I neared the end of my second Art School year on a friendly footing with most students and teachers I knew. Several girls enjoyed my company, despite my total failure to start a sexual romance with ones who attracted me. The Art School had no literary and debating society of the kind I had enjoyed at Whitehill, so I and Malcolm Hood started one. I sang in a choir run by a friend – performed in School concerts – had become a Recognized Character whose reputation (I heard later) was enhanced by many who thought I would die young. The State Bar in Holland Street, off Sauchiehall Street, was the School’s favourite pub when Glasgow pubs closed at 9 p.m., even at Hogmanay, supposed to be Scotland’s happiest festival and certainly the most drunken. Both my parents had celebrated it cheerfully but soberly. Around closing time on 31st December 1954 I left the State Bar and leant over the bonnet of a parked car feeling very sick and drunk. I was hailed by a small group leaving after me. They took me with them to parties in houses near the university I had never visited before or since. This was the best Hogmanay of my life; all later ones have been anticlimaxes. Bob Kitts was in the group, a London art student who had been invited north for the new year by Glasgow students he had met when on holiday in France. By talking and talking and talking with Bob I grew steadily sober.
His father had been a merchant seaman who, unlike mine, had suffered unemployment during the Depression, but later worked as a driver for the GPO. World War Two had changed life for the Kitts as much as the Grays. The parents stayed in London while Bob, his two brothers and sister were evacuated to Cornwall, separated and billeted with strangers. As often happened, young Bob was with people who treated him badly until his strong-minded mother found out. She took him away and placed him with a kindly family he remembered fondly. During the London Blitz the father and mother were bombed out, so after the war the family were reunited in a completely different home, but resumed the Cockney tradition of summer holidays in the farms of Kent, earning money by hop-picking and sleeping in tents after sing-songs round a camp fire. Until 1960 every fit young British male had to serve two years in the armed forces. I (luckily) was unfit, but Bob had served two years in Henlow RAF base. This allowed him to attend night school classes and make a portfolio of work that had got the Slade Art School to accept him as a student. His fees and living expenses were, like mine, paid by the new Welfare State so we were both Socialists – Bob said his family never had anything to Conserve. We were both fascinated by the visual arts, loved the writings of Dylan Thomas and Scott Fitzgerald, and were writing a semi-autobiographical novel inspired by Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While discussing time and space in image and word one of us said, “The only logical outcome of our interest in word and image is filming,” and the other agreed. We arranged to meet again as soon as possible and correspond with each other in future. On the night we met, Bob also met a Glasgow girl, Hilary Leeming, then a domestic science student. I came to enjoy a relaxed, platonic friendship with her that I later enjoyed more than once with the lovers of friends.
Drawing of Robert Kitts , 1955, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Hilary Leeming , 1959, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm
Portrait of Bob , 1958, ballpoint pen on paper, 30 x 21 cm
In the 1954 summer holiday I took part in an Art School visit by bus, ferry and train to Florence, Rome and Venice. Dad was then a site clerk at Arden, south Glasgow, where one of the new housing schemes that came to surround the city was being built. To pay for the trip he got me work as a joiner’s labourer and, during the Glasgow Fair Fortnight, as a day watchman. I made several sketches to help me make one of those large, complex, realistic compositions I have hardly ever had time to complete. I was also planning a picture for an Art School competition with a small money prize for the winner. The given subject was The Marriage Feast at Cana where Christ did his first miracle before his mother and disciples – six fishermen, a doctor, lawyer, tax collector, artist, handsome young lad and the accountant, Judas. In Italy I looked for faces illustrating this social and psychological range and found some among sculpture in Italian museums, where the pictures I mostly enjoyed were small early tempera paintings in clear bright colours and labelled Primitive. Beside them the wild dramatic gestures and swirling drapery of big high Renaissance oil paintings seemed very dull, though I now know they were seen through brown layers of varnish that restorers would soon start to remove. But these richly dressed folk had obviously been painted to satisfy equally rich patrons, which was why Blake had detested such art, and why Ruskin had thought art from before Raphael’s time set better examples. St Peter’s, Rome, perplexed my working-class soul with its preposterously expensive efforts to impress. I thought the holy water holders unintentionally comic. The water lay in folds of sculptured drapery held up by cherubs happily kicking their legs – marble or bronze winged babies who would have been eight or nine feet high and weighed several tons had they stood on the floor. To what was visible within the great buildings I preferred the sight of them and the people and streets outside. I saw why Matthew Arnold said that the British should learn to build beautiful cities from Italy. Yet in Venice I enjoyed much of the labyrinthine mystery of Old Town Edinburgh.
Sketches from a Workman’s Hut and Building Site , 1954, ballpoint pen on notepaper
Marriage Feast at Cana , 1953 Indian ink on cartridge paper, 104 x 95 cm
Meanwhile I found several faces for my Marriage Feast picture among my fellow students, and the grief-stricken face of Mary at the head of the table came while doodling in a notebook. I thought it appropriate for the mother of many sorrows, though on this occasion she need not have looked so unhappy. She was a Jewish mother urging her son to perform his first miracle – turn water into wine. He did, after complaining that she should let him decide when it was time to start out on his miraculous career. (Years later an Orthodox couple I met liked this picture because they said it described a typical Jewish mother–son situation.) I meant to make this picture something I had not before attempted – a big oil painting on a hardboard panel. Back in Glasgow I had no time to do that. Mary and the disciples were drawn separately with Indian ink on cartridge paper, then cut out and pasted together on a larger sheet of paper backed by hardboard. Unable to imagine the face of Jesus I depicted the scene from his viewpoint at the foot of the table. Only his naked arms appear, one hand making a gesture of refusal, the other of acceptance. I drew them from my father’s arms and now see that I too have small, sturdy hands like his. They are the only successful part of the picture. A disciple’s head at the end of the left row peeled off and has never been replaced. Five years later I gave the picture as a wedding present to Malcolm Hood and his wife Joy, borrowed it back to have it photocopied, and left the original too long with the photocopying firm. When I went to collect it the firm no longer existed so the original was probably destroyed.
Minister with Ominous Street Scene , 1952, linocut with addition of pen and acrylic in 2006, 30.8 x 26.2 cm
Book of Jonah , 1954, lithograph, 15 x 25 cm
This picture ended my first two Art School years of the General Introductory Course, after which the students chose
