Owning Up: The Trilogy (38 page)

It was spring by now. I lay on the grass smoking, reading or taring up at the blue sky. The goldfish gleamed among the reeds of Billy Butlin’s neglected boating-lake. The sea’s horizon no longer held its threat.

In the newspapers and on the newsreel in the cinema where I went to see James Cagney in
The Roaring Twenties,
they showed us for the first time the appalling images of Belsen: the stumbling living skeletons with their bald heads and huge empty eyes, the bulldozers scooping up the mounds of dead. As far as I can remember, they hardly affected me, seeming no more real than the briefly illuminated bug-a-boos in the Skegness ghost train. How could I weep over a poem and remain indifferent to this proof of what humanity is capable of ? I am unable to answer. In this respect the nineteen-year-old self that I am trying to recreate or understand is a total and repellent stranger. What did he feel as the camera explored the gas-chambers and the ovens? I can’t remember. I’d like to think it was too horrible to grasp, but fear that it may be simply because I can’t face up to my own self-centred lack of imagination. I wrote home praising
The Roaring Twenties.
As usual, I also asked for a small sum of money on some rather flimsy pretext. Waiting for my draft, this time to another Butlin’s camp in Pwllheli, North Wales, I was given a stick with a nail in the end of it for collecting waste paper.

I’d made a new friend, this time of- undeniably working-class origin. His name was Tom Dash and, although he was a grammar school scholarship boy, his father was a dustman who lived in a pre-fab in Dalston. ‘My old man’s a dustman,’ Tom sang in an exaggerated Cockney accent. ‘’E wears a dustman’s ’at!’ Writing to my mother I suppressed the scholarship but emphasised his . father’s profession. ‘He’s very clever though,’ I added, ‘and is teaching me about a political theory called Anarchism which I find very convincing.’ I knew how to tease my mother.

Actually I did find Anarchism convincing, or at any rate in so far as I was able to concentrate on the pamphlets published by Freedom Press which Tom had lent me. One of them, I was delighted to discover, was by Herbert Read, who had also edited the Faber Surrealist anthology I had found by chance in a Liverpool bookshop during the school holidays some three years earlier and carried with me everywhere since. Already believing myself a Surrealist I could now, without fear of being labelled inconsistent, declare myself an Anarchist as well. Tom saw no reason to return the compliment. His Anarchism was less romantic, based on his hatred of class oppression, on his memories as a child of Mosley’s march through the East End (he had no trouble in reacting to Belsen). He found Surrealism irrelevant to the struggle, even suspect.

After the relaxed atmosphere of Skegness, HMS
Glendower
came as a nasty shock. For the first three weeks, it rained and drizzled non-stop and this coincided with more bullshit, discipline and physical unpleasantness than I had yet encountered. We had to get up at 6.30am, go everywhere at the double, and perform such dangerous feats as clambering up the sixty-foot main-mast erected by the swimming-pool, and climbing hand over hand upside down along a rope suspended unpleasantly high from the ground. Bell- bottoms or no, there were times when I almost regretted my inability to add up and envied Percy and Harry sitting in their nice offices filling in ledgers. Falling into my bunk each night, aching all over and completely exhausted, it seemed only about ten minutes before they woke us up again. There was no shore-leave either. No time to read or think.

What they were doing, of course, was breaking us down as individuals in preparation for turning us into sailors. What I tended to forget was that my fellow sufferers had only been in the Navy for a week or two. I’d been spoilt, softened by months of cushiness and tolerated skiving.

Then, quite suddenly, things improved. We got up an hour later; the dawn was getting earlier too. The sun shone and across the parade ground Snowdon, until then invisible, rose snowcapped into the sweet spring air. I felt fitter than I ever have before or since, and mentally buzzing with new ideas as yet only partially formulated. Anarchism for instance. What a beautiful concept! A rational world in which what you made was for use, not profit, and all you took was what you needed. Love was the only law. Money unnecessary. Crime – once envy, greed, and private possessions no longer existed – would be unnecessary. Why steal when you could take freely? Free sexuality would extinguish jealousy. Nobody would mind who his father was because children would be the beloved responsibility of all. War would be unthinkable; police, spies, informers, politicians redundant. It was simply a question of convincing enough people that they held the power to free themselves from their chains. They must be taught – no, persuaded – that it was useless overturning one political system simply to embrace another. Communism, Tom had pointed out, was simply one more form of tyranny. Until then I hadn’t realised this. As Communism was one of the several subjects which brought my hated prep-school headmaster to the edge of apoplexy, I thought it must be defensible. Not so, said Tom. Marx might have claimed that the end-product of Communism was the withering away of the State but the reverse was true. He gave me Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
to read, and Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia.
I found them much easier to grasp than the political pamphlets, and took his point. Long live Anarchism! Down with the State!

Surrealism also. Perhaps Tom was right to reject it personally. After all there would be a lot of spade work necessary to dismantle the apparatus of power, to help the Workers’ Syndicates supplant the bosses, to distribute food and raw materials, but at the same time purely practical activities were not enough. ‘Change life,’ the Surrealists had ordained. ‘Tell your children your dreams!’ From the few texts I’d read; from the reproductions of Ernst, Dali and Magritte I’d studied; I had derived amazing certainty that the marvellous was all about us, that if only we could escape from that mental labyrinth built in the name of morality, religion, patriotism and the family, we could all become poets; move through a universe where dream and reality were indistinguishable. If Anarchism was to provide the sustaining bread of life, Surrealism would pour out the intoxicating wine.

All this rilled my head as we learnt how to clean a rifle, knelt at Church parade, or saluted the Quarter Deck, and it never occurred to me to translate my revolutionary fervour into practice through some act of refusal or defiance. I had only to shout a blasphemy in Church, refuse to salute the Quarter Deck, or throw down my rifle to prove that the status quo was as determined to protect itself as Tom maintained. I did no such thing, and nor did he, but as we argued and theorised, a true Anarcho–Surrealist was about to leave Skegness to join us. I knew him too. He had been at Stowe with me. His name was Tony Harris Reed.

Tony had already played a formative role in my life. Thin and almost colourless in physical appearance, he had the questing expression of a hungry ferret and, ferret-like, was prepared to track down an idea through the most complicated system of burrows. Nor was he against sinking his teeth through to the bone of the hand of anyone in authority foolish enough to try and handle him after his re-emergence. A true black humorist, he would carry a dislike to extreme ends, in no way disdaining so childish a ploy as letting down a hated master’s bicycle tyres, and yet at the same time using his considerable inventive powers to build up such an exaggerated picture of the man’s minor eccentricities as to reduce us all to mocking laughter at the very mention of his name.

One of his butts – an admittedly pompous history tutor, but in every other respect comparatively harmless – reduced Tony to a state of near hysterical rage, and was metamorphosed into a figure of Ubu-like proportions. The unfortunate man had a dark, ruddy complexion which contrasted startlingly with his cropped snow-white hair and neat moustache. Tony decided he looked like the negative of a photograph. He also put it about on no evidence at all that his wife, a plain lady of no doubt entirely conventional morals, was not only an insatiable nymphomaniac but a thief to boot. In support of the latter theory he claimed that, following her by chance along an obscure path from the school’s wartime fuel supply to the married masters’ houses, he had at first thought her to be pregnant–no doubt the work of some precocious sixth-former or a randy if indiscriminate junior master – but then noticed how, every now and then, a piece of coal would fall from under her bulging mackintosh. During our readings from a translation of Plato, Tony, while remaining completely po-faced himself, would imitate quite blatantly the man’s affectedly clipped drawl, reducing the rest of us to ill-suppressed handkerchief-in-mouth splutterings.

He’d also cultivated a vendetta against the President of the Debating Society, a maths master of superficially liberal principles as long as everything that was said remained within certain limits. Noticing that the American popular singer Frank Crumit had died, I proposed, and Tony seconded, that in future the President should wear
in perpetuum
a black tie in his memory. The master claiming, quite correctly, to fail to see any relevance in our motion refused, but was voted down by a carefully canvassed majority. From then on, whenever he failed to observe the rule, Tony or I would jump up to protest vigorously during ‘any other business’.

The main target for his anarchic disrespect was less expected. It was Robin and Dodie Watt, the Canadian couple who ran the art-school, a modern concrete building behind the chapel, a refuge where anybody during his spare time could go and paint or argue, a haven for generations of Stoic aesthetes and for unconventional masters as well.

Robin Watt was a quiet man who painted portraits in the style of a less exuberant Augustus John. His wife Dodie was a far more positive character. She drew well, was both kind and protective to her protégés, and managed to stimulate a great deal of interest and excitement in art in general and certain aspects of modernism in particular. She had however certain very defined ideas about what was and what wasn’t acceptable in painting and, to make sure we all toed the line, would pin up paired reproductions which we were expected to divide into good, bad, or in some cases of equal merit. For example, a Matisse was ‘good’, a Holman Hunt was ‘bad’, but apples by Cézanne and Courbet were both ‘good’. If we went wrong she’d explain why and, as she talked well, it proved an extremely effective form of visual brainwashing.

Arriving at Stowe, rather apprehensive, and feeling both provincial and lost, I found the Watts and their art-school an unexpected haven, and was soon preaching their gospel during the holidays not only to my mother and small sister but also to my various Liverpudlian relations, including a rich cousin of my grandfather, who took it pretty well considering that my lecture took place in a large drawing-room hung with original Pre-Raphaelites collected by her father, a nineteenth-century ship-owner.

At first Harris Reed was equally under the spell of Robin and Dodie Watt. Indeed he produced with remarkable facility a huge number of precocious pictures in the style of those painters we were taught to admire. Yellow crucifixions against pink landscapes in the manner of early Gauguin yielded to cubist still-lifes on up-tilted table-tops after Braque. Matisse nudes jostled Chagall lovers. Picasso harlequins sat amidst Derainesque landscapes. The rest of us were dazzled by his eclectic brilliance although the Watts, while by no means wishing to discourage so receptive a disciple, felt he ought to spend a little more time improving his rather shaky draughtsmanship.

Given that Ma and Pa Watt, as we had come to call them, were our mother and father figures, there came that inevitable moment during our later adolescence when we began to question their authority, and here Tony turned what might otherwise have been little more than a series of mild disagreements on the relative importance of this or that painter into a full-scale revolt.

It was my discovery of Herbert Read’s book on Surrealism that acted as the catalyst. I’d brought it back to school in a state of high excitement and carried it, like a trusting puppy, to the Watts for their approval. They were of course both aware of Surrealism, having visited that pre-war exhibition in London which had led to the publication of Read’s anthology in the first Place. Furthermore, in the art school library was a copy of ELT Mesens’
London Bulletin –
No 1 which contained a reproduction of Magritte’s
Le Viol
which Ma and Pa Watt dismissed as sensationalism – and, more damagingly, ‘literary’ – although personally and secretly I’d found it both disturbing and impressive.

It was a weekly custom of the Watts to hold, in their own room, a discussion-meeting-cum-sketch-club and it was here that I produced my book. There were about eight of us there, including Tony and Guy Neale, the third member of our little clique. It was Guy who’d first introduced me to jazz. I’d shown both Tony and Guy the book earlier, and they had shared my enthusiasm. Ma Watt looked rapidly through the reproductions, screwing up her eyes behind her glasses as was her habit. She was almost entirely dismissive. ‘Old hat’ was her first condemnation of the movement as a whole. She was willing to allow that Klee, Miró and of course Picasso were OK, but she dismissed Dali, Magritte and Ernst as ‘no damn good’. Robin mumbled his agreement. I felt very depressed but then, in an unprecedented way, Tony and Guy began to argue quite forcefully. Ma Watt stood her ground. ‘Silly Freudian images painted as photographically and as badly as the Pre-Raphaelites.’ Taking courage from my bolder friends, I too began to question the whole aesthetic grid through which Ma Watt judged pictures and the meeting, usually so civilised, finished on quite a sour note. The following week, despite considerable grumpiness from both Ma and Pa Watt as to the value of what we were doing, Tony, Guy and I began to turn out pictures in the orthodox Surrealist manner.

Tony didn’t let things rest there, however. Taking advantage of Ma Watt’s absence (I believe she suffered from migraines), he asked the more easily persuaded Robin if we could use the small sculpture room for a Surrealist exhibition. He tentatively agreed, thinking that we intended to do no more than hang up our pictures. Not so. The following Thursday, the Watts’ day off, we set to work with full iconoclastic enthusiasm. We jammed a large doll’s head over the taps of the sink so that the water poured out of its neck on to ” piece of coral. We smashed in the breasts of a classical plaster-cast bust and put tins of condensed milk in the cavities. We dragged in a dustbin and filled it with the dismembered limbs of the school’s skeleton, painted shocking pink. We scattered dead leaves all over the floor. We hung our pictures too of course, but copied out various Surrealist texts below and above them in poster paint. We also imported two or three gramophones and attached various incongruous objects from the still-life cupboard to their slowly revolving turntables. We were rather pleased with the general effect.