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.