A Postillion Struck by Lightning (34 page)

Patiently this day he sat beside me, dragging up a stool to my desk, slowly he examined my startling, lurid, finished cover. Gently he explained that I might have possibly missed the point of the exercise. It was not, he said, to tell the entire story of Mr Bates on the cover, but rather to leave that to the reader to find out for himself which, after all, was the author's job. Mine, he said gently, as the designer, was to suggest to the reader what he might find beneath the wrappers; to offer him some simple, uncomplicated, symbol which he could recognise enough to tempt him to read the book. Not something which would convince him that he had read it already, or worse, that he knew what it was all about and didn't want to read it anyway.

Swiftly, economically, he drew a face, a cloth cap, some rabbits' legs, a long waving line which was clearly a field of corn, and the entire subject was before me. I apologised in a mumble. He was anxious. “But are you
sure
you know what I mean? Simplicity, you see … just the suggestion. The essence. Not,” he said gently, “a map of England with all its Blood Sports.”

I started again much cast down but already agreeing, how could I not, that he was right. But
how
to simplify … how to find the “essence”? That was my problem, and eventually stealing from him shamelessly I did my design by the end of the week and got top marks.

But the discovery was magical, I mean the general discovery. Being treated as an equal, as an already proved, which I was not, artist, gave me back a great deal of ebbing courage. I drew and drew and covered page after page of sketch books with a wild assortment of ideas which I then was forced to condense, simplify, coordinate, in short… design. It was not, I was quick to find out mercifully, quite the same as merely “Drawing”.

Drawing was much harder. Drawing meant, for me, the Life Class. A serious, grimy room. A wide semi-circle of stools round
a battered rostrum on which reclined, or stood, in patient humility, and bored indifference, a naked woman or, at times, man. Always ugly, always thin or vastly fat, as unacceptable naked as they must have been fully clothed.

In winter they froze to liver-sausage blue in the arctic room, warmed only vaguely by a one bar electric fire, around which they huddled at the “rests” in tatty silk kimonos—in the summer they baked and broiled under the relentless glare of the sun from the skylight windows—all for a pittance an hour. Eyes glazed with boredom, they saw past and beyond us, locked into a frozen area of numbness from which nothing save the ringing of the alarm clock, to tell them their time was up, could release them.

Although, up until then, I had never seen an entirely naked woman, I was completely unmoved. I only remember being saddened by the sight of so much ugly flesh humped so dejectedly in a bent-wood chair. I found drawing their ugliness far harder to cope with than anything else. It seemed that if I started off with a head the left foot usually ended up miles off the bottom of the page and somewhere in the region of my own feet. However much I held up my pencil to measure, as I saw the other students doing with great professionalism, I never got the proportions right, and in spite of constant rubbings-out and starting-agains, the human body defeated me entirely. I sweated on and for ageless days sat in a smaller room with some others who found it as hard as I did, studying and drawing, in vicious detail, every bone and socket in a range of dusty skeletons which hung, dangling feet and hands, from wooden gibbets, swinging forlornly in the draughts.

“Try not to bother with her too much,” said Henry Moore, who took us for Life and, later on, Sculpture. “She's not much good really, but it's very hard to get skeletons these days. Very hard indeed. She's pretty young, this one, mid-twenties I'd say … died some time about 1890. You see the rib cage? All squashed up, those dreadful corsets of theirs. How did she breathe for God's sake? You see? Squashed tight. Quite useless for you really. No Form there, simply de-formed. Shocking really. But it's the best we have at the moment.” Smocked, and with a woolly tie, he too moved among his pupils quietly and gently, correcting and suggesting here and there, patient with the slow, glowing with the more advanced of us. Wanting to share his obvious delight
and love of the Human Body. “This absolute miracle of coordination, of muscle and bone. A brilliant conception never yet beaten,” he said.

But it took me a long time to come towards sharing his delight. And although I sat spellbound if he came to my board to tug a muscle or a joint into place, or scribbled a rapid explanation for me on the side of my disordered, erased, smudged drawing, his swathed, mostly faceless figures reminded me a little too sharply of Mr Dodd's mummies ever to re-kindle a dying interest in the Human Form. I served him better in Perspective, and he was encouraging and kind, and when I said, rather timidly, that I wanted to go in for Stage Design rather than any other form of art he set to with enthusiasm and bashed me into Vanishing Points and Source of Light until, little by little, I abandoned almost altogether Life Class and attended, as often as I could, and more often than I should, Perspective. Which is why, to this day, I can still do a remarkably good bird's eye view of the Piazza San Marco, Times Square or even Kennington Oval looking as if they had been struck by bubonic plague. My perspectives are empty. However I am very good at people leaning out of windows. That's about as far as Mr Moore, with all his patient efforts, ever got me.

If I was hopeless at Life Class I was making tremendous strides towards becoming a Playwright. The Cox family was exceedingly encouraging and welcomed me into their family. Every evening, after I had returned from Art School, I would cycle over to “Chez Nous” and spend a great deal of time with Nerine, who was soft, blonde, gentle and deeply interested in all my theories; discussing the ideas for a new play, the plots and even the sets. We wrote poetry together and spent hours in the depths of Rotherfield Woods talking of my Future. We never, it seemed, ever got around to hers. And at no time did we discuss the world around us which was steadily becoming more and more troubled but which caused us no apparent concern. The pronoun “I” fell rapidly and confidendy from our lips. Except that her “I” was “You”. Which I felt was just as it should be. Eventually, from all this airy chatter and from all these floating plans about my Future a play got written. It was called “The Man On The Bench” and starred Nerine as the Prostitute and myself as the Man. As far as I can recall it was a very long monologue for me interrupted, only here and there, by Nerine dressed in black satin and a feather boa.
The trick was the surprise ending when the Prostitute left in a huff and the Man fumbled about in the skirts of his overcoat producing a white stick. Blind, you see.

Very moving. I don't quite know why I had not given the entire plot away from the start for I fixed my eyes in a steady glazed stare at a point somewhere beyond Ashdown Forest and never let it waver. It went on at the Village Hall and was well received by a rather sparse audience who had other things on their minds since, a day or so before, Germany had annexed Austria. This irritated me more than anything else. We had a poor house, and I felt that the Message of the play was unfairly judged. However I cheered up considerably when I realised that within a few days I should be seventeen and Mr Cox had offered me my first leading role in a “real” play which was to be the September Event of the Village.

It was decided by the all male Committee of the Newick Amateur Dramatic Society, known as the NADS, to do an all male play With A Warning. “Journey's End” was selected as being the most suitable—a reasonable cast, one set, and timely in a year of mounting tensions. I was to play Raleigh. I started to learn the French's acting edition there and then.

In the meantime the rest of life was going on in its implacable way, which in no way affected me much until the death of beloved Mrs Jane and shortly afterwards that of Grandfather Aimé. A slight stroke and growing incontinence finally forced his departure from the grubby house by the West Pier into his clean, spartan, nursing home in Kemp Town.

Enraged at being removed forcefully, as he said, he gave one of his cronies in the Junk Trade a five pound note to strip out the house. My parents arrived to collect him one morning as two packed vans drove away from the mouldy square. He retained a few “Treasures” with which to furnish his room at Kemp Town; the rest were dispersed all over Sussex, some even landing up at Christie's months later. There was nothing to be done, everything was perfectly legal, and my distressed parents managed only to retrieve a Nanking jar, a black ebony table, and a pile of National Geographical Magazines. Grandpapa's spite had won. And it finally killed him off, loathing his Matron, smoking like a chimney, and wilfully peeing all over his faded Aubusson. He went almost as suddenly as he had entered, or re-entered, our lives. Singularly unmissed and shortly forgotten.

Rehearsals for “Journey's End” started amidst the growing tension in Europe. Not, perhaps, the wisest of plays to attempt on the threshold of a new war—although that did seem rather unlikely to me once I had been reassured, by gentle Nerine, that I would not be called up until I was at least nineteen, which gave me two years, and no war, no modern war that is to say, could possibly last
that
long. Also, she had heard it said at the Red Cross and in the St John's Ambulance Brigade, to which she was devoting more and more of her time, that all the German Tanks were made of cardboard and the Population were half starving, having neither milk nor meat nor butter.

My father, needless to say, did not share these opinions and was longer and longer at “
The Times
” than he was at home. All about us a disturbing feeling of apprehension was stirring. People were getting restless and even starting to dig trenches in the London parks. Erica Schwartz and her friends got more and more frantic and held long urgent meetings in the Common Room and begged us all to be Conscientious Objectors, which I thought might be quite a good idea the way things were moving. One of my special new girl friends, a golden blonde with a white sports car and a father who made shoes in Czechoslovakia, one day was no longer at Class and we heard that she had suddenly been ordered back to Prague. I was very depressed because she was beautiful, rich, clever and liked me to the extent of cooking me baked beans on toast on her gas ring in a crumby little flat which she rented for fun in Jubilee Place. I was astonished that she should leave without even sending me a note for we had become, I thought, very Close Friends… however, she went. The Govonis had been recalled to Rome some time before, but Giovanna was sent back to stay with us for a holiday to “keep up her English”. The telephone now rang almost constantly from Rome with worried appeals to get her back as soon as possible. My father and I drove her down to a boat at Newhaven and shoved her up the bursting gangway filled with anxious people carrying bags and suitcases. We waited on the quay until eventually a small, weeping red-headed figure fought her way to the stern waving, sobbing and crying out “I love you. I'll never forget you. Goodbye, Goodbye.” The sirens went, gulls screeched and the packed ship moved gently away from us.

She stood there waving and waving until the ship made a slow turn to port at the end of the long jetty and bore her away, out of my sight, for twenty-three years.

My father and I were very quiet driving home through the lanes to the house. He only spoke once, when we stopped at the Chalk Pit outside Lewes for a beer.

“I can't really believe,” he said, “that it is all going to happen again.”

The rehearsals for the NADS were cancelled. No one seemed to have the heart to read through a play which was regrettably becoming more and more timely. Added to which it was difficult to get the cast together because people suddenly had extra things to do in their spare time, and Cissie Waghorn, who had a car, dragooned and bullied myself and a boy from Fairwarp called Buster into driving about the county fitting elderly people with gas masks and explaining to them the problems of Blast and Blackouts.

Influenced by all this activity and talk of a new War, and very much by “Journey's End”, I started to paint, exhaustingly, scenes from the first World War. I read every book I could lay my hands on in my father's study ranging from
All Quiet On The Western Front, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The War Of The Guns
to the Michelin
Guides to the Battlefields
. William Orpen, John and Paul Nash became my idols, and my bedroom was covered with reproductions of their works. I was
quite
convinced that I was painting in this fury because I was the reincarnation of a young soldier who had been killed in 1917. Nothing would budge me from the belief; the output of my work was prodigious, leading Sutherland to say that it was probably better to “get it out of my system” and exercise my imagination. He was very patient and understanding and knew full well that no reincarnation was taking place, simply a release from too much emotionalism.

In this welter of second hand grief, anxiety, and something which was rapidly approaching self-pity, the Polytechnic closed down for the Summer Recess and, armed with my paints and brushes plus a bursting portfolio of agonizing scenes in the blazing ruins of Ypres, Albert with its leaning Virgin and sundry portions of the entire Western Front, I glumly headed for Sussex, Nerine and the fitting of yet more gas masks. I felt lost, worried and disconnected. Even though my last reports from the Art School had been glowing and highly encouraging, I felt within me the interest and love for Art slowly ebbing. I knew, instinctively, that I would never be a successful painter, for the simple reason that I did not want to be. I had no dedication but a totally God-given
talent which I truthfully wished could be directed towards the main love of my life: the Theatre. And my father's sudden and extraordinary decision, already planned long before I knew anything about it, to send me off to study the process of colour photogravure at The Sun Engraving Co Ltd at Watford came like a bolt from the proverbial blue and only increased my growing despair. If I had given up the idea of the career laid down for me it was quite clear that his mind was still quietly working towards Printing House Square.