Chapter 14 After Kevin

 



 Chapter 14  After Kevin


Kevin was murdered when I was 21. He was 19.

I was only half alive for a very long time.

I went off to London, having drawn back from suicide.

My old school friend Helen was living in W 9. in a house her father

owned and I was able to take a very small room there. She and her

boyfriend John lived in a large room and kindly asked me out about 100

times before I was able to go anywhere and they kindly tolerated my

blank misery without complaint.

At college I managed to cope.

Eventually I even started to feel some attraction for a dark striking 

looking man on my teaching course who also came from Derbyshire. I

was excited when he offered me a ticket for a Frank Zappa concert at

The Rainbow and very disappointed when I found our seats were in a

whole row of students from college from the Institute of Education so

he hadn’t really asked me out.

Zappa was dragged of the stage by a jealous bloke in the audience who

thought Zappa was staring at his girlfriend. Frank’s leg was broken and

the concert ended early.

Shortly afterwards Max asked me round for a meal. More excitement, a

long journey south of the river and then there was Max’s flat mate, not

going out, a tough looking chap with short hair.

I asked Max back and he came a day late and pretended he wasn’t

hungry as I’d eaten his half for lunch. He didn’t seem hungry for love

either. Maybe he was shy, maybe he was homosexual. I was too

embarassed to find out.

A bit like earlier and later instances of unrequited desire this served to

show I was still alive and likely to make a new relationship sometime,

but kept me safe from actually starting one.

I started to make a film about how my walks with the dog helped me

throughout my grief, a film to be finished 30 years later, when the voice 

over I recorded sounded as if it had just happened so vividly was the

experience evoked in me by watching the film.

It wasn’t until, after 30 years of troubled relationships, of toiling as a

teacher and art therapist as well as continuing to work as an artist, that,

more settled in the luxury of having a loving husband, I was able to

finish the film, ‘Morning Walk ‘ and to see it at Cornwall film festival and

the Cambridge super 8 festival amd could receive the respect of an

audience moved by its reality and poetry. It shows how life can insist on

continuing in the face of meaningless violence and painful sorrow.

Teaching was not easy for me, but in a way I was immune to

noticing how difficult it was and I couldn’t see what else to do.

  Just at the time when I should have been a struggling artist in London,

perhaps on the government self employed scheme, I put my head down

and my nose was shooting sparks from the daily grind, trying to keep

youths in order and busy.

  We hadn’t learnt anything about how to maintain discipline. One day I

left a class in tears and went to the toilet to smoke, a habit I’d picked up

late from a young man who knew my landlady and slept with my friend

Boo, who was twice his age. He ill treated her and stole her car and he

smoked sobranies which were all different bright colours in a nice box. 

When I came back from the toilet, just before the bell, the fifth form boys

in Dagenham realised and one called out, ‘She’s been for a fag in the

loo.’  They ‘d thought I’d gone for the Head and had tidied up the room

and picked up all the bits of charcoal they’d been throwing.

After that it was just a little easier. Danny took a liking to me and asked

me to go to Dagenham Roundhouse with him. I declined but wrote on

his art report ‘shows interest and tries hard’.

  Three boys I sent out to the second year head came back looking

pained with their hands under their arms. I sought him out at the break

and complained that I hadn’t wanted him to cane them. ‘What boys?’ he

replied. They’d fooled me, but were now found out. It was a few years

before caning was abolished and the existence of physical punishment

made it more difficult to maintain order for those of us that didn’t use it. I

found myself twisting an occasional ear and tapping painfully on

someone’s head to get their attention, in ways that appalled me later.

 When I left a girl in my class went out without permission and came

back with their present for me, a box of chocolates. I was appreciated in

some small way - I’d arrived there wondering why they collected me in a

car from the station at Dagenham East and left realising they wanted to

whisk me to the interview before I got a chance to take in what the 

neighbourhood was like, that is that it was a bleak, cheerless area.

I’d got through the probationary year, I ‘d moved several times, always

having to prioritise choosing a place near unfenced park land so I could

take my dog for a walk before and after work.

 My new post was at a Catholic school, a Comprehensive. It was o.k.

that I wasn’t one if I didn’t make an issue of it.
 
Boo, my friend with the young Cypriot lover, had given up art teaching

by this time. She had a private income from her grandfather’s efforts to

lay water pipes throughout India ao she could give up one occupation

and try another. She lived in a lovely little house near Hampstead Heath

and she’d been a hat maker. Older than me, she was a sort of lively

sister. She described herself as ‘lower middle class’ but to me she was

aristocracy. She knitted her mother a dishcloth for Christmas, she’d

heard there was a way of paying for a house not all at once, she thought

of going to Paris for the weekend to choose spectacles and had no idea

what stopped me going too. She had a lover who was a workman who

popped in now and then.

When the inspector came to see her teach, Boo held her head in her

hands and shouted ‘I can’t teach with you in the room’, and therefore

she failed.
 

I was another world to her, and we got on very well, lots of laughs, art,

parties, dope, and yet I kept my feet sufficiently on the ground and

earned my own living. It didn’t occur to me not to. My parents postwar

devotion to work and duty left its mark.

One day on teaching practice I went to the first school near the

heath feeling ill. A girl came up behind me and suddenly dug me

in the ribs from behind and I swung round without thinking and hit her on

the head. She said, ‘you’ll get the sack for doing that’. I went in tears to

the headmistress, after apologizing to the child.  The head sat me down

with a steadying sherry and told me not to worry. She took in her stride

that I had come to work with six shades of eye make up and my hair in a

dozen plaits flying round my head and that I went and drank in the pub

opposite every lunchtime.

The Catholic school that I went to work in after the year in

Dagenham,was in East Finchley, nice because that’s where the

Northern line emerges from underground. I stayed there 19 years,

teaching art, pottery, art history and my beloved film-making weeks in

the summer activity period.

 Boo remained my best friend for years, entangling herself with more

highly unsuitable men than even I found, until she converted to 

Christianity,  found her previous associates were all in league with the

devil, and was lost to us. Before this she came round one day and gave

me a painting of her mother, saying that she wanted to destroy it. At

first I insisted I would just look after it for her, but after many years I sold  

it. It was by William Scott, and to my surprise it made £4,000, more

money than I had ever had. A science teacher overheard me talking to

Christies’ on the phone and thought it was one of my works.

 If only.

 

Chpater 13 Teenager

 Chapter 13   Teenager

I passed the eleven plus and went to the grammar school, facing daily

the dangers of passing the secondary modern girls as their school was

on my way, but I set out early and returned late to miss most

confrontations. I hated my uniform, horrid uncomfortable white shirt and

a tie. All I liked was the blue and white woolly scarf and the velour hat.

Rules abounded at the new school and skirt lengths were measured

with a ruler., early on to make them not too long and later not too short.

Even the number of gathers at the waist was monitored. Mine had too

many and had been made by a dress maker as my mother lacked

sewing skills. I couldn’t even therefore thread a sewing machine and the

sewing teacher thought this was beyond the pale and wouldn’t explain

how to do it so I always had to wait and use one someone else had

threaded. It took me almost a year to sew up a gym bag and embroider

my name on it in red chainstitch.

 
The next year was spent on a hideous pinafore to use in cookery, where

we made an upsidedown cake and stuffed eggs, which are a very small

thing to stuff. The third year brought the indignity of Mrs Arter measuring

us for blouses, shouting out the shaming small number of inches round

the bust. I never wore the blouse.

I also hated games and gymnastics, couldn’t do forward rolls over a bar

and only ran quickly to get to the showers at the end before the games

teacher, who lived with the latin teacher, arrived to look us over. I learnt

all about periods and the facts of life from a girl who whispered it all in

my ear one games lesson when we couldn’t go out because of snow on

the pitch. Luckily her facts were correct.

Otherwise lessons were o.k., I was good at a lot of things and was

placed in the top of the three streams and usually came third in the

class.

I was however very afraid of being shown up in French as having no

bathroom.  I prayed for 3 years, successfully, not to be asked in oral

anything that would reveal that we lived in a house with no bathroom. I

didn’t think of lying.

I made friends with another clever girl and we became an inseparable

pair, Her father was a manic depressive known as ‘the big one’ by her 

her

mother and brother. Eventually he went off to Northern Ireland and

became an Orangeman. The family moved to lose touch with him and

ignored attempts to find them that he made through the Salvation Army.

In about the third form the art teacher started to admire my work, told

me I painted like Bonnard and really encouraged me. The English

teacher was also trying to recruit me to study English at University. The

art teacher, Mrs Roberts , was the least conventional member of staff in

the place. She didn’t wear make up and was very tall with bare feet and

sandals. She had a yellow board and blue chalk unlike everyone else

and she let me stay in at lunchtimes to paint, and I made a 6 foot wide

 abstract collage with paint added.

I worked very hard and was one of 6 girls who missed out the fifth form,

taking 5 O levels in the fourth form and going into the sixth form early. I

wasn’t made a prefect at first, which was upsetting as most girls were

Perhaps I was seen as too small, too shy or too arty.

My periods didn’t start until I was about 14 when I woke up in a pool of

blood. My mother said she’d been waiting for this and went and went

and got the necessary equipment which she had ready.


I studied singing with a teacher and did well in a competition before I 

started to feel that I didn’t want my voice to be trained operatically. I

prefered to sound like a young Joan Baez and I stoppped the lessons.

Competitions made me nervous anyway, though later I found Joan

Baez had been sick before going on stage for years I went on playing

the piano, passing exams with my mother teaching me.

I went to Bible class for a while and played the piano for the hearty

choruses and went to Holy Communion, but I was starting to feel doubt

about it all and felt very uneasy reciting the creed. My mother told me

she of course did mot believe in the virgin birth and this made a big

impression on me.

I didn’t go out much and met no boys and doubted I ever would. I felt too

thin and unattractive in this pre Twiggy era.

When I was 14 my Mum and Dad and I went to France for a holiday.

Dad was very bad tempered. At one point he roared from downstairs in

a cottage we stayed in that I’d never make a teacher. Another day he

walked off and left us in the car for ages until he came back. One day he

said he’d like to push both of us off the sea wall to drown. I never found

what this was about. I thought he must be unfaithful and about to leave.

Before this I had been very ill with a mystery virus that meant I had

severe nose bleeds and was taken into hospital for a lot of tests. I hated 

being there and promptly recovered. Now I think this illness came to

remove me from the bad atmosphere at home. Dad was very easily mde

furious, then he’d shout at me and I’d cry a lot. When I came home from

the hospital everyone was careful around me, gentler and nicer. Did it

have anything to do with questions my sister had asked them?

I didn’t go away from home at all, unlike my sister who had stayed at

Nana’s sometimess. I wanted at all costs to avoid the Horrible Uncle.

The school had annual days out in the sixth form, to Cambridge one

year, and then ours was the first year they let a trip to London go ahead.

We also went to see the York mystery plays and to see international

hockey at Wembley. The girls were told not to shout or wave scarves

during the match and not to exchange scarf tassles with other schools.

Those that did had the multicoloured taslles removed when we got back

and rumour had it that the deputy head burnt them by the long jump pit.

Our head mistress was a remote figure who spoke of the horror of

finding an applecore ‘jettisoned’ on a window sill and told us never to put

our scarves round our heads like mill girls.
 

I’d go into town on a Saturday and mooch around and go in the art

gallery, whereas my cousin Jane was told never to go in as strange men

might be in there, The result was that Jane was on her own outside 

waiting for me to return from being inside on my own. I examined the

rather frightening Joseph Wright of tomb robbers and the sad one of an

Indian, red indian, widow. There were other shows. I remember noting

down that I liked a painting called ‘brownskin sugarplum’ by Ian

Breakwell., much later discovered to be a fellow flaneur.

When the family went on holiday I began to drag them into galleries

especially in St.Ives.

One week end we went to see David Warner as Hamlet in Stratford and

my father was so completely captivated that he sprang to his feet and

shouted ‘Bravo’ at the end. I’d never seen him so excited.

Generally we saw plays locally and concerts and the ballet, but often

Dad did not come with us. It was before they stopped playing the

National Anthem at the end of the show and I wanted to refiuse to stand

as a protest against the monarchy. Once I saw a woman who didn’t

stand, but it turned out she couldn’t so I felt ashamed.

I joined Derby ‘young playgoers’ and did theatrical exercises at Saturday

classes and spoke to one or two boys briefly.

Helen and I continued our friendship and took ages walking home,

loitering on the corner and calling in to chat to a middle aged man in the

bric a brac shop. He was called Maurice and lived with his mother. This 

must have scared my mother but she never said anything.

We moved when I was 14 to a better house, with a bathroom. My father

bought it at an auction without telling us after what seemed to be years

of them house hunting every weekend.

My sister married an earnest young man and now I got a big room to

myself. I’d been the bridesmaid, wearing a rather old fashioned subtle

blue grosgrain dress. I kept calm and sewed her into the dress when the

zip failed. Then I  cut her out of it afterwards when she changed into a

little scrambled egg yellow suit with an edge to edge jacket.

I wore a green corduroy coat and a beret and look very sweet in some

photos taken in a booth in Woolworths before we went to France.

I was slim, had my hair cut like Sandy Shaw, played the guitar a lot in

my room and longed for life to start. I applied to University and went off

to Straford on my own initiative to see backstage in case I’d like to do

theatre design. I did well in my A levels.


 I made a mustard smock dress and a shiny blue shift and knitted a

purple skinny rib jumper a la Mary Quant and I was all ready to leave

home.

Chapter 12 Childhood

 


Twelve Childhood.


I was born in 1949, conceived to celebrate the beginning of the NHS or

 the end of the war - my father’s return from the forgotten war in Burma.

 Eager to be born, I arrived early. My mother had to run down the

hospital corridor to reach the delivery room. I was undersized and

was kept in hospital to gain weight and was given sunray treatment to

be rid of jaudice. My mother was unable breast feed me because of an

 abcess.

 
My earliest memory that can be dated is 1953, the Coronation party

above the Co-op. Unhappily I remember only two unpleasant things.

 Because I had a sister, Anne, 9 years older, we had to share one

orange juice with two straws. Because I was too small, although I had

confidently taken a seat, I was told I was not allowed to join in musical

chairs as it was a rough game.for big children.

  I also remember my father bought me a green and cream toy wooden

sweeping brush when I was ill, probably one of my bouts of bronchitis,

not helped by a cold damp house. Also I was not allowed out to play in

the snow whereas my sister was out there with her friends.

One day in summer I was holding a cup of tea and looking at someone

 and spilt the tea all down my dress. I felt very humiliated and had to go

 in to change.
 
 
Our house had an outside toilet and when it rained loose bricks in the

yard sent dirty water shooting up your legs. Big spiders lived in the

newspaper round the door and would suddenly drop out onto the wall

and scare me. We had a tin bath, brought up from the cellar on Fridays

for baths in the kitchen. I’d get dry by the living room fire. Dad was out 

late collecting insurance money before people spent it.

Every Saturday we went to Nana’s, my mother’s mother’s, by bus, two

buses, past fields with sheep in them. I knew my Uncle Norman, on my

father’s side was in the prison we passed. No one ever spoke of him but

I knew he was a thief. Mother’s brothers were one nice, the quiet one

called Don, who took a photo of me and I had to sit very still for ages

while he took it, wearing my best taffeta dress with pink smocking on

turquise, the musical brother who came round to play Mozart’s clarinet

concerto, Mum being the orchestra on the piano, while I played with my

toy cars quietly behind the sofa.

One of the Uncles was rarely seen, smoked and wore a cravat and

admitted to liking to cry in the cinema. His wife had run off with the

landlord of The White Hart and he was sad they had no children. He

was a painter and decorator like his Dad had been and heroically a

volunteer fireman.They’d lived in the Millhouse and had a gramaphone

and long playing records and my mother said to me when we left who

could possibly want records that played for so long? We were used to

the 78s the musical uncle played and I’d dance around the table to the

Sugar Plum Fairy.

At teatime the horrible Uncle came in, the one I was afraid of, who tried 

to grab me as I went past. He\d sit near the door and I’d delay going to

the toilet until he moved. He’d demand I kiss him goodbye and I always

refused. I only kissed Nana, unwillingly, when Dad arrived to rescue us

and take us home in the car. No one stopped the horrible Uncle, Ralph,

from tormenting me. All I wanted was to be allowed to exist unmolested

in my own space. No one told him to leave me alone. Maybe they didn’t

because of his hare lip, which was ugly, sewn up to leave an odd bubble

on his lip. They were all sorry for him, especially my mother, who

remembered him as a child when his cleft palette meant he couldn’t eat

properly and he came back from errands to the shops in tears because

they could not understand what he said. Why they couldn’t write a list for

him I can’t imagine. He grew up noisy, opinionated, dominating the

household and stayed home for ever to look after his mother until she

died. He was a gardener with a red neck and earth stained hands, but

good at cooking and could ice a cake with pretty little pink rosettes of

icing and silver balls.

The house was more solid and bigger than ours although disparaged as

it was a council house. The council kept it in good repair and it had a

bathroom, but my parents said it was terrible that they couldn’t as

tenants choose the colour of their own front door.The front room, never 

used, was like a museum with a big wooden table, a curly orange dish of

carnival glass, a wooden cigarette box, a white glass vase with a grey

picture of somewhere on it and there was a huge print of the painting of

a child, ‘ Bubbles’ on the wall. The other room had a sideboard with

handles that I could stand up, photos of Mum and Dad at their wedding,

Mum holding a huge bush of roses and lily of the valley with ferns falling

down her carefully arranged folds of wedding gown. There was an

unframed photo of Uncle Don as a sweet Christopher Robin sort of child

with a coat with velvet bits on the collar. There was a big Newlyn

painting, a print of a sad woman looking out to sea holding a letter and

we presumed her lover had drowned. There was a photo of my sister

very plump and stolid and unkindly called ‘pudding’ by the horrid

one.There was a box of buttons to play with, a t.v. years before we had

one and a Goblin vaccuum cleaner.

Nana and my mother knitted our jumpers and even bathing suits that got

heavy with seawater and took ages to dry. Mine was red There is a

photo of me gravely blowing soap bubbles from a clay pipe.

One day my Dad had come home in a car, an Austin  7. Nana was

visiting us that day and she called out, ‘Mabel, its Frank, he’s in a car’ It

was enormously exciting. I loved it. I sat in the back looking out the back 

window and telling my Dad whenever there was a car behind. Or, I sat in

the front and worked the trafficator switch so the orange lit

indicators flew up on the left or right. Sometimes they need a thump from

inside to make them work. Sometimes the car needed a push up a hill.

Dad showed me how to crank start it with your thumb not round the way

you could get it broken when the handle jumped.He told me all about the

engine, the gears, the pistons like men pedalling, the compression and

explosions.

Every Saturday there were cowboy films at Nana’s. Strong silent men to

whom women were incidental, men with guns who strode and rode and

killed but had a sense of justice and were brave. Women appeared in

bars looking exotic in tight satin bodices and with feather boas. The  

man from Wells Fargo, The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, these provided my

animus figures, manhood with no communication skills used with

women beyond a quiet respect, without emotion, and no sex.

  After the cowboy film on a Saturday Dad would arrive at last, and when

the man shouted ‘Wakey Wakey’ and the girls went round on display at

the London Palladium we were able to go. I’d pretend I was in a space

ship as we drove through the night. I was safe and happy to be going

home. I hated my horrible Uncle with all my heart but I couldn’t complain 

or explain because they all saw how he treated me and no one spoke up

for me.

Maybe I’d marry the nice Uncle when I was older, the quiet nice musical

one who never touched me.

We hardly saw Dad’s mother, but she was beautiful, with a long string of

amber beads and tortoishell combs in her white hair. She was lively and

had big books with photos of the old queen Mary and had a hearth with

a stove and two black rings to keep kettles on.  She went out to whist

drives and had falls.

Nana was ugly and red faced and was without style or ornament. She

never went out and looked like the man on the Quaker Oats packet. She

disapproved of her sister Ethel, who I liked. Ethel played the harp, wore

fur coats and had dogs and budgerigars and lodgers and no children.

Mum said I was wrong, Nana didn’t hate her sister, she loved her, of

course she did.
 
I read a lot, played a lot on my own, imagining I lived on a desert island.

Sometimes I played with my two cousins whose father was in prison or

the girls who visited two doors along, who showed me their little

brother’s willy one day, my first inkling of the difference.

I made friends easily with children on the beach.

Unfortunately on holiday Nana and the Horrible Uncle came with us.

Nana would come for a walk with me before breakfast. We stayed in a

hotel in Wales with high tea and a games room and all the children ran

round the top landing and down the back stairs where the maids went

and round and round. There was a gong to be bashed before meals and

they let you take a turn doing it.
 
At Grandma’s Dad chased me and the cousins round and round and we

shrieked and giggled and he left the mop at the corner so we thought  he

was there and he came round behind us.

At Nana’s we walked over the fields with cows in and knew the names of

all the flowers and I got hayfever and hated it. We went blackberrying

and I nearly impaled myself on barbed wire trying to evade my horrible

Uncle as I ran down a path.

Nana made a whole cupboard full of jam each year. She never

remembered what food I didn’t like and thought I should be made to eat

everything but my mother disagreed and refused to make food a

torment. Nana thought I should be made to blow my nose but no one

explained to me how to do it, they just held a hankie and said blow and

nothing moved in my nose and I had to learn from reading in a book how

to do it. Nana said soap should be put up my nose to make me sneeze 

but no one did this.
 
I was thin and energetic and not as afraid as my sister had been., who

wouldn’t speak to me when I was born if anyone was there. I think

maybe she wanted to tell me something awful that had upset her so

much and that she did tell me and that maybe she made herself fat as a

barrier against the world.

Anne seemed very separate, a sturdy child in national health specs, who

played hockey and wore a tomboyish rubberized green smelly jacket.

We lead separate lives. She had spent time alone at Nana’s as a child

but I wouldn’t go.

I got upset in the night until my mother heard me crying and came in and

found it was all because I couldn’t do cross stitch. I’d not been able to

see when the student teacher was showing us but I hadn’t said so.

Mother didn’t know how to do it either, but she worked it out for me

She stoppped the little girl who stole my gloves and told people it was

her birthday several times a year. But I didn’t tell anyone about the girl

at Sunday school who pinched me. I was due to go up to the next class

and would have been liberated from this nasty kid, but seeing me crying

the teacher said I needn’t go up after all if I was upset, and I couldn’t say

I was crying because of the girl pinching me. I just refused to ever go to 

Sunday school again but I wouldn’t explain why. I must have thought I’d

be laughed at and they’d never stoppped my Uncle, but I knew my Dad

didn’t like him.

I’d been so fearless when I was five, singing all the verses of away in a

manger and refusing to leave the stage, taking a step backwards every

time the teacher tried to lift me down, because I didn’t like to be touched

and I knew performers walked off at the side properly and I was going to

do that.

On being taken to Santa Claus I was asked for my penny and said I

didn’t have one as I knew I had a half crown. They came out and said

‘This child has no money’ and my mother said I had and I had the

halfcrown still of course.

At the optician they asked if I knew the letters and I thought they meant

had I got prior knowledge of the test and said no and they started to get

out a chart with boats and planes on and my mother said I did know the

letters and I said of course I knew the alphabet.

I refused to wear a dress my mother bought me from a catalogue

because I didn’t like the feel of the cloth and the pattern had white in it.

I liked to draw. My mother had an abstract pattern I’d done in wax

crayon on the wall in their bedroom, which I only went into very rarely. At 

night there were mysterious light patterns on the ceiling which appeared

and disappeared as cars went by, a sort of warm brown glimmering.

I wanted to ride a horse and go to ballet but I wasn’t allowed. It was

probably because of the cost but no one said that. It felt as if they

thought all these things would make me a show off.

I learnt the piano from mum and I went to singing lessons. Two children

mocked the way I really opened my mouth to sing loudly and these

same two hated me for organising a collection to buy a student teacher flowers

because they didn’t like her. The student taught us about red Indians

and I made a beaded head band. Cynthia and Julie phoned me

pretending to be from the radio and asked me to sing down the phone.

I wanted to skate and ski and have a dog but I wasn’t allowed, nor to

have roller skates or a bycycle. I believed that in heaven I would be

asked what I wanted to do and I would then go and do all these

things.

Only father’s aunt Jeanetta died. Both gradfathers were dead and

I couldn’t even remember the one who was alive when I was born.

I was never left with anyone and was kept safe and didn’t learn to tell

the time until I was nine and never went anywhere but the library on my

own. I chose books from the side labelled for boys, Biggles and William 

and Jennings.

I didn’t get on all that well with my Dad. I didn’t like the way he’d seize

my hand when we crossed the road or instruct me to say thankyou when

we left some’s house when I was going to so then I wouldn’t because

he’d said it for me. He read in funny voices and missed bits out. I liked to

go and meet him when he came from work on his bycycle and to count

the money he collected and he’d help with school stuff, explain to think if

a maths answer made sense.

Very few people came to the house as my parents had no friends. Only

my mother had a nice friend Frances, with the frightening dog called

Captain and no children. We called her Auntie but we rarely saw her.

She had a lovely voice and they laughed together.

An encyclopedia salesman came but my father said it was a waste of

money and we could use the library. A man once came covered in

tattoos which I thought looked great but I gathered that mother did not.

One day I heard the word rape on the radio and I asked what it meant

and my mother would not tell me. Neither would she explain why

sometimes she could not go swimming.

We went to France on a holiday with the evening class people where my

mother learnt French. There, aged ten, I discovered delicious food, roast 

chicken, peaches and black coffee, hot weather, glow worms and

crickets.

We also went to St.Ives and saw the beatniks on the wall and I wanted

to be like that, loitering by the sea, arty and free.




 

Life Class 1967 Chapter Eleven. Horror.

 Chapter Eleven. Horror.
 

The term finished but Kevin and I stayed on in the flat, postponing the

 move to London until nearer the start of my teaching course.

    One of the requirements was to have done a week’s observation in an

infants’ school and somehow it seemed to be expected that I would do it

in Derby. Although I didn’t want to leave Kevin and stay with my parents

 for a week I didn’t get around to changing this. It was only a few days.

 Kevin saw me off on the bus, he ran alongside it in the dark, waving.

Relations with my parents were still difficult and I said maybe he

shouldn’t phone. He must have felt a bit lonely and afraid, abandoned,

although I thought of him all the time and wanted to be back with him as

soon as I could. He knew I loved him. We told each other we loved each

other.


 Kevin went off for a drink with Dick and Helen, didn’t want to go straight

 home alone and wandered along the main road towards a late night

cafe.

I was out with my parents at a play and then came home and watched a

sitar concert on t.v., thinking how Kevin would like it, trying to remember

 all about Ravi Shankar to tell him. There was no phone in the flat so I

couldn’t phone him.

The Infant School was just down the road from my parents’ house. I had

been reading John Holt’s books about education and I sat trying out his

theory with a little boy using cuisinaire rods, taking two away from ten,

counting the eight left, putting them back and counting the ten, taking

them away again, waiting for the wonderful moment when the penny

 would drop and the boy would be certain of the number without

 counting, would know it was going to be the same and always the

same. I was going to enjoy that moment of certainty. I was starting to

look forward to the teaching course, to moving to London, to a new

phase of life with Kevin, to being a couple in a new place. The Head

came in and was pointed towards the student observer, who was sitting

 with a small boy doing maths with the cuisennaire rods. There was a

message, I had to go, something had happened involving police, a

phone call, we had to go to Nottingham. No one would say much.

 I got to my parents house and ran to the toilet just in time as my bowels 

emptied. I was hoping and praying, but Kevin had been attacked, I was

 praying that he was alive, I was hoping he wasn’t a brain damaged

vegetable, but no one said.

  My mother stayed home and my father drove me. We went into a room

upstairs on a high floor and a detective came in and told me that Kevin

 was dead.

We couldn’t see the body. It was impossible, it was unbearable and I

wanted to throw myself out of the window, which was barred, and I

 screamed and beat on the door when the policeman went out and

locked it.

I had to sit with the detective and give a statement. He forgot we were

talking about a dead man who I loved and made a stupid remark about

 what a great time we students had.

How much can I hurt and cry?

I insisted on going back to our flat to look after the dog. My Dad was

 forced to leave me there. He was grey with worry like when I was lost

on the cross channel ferry and they thought I’d been swept overboard.

But what could he do now? My mother asked me to phone each day.

 That was all she could do. Everyone was sorry of course, some could

not speak, a stupid girl from up the road told me Kevin was in a better 

place now. Jane’s chap Steve came and sat in the room for several

hours just to be there, while I lay in bed, with a cold, unwashed, with the

dog beside me and time passed very very slowly.

I went to my sister’s one day and one of the little girls said I shouldn’t

have any dinner because Kevin couldn’t have any, which was exactly

 how I felt.

The local paper had headlines, ‘Hunt for killers as body found in city’.

Kevin’s body had been found on the Monday by a man on his way to

work, down a side street near some waste ground, under a bush. Maybe

 he’d gone down there for a pee. His head was smashed in. There was

 a mark from a belt buckle on his neck.

Two men who had never met Kevin before were arrested the next day.

They had told several people they knew that they had killed a man and

someone had gone to the police.They had enacted how they did it, how

 thye had a mangle roller with a steel rod up the centre with them in

order to attack someone, anyone, they showed the older one’s girlfriend

how they did it. She went to the police.

They were charged with murder.

If I had not gone to Derby, if I’d asked him to phone so he felt less alone,

 if I hadn’t bloody gone he’d be still alive.

I became preoccupied with death, my own. It wasn’t bearable to go on

 dragging myself from day to day. I wore black, the same black wool

dress all the time. I took the dog to the park, I phoned my mother every
 
evening. I wept and my head was constantly hurting from the crying,

and I thought about how to kill myself.

A few week’s before a sort of survival guide had arrived in the post,

delivered free. If you read it in  reverse it provided a suicide guide. It told

you which tube rail was live, how to cut your wrists, how much aspirin or

 paracetamol was lethal, how long gas took to kill you
.
I went into town to buy enough paracetamol and razor blades and a

bottle of gin. I met the stupid woman from up the road and she said was

I just going into town to cheer myself up.

Its an odd thing to go for a last walk, to have a last conversation with

your mother, to burn your diaries, to wait for the woman upstairs to go to

work, to take the dog a last walk, to leave a note to ask for Kevin’s

family to be asked to take the dog, to go into the kitchen and seal the

doors, to turn on the gas, to sit on a cushion on the floor and listen to the

gas hiss but hardly smell it because of my blocked up nose, to start on

the tablets and the gin.

I had always been bad at taking tablets so it took a while to get even a 

few down and I wasn’t used to gin at 9 am . I thought if I slashed my

wrists I’d run into the street. I was so tired and so very unhappy but I

started to worry if any one would take care of the dog, Butch.

I was sorry to hurt my family, my mother, I started to imagine my

mother’s grief.

I thought of the gas escaping into the garden, that some one might

come round to the back door and light a cigarette and it would all

explode and they would die and I would be left permanently disabled but

alive in a wheel chair. I thought that I didn’t believe in a life after death

 so I wouldn’t see Kevin ever again whatever I did.

All this, the hiss of the gas, the horridness of the gin, of gulping down

 the pills, of having a headache, of thinking of the dog alone, of my

mother crying. My mind would not stop.

 Eventually , suddenly, I noticed my mind change. I opened the back

door to let out the gas, threw out the big brown jar of paracetamol, kept the

Gordon’s, took the dog out, phoned my mother as usual and told the

woman upstairs when she came home from work that she couldn’t smell

gas,she was mistaken, I couldn’t smell it.

And that was it.

I had to live.

Life Class 1967. Cornwall & University.

 





Chapter Ten.  Cornwall and University

It wasn’t easy to get work in Cornwall. In St.Ives we went to the job

centre and were shown a very small box card index, the sort you might

have at home, four inches wide. This contained all the available jobs for

the area.
 
    The only one offered to us was broccoli cutting but when we enquired

we could not be considered if our address was a van. We could not

obtain a room to live in as we had no jobs.
 
   Even parking the van was a problem overnight . All the car parks had

signs saying no sleeping in vehicles and policemen would arrive shining

torches in at us and moving us on. One copper was nice and showed us

by driving ahead to a layby where we could sleep for a while, because

mostly the roadside wasn’t o.k. either.
   
    Washing is also a problem if you live in a van with no facilities, just a

mattress in the back and a camp stove. We had to go into a cafe or

better still into a hotel. One of us would loiter with a drink while the other

explored for a bathroom or sink and the we’d come back with wet hair 

and wait for the other one.

  It was hard work. We didn’t get on well all the time. In Fowey I got

angry and walked off and went to the cinema. Kevin went looking for me

and managed to get in without paying and find me.
 
    We had to keep some money for petrol to go home, but most of it had

gone. In Mevagissy Kevin had the idea to dive for crabs because we

saw them for sale for a guinea each on the quayside. He persuaded me

to invest most of the available cash in a pair of flippers and a diving

mask and snorkle. He was an excellent swimmer and he set out to find

crabs eagerly. After three hours he emerged with red rimmed eyes, had

to admit defeat and we set off for home the next day.

    The competition cheque was a great help when we got back to

Nottingham.
    
I was into a new term with my own projects, using a Van der Graaf

generator to try to make soap bubbles pick up an electrical charge and

either attract or repel one another. I was allowed to do this experiment in

the science tower at the Unviversity, with the help of two amused male

technicians. Mostly we got stinging soap bubble bursts in our eyes and it

didn’t work properly. Anyway I had no idea of documenting my research,

and in those days it wasn’t called research.

   A similar metaphor for human relationships was my circular wooden

platform on bedsprings with coloured polystyrene balls bouncing on it.

My tutors stood glumly round it and asked if it was part of the concept

that it was so badly made. I said I’d made it as well as I could. I can’t

remember any sort of supportive tutorials or any group discussions.

Mostly people kept their ideas secret in case any one else pinched

them. I can’t say where my ideas came from, mainly this fluxus type

zaniness was in the air. Also I used to go to the Midland Group

exhibitions. I’d seen Liliane Linne’s circular surfaces with moving balls.
  

 I also put newspapers out in a grid in the University grounds to see if

people reacted. Some one made them all into a soggy ball. This time I

had the wit to take before and after photos. No one gave us any advice

about documentation, about applying for exhibitions or organising

them. We just went on with no teaching imput, exploring however we

liked and only being criticized, and that savagely, when assessments

were made, the results of which we were not told. It seemed to be a

mark of success for the male staff if a young woman left the crit session

in tears. I was able to withstand the criticism mostly by pointing out any

short comings before they did. Were they impressed? I have no idea.

We were engaged in a game with no rules or rather we didn’t know what 

they were.
 
 Kevin got an old felt hat and put a padded doughnut shaped ring in it

and went off to work as a brick layer’s mate on a building site. He began

with a hod but the custom in Nottingham was that the labourers carried

the bricks on their heads. It was tough. I was unaware of this world. It

seemed a working class man was all the time aware of his honour and

of potential threat. Kevin explained that he had to expect attack. If a man

looked at another man  and turned his glass over or his cup this was a

challenge.
 
I could hardly take this in. The only physical challenges I’d had was a

boy aged six at infants school who demanded my chocolate in the

cloakroom when no one else was there. I’d said no firmly and walked

past him. Then when I was 13 a girl set three little kids on me as I came

back down a narrow path from the grammar school. She was screaming

stuff about grammar school kids being stuck up and tried to take my

bag. I swung it at them, got away and went the longer way round in

future.
 
   One of the men Kevin knew from the building site, with a head that

came straight out of his shoulders with no neck, like a peg, the result of

years of carrying bricks on his head? leaving him like a big threatening 

dolly peg, had a sideline in selling pictures. These were done on black

velvet presumably on an assembly line somewhere abroad. He sold

them door to door in the evenings, spinning a line about being an art

student seeking peoples’ reactions. Probably if they let him in folk were

so intimidated by his presence that they bought something to get rid of

him. He invited Kevin and me along to try this, squashing us and the

stock into his mini. I said I’d go but I wouldn’t stoop to lying. It should be

perfectly possible to be honest about it. There was an image of the

Houses of Parliament, a Red Indian, a deer, a pseudo cubist still life etc.
 
   At the first house where I was asked in I found myself lying. I was

disgusted with myself and resolved not to go out with them again.
 
At the fifth house I felt uneasy. The room was stuffed with real paintings.

I recognized a Samuel Palmer etching. I came clean. I was an art

student, short of money. The man also told the truth, he was an art

lecturer from Leicester art college. He laughed synpathetically. He didn’t

blame me, wished me well and was pleased I knew a Palmer when I

saw one.
 
 Neither of us sold anything. I wrote an expose about this scam and sent

it to the new glossy magazine,’Nova’, They rejected it, stole the idea and

commissioned their own writer to do a story on it.

 
     Kevin was practising karate and hurt his knuckles trying to split a

plank in the builders yard at lunchtime.
 
    He then got a job in a factory where they made hammered steel parts

and he brought home a little hammered steel tube that he could use as

a slide on his guitar. One day he came home staggering, all bug- eyed,

strange and ill. He’d fallen into a vat of degreasing agent. Or maybe he

was pushed? Luckily he was o.k. by the next day.

   One night after too much to drink he wandered out to clear his head,

barefooted, and came back between two policeman. He was nearly

crying. They’d  picked him up, trodden on his naked feet and brought

him home to verify that he had a home to go to, but they then took him

to the cells in town and charged him with being drunk and disorderly. He

was up before the court in the morning. I went down to the cells. Kevin

said the policeman were harrassing a woman, maybe a protstitute, and

he had tried to defend her from them. In court the policeman read

awkwardly from his notebook. Kevin came up in the box from the cells

below, in his sheepskin kacket, his blonde hair long and wild, like some

one in a Warhol film. He was found guilty and taken away. I went round

and paid his £5 fine.
 
   One weekend Kevin insisted on going to see his parents, He’d not 

seen them for three years and it seemed he’d left without any intention

of returning. While he was coming back from Caterham he took some

LSD at Piccadilly circus and had some strange experiences.
 
    I had been wracked with anxiety in case he never returned and I was

appalled that he would take drugs so casually. I’d read all about acid

and I wouldn’t try it without making arrangements for someone to look

after me etc. As I was always too busy to set any time aside I never got

around to it.
    
Before he’d met me Kevin had been a cat burglar, at age 14 a sort of

apprentice to an older man  who’d taught him how to break in and move

noiselessly, wearing black. He was good at climbing and moving silently

but he was still caught and had been put in a detention centre. The way

he talked about it, the clanging of the cell doors, the rough way they

were treated, knocked down for not saying Sir when he had no idea he

had to, it sounded as if he’d been in there for years, but it was actually a

month. He didn’t want to go back. He’d just been adventuring. He’d had

great trouble fitting in when his family returned from Rhodesia, when the

indigenous people started being violent to the white colonials., even if

they were working class colonials. At the age of 7 Kevin had never been

to school and was only just learning to read and write. He still left 

misspelt notes for me.
 
Then Kevin’s little brother had died of leukaemia. Kevin remembered

him saying ’Its not the age you live to that matters, its the way you’ve

lived your life.’

  My mother assured me she did not condemn Kevin for his early

conviction for stealing, it was a childhood crime, it wasn’t like our bad

Uncle who went on as an adult swindling people out of their money for

decorating jobs and then moved on without doing them so the people

came round angrily wanting their money back from the family home. I

was very angry when Kevin and Dick from over the road came home

with a small barrel of beer they’d pinched from a pub yard. I refused to

have anything to do with it or to have it in the flat. This fierce pride in

being honest, which came from my Dad, who had handed in a bag of

money he once found in the street that someone had left on top of their

car and driven off,  was a help to Kevin. He didn’t want to upset me, he

respected this and took it in.
 
   Kevin wanted to live a good life and we were planning to go to London

because I thought my future was there as it was the centre of the art

world. I wanted to study film making at the Slade. I bought a super 8

camera and began to take bits of film at the weekends of our ordinary

lives, the park where we took the dog every day, Kevin glancing up as

Butch belted towards him along the pavement with wild doggy

enthusiasm, two white cars passing one another in the distance.Then I

wasn’t selected and decided to go to take a teaching course. The

important thing was to go where the art world was and Kevin would be

able to work anywhere.
 
 I got an interview at a college south of the river and we set out in

February to go there. Now we had a motorcycle and side-car, but Kevin

took the sidecar off and sold it and replaced it with a box for the dog,

who leant round corners with his ears streaming in the wind.

   We decided to go all in one go without stopping, but the cold was

bitter. Kevin’s hands even in thick gauntlets were frozen round the

handlebars and we had to stop at every service station on the M1 and

revive ourselves with hot drinks.

 The college was depressingly out in the suburbs in Lewisham. I didn’t

like it and I didn’t really want to teach either.

  In the end I was offered a place without even going there by the

prestigious London University Institute of Education, right by the British

Museum and much much better, so it was settled that after finals we’d

go off there for a new life. I vaguely imagined we’d probably marry and 

have children. Kevin asked me to marry him from time to time but I

wasn’t ready despite being certain I loved him for ever and ever.

   For my final year I specialized in art history because it was a better bet

to be sure of getting a good degree. I chose to study for it with my tutor

at the art college, Colin Ryde, because he knew more about the

mediaeval period which I wanted to study. He was also handily down the

road at the art school, not out at the campus. He pointed out all the

problems with studying a manuscript. I wouldn’t be allowed to touch it,

even if I went to Dublin to see the Book of Kells I’d only have one look

with someone else turning the pages with gloved hands. Why didn’t I go

to a resource down the road like Southwell Minster? This was a

document in stone.

  So Kevin and I and the dog, who was allowed in, became frequent

visitors to Southwell Minster and I began a serious study of the

Chapterhouse sculptures. There was only one tiny book,’The leaves of

Southwell’ by Pevsner and therefore there was a lot of scope to map the

sculptures, see if there were several styles of work, any overall scheme,

and see what the figures, animals, green men and the strange mermen

figures on the ceiling, 100 miles away from the sea, might mean.
 
Colin Ryde was an interesting person with whom to have tutorials and 

ng person with whom to have tutorials and

he was pleased I’d asked for him. He wasn’t sufficiently appreciated in

the art college where art history was barely tolerated by most of the

students. He stood out, wearing a tweed three piece suit instead of

jeans. Colin had a degree in music as well but he told me he preferred

to keep his first love, music, for pleasure and use his second to make

money. Sometimes we went over time and talked of all sorts of things

and he’d see a disgruntled suspicious Kevin waiting outside the room, a

bit of a rough tough looking bloke, waiting for me to have finshed.
 
   Colin arranged for a college photographer to go over with a long lens

and take good photos of everything in the Chapter house and all the

images were numbered and represented by different colour codes on

the elaborate plans which I made of the room. My main conclusions

were that there was no scheme of work. The different styles from

naturalistic detail to more stylized depiction were all jumbled up. It

seemed likely that the workers took a few sprigs from the hederows on

their way to work and put them where they fancied. Pagan figures were

allowed in the Chapterhouse, which was used for meetings of the monks

and disciplinary  occasions not for religious ceremony. It looked as

though there was a determination to keep the importance of the ancient

Jack-in-the-Green. The ceiling mermen remained a mystery. There was 

nothing parallel in the rest of the Minster. 

My dissertation was an original piece of work and I got a 2:1

Life Class 1967 Chapter 9 Life with Kevin

 



Chapter 9   Life with Kevin.

   It’s not easy to hitch-hike as a couple with a dog so it took us some

time to get up to Nottingham. On the way we got over a fence and had a

swim in someone’s pool, Kevin’s idea of course.
 
On arrival in Nottingham Kevin had the daunting experience of

immediately meeting George, my ex, who’d moved in next door. The

next day he encountered two other men who seemed on very good

terms with me. I wouldn’t have liked it in reverse.

   
The Goose fair was just setting up down the road and Kevin went off

and secured a job there working on the roundabout the one with the

bright shiny horses with real horse hair tails and big cockerels, with

music from an organ where the tunes were on big cards with holes in

and it seemed almost always to be playing ‘On Mother Kelly’s doorstep’.

I had never been on one of these roundabouts before but now I got

unlimited free rides. Kevin was such a good worker that the family that

ran the roundabout asked him to come with them as a permanent 

fairground worker, and I would be welcome also.

  It was a wild idea, but I didn’t really consider it, I wanted to complete my

degree. Kevin was happy enough not to go, he found work here and

there. He changed tyres on tractors and came home on his motorcycle

with a rabbit for dinner stuffed into his overalls and then he tried to stuff

its head but it got magotty and had to be discarded.
   
Kevin got used to coming into the art college, met all the students and

helped me with the sculpture I was making of ‘urban grass’ which was

made of long thin sections of ply wood attached to bricks. He pointed

out helpfully that the reason I could not saw the plywood effectively was

not as I assumed because I was useless at woodwork but because the

saw was blunt and the woodwork assistant was too lazy to help. He got

a wonderful wild-looking sheepskin coat, grew his hair a bit longer, went

to french films and Warhol’s ‘Chelsea Girls’ and ate frquently at the

University.

    
  One day we were going to make love with me dressed in very liitle but

a feather boa when Kevin remembered he had to collect a motorcycle

part from a nearby garage and it would be shut soon, so he said to wait

there on the sofa and he’d be back in a jiffy. While he was out he forgot

all about me waiting and ran into an unpleasant liitle bloke who also had 

worked on the fair and asked him back for tea.I heard him coming in

talking and flew across the room to stop them coming in.
   
  Occasionally I went over to see my parents, without Kevin. Our

relationship was a secret, which Kevin wasn’t happy about.

  I was in the kitchen chatting to my Mother when the doorbell went and

Kevin staggered in, drunk as a skunk. He confronted my surprised Dad

and slurred out that he was living with me, he loved me and he wanted

them to know. My Father went silent and sank into his chair as if he’d

been hit. It seemed he could not speak. My Mother said she’d known

there was something going on in Brighton. As it happened I’d been

telling her about a friend who was living with her boyfriend, seeing how

she took it, which was quite calmly, she was aware that times had

changed.
 
 However, Dad didn’t seem to be aware of this. Eventually he said, ‘In

my day some people did things like that but we simply didn’t speak to

them”
   
I was happy, proud of Kevin in a way, even if he was pissed as a newt. It

was sweet the way he said he loved me. He’d already asked me to

marry him, even more since we’d been to Dick and Helen’s wedding,

friends from across the road. They got married in the register office in 

Shakespeare Street near the art college. They were outside chatting to

us waiting for their turn and missed it and had to be hurriedly fitted in

later. In the confusion, I got into the room and Kevin was left outside. I

witnessed Helen start crying when she came to her bit to speak,

remembering what a mistake it had been the first time.
    
The entrance where Kevin was waiting was all covered in highly

coloured faience art nouveau glazed tiles. Helen and Dick were planning

to go to South Afica with her daughter, which upset me a lot. How could

they go and live in a country like that with apartheid? Here their little

girl’s best friend was a nice black boy called Barrington. How were they

going to explain the awful difference in South Africa? Kevin had been

brought up in Rhodesia with black servants and he’d never thought

about all this but now he began to. I photographed him  in the city

posing near all my favourite Victorian buidings and next to my finished

urban grass exhibit in coleege and next to a graffitied wall that said ‘War

is not healthy for children and all living things’
 
Generally we had a lovely time. We left my parents to their aghast old

fashioned attitudes, well Dad anyway, and went back to Nottingham

hand in hand.

   
   It suited me to be settled and I was able to work. Kevin took an 

interest in my art and in art in general and in music and in being part of

the scene. He got work as a taxi driver. One night he told me he took a

customer round to a brothel and the young woman called out that she’d

take the driver for free. Kevin was cheerful, brown, lively and got on well

with everyone.
   
That summer we’d bought a van to go to the Isle of Wight pop festival

again and then on to Cornwall. My father was now tolerating the

regrettable situation, which in his eyes was even worse as Kevin wasn’t

even studying at the University but was just a working man like himself.

Dad thought Kevin wasn’t too bad one day, he told me much later, when

he helped Dad move a couple of rhododendron bushes in the garden.

Dad could see Kevin was devoted to me, but he was disappointed and

he was now again aghast that we were taking off tfor the summer, Kevin

outrageously giving up work for the entire summer.
   
Just before we went off in the A55, I found I’d won a prize. As we

hadn’t enough money I’d taken to doing competitions. One was called

‘A New Start In Life’, you could win £1000, then a year’s wages. I

answered the questions candidly and wrote a slogan about needing to

be brave to have a successful relationship.
 
 A man came round to interview me, I was short listed. Unfortunately, 

having entered at least two dozen competitions, I couldn’t remember

what I’d written. I tried to see what he had on his clipboard but he

wouldn’t let me see. My replies therefore were not very satisfactory and

I didn’t win first prize. Instead I was informed I would get a colour

television set. In the rules it said we couldn’t have the money instead but

I wrote off and said we didn’t even have a black and white set, we were

poor students and could we have the cash? They relented and were to

send a cheque for £350, but we had to set off without it or we’d miss the

festival.
    
   Police frequently stopped us in our van, two hippies with a dog. It was

a time of lots of police stop and searches. Once at a party twentyfive

police arrived, tipped off to look for hard drugs. The guests were all lined

up to be searched, men in one room, women in another. Even the ashes

were taken from the hearth and the host had to go to ask for the dustpan

back the next day.at the police station. The police dog ran around with

someone’s underwear in its mouth. There were no hard drugs there and

a couple of people who had a small quantity of dope were able to thow it

out of the toilet window so no one was even prosecuted.. One guest had

known to demand a search warrant which held the police up for a few

moments at the start.

  Anyway we set off and caught the ferry over from Portsmouth. As we

had a van we gave other people lifts.
   
A whole boat load of police went over to keep things in order and waved

cheerily to us all. At night the people who hadn’t paid to go in were all on

the hill opposoiite so they could see as well as hear everything and they

lit matches so thousands of tiny flames were appearing and

disappearing in the dark.
   
 Bercause of inhaling something I fell asleep and woke up to find

everyone roaring approval and Bob Dylan just giving his last song, “Lay

Lady Lay’ I’d missed it all and he was off, circling in a helicopter.
 
The dog went a bit funny at one point, shivery and strange as if he’d

been affected  by some narcotic. But he was o.k. after a while.  The

competition cheque could not be picked up without returning to

Nottingham but we decided to carry on to Cornwall, live in the van and

seek work.
   
Back in Portsmouth Kevin disppeared round a corner and came back

with my name tattoed on his arm. What a mad thing to do and it hurt,

what a sign of committment. Once later after a row he tried to cut it off

but it survived intact. MARY.

Life Class 1967 Chapter Seven First being loved.

 



 Chapter Eight   First being loved.

   Everyone was going away for the summer, so, although we were

keeping the same flat, I wrote off to Brighton art college and asked them

to put up a card asking for a place to stay, and set off with one small bag

of clothes for six weeks at an address in the Ditchling Road where two

other strangers were also staying. I went to a nightclub, met a merchant

seaman in the hot dark pulsating disco and had a rash uncomfortable

one night stand as it was termed. He left me his betting slip which I

cashed in as he had won. For the first time I encountered the bleak

atmosphere of a betting shop, all men intent on watching the screens,

cigarette butts all over the floor, despair and hope like a fog of wasted

frozen dismal life. I’d be more careful now, not get into situations where

sex was expected and then it was over and it wasn’t much fun.

   I took a job as a cleaner. On arrival at the house on the first day I was

asked to iron and to peel potatoes. Both of these things I had never

done. I made a stab at it. The house was on three floors and the

vacuum cleaner was heavy. I was only seven stone and fragile looking

even in a workish dress. The son of the house was home and he

offered to carry the Vacuum cleaner up and down each floor for me. I

didn’t think to stop him. That was Saturday.
    
    The next cleaning day was Tuesday and I arrived early, eight o’clock

start. The woman opened the door and looked perturbed, hadn’t I got

her letter? She was very sorry, she couldn’t continue to employ me. I

was unsuitable, I didn’t even look as if I could scrub floors.
   
  I walked away. By the end of the road I was skipping and singing a little

song to myself about how I didn’t look like a scrubber. I wasn’t sorry. It

was a nice day and I made for the beach although I had nothing with

me, no money, no swimming things and it was far too early for the

beach, there was no one there.
   
 I took off my lime green suede sandals and paddled at the edge of the

sea despite the pebbles, humming to myself, scanning the glittering

horizon. Free of work, the horizon was one of infinite possibility,

immensity, like the Courbet painting in the National Gallery. Tomorrow 

would do for looking for another job.

    In the distance there was one person, with a dog, a youth in jeans

and a pinky-red jumper, The dog was a puppy, playfully jumping about.
 
 How did we get to speak to one another?
 
 I can’t remember. I must have walked within earshot, he must have

spoken, maybe he asked the time.
 
How did I get to sit down next to him? And then he moved the dog from

between us to his other side, shared his towel because the pebbles

were uncomfortable, fetched me tea and sausage rolls with his last

luncheon vouchers, leaving me to hold onto the dog by his short lead so

I couldn’t leave.
   
The day passed and we were talking for a long time. He had been born

in Rhodesia, he had blue eyes, a sort of deep sea blue, not the pale

kind. He had not been a student, he was two years younger than me,

his hair was blonde and quite long. He was unhurried, undemanding and

listening and serious and smiling in a lovely way. And then he was

balancing one pebble on my knee as I lay still and then another and one

more and all down each leg so I wouldn’t move in case they fell off. He

made no move to touch me, asked for nothing and waited like someone

encountering a small deer in a wood, motionless, both waiting and 

listening to see if trust would allow getting a little nearer.
 
It got later: we were hungry. I suggested going back to where I was

staying to get something to eat. I had eggs and bread. There were two

other people there, it was quite safe, I wouldn’t let him stay and he didn’t

suggest it.
   
   And all the time we were talking and it was getting more interesting

and exciting and light and sweet and something not to lose but to

consider and I liked his blue eyes, his smile.
 
 I couldn’t think, I needed to go and talk to myself, to see myself in the

bathroom mirror, to slow down, not to become someone who slept with

anyone, not like the last one, who had been a mistake. I went into the

loo and looked at myself in the mirror and saw that I had already

decided and came back with this clearly seen. He would be staying and

he knew I had decided in the toilet and he was very pleased.
    
       Kevin was so very cautious and gentle and then excited and so

happy and he opened the window and got out on the roof naked and

walked along balancing on the ridge of the roof, and made tea, and said

he loved me. I was not used to hearing this, what was love and how

could he know? He knew and had none of the studenty intellectual

reservations. He was in fact in need of love as well, but he knew what

ell, but he knew what love was in a way I had never known and he 

was unafraid, he had nothing to lose and he saw me as a lovely possibility, 

a future different from his past, a sweet lovely girl with no guile and no, 

no anything that could spoil her, like the blue fairy, like his old love but new

 and better and here and not lost or broken and he relaxed for a moment on a

mattress on the floor, with his dog in the corner and his girl by his side

and we slept and we woke up together as if we were married as far as

he thought, just for the summer I thought, its just for the summer,

even if the love-making made me cry and feel something in a new way

and both of us with our eyes open.
     
The puppy got out somehow and was lost.
 
 I stayed home in case he returned and Kevin went to search. He

searched all day until he could not walk any further and came home and

we waited and waited and left the door open, but how could a puppy find

again a place he had only been to once?

    At last we lay down, still hoping, sharing the sadness and the longing

until we dozed off.
   
Suddenly there was a scrabbling on the stairs. Unbelievably Butch

staggered in and fell over into an immediate sleep, his eyes darting

behind the pale fur, his little paws still moving, searching and searching. 

   It was a marvellouslly happy moment.

 Kevin had been staying with a man he met on the beach who was a

social worker who probably hoped to seduce him but wasn’t pushy. We

went to get his things, a small bag, I waited outside.
 
 I got a job at the cinema, watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’ every evening.

Some of the usherettes had seen it two hundred times as it was on for

the season. They knew all the continuity mistakes. I had to fetch and

carry down a very heavy tray of ice creams, down five flights of stairs,

and get the change right in the dark or it was deducted from my meagre

wages. On the day off we were given free tickets for the other cinema.
 
 Kevin came into the bar in the interval every night and met me out, until

he got a job as a double - glazing installer, coming home with cuts on his

fingers and powdered glass in his hair. He went off to do a job in

Nottingham one weekend and phoned the police when he couldn’t get

home and they came into the cinema to tell me he was o.k.
 
 A few days after we met Kevin was ill. It was like pissing razor blades.

He knew what it was because he’d had it before. He wasn’t angry, he

took us off to the clinic for pills, a week’s abstinence and we were cured

of gonorrhea, another present from the merchant seaman.
 
 Unexpectedly my parents called in, passing on their holiday. So they 

met Kevin and afterwards said they had thought there was more to it

than that he was another person staying in the house. It was something

about the way he looked as he leant out of the window waving goodbye

next to me.
   
One day we rowed about something and I walked off the beach, but

loitered on the first corner so much hoping Kevin would follow. A young

woman started to talk to me, suggesting that we pick up two men for

money, or maybe we could do without them and just have fun the two of

us? How did I know I didn’t want to if I’d never tried it? I was so

surprised I couldn’t think what to say. I had a boyfriend. Well, o.k. She

was up for a threesome. At this point Kevin appeared to the rescue and

the woman melted away to try another corner.
 
 We decided to go off to the pop festival on the Isle of Wight.

Kevin played cards after work and won a sleeping bag, so we had one

each although we tried squeezing into one, which was just possible but

it wasn’t possible to make love because it was such a tight fit.
 
 We left the dog with Kevin’s grandfather, who lived in Brighton. We had

to spend a night on the floor in the same room as the old man, who got

up twice in the night and peed loudly into a bucket while we held onto

one another shaking with laughter but repectfully silent.

The music was amazing, Hendrix. The crowds were vast and entirely

peaceful. We slept out on the grass. We smoked a little dope. Kevin

smoked roll ups and kept a piece of orange peel in the tin to make the

first drag taste of it, and he’d offer this to me whilst never trying to get

me to take up smoking, and I didn’t.
 
 I was thinking that now it would be over. I had had a wonderful summer

but I had to go back to Nottingham to University. Kevin however insisted

that he was now with me, we would hitch to Nottingham, he would never

leave me, he loved me. As we set out together,  I began to believe him,

to recognize that I wanted to believe him, that I maybe felt the same but

hardly dared to feel this.

Life Class 1967 Chapter 7 First Student Protest

 

Chapter seven   First student protest.

  The other compulsory trip abroad to complete this twentieth century

 version of the Grand Tour for we who had learnt a smattering of Italian

for two years was a whistlestop dash from Florence to Sienna, Assisi,

Padua, Rome and Venice, all the images and artists left jumbled in the

mind like a quick fire slide show.

  In Italy it was cheaper to eat standing up than sitting down just when

you needed a rest. We couldn’t afford a gondola, anyway there was no

romance except the Swiss girl went out with a soldier who wore one of

those feathered helmets. In Rome we walked single file down a street as

a passing male drove slowly by, playing with his penis, so that each of

us turned round to check with the student behind if we’d really seen this.

  It was impossible to walk about in Italy as an 18 or 19 year old woman

 without a constant what would later be called harrassment. No, we were

not Americanos, no, we would not go dancing, no. I turned on a group of 

boys so savagely that they dropped back a little stunned by my anger. It

was far more constant a nuisance than at home. We were evidently not

Italian and therefore were assumed to be much more available.
 
As it was Easter many of the sacred works of art were covered up by

lenten purple cloths. We also missed Leonardo’s last supper and the

Borghese  gallery in Rome was closed.
 
   I prefered the pre-Renaissence works. The Michelangelo David was

too big and fleshy, too Derek. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, which

Professor Smart had had projected on the very low lecture room ceiling

for weeks on end, where it was reduced to about two feet long, was a

bore. I tried to lie on the floor to study it and was at once ordered to get

up by the invigilating guards. I said to Bryony there should be a

trampoline and we could bounce up and scrape bits off until the

wretched thing was destroyed.
 
The tutors were distressed that the stuudents seemed to have given up

the practice of sketching. The University staff didn’t mix with the art

college tutors and the politics of running a course between the two

institutions was becoming awkward. The art college had opened a new

building with a white brick interior. Margaret Thatcher, education

minister, came to open it and was greeted by shouts of ‘Margaret 

Thatcher, milk Snatcher’ as she’d stopped the school milk provision that

had made us grow taller than the previous generation. In the old council

flats opposite the tenants hung out a banner ‘They’ve tarted up the

outsides [hastily repainted the week before] come and look at the

Insides’. She didn’t. The new building had a new regime of students

having no individual territory, none of the little personal cubicles beloved

of art students and that I was looking forward to. There was instead a

big open plan space with clean, new metal tables and no years of

scrapings of oil paint like there’d been in the old place and that had so

attracted me at my interview.  
   
  In Italy I didn’t take to the Venetian artists either, but I took a trip alone

to Torcello and loved the Byzantine mosaics. I didn’t like shopping for

shoes endlessly like the other four girls and I went off boldly alone to

see the Appian way and the Catacombs. Jane, the Professor’s daughter

was impressed that I knew all the events of holy week from earlier

instruction in Christianity. I hadn’t really been able to believe in it all

since before my confirmation when I was ten when my Mother said that

of course she didn’t believe in the virgin birth. I thought belief had to be

all or nothing but then I couldn’t stop it being chipped away in bits even

though I had loved the stained glass windows of St.Thomas’ Church in 

Derby and the painting of Christ with a lantern, and the evangelical

course on which we all got a little gold key on a red ribbon and Father

Gibbard gave impassioned sermons and there was at least time away

from home to hear of ‘the key to happiness’ and be assured over and

over again that you were loved, [happy,loved and saved] that your

decisions were important, that you were a person apart from your family.

It gave a space for thought and for topics that were never broached at

home.
 
I loved the Giottos in Padua and Assisi. Assisi was so beautiful with the

hills and I decided it would be an excellent place for my honeymoon. I’d

wear the green satin pre - Raphaelite dress and I’d be properly in love. I

was clearing  space where such a thing could happen, to care

passionately, not just for art, but for another person. I was in love with

the idea of it.
 
 I also loved Donatello’s David, so slim and sweet and androgenous,

Botticelli’s Venus and the picture of Spring, the black and white marble

patterns and the spaces and the warmth in Florence, the being

surrounded by people I didn’t know who spoke another language, the

being away from home, a flaneur, observing from the sidelines, the flow

of images, the exhilaration of what art could be, so all around, an urge to 

ving from the sidelines, the flow of images, the exhilaration of what art 

could be, so all around, an urge to go beyond home, 

to be someone completely different, completely away

from the Horrid Uncle, who I could now avoid ever seeing, to be some

one whose home would be wherever I was, who would not be going

home for Christmas, who would not be surrounded by three children like

my Sister, even though holding the first baby Anne had in my own arms

had made a wonderful connection, that could wait.
   
 As one of the BAs had been removed from our course there was a

place vacant on our trip and this was taken up by an art student from the

college who was from Thailand, the one who had proffered the dirty

postcards.
 
    There’s a thing some men fail to realise that women share a lot of

stuff. They are talking, talking all the time, in their shared hotel rooms,

every time they go off to the toilets together, all the time comparing

notes and sharing and learning and thinking. The Thai boy approached

the Swiss girl first, knowing her father was rich, but not that her Dad

wouldn’t pay her the equivalent of the grant that the working class one

got for free. He asked her, behind a sculpture somewhere in Florence if

she could lend him a few quid. She refused. When he approached the

other four, each time cornering them on their own, he didn’t even notice 

 that they were well prepared for his request as they turned him down

determinedly, their resolve strengthened by their nightly comparing if

notes.

In Florence we all went dancing and found on exiting that tv pictures of

us had been transmitted to street level.

Did anyone even take a camera? I didn’t. There is no record of those

glorious days in Italy. Were there any notes taken? Any drawings made?
 
 It feels as if there were none, we were so rushed, so busy laughing and

talking and being that it’s all a blur of shimmering excitements and

carefree one thing after the next without stopping.
 
        There were of course examinations. I was good at them, confident

that I could cope with the strain, whereas the doctor’s daughter suddenly

stood, knocking her chair over, called out something, ran out and was

only allowed to pass on grounds of recurrent migraine. However, she

wasn’t allowed to pass in practical, she was told to leave, and then

there’d be eight. She was one of those women who, sure only of her

unattractiveness and unfashionably large, formed sexual relationships

only with unavailable men who went back to their wives, then she could

say to herself that they’d never been free and that was why they left,

that it was over before it began. There were no classes for self esteem. 

ere were no classes for self esteem.

None of us had heard of eating to make a barrier of fat against the

world. Who knows what had happened to make her thus?

 This all coincided with a new mood in ’68. Students were meeting, there

were demonstrations in Paris and a revolution at Hornsey. Art students

from Hornsey arrived to address us, to politicize us.

     We BA students were an ideal group to target, we mixed with the

years above and below in lectures, we studied in one compact area of

the campus and we were easy to get together. Julian Spalding was an

eloquent speaker and we forced the staff to listen to us. We demanded

to learn about art beyond Europe, beyond America, we wanted a world

view, what was happening now, globally. The staff could see the point

but how could they teach what they had never learnt?
   

    There was no actual sit-in, but there was a sense of taking power. Our

main success was the doctor’s daughter. She was allowed to work over

the holidays, resubmit and return to the course. Solidarity worked and

she was re-admitted. 

We did not even ask for female tutors or for study

of female artists beyond Hepworth and Riley. In fact the woman who

made the surrealist fur surrounded cup, Meret Oppenheim, had been

mentioned, but it was years before I discovered her gender.