Return to England

I returned to England, not to be a painter. I had more urgent objective for which I needed a steady job. After nine months of demoralizing unemployment in which I felt I could not even draw , leave alone paint I had a short job for three months under slavery condition and then took another in a village school in Cambridge a full-time, living in teaching post in a school for underprivileged children.

I was soon pushing these children to take the ‘(A)’ level Art in their fourteenth year. For this I felt they needed experience of a three-hour stretch of drawing and painting since that was the time given for an examination paper and the class periods were never that long. So I began a regular once-a-week evening class; one and a half hours before evening tea and one and a half hours after. Girls posed as models in various costumes, sometimes doing some activity like sweeping or cleaning. Since this class was in my own time I felt it was legitimate for me to draw beside the girls not only for my own benefit but to give them a standard. Though I could not draw at my best because of frequent calls to help someone, the exercise did allow me to study young girls as I once studied Nepali women.

The evening coincided with the visit of a previous student at the school and sometimes I found that students who had been working before tea were absent after, others bringing their excuse that they had been vomiting in the cloakroom. I suspected drugs brought in by the visitor.

My end of term holidays usually began by my collapse and a time in bed. On one of these occasions I was so debilitated that I could not even bear the light and lay for days in bed with the curtain covering the window. The only thing relieving tedium was the little transistor radio near my ear. It was the time of ‘flower power’ and San Francisco the centre of this. There was a song being played over and over again. “If you come to San Francisco be sure you wear some flowers in your hair.”

It seemed to be the topic of the day- the growing drug scene so woven around with suggestions of beauty and Cycladic colours.

I thought of the girls I taught and my apprehension of drugs beginning to reach them- these girls with their slender bodies and strong legs, developed through gym and games.

The representation of this was growing in my head, becoming so obsessive that I had to get up on to my bed, pin a sheet of paper on the wall and begin sketching it. The youngsters with their boy friends, coming into the scene for kicks; the next stage, falling in love with the flower. I fell back on my bed, too weak to carry on. My mind was going ahead of me, giving me no rest. I needed a larger paper to do the next stage. I pinned another sheet alongside the first. I drew the girl with her boy, lying together, Lotus-eating, forgetting the world. The flower beside the entrance would be the passion flower, for the drug scene at first would give a false suggestion of romance.

The flower she would fall in love with would be the poppy. Of course, the lotus would stand for the lotus-eating scene, its flat leaves holding them.

My mind continued to work, almost feverishly in the half light and the slightly high temperature of illness. I never drew a youth losing the use of his legs as he clung to a stem. He became chained to the flower. Then came collapse and despair and decay, the end coming towards the centre of the picture, the girl being swallowed up by the flower. Two or three more sheets had been added to the fist two to contain all this.

My first objective on recovering was to get a length of cartoon paper which would roll up easily and on which I could put down all that I had worked out on the four sheets together with plants that produced the various drugs along with any others I might find that had a hallucinating effect.

This had to be researched. I obtained information from Golders Green. Finchley and Plymouth Libraries. There was very little spare time in which to work on it whilst at school, what with extra evening lessons, duties and so on. Working on the picture was mostly confined to end-of-term holidays.

I had to spend most of the holidays with my parents in Plymouth. I knew Ma would have a fit if I pinned the cartoon to her walls, so, since I was working on the research of plants and designing their growth to suit the spaces between the figures, I traced the figures on manageable pieces of tracing paper which I could pin to an ordinary drawing board. The designing of the plant growth was done with the board on my knees in the sick-room where my father was dying.

By the time the next holiday came the plants had all been added to the figures on the cartoon paper and since I could not avoid going to Plymouth where my mother was now living alone, a widow, I took the cartoon with me. No! I could not pin it to the wall. I had to search the town for a timber merchant, find the sort of light weight, but substantial wood that could take my 7 ½ foot cartoon and bide my time until they could deliver it at their convenience. All took several days.

My niece and her husband arrived when I was there with the good intention of helping my mother. I felt it was time for me to go back and prepare for the next school term. I had painted a background to the figures and the plants.

“What am I going to do with that old board? I can’t have it hanging about here” Ma complained.

“Get John to cut it into convenient pieces and bring it back to me in London.”

So the board was cut up.

I bought a length of canvas and conveyed the cartoon design on to it. The canvas was pinned to the wall in our small flat. When the next holiday arrived I went down to Plymouth for a week.

“Can’t you stay longer?” pleaded Ma.

“No! I have to get back to the painting”.

It would have been better for her had she not had the board cut up.

The painting was almost completed. I rolled up the canvas and moved it to school where I pinned it up in the Art room.

The children were most intrigued. They wanted me to define the meaning. I knew it would have more effect than any cautionary advice.

One day a girl came and looked at the picture.

“I dreamt last night that I was the girl going through all that” she said.

Once the picture was finished I had to get a stretcher frame for it. All the Art shops shook their heads. Too big! Only Winsor and Newton could do it. I went to them. They quoted £20. That was a fortune in my eyes. More than I then earned in a week.

Then my son said, “Explain how a stretcher works and I’ll try to make one myself”.

I described how on length fitted in to another, snugly, without nails, to allow for the tightening of the canvas. I wanted a batten down the vertical middle so that in tightening the canvas the two long pieces remained parallel. The stretcher was made; the wood cost him £2.

It was more difficult to stretch a painted canvas on to a stretcher that to stretch the canvas first then paint on it; but it was done. Then my son made a frame. The picture minus the frame was 7’3” x 37”. It was too big for our home.

I put it into exhibition where it was hung in a very prominent place in Harrow’s Debenham’s, with lights shining on to it so that it attracted ordinary shoppers to gravitate towards it like moths to a candle. I had priced it £300 because there was no place for it at home.

Later Mrs. Nash, who ran the Harrow Art Society, asked me to borrow it to hang it in the Art Centre. She brought the press to see it and it was published with something about me, in the Harrow Observer.

She rang me

“Your picture is £300, isn’t it?”

“No! It is £700”

“Why the increase?”

“We now have a wall for it.” We had moved to a bigger house.

The picture, “Flower Power”, was later in my first one-man show in Harrow. Mrs Nash came in and said “Flower Power” is now £700, isn’t it?”

“No it is not for sale”

“Why”

“My son wants to keep it.”

She bought a small picture of an old lady feeding birds, which were wheeling around her in flight, ready to perch and receive the food she held out. I had got the idea when I once sat next to a beautiful girl who was feeding birds.

“Do you want some” she asked offering me a part in the bird feeding, but I declined. I was too busy watching. This prompted “Old Woman with Birds.”

“I have a Stella Brown at last” said Mrs Nash. Later she told me they always looked upon the old woman as Stella Brown herself.

But to go back to the painting sequence.

With the slender body and strong legs of the teenager I did another large painting “The Cart Wheel”. It was a pattern of the figure as it moved from the upright, through to the upside-down and on finally to the upright again. The background was of arcs and circles made by carefully placed dabs of paints, the figures light at first against a dark background, emerging from the action dark against light background.

Whilst working on the beginning of “Flower Power”, I had gone to Au, ST.Gallen in Switzerland. I had been put up there in a flat all to myself and was able to move around from room to room and look out of the windows in all directions. It was a new experience and I was delighted I had brought an Ingres block with me, a sketch-book of tinted pages which could be used with pencil pastel of gouache paint, a paint water-based but with body in it so that it could lay opaque in the paper surface. I had these mediums with me. I began on a green landscape from one window but next day snow covered everything. The houses were more colourful than the ground when it was covered with snow, so I concentrated on these with their shuttered windows. Before one, the snow had been cleared away from the road, leaving a wet surface in which the house was reflected. Coming home I put these subjects on to canvas and added figures, a lone woman walking in the wet road, in one children playing snowball and in the other tobogganing.