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
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