Got it made
I had got to the end of my thirties, or very close. I was an outpatient at a drying out clinic near Beverley in East Yorkshire. I had a contract with a London gallery, a bed-sit in the Avenues at Hull and a studio down in the old quarter. I was a regular client down Waterhouse Lane until I met Deb. She was a smashing painter and a fresh-smelling honest to goodness fuck. She took the photo.
My contract with the gallery paid me enough to rent a mobile home all the year round at Easington Caravan Park where the scruffy bend of Spurn Point hooks down into the mouth of the Humber. A rusted rail track ran down to where great seaward looking guns had once been placed. Near the end of the Point there was a child’s coloured block Coastguard building with a roof full of wire sticks and nets and if you went on to the tip when the tide was full then the water rose up away from you towards ocean carriers sliding home.
Deb will have been standing on the edge of a low cliff to take the photo, above the coarse sand beach which was all that separated us from the North Sea. One night red lights drifted past the big window and we heard a chuckling snuffling sound. It was a dredger come over from Holland to put the coastline to rights. In late spring there would be a line of black rubber figures evenly spaced along the shoreline. They were holidaymakers, miners from South Yorkshire spending a week night-fishing.
The mobile home might have been a Willerby from a local firm, an industry built on the skills and materials of wartime aircraft production. There was a lounge with a gas fire that tailed off into a kitchenette. There was a compartment with a double bed and another with bunks. There was a shower and an Elsan. The surfaces were wood, not plastic. The upholstery was a wool blend — there was, beside the foam cushions over the fold-out guest beds a cottage suite that was almost Swedish.
As you can see I am wearing comfy synthetic loose clothing. I am shod in white leather boxing boots to dance on the pedals of my Ahbewher green Renault 20, burning down to London to see the gallery and burning back manic to the point of recklessness. George Guest bicycled all the way out from Hebden Bridge and did the gouache of the interior. George had been a mainstay for several years as I free-fell. Now, thirty years later I’ve just been told he’s died and I note a corner of my magic carpet no longer weighed down and flapping wildly, aching to be off. Wait a bit I say.
My life at Spurn, the night swims, the long staring at the sea, the pottering back into town over the flatlands as St Patrick’s spire advanced into the sky, finished with a crash bang wallop. Deb shrugged me off. The gallery broke the contract due to unforeseen circumstances and on a trip to Aberdeen I got a phone call from the caravan site,
“…cliffs gone, she’s lipped over the edge, axles won’t stand to be dragged back neither…”
Without the contract I was lost for my studio rent. I dramatised the situation as a Viking funeral. By then I had a twin-carb Saab 99 Automatic which drove like a tractor on skis. I crammed my studio into it making the windows useless for looking, drove out to the mobile home to leave the gas fire running and then north to the Orkneys where I had an exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre booked. Nothing could be more natural than this I thought, nodding up the A1.
I didn’t realise then but I was coasting amongst whizzing, unheeding planets on the good fortune of my birth. That the rocket was out of fuel I hadn’t noticed for I appeared to be moving. I didn’t yet understand anything about how things started and stopped, appeared and disappeared. The time on the Orkneys — a whole three months — I needed to have been making my own power plant but it was sterile: all my printing inks had soaked up water somehow and I was impotent with the blonde from yesteryear who’d come along for the ride. Glum faced we watched seals play, we stumbled around Iron Age stone huts and got lost in dark rain and I managed only a trio of linoprints that weren’t soggy or torn up. On the opening night of the exhibition, November 1st 1991, the northern lights came over the sky and everybody rushed out to goggle at nature’s nod to Disney.
The blonde got a call for jury duty and we drove down to London and somewhere on that island length drive around the latitude of the Cheviots the sky started to reflect the orange glow of sodium street lights. We crashed briefly at the bedsit in Hull, groggy and well wary of each other and then on to the metrop. Somewhere in the tangle of Brent Cross by a Tube I could have made a gesture that resolved our puzzle and pulled away from the kerb. Instead I went to a map and searched the Essex estuaries for a Spurn Point look-alike — maybe I could pop into London by train? But I couldn’t tailor for two and she kept the same bed she’d had as a child. There was a wilfulness I couldn’t dissolve but being sunk in emotional glue must have reminded me of love.
If I’d had a post I might have got away with it. Weren’t there hundreds of thoughtful metropolitan artists scurrying out to the provinces to earn their crust? A technician at the art school in Hull, a printmaker called Rowland Box shook his head,
“…you’ve got on the wrong way round, come on, you ought to know that…”
The following summer I had an exhibition in Hull at the Ferens where I showed the trio of linoprints from Orkney. The owner of East Yorkshire Aluminium bought them — a spin off from the caravan business that had grown fat on double glazing. His secretary wrote out a cheque there and then for a thousand pounds. He had them hung in the entrance. When I asked to borrow them for an exhibition at Peterborough City Gallery in 2000 they told me they were lost when his business went up in flames.
In Queen’s Gardens, a dock filled in and laid out with the bright hope of post-war planning but subverted by a Thatcherite café there was a plaque and a bust to the memory of Robinson Crusoe and his imaginary departure. There are his words: Had I the sense to return to Hull, I had been happy. I went to the language department of the College at the back of the Gardens. A Baltic cruise aboard a cargo had given me a taste for the sea. I could teach East European sailors Seaspeak, English for mariners, in their off duty hours onboard in return for free travel. They would call me матвего хцлтоду. The lady said I ought to have a TEFL certificate. I lacked front, I backed off. Ever so gently I’d got myself on the wrong heading, what I thought was the track was a refraction, truth bent by my wrong-headedness — I’m lucky life is long.
