Fifty Years Ago: Friday, 10th September 1976
(Gosforth — Age 14:11)
I didn’t sleep well. It was too cold with the bed near the window. I had moved it there a week or so earlier for a change, and during the drought it had been cooler beneath the modern double-glazed Crittall window. Now that was working against me.
My room was a mess: clothes, records, books, drawing things, school things, guitar music and newspapers. Really I was echoing Mum, who said it all the time. If the cleaner was coming in everything had to be put away because she wasn’t paid to “tidy up”.
I was getting cuttings for Julie-Anne’s project on pollution. It was a summer holiday Geography project, the sort of task that seemed familiar because we had done something similar in French using Paris Match. I went through Sunday colour supplements, local newspapers, magazines and books we already had in the house. New Scientist was more likely to provide something useful than Cosmopolitan or Vogue.
It was lovely to have something she had to do that actually interested me and that I could help her with.
I then drew tracings from photographs on glass. I was experimenting with a homemade light box: a sheet of glass propped up at both ends on stacks of books, with a light underneath, or an Anglepoise directed at white card.
Mum had strong views about how drawing ought to be done. She had a degree and Masters in Fine Art from King’s College, Durham, and had taught art before we were born. In effect, her four children became her continuing class. I listened particularly closely to her. She disapproved of copying photographs rather than drawing from life, using a ruler, using black, using any pencil that wasn’t a soft 4B or 6B, and throwing away early drafts. I could continue.
Mostly I obeyed because what she said made sense. I was training my eye to transfer my impression of the real three-dimensional world — a person, pet, building or tree — onto a blank two-dimensional sheet. You could tell when something had come from a photograph rather than from observing the thing itself.
I drew often: still lifes, buildings, portraits, my sister watching television because that was one way of guaranteeing she stayed still, and quick cartoon-like sketches of groups of people. Mum once showed me a sketch and watercolour by an artist friend of a lioness in which the drafts and workings remained part of the finished picture. My sister still has it.
One of the drawings I did that day was of a nude girl. It wasn’t a vulgar picture but a serious drawing, using the outline from a photograph I had taken of Julie-Anne at Whitley Bay earlier that summer, in front of what was then the new leisure centre with its swimming pool and wave machine.
The photograph had been taken with my beloved Kodak Pocket Instamatic, which I had been given for my thirteenth birthday. I loved that camera. It documented everything: school life, home life, people, holidays. Julie-Anne and I had taken photographs of each other on the beach. The one she took of me survives: I am lying on the sand, cropped at the torso, unfortunately with my eyes shut. The photograph I took of her was its counterpart, similarly cropped.
I put her photograph beneath a loose sheet of paper on my homemade light box, traced the outline and reimagined the figure as a life drawing.
That was why I felt the need, even in my own diary, to insist that it was not a vulgar picture. I was already justifying it to myself. I hadn’t asked Julie-Anne to pose nude and I hadn’t photographed her nude. What I thought I was doing belonged to art. There were Raphael, Rubens, Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Pre-Raphaelites. Artists drew the human figure.
Julie-Anne wasn’t particularly interested in drawing herself. This was entirely my transformation of an ordinary photograph.
Drawing somebody was different from simply looking at them. If you drew a sitter you were allowed to look properly: at the eyes, the mouth, the shape of the face and figure. You concentrated. Your hand responded to what your eye was seeing.
My interest in the human body was distinctly one-sided. That had crossed my mind and it didn’t trouble me. I’d seen plenty of male bodies naked being sent away to boarding school from the age of eight; not once did I consider them a subject worth drawing. On the other hand I was naturally drawn to the female form, and drawing it produced a genuine physical excitement. That wasn’t separate from the act of drawing; it became part of the concentration.
I knew the sensation from sport. Before a swimming race, or an obstacle course there was a point when the body and mind tunes itself for what was about to happen: the pulse quickened, attention narrowed and everything became more deliberate. I was finding that Drawing something that genuinely excited me could produce something similar. The feeling travelled into the hand — into the pressure of the pencil, the speed of a line, the hesitation before making a mark and then the confidence of making it.
Perhaps that was one reason the female figure had such force as a subject. I certainly didn’t have to look far in art history to find the same fascination. Raphael, Rubens, Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Pre-Raphaelites had all made the human body central to their work, and male artists in particular had returned again and again to the female figure, clothed, partly clothed and in various stages of dishabille. At fourteen I didn’t need to construct a complicated argument about why. I could see the tradition in front of me, and I could feel something of its attraction for myself.
Yet I could understand why being caught with a drawing of my girlfriend naked would appear wrong. Was it pornography? That said, knowing my mum and her connections, she may have felt my efforts to copy from a photograph were flawed from an art practice point of view and for me into a university life class.
I did plenty of self-portraits, but never treated myself in quite the same way. They were heads and faces. I rarely even added the torso.
I kept the Julie-Anne drawing secretly for a while and then destroyed it. The thought of somebody finding it and recognising her was too awful. Whatever I thought I had been doing as an artist, I knew perfectly well how somebody else might interpret it.
Then I had a Badidas bath.
Bathtime was something I did most days if I didn’t have to be somewhere. It was sanctuary, cleanliness and time to myself. I could read uninterrupted or simply daydream.
Badidas came as green gloop from a dark green bottle and produced great quantities of bubbles. There was an art to getting the bath right: too hot, too full, then too cold if I stayed in too long.
There might be the portable radio and something to read, with my head against the plastic pillow fixed to the bath with suckers. I could control the hot tap with my big toe. I noticed what prolonged soaking did to my fingertips. I examined myself. There still wasn’t a hair on my chest. Having spent much of the summer cultivating a tan, I could even worry that a long bath might somehow wash some of it off.
I would sink beneath the water and hold my breath, come up again, add more hot water and stay until the bubbles had disappeared.
There was certainly an element of “having the body beautiful” about it.
The bath ended with the destruction of the remaining bubble mountains with a bar of soap or if I’d got the bottle, I could make channels through them with a jet from a Fairy Liquid. Fairy, mum’s idea of shampoo.
Afterwards I went into Newcastle.
I bought The Amateur Astronomer by Patrick Moore. It was the classic beginner’s hardback, full of maps and diagrams for somebody beginning to learn the night sky. I most likely bought it from Thorne’s, where Mum had a teacher discount card that gave us ten per cent off.
I can still see the cover: black, like the night sky with a close-up of the edge of the moon and lettering in yellow. The iconic colours of JPS Formula 1 racing car by the way.
Astronomy had occurred to me as something I hadn’t explored properly. Dad had already shown us how to find the North Star, the Plough and Cassiopeia. Patrick Moore gave me somewhere to go next: Orion, the planets, star maps and the possibility of learning enough to know what I was looking at and why it mattered. And if I got lost in the Sahara or crossed the Atlantic I’d know which way to go. Was their life out there? Are they watching us? What did they make of us? Were they like alien characters from the Smash adverts laughing out our antics?
I also bought a less advanced book on Pitmans shorthand. I’d already tried shorthand but needed something intended for a beginner.
Then I went round to Julie-Anne’s. I took some sheet music. She had none. A lovely classical guitar that her sister might have got but had never learnt to play and that didn’t interest Julie-Anne either. I didn’t yet have one myself yet, though I fancied having one enormously and had wanted at Mowden – but they were banned! I had Annie’s Song by John Denver, with piano and guitar chords. I had wanted to play the flute part. I would strum the chords or try to pick out a tune.
Saturday was getting closer, and with it my return to Sedbergh. The time I could spend with Julie-Anne was becoming finite. I wanted to fit in one last visit.
There might still be a little present for her before I went — a book, a record, a picture frame, some trinket perhaps; the next entries may recover it. There would certainly be phone calls, right up to the morning of departure.
For now, though, there was still another afternoon to go round to Julie-Anne’s with guitar music, help with her Geography project and simply be with her before school took me away again.
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