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.
Sorry about the repetition and a few errors-I can't see how to edit it at the moment.
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