of a fever soon after giving birth, of the child who
                                                              
also died in infancy, of how on my father’s side Uncle Norman died of

cancer and left Bessie to cope so well, but instead the complete secrecy
                                                       
around the sudden disapperance of Norman led me to think he was in

prison, to imagine from the age of five to sixteen, when I found out the

truth and was so angry, that a warehouse on the way to Nana’s which

we saw from the bus, was the prison, to think every Saturday on the way

to Nana’s that Uncle Norman was in there, we never mention him. So I 

never did, not even to the Cousins who could have told me that their

Dad had died.

     Sometime around then Nana went crazy for a while. I had been

reading R.D. Laing’s ‘Knots’ about the convoluted family dynamics that

make sense of mental illness. Nana got up in the night and my Horrible

Uncle found her in her nightdress insisting she must give herself up to

the police.

    I had to be told something - we all went up to visit Nana, now in a

mental hospital under the impression that it was a hotel and anxious

about how it was to be paid for. She sat and shredded into pieces the

daffodils we took her. It was shocking to see her, normally a stolid

unglamourous figure, with a face like the Quaker Oat packet man, red

and plain, her body wrapped up in a flowered pinny, a tough, carping
                                                          
critic of all who passed the window, but closing her eyes in case the

show jumping horses on t.v. should hit a fence. She wouldn’t wear

green, she wouldn’t remember what foods the little me didn’t like, or

maybe she served them as a point of principal to try to enforce

obedience, but here my Mother wouldn’t collude. I was never made to

eat: food was not an Instrument of torture.

    The next time we visited E.C.T. Had been administered - Nana was 

calm and dull - memory blotted out - ready to be returned to the custody

of the Horrible Uncle. However, Uncle Maurice was dead, another

secret, a never before mentioned extra brother of my mother. I was

angry and puzzled. Surely I’d made a family tree at school, junior

school. Nana’s Mother who died was not on it, the Brother that died in

infancy of a fit, when the doctor wouldn’t come until he’d finished his

dinner, was not on it, and now another omission, a whole other Brother,

 So somehow as a child I had transferred the prison to other Uncle on

the other side of the family.

     Could a family really be so ashamed of a thief as to never even

mention his existence, all photos removed?

     It seemed so.
                                                   
     I was against  E.C.T. and pro R.D. Laing. How is it that a child can be

so unlike its parents? I liked the realism of ‘Up the Junction’ a play about

an unmarried mother that talked of sex, abortion, and homelessness

and I hated the Brian Rix farces with their dirty jokes so much that I left

the room to go and listen to Elgar’s cello concerto and that record my

sister left behind when she got married about a woman who wasn’t too

tall but was ‘the cincinatti fire ball’.

     There was another secret I found out from a tiny old diary kept by my 

nine years older Sister. Aged twelve, she’d written ‘the baby has

pneumonia and is in hospital’. The baby was me, why hadn’t I been told

that I nearly died? Implacably the answer came as usual, ‘the subject

never came up’

    All that made my Mother very angry was my asking what ‘rape’

meant. I could not be told until I was twice as old as I was when I asked,

when I’d be sixteen - by which time Gail had whispered the facts of life

into my ear during a wet games lesson and I knew never to ask my

Mother again.

     All that made my Father very angry was any mention of the house at

Max Road. While he was in Burma, my Mother had given up the house

at Max Road, which was too expensive in rent and made her liable to

have a soldier billeted there, and she went back to live at her Mother’s,

Nana’s. So, when my Father returned, much after VE day, part of the

‘forgotten army’, he found himself having to live at Nana’s with the

Uncles and a strange sad baby girl who didn’t know her Dad, my

Sister, most unkindly referred to as ‘Pudding’ by my Horrible Uncle.

          I had hated my Horrible Uncle, Ralph, for as long as I could

remember and yet every Saturday before I became a teenager and

could refuse to go and could spend Saturday in town in the coffee bars 

nd record shops and Derby art gallery, I had to endure his not really

very subtle ill treatment, under the nose of my apparently unconcerned

Mother, until Dad arrived to rescue me.

    From the moment Uncle Ralph entered the room, I was continually

aware of exactly where he was, so that I could be at the opposite place.
                                                                                                                                 
 Opposite him to play chess was in a way safe, safe from his lunges to

take hold of me. On leaving he would always demand a kiss goodbye,

and I would always refuse. No one ever said to stop tormenting me, to

leave me alone, not to set up for life a horror of goodbyes and kisses.

Was it because of his hair-lip? Either my revulsion or their reluctance to
                                                                     
 criticize him? But I hated him for the way he behaved, not for the bubble

shape on his lip and the scar. My mother remembered him as a little

boy, upset by jeers, unable to speak clearly, returning in tears from going

on an errand to the shop in the village. She knew he was not the wicked

brother, the worst Brother. I could not articulate what I hated, what I

feared. I loved the quiet Uncle, who would never touch me, the musical

one who took photographs, that played the clarinet and the double bass

and seemed rather lonely, and then surprised me by marrying, the

reserved quiet one who does beautiful book-binding, who eventually 

paints, who left home and left the Horrible Uncle to forever take care of 

his ailing Mother.

            So, a naked woman, surprising in her massive bulk, and thirty

teenagers staring at her with a certain respect. They tried to tell the truth
                                                                                                                                    
with their marks, they didn’t ridicule. They didn’t ask why the model was

 never male.

     And secrets, a lack of naked truth, with the aim of never discussing,

always avoiding, what? Keeping a child safe and happy and

unworried? Denying death, disesase and all sorts of harm and badness?
         
Post War there was not even advice. No stories of death, torture,

suffering and also no words to help with love, only unspoken feelings,

always unspoken, unexpressed.

    All I learnt was by osmosis, leaving a certain freedom.

 

 

The Mirror and the Palette by Jennifer Higgie

 

 

The Mirror and the Palette - Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits. Jennifer Higgie, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2021

Jennifer Higgie is from Australia and works as an editor of Frieze magazine. 

 

In this book Higgie introduces women who have made self portraits and puts them in historical context, grouping them by themes such as ‘Allegory’ or ‘Hallucination’. 

She tells us about their other works, which are described but frustratingly not illustrated so the reader has to do their own internet searches.

 

There are illustrations of self portraits by each of the artists chosen for lengthier mentions. I enjoyed the writing which flows easily and as I knew of most of the artists mentioned I was reminded of their stories with some new information being offered.

 

I was pleased that eventually this author mentions Frances Borzello’s ‘Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self Portraits’ 1998, which covered many of the same artists.

 

Jennifer chooses to refer to the artists by their first names after the first mention of their full names. This hinders the reader in remembering their names to find out more about them or be able to refer to them and thereby does not help the progress of spreading knowledge of them.

 

I am disappointed that Higgie does not break much new ground because it would have been fascinating to learn of women artists in Africa or China, South America etc, but she does include women from Autralia and New Zealand.

 

Also I would have liked the scope of the book to include more recent artists. Tracey Emin would be an obvious contemporary choice. Maybe someone else will take this up.

 

For anyone who knows little of the subject this book will be a useful introduction.