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.
No comments:
Post a Comment