suppliers he trusted, without the bother of traipsing across town. He preferred to wander from room to room in our little house in Calthorpe Street, his eyes perpetually focused at a height which, had there been a person standing before him, would have been crotch-level. He liked to wear crude workman’s trousers and a loose shirt with paint-spattered sleeves. His paintings depicted men dressed similarly informally, reclining against trees in a forest, or on the banks of a river, accompanied by naked women. He never tired of this theme. There must have been dozens of canvases stacked against each other in a corner of the studio, perhaps a hundred or more naked women and clothed men rubbing against each other, some long-dry, others still slightly wet. None of these paintings was ever sold.
My father’s portraits were a different matter. In these, he combined (as a contemporary critic admiringly put it) ‘innovation with exercise of skill, as though a modern master like John Singer Sargent had been touched by Fauvism and was none the worse for it’. I am still not sure what this means, but I do remember my father’s portraits very well. He was careful with the faces, had a flair for skin, and liked to take liberties with the sitters’ clothing. Dresses would blur into impressionistic designs, shoes would be dark smudges. Sometimes, if he was obliged to paint a whole family of daughters, the hands of those he considered less interesting would have ambiguous numbers of fingers. Legs and arms were often longer than anatomically feasible. Most customers were satisfied, though, feeling that they had immortalised themselves in a nobler medium than photography, and that they had patronised a rising star of the avant-garde to boot. But as it turned out, my father’s star rose straight through the smoky sky above Bloomsbury, into oblivion.
We weren’t to know that, then. My father was the head of our household. He had a job. My mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t have jobs, unless working for suffragette organisations was a job. I suppose it was. You know, I grew up awfully confused about work and what it was and who was supposed to do it and who wasn’t. Some of the children at Torrington Infants were of the opinion that gentlemen and ladies didn’t work: not working was what made them gentlemen and ladies. The more prevalent view, by 1908, as far as I could determine, was that men ought to be gainfully employed, but that ladies should not be paid for anything they did, or at least shouldn’t need paying. The legions of women who laboured in factories and shops were seen as unfortunates; their only claim to dignity was that they hadn’t descended into beggary or prostitution. As for domestic servants, I just couldn’t figure out what they were about at all. Our family employed a maid-of-all-work, even though Mama and Aunt Primrose thought servants were an offence to socialism. Rachel, her name was, I think. She rarely spoke.
But, getting back to my father … Mama and Aunt Primrose always treated him with affectionate condescension, as if he were a dog. An occasionally infuriating, improperly house-trained, but always amusing dog. He played up to them, as a dog might. He had a way of adjusting his big brown eyes that made them glisten imploringly when he was hungry. He slept wherever he chose. Indeed, he slept in so many locations throughout the house that I never developed any conception of ‘the bed’ as a shrine of marital intimacy. That’s why I’m wary of telling people that Mama and Aunt Primrose shared a bed, and that my mother and father slept together only occasionally. Sex: that’s all people think about nowadays, and the more deviant, the better. It wasn’t like that in our household. At a certain time of night, when Mama and Auntie Poss had grown tired of talking about female suffrage and the evils of the government, they would shuffle off to bed, and perhaps find my father snoring there like a Great
My father’s portraits were a different matter. In these, he combined (as a contemporary critic admiringly put it) ‘innovation with exercise of skill, as though a modern master like John Singer Sargent had been touched by Fauvism and was none the worse for it’. I am still not sure what this means, but I do remember my father’s portraits very well. He was careful with the faces, had a flair for skin, and liked to take liberties with the sitters’ clothing. Dresses would blur into impressionistic designs, shoes would be dark smudges. Sometimes, if he was obliged to paint a whole family of daughters, the hands of those he considered less interesting would have ambiguous numbers of fingers. Legs and arms were often longer than anatomically feasible. Most customers were satisfied, though, feeling that they had immortalised themselves in a nobler medium than photography, and that they had patronised a rising star of the avant-garde to boot. But as it turned out, my father’s star rose straight through the smoky sky above Bloomsbury, into oblivion.
We weren’t to know that, then. My father was the head of our household. He had a job. My mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t have jobs, unless working for suffragette organisations was a job. I suppose it was. You know, I grew up awfully confused about work and what it was and who was supposed to do it and who wasn’t. Some of the children at Torrington Infants were of the opinion that gentlemen and ladies didn’t work: not working was what made them gentlemen and ladies. The more prevalent view, by 1908, as far as I could determine, was that men ought to be gainfully employed, but that ladies should not be paid for anything they did, or at least shouldn’t need paying. The legions of women who laboured in factories and shops were seen as unfortunates; their only claim to dignity was that they hadn’t descended into beggary or prostitution. As for domestic servants, I just couldn’t figure out what they were about at all. Our family employed a maid-of-all-work, even though Mama and Aunt Primrose thought servants were an offence to socialism. Rachel, her name was, I think. She rarely spoke.
But, getting back to my father … Mama and Aunt Primrose always treated him with affectionate condescension, as if he were a dog. An occasionally infuriating, improperly house-trained, but always amusing dog. He played up to them, as a dog might. He had a way of adjusting his big brown eyes that made them glisten imploringly when he was hungry. He slept wherever he chose. Indeed, he slept in so many locations throughout the house that I never developed any conception of ‘the bed’ as a shrine of marital intimacy. That’s why I’m wary of telling people that Mama and Aunt Primrose shared a bed, and that my mother and father slept together only occasionally. Sex: that’s all people think about nowadays, and the more deviant, the better. It wasn’t like that in our household. At a certain time of night, when Mama and Auntie Poss had grown tired of talking about female suffrage and the evils of the government, they would shuffle off to bed, and perhaps find my father snoring there like a Great
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