Читать книгу Still Spitting at Sixty: From the 60s to My Sixties, A Sort of Autobiography - Roger Law - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGED

When I arrived at art school, still some days short of my fifteenth birthday, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had half feared that it would be like an extension of secondary school, but there was no catch as far as I could see. Within weeks I was smoking as many Woodbines as I could lay my hands on and getting to gaze, through my studies in Life Class, at a variety of naked women. Since I had not yet managed the art of joined-up handwriting, I knew my chances of emulating Mr Baumber’s sign-writing skills were slim, but I did not mind that in the least, as I could instantly see many other far more exotic possibilities opening up before me.

In those less pressured days, before the Commercial Art course was renamed Graphic Design or Visual Culture, the whole emphasis was on skills across a wide spectrum – drawing, sculpture, modelling, painting, ceramics, printmaking, stage design, lettering, you name it. No running before walking was allowed. Practising the skills, rather than writing or theorizing about them, was the order of the day. There was of course no question of acquaintance with what is now often considered the best friend of trainee designers and even artists – the computer.

It was a different world, ludicrously old-fashioned by today’s standards, but it was one that left its mark. I may not have been the most disciplined of students, but to this day I can make a fair stab at identifying an artist’s influences by looking at their work, pull an etching plate from the acid at the right moment, and when modelling think three-dimensionally without effort.

The course took four years, almost five in my case as I had some catching up to do. To compensate for the largely self-inflicted inadequacies of my Littleport education, I was initially put on a course of general literary and historical studies run by a man called David Joseph, who subsequently rose to great heights in the Open University. I did not come to this discipline with a wholly virgin brain as my mind was brimful of Krazy Kat, L’il Abner and numerous other American comics available in Littleport as surplus to the requirements of the surrounding US air bases like Mildenhall and Alconbury. Joseph enriched the mixture with injections of Dylan Thomas, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger and John Osborne, and in the process he gave me an appetite for literature that I could never have acquired in the regimented atmosphere of my old school. The fact that there were no mandatory examinations may also have helped, though I did take an O Level paper in History and passed, thanks to a heaven-sent question on the Littleport riots.

The art school, originally founded by John Ruskin, was quite small, with only about 100 pupils taught in groups of ten or twelve. The technical college, of which it formed a part in my day, was grafted on later and run on more sausage-machine lines. There were a quite a few Fenland potato-heads like myself on the technical side, but the art school exhibited a much wider social range. There were earnest grammar school types along with a generous sprinkling of public schoolboys whose company in the college, and in the university, I tended to prefer for their more irresponsible quality. We were also uplifted by the presence of some very upper-class girls with double-barrelled names, who had been sent to the Cambridge School of Art to find a husband, preferably from the university.

To the task of teaching this motley group the staff brought an admirable attention to detail. Some of the older tutors had been taught anatomy at the Slade by Henry Tonks, a man of legendary application. During the First World War Tonks had been asked about his feelings when he composed drawings of soldiers on the front line. ‘It’s a chamber of horrors,’ Tonks said, ‘but I am quite content to draw them as it is excellent practice.’ In keeping with the Tonks tradition, we had to do drawings of absolutely gigantic magnifications of human ears, feet and hands which were much weirder than anything you might see on Spitting Image. The commitment of all our tutors was impressive, though few could excel John Norris-Wood, who took us for natural history drawing and kept a crocodile in his bath.

During my first year I grew very fast to well over 6 feet. As a result I would be looking around for fellows of my own age who might make useful drinking companions without giving me a crick in the neck. One morning in Life Class, at the start of the second year, I spotted what looked like a suitable case. He was a tall, fair-haired new boy who was looking at the model with that peculiar tense expression which indicated that he was gazing upon his first naked lady. I went up behind him and said, ‘Hello mate, I come from Littleport.’

Peter Fluck was hardly my ideal as a friend. For one thing he was neither a fellow potato-head nor a public schoolboy. He was the son of a grocer and belonged to that despised breed, a grammar schoolboy, with four O Levels to prove it. We were almost exactly the same age but he had wasted the previous year at school amassing these impressive qualifications. The other galling thing about Fluck was that he was an absolute ace at lettering, with virtually no formal training. I used to ascribe this skill to the frequency with which he had to repaint the ‘L’ in the sign over his father’s shop in Park Street.

I do not think I was Peter Fluck’s ideal as a friend either. I think I was, and probably remained, a mite too boisterous and uncouth for his more refined taste. The thing that doomed us to each other’s company was the fact that we made each other laugh.

Very shortly after our first meeting we left the bosoms of our respective families and set up as independent men of the world in a shambolic room in a house in Oxford Road. We would sleep there on opposite sides of a large double bed in chaste amity. Soon after this ménage had been established I took up with Deirdre Amsden, who was among the more capable students in our class and the possessor of a most entrancing bum. The consequence was that Deirdre moved in and Fluck found himself forced out of the room onto a mattress in the hallway. Fortunately, he had to laugh.

Life at college was enjoyably disrupted by the arrival of Alec Heath who, as the new principal, rapidly started to introduce new teachers. The man he brought in to ginger up drawing was Paul Hogarth, a descendant of the famous William, or so he said, though this was his least significant credential.

Unlike the men in the Tonks tradition, Hogarth was a really exciting character. He was not a career teacher but someone who had lived by selling his skills in the marketplace and this, Fluck and I decided, was very much the way we wanted to go. Hogarth also demonstrated the possibilities for combining art with action. He had travelled the world, drawing and politicking when the occasion demanded. He had driven relief lorries in the Spanish Civil War, and later in Poland in the 1940s. In the early 1950s he had been among the first to open up Eastern Europe and China to Western eyes through his drawings. Though identified with Communist causes, his work was most celebrated in the United States, where it appeared regularly in magazines like Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

Paul Hogarth

He was also appealing to us for the way he had mislaid his first wife. She had told him that if he worked with ‘yet another drunken writer’ she would be on her way. As it happened, Hogarth had accepted a commission to do the illustrations for a book about Ireland, working in collaboration with Brendan Behan, one of the island’s thirstiest inhabitants. The book was a great success, but it was the end of the marriage.

It was through Hogarth that we became acquainted with the concept of the ‘artist reporter’, essentially an artist dealing with the topical issues of the day as raw material. This was immensely appealing as I was drawn to the idea of making visual statements rather than just representations. And I was already dabbling in caricature. This was not one of Hogarth’s areas of expertise but, unlike his predecessors, he encouraged this form of expression. Indeed, he went so far as to publicize one of his own exhibitions with a caricature of himself done by me. This was a brave act considering that his hairstyle was not dissimilar to Bobby Charlton’s.

Hogarth taught us that there are a million ways of portraying the world, and that these endless possibilities had to be tailored to the artist’s vision. Young artists used to be apprenticed to older artists not so much for technical reasons but in order to achieve the approved focus. Taking this message to heart, I became very adept at achieving Hogarth’s focus, making the marks he made and, more importantly, omitting what he would leave out. One day, in a bid to test the limits of his sense of humour, I copied a drawing he was working on while he was out to lunch. I then scrunched it up and threw it on the floor, while concealing the original inside his desk. Naturally he found the scrunched version first. He went ape, until I revealed the switch. But he was not a man to hold a grudge. Soon afterwards, as if in recognition of my plagiaristic skill, he began to steer paying work in my direction – small commissions from the East Anglian magazine and other local publications which he could not get around to doing. These little sub-Hogarthian studies constituted my first published work.

Another teacher who impressed us deeply was Bobby Hunt, who had worked closely with Fitzrovia’s star illustrator and painter, John Minton. Indeed, it was said that Minton would offload surplus work to Hunt and later sign it as being his own. Hunt’s classes were like stand-up comedy routines, though he knew his stuff. He was also a boozer but avoided alcohol addiction, it was suggested, by never closing his mouth long enough to swallow his drinks. As he taught he used to pace the studio’s parquet floor. This endless pacing worked some of the blocks loose and one day he tripped, and both he and one of the blocks flew across the room. On replacing the woodblock, he found a tightly folded note had been placed underneath it. As he stood up he carefully unfolded the note and read aloud to the class, ‘Bobby Hunt is a cunt.’ I could not claim any credit for this particular wheeze but I had to admire the foresight, skill and planning that must have gone into its execution.

Paul Hogarth’s greatest gift to us was access to his library. Both Fluck and I were already well versed in the English tradition – Gillray, Cruikshank and the rest – but Hogarth had an enormous range of European stuff that we had never clapped eyes on. We would descend on his home at weekends and devour back issues of L’Assiette au Beurre (which colloquially translates as Gravy Train), the brainchild of Samuel Schwarz, a Polish Jew who made his original stake by selling soft porn in French garrison towns. The best illustrations were to be found in the early twentieth-century numbers, where all the issues of the day – from concentration camps to the Dreyfus Affair – were confronted with fierce satirical energy. And Hogarth would show us books of drawings by George Grosz about Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s which were so powerful they gave you the feeling of almost being there.

The most practical thing Hogarth helped to provide was contacts. He got on to the university and told them there was no reason why their publications should all look so execrable when there were so many able art students resident in the same town. Partly as a result, Deirdre and I got to art-edit a number of university organs, including six issues of Granta, a young thinking person’s magazine if ever there was one. Our successor on Granta was Peter Fluck.

There was a pretty girl in our year called Wendy Snowdon who fell in love with, and later married, an undergraduate by the name of Peter Cook. So we all became friendly. All over Cambridge at that time I would hear young men talking with oddly depressed vowels (later nationally recognized as the key intonation of Cook’s E.L. Wisty creation) and I was relieved to meet the originator of this strange voice. I was beginning to fear it might be contagious. Cook was a funny man, but you would hardly have picked him as the father figure of the satire revolution that was lurking just around the corner. He already had the laconic delivery that he would bring to some of his later more famous observations – ‘my lady wife, whose name escapes me’, ‘not a million miles from the truth’ and ‘tragically, I was born an only twin’ – but he did not give the impression of being a man of great initiative. In appearance then he was like a Regency buck, but pleasantly diffident with it. If he had a keen interest, other than the horse-racing pages of the national newspapers, I never noticed what it was. But he became a kind of benefactor.

Peter Cook

Cook owned a building in Park Street, a few doors down from Fluck’s grocery store, and it had some surplus space. He allowed Fluck, Deirdre and myself to occupy the ground floor and to put up a Fluck-fashioned sign announcing that East Anglian Artists was open for business. Since neither Fluck nor I was on a grant, we both came under a certain amount of parental pressure to earn a few bob. My father tended to treat me with all the reverence that he might accord to an out-of-work actor, though he could never quite bring himself to wish me out of college and into the army, an ever-present possibility since conscription was still in force. East Anglian Artists, being on a flight path to Cook, who lived upstairs, attracted some intriguing visitors. One was David Frost, though there was never a lot of point in knowing Frost if you already knew Cook because he would retell all Cook’s jokes. Cook called him ‘the bubonic plagiarist’.

East Anglian Artists never did much actual business. Nor, for that matter, did our movie. This was a delicate study of Deirdre and myself as two beautiful young people with Fluck brilliantly empathizing the role of an imbecilic old man. Shot on location in a country house and a scrap metal yard, it was taken to New York by its student director in search of a niche market. Neither he nor the film has been heard of since.

Eventually Fluck and I discovered that we could make more serious money by doing the early-morning cleaning at Fitzwilliam House and by waiting at table for the undergraduates at Trinity, where we became celebrated as the ‘Gypsy Menace’. It was therefore not very long before self-service catering was introduced.

For all our reverses on the economic front, we were rarely idle. The late 1950s were the early days of the peace movement, which reached its crescendo with the Aldermaston marches. Many of us were deeply involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and its later more aggressive offshoot, the Committee of 100, which had a deliberate policy of direct action, including breaking the law of the land. There were some staid figures in the college who saw this as evidence that Hogarth was leading the young astray, but it was not so. Hogarth had by this time left the Communist Party a disillusioned man. The one thing he never wanted to talk about was contemporary politics.

It is hard, looking back, to recapture the intensity and anger of that period. I think it boiled down to a feeling that we had been hoodwinked about the nature and extent of the nuclear threat. When you stripped away all the reassuring rhetoric about nuclear war being ‘limited’ you realized that this meant limited to Britain and a few others who had drawn short straws in Europe. No matter how limited any nuclear conflict was, you could be sure that Littleport, with its friendly neighbourhood US bomber bases, would have no chance. Later generations would learn how to become more fatalistic about the nuclear threat but mine was idealistic, or perhaps innocent, enough to believe that things could be changed.

Blessed with a grandfather who was deeply versed in the horrors of war and who seemed only too delighted to pay my fines, I became a none-too-pacific peace agitator. My time spent being picked on in pubs as a serious underage drinker had equipped me well for the confrontational stuff to which every demonstration is prone, while my art school training was all I needed by way of entrance to the crude but exciting world of agitprop.

David Joseph, my literary mentor at college, had a friend called Richard Fletcher who paved the way. Fletcher was a very intriguing man who had invented a method for sticking aluminium on to plastic and paper. You can see examples of its application in the average packet of peanuts. Unfortunately for Fletcher, he patented the machine that churned the stuff out rather than the process itself, and missed out on a gold mine in royalties. Aside from being a distraught inventor, he was also an ex-racing car driver for Lotus, a property developer, the publisher of newspaper called Union Voice, and a Labour Party fixer of a very high order. Fletcher was aiming to fix things so that the Labour Party would come out in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, which indeed it did at the Scarborough Conference in 1960 (only to do a U-turn a year later).

Fluck and I, together with several other mates at college, supplied the artistic shock effects for Fletcher’s posters and pamphlets, indicting Hugh Gaitskell and the right-wing Labour leadership for all its revisionist works. Fletcher, in his turn, provided logistical support, in the form of a van. We would use this to travel to the big union and party conferences, where we would plaster the neighbourhood, with special reference to the delegates’ bedroom and breakfast room windows, with our compelling messages.

These trips took some organizing. I can remember one raid on a Labour Party conference quite vividly as it was the time when we made the stew. There were twelve us going in Fletcher’s van and as nobody seemed to have any money I had the bright idea of filling a milk churn with a gigantic stew of cabbage and pigs’ trotters that would sustain us through a week’s agitation. There was no problem locating a milk churn, but the process of cooking the stew and decanting it by stages into the churn proved incredibly lengthy – so lengthy, in fact, that by the time the last pigs’ trotters had gone in at the top those at the bottom had gone off, infecting the whole brew. We then had the problem of burying eighty pints of pigs’ trotter stew in a Cambridge garden. This was done under cover of night, and to the best of my knowledge the stew remains buried there to this day. At some future date, no doubt, it will make a most interesting archaeological find.

I never ceased to enjoy art college, but it was becoming evident that some aspects of my existence were getting up the nose of the authorities. There was much twittering among the academic staff about my living with Deirdre Amsden. In the Swinging Sixties our association would hardly have twitched an eyebrow, but we were still back in the shame-ridden Fifties, when appearances were deemed all-important. I was made aware, from levels above Hogarth’s, that the fornication had to cease lest it spread epidemic-like through the college. So we headed the problem off at the pass one lunchtime by going out and getting married. Fluck gave us a packet of twenty Senior Service as a wedding present, which showed great thoughtfulness as far as I was concerned, as Deirdre did not smoke.

Then there was the matter of the Anti-Ball which Fletcher and I staged in a demure village called Little Shelford just outside Cambridge. We got this house, one of Fletcher’s due for renovation, and did up its walls with lurid graphics naming all the destructive influences in the land – from King’s College to the monarchy. We then issued invitations for a CND fund-raiser to every activist in the country. It was without question the greatest party in Little Shelford’s entire history, but the cops still came to break it up. The whole enterprise was thought to reflect poorly on art students in general, and on the Cambridge school in particular.

I was on probation, obliged to give assurances of improved behaviour, though not for long. I was well into my final year, researching George Grosz’s Ecce Homo series of drawings for my thesis. But certain things had changed. For one thing conscription had been abolished, so there was no chance of my being immediately presented with the Queen’s Shilling on leaving college. For another, I had built up enough contacts, principally through Fletcher and Peter Cook, to give me some assurance of finding work. As it happened, I had to go up to London to do some research for my thesis at the British Museum. I went, and never came back.