Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Gradually, we began to form our own favourites among the various schools of art. I was most profoundly moved by the Flemish Primitives, by Van Eyck, Memlinc, David, Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, Geertgen Tot Sint Jans. Possibly my Belgophilia was again at work, for I had recently made myself familiar with the Groenings museum in Bruges. At any rate, my dominant tastes have remained the same until this day. And very lucky for me, as it turns out: what I most desire is unacquirable, even by the purse of the multimillionaire. So I have always been able to take comfort, as I have when viewing some item of dress and jewellery in a shop window, by saying, ‘Well, you can’t have it’ – and have passed on, calmed and appeased.

  Not unnaturally, when I think of the treasure I should most like to possess in all the world, it is Van Eyck’s The Mystic Lamb, in the church of Saint Bavon, in Ghent. (‘Well, you can’t have it.’) I pass on, freed from desire. Anyhow, where should I put it?

  Miss Hedgeland taught us to pronounce most of the names wrong. She made something mysterious of Pollaiuolo, and as for pronouncing the Flemings, had very small idea. Few people have. I once asked a Flemish friend to write down the proper pronunciation of the names of half a dozen great painters. I have tried these out myself, but finding them quite misunderstood in England, have given up this somewhat snobbish habit. Who is Van de Hoos? Van Ake? Gairtgen tot Sint Yons? I have learned to stop it. But I still pronounce the name ‘Brueghel’ correctly. It is ‘Brerghel’ (with a marked guttural). It is not ‘Broygel’, as it would be if, in German spelling it were ‘Breughel’.

  I learned who were the Italian painters in the various schools and listed them carefully. I longed to travel extensively in France and Italy, but it was many years before I got as far as the Uffizi.

  I took an examination in all this, for what was then known as ‘Matric’. Never before have I sat down to a paper that really seemed to be child’s play. It was one of my first few scholastic successes, English apart. In geometry I distinguished myself by getting a plain O, which did not seem in the least like Giotto’s.

  To Miss Hedgeland, then, I owe what was to be one of the deepest pleasures of my life. On leaving school I read as deeply into the subject as I could; I profoundly admired Max Friedländer. In his remarkable book, Art and Connoisseurship, there is the reproduction of an extremely simple line-drawing by the sixteenth-century German, Wolf Hüber, of The Mondsee and Schaffberg. Why it so snagged my imagination, I do not know: but it has figured many times in my dreams. It was pure magic, to me – and who can account for magic? I have never succeeded in obtaining a reproduction for myself.

  Here I have, for a moment to pause: and to say that in this whole field, I am the merest amateur, though I think I might have made something of a living as an art speculator. When I came into contact, on B.B.C. ‘Critics’, with experts, I shrank with humility: though that didn’t stop me from talking vigorously about whatever we had been seeing that week. I must say they treated me (most of them) with kindness and indulgence.

  In the fifties, Charles and I had enough money to acquire a modest collection of our own.

  My first serious purchase was a matter of pure chance. It had become my habit to wander weekly through the galleries of W.1, usually coming out ‘by that same door that in I went’. But one day, going into the Redfern Galleries in Cork Street, I was struck with excitement. Here was an Australian painter, Sidney Nolan, whose name I did not know at all, few in England did at that time. These were strange, authoritative paintings of unfamiliar subjects, bizarre figures in landscapes that seemed to extend over a whole continent. They were the first to be seen in London of the ‘Ned Kelly’ series. I called Charles in to see them at once: and we bought, for a sum we didn’t have to think about – we would have to think about the purchase price of a Nolan now – ‘Kelly 1954’, perhaps the prototype Kelly, and the most widely reproduced. This shows Ned, in his armour made from ironmongery from the kitchen, astride his horse, his back turned to the spectators, his gun, which also looks homemade, under his arm. He is facing an almost empty landscape, perhaps a few far distant gum-trees. The sky is cobalt-blue, with two hump-backed clouds, and a few darker drifts of cloud that might be gun-smoke. The gum-trees? They might equally be a line of his advancing enemies, who shot it out with him at the Siege of Glenrowan, and later hanged him. There is a rectangular hole at the top of his square black helmet. This one must interpret for oneself. To me, it symbolises the fact that to many Australians in his own time, Kelly, though real enough, was merely a myth. It is a myth sitting there on horseback.

  Since then, we were able to acquire, in those early days, a Leda, a magnificent painting of a dead soldier on the beaches of Gallipoli; and a mysterious, sea-borne painting of Ayer’s Rock, which is a thousand miles from any sea. Two of his paintings he has lent us, for so long as he wishes us to keep them.

  Australia was founding a genuine ‘school’ of painting, and astonishingly quickly too. Russell Drysdale appears to be the founder of the style, much more so than Dobell. Arthur Boyd is a fine painter, in his own peculiar idiom, with his emphasis on aboriginal life; but I believe the best of them all is Nolan, and, that though he may have his fluctuations of fortune, while, like Picasso, he may be experimenting to the point where he can not hope to bring everything off, he will be regarded as such. Some critic wrote recently that Nolan was out of the main stream of contemporary art. For God’s sake, who wants to be in one? Did El Greco? And it seems to me that the mainstream today, in so far as it is discernible, is carrying along with it much that is shoddy, meaningless, or just uncertain. Sometimes it reminds me of a stream carrying along a miscellany of tin cans and derelict perambulators. If anyone told me that I was in the ‘mainstream’ of the contemporary novel, I should not regard it as a compliment. Marcel Proust was not in any stream but his own.

  Among other things, including a Chinnery on loan, I have a good Greek island painting by Michael Ayrton, a drawing of myself by Mervyn Peake (1949), a Neizvestney sculpture drawing. I have no water-colours, except for a weedily romantic Varley.

  But Varley brings me to a fisherman’s story: the story about ‘the one that got away’.

  In 1945 and 1946, I was pretty poor, though not so poor as I had been. Whenever there was a show of English water-colours at Agnew’s, I attended it. How absurdly cheap they were then! One day, I was sufficiently carried away to put my name down for Harpignie’s La Tour Saint Jacques: which was going for forty-two pounds. After this daring stroke, I continued my way up Bond Street: and suddenly, Fildes-like visions came over me of Andrew and Lindsay starving, clinging to my skirts, outside the Casual Ward. I raced back and cancelled the sale. It is a sorrow to me, to this day. Could I have managed forty-two quid? Yes, just. And what would that lovely water-colour fetch today?

  But then, I have never bought paintings as an investment.

  I also lost a fine, erotic Etty, of a pearly and roseate nude with a fat bottom and decorous Victorian hairstyle, bathing in a studio background. All for sixty-eight pounds. I hadn’t got sixty-eight pounds, or thought I hadn’t. Relatively few people have a fondness for Etty: I have. He seems to me to have had a very rapturous time of it.

  Just as a far greater painter, Renoir, had a rapturous time of it. For the first time in the Chester Barnes collection, in Philadelphia (which seems almost as difficult to penetrate as Fort Knox), I found myself a little satiated. Yet I suppose that, after Monet, he is my favourite Impressionist. Almost everyone takes joy in the Impressionists; Monet’s Terrasse de Ste Addresse, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, can conjure up the pure joy of a warm, breezy day, when everyone is happy and life has no cares. Sisley is, to me, a particular delight. But I have no sadness that I do not, and cannot hope to, own one. Some of my American friends do, and I can see them when I like.

  There is one way – this is purely idiosyncratic – in which painting has been more of a solace to me in times of distress or pure misery than either music or literature. In the National Galler
y there a large painting by Niccolo dell’ Abbate, in which the miniscule figures of – I think – Abraham and Isaac are shown in the foreground against a vast blue, mountainous. winding landscape. It is not a great painting, it is indeed, not one of my more eccentric favourites, as is the little Simon Marmion in the early French collection.

  But in front of Niccolo, I used to sit, and gradually allow myself to be absorbed into it, stepping into the frame and travelling on, to where I did not know, through the mysterious d1stances. No one knew where I was. No one could get at me. I was safe. This was not, I emphasise, anything to do with mystical experience. It was an act of will and imagination.

  It did not last long. After that I had to go out into the rumble and flutter of Trafalgar Square, and get my bus home.

  6. Fever Hospital: 1922

  In 1922 I contracted nasal diphtheria – a mild form, I believe, as it goes. I was then nearly ten years of age. I was sent to Stockwell Fever Hospital (no private patients here, and my mother could not have paid for me if there had been) where I spent some six Dickensian weeks. I say ‘Dickensian’ because it seems to me now that the circumstances of imprisonment there would have been well within the range of Dickens’ imagination.

  I did not feel particularly ill: my daily plague was a nasal irrigation, which I came to tolerate. I can’t say that the food was horrible – but to me monotonous: because I had an allergy to fish, I lunched every day for those six weeks on mince and rice-pudding. (It is perhaps an oddity that I object to neither now.) But after that, I was hungry. For tea, a couple of pieces of bread scraped with margarine, and perhaps, as a treat, marmalade. But because I was not then quite ten, I was denied supper. I had to watch while the trays went round the ward to pretty well everyone except me. Also, I was cold: complained repeatedly of this to my mother, begging her to induce them to give me another blanket, but my letters were heavily censored, whole lines blacked out, and this worried her to death.

  My comforts were the magazines she sent me, the letters I constantly wrote to her, and occasional visits from an elderly Benedictine priest, who never attempted to convert me, or even pray with me, but simply to give me twenty minutes’ fun.

  Not all the children were unhappy. Some had come from such miserable homes that hospital was Paradise. There was a little boy – much younger than I – who was called by all ‘Bloody Bert’; this because ‘bloody’ was his only known term of endearment. ‘Bloody nurse!’ he would cry, entwining his fragile arms, like sticks of celery, round the neck of a favourite.

  Most of the nurses were kind. But I happened to fall foul of a bad one. Her name I shan’t give: I shall call her Nurse Birch. She took a dislike for me which I now recognise as pathological. Because I happened to speak standard English – you can’t come of a theatrical family without doing that – she thought me ‘above myself’. Her habit was to read out to the whole ward my letters to my mother and – worse – my mother’s to me. Having received the expected chorus of titters, she would remark: ‘Pamela, you are too old for your age.’ I remember her as singularly without colour. None in her lips, her eyes, her cheeks: I suppose such hair as appeared beneath her cap was a palish brown. She was tall, bony, slowmoving.

  On night-duty, I dreaded her. She would usually fetch me a bed-pan and sit me up on it (I would never demand one till the last vital moment) but then leave me there, despite my pleas, for any time up to three hours. She was the only dyed-in-the-wool sadist I have ever personally encountered in my life.

  Why did I not complain of her to the Benedictine Father? Because I did not dare. Somehow I was afraid the complaint would leak back to her, and be visited on me. (Schoolchildren often have much the same fears.) When I was at last released from hospital, I told my mother the whole story. She went with it to the Governor, and heard to her amazement that there had been many other complaints (disregarded) about Nurse Birch. But mine clinched it, and this dreadful woman was at last dismissed.

  Apart from her persecutions, I settled down, for a cosseted child, fairly well into hospital life – after all, it would come to an end some time. There were the delights of The Magnet, The Girl’s Friend, The Gem, and several other magazines of the same kind: there was the joy of my food – yes, mince, rice-pudding, bread and scrape – and of the nights when Nurse Birch was not on duty.

  I believe a real attempt was made to provide a happy Christmas for the children, though I was released before that. But I remember Bloody Bert weeping because he was to be released too. He had so looked forward to it! He was going back to a home more wretched than any I could imagine.

  There was one singular horror: that was the regular aperient; a breakfast-cup full of warm liquorice powder. This was wholly disgusting, and cascara sagrada, when permitted, was a treat. One day, due for the liquorice powder treatment, I overheard one nurse saying to another that the dispensary was almost out of it: so, in a burst of spirit, when my cup came reeking round, I deliberately spilled it. The ruse was successful. But imagine a ward-full of children daily and madly straining their bowels in the hope of escape from this particular torment.

  I got better, of course. First I was allowed up in a chair, then was permitted to wander round the ward, and at last my mother came for me. She had brought with her a dress she had specially made for me, of peacock blue, and pretty voluminous: an unhappy choice, as it turned out, as I was as yellow as a lemon and my legs and arms were like sticks. We went home by tramcar, through the liberating streets: and then – she said – I ate more slices of bread and real butter than she had ever seen anyone eat in her life.

  Conditions in fever hospitals have doubtless changed. I think now that it would be impossible for a child to complain nightly of cold without being given a second blanket. Liquorice powder appears to be a thing of the past. Nurse Birch, herself, has disappeared from history: I think she can have left no successors. But of course I don’t know. She must have made her ghostly reappearance as a wardress in the concentration camps.

  Apart from those several miseries I cannot believe that I was unhappy at all times. In fact, I certainly wasn’t.

  Still, my memories of this time are necessarily vague. Perhaps they have to be. But I do not remember, even once, crying myself to sleep. I had too much to look forward to – eventually.

  7. Travels I

  I had not been abroad till I was fifteen: in this, all my children were to be far luckier. Then, I went to Belgium with my mother and my Aunt Kalie, first to Knokke, and then to Bruges. I have written so often in my novels, both as total background or in part, of Bruges and the Belgian coast, that I shall say no more here: except that of all cities, Bruges arouses in me the greatest nostalgia. The attribution of ‘Belgophilia’, recently applied to me, is just.

  I first crossed the Atlantic with Charles and with George Bosworth, then Personnel Manager to the English Electric Company, of which Charles was a director, in 1954, for a visit to the Canadian associates. It was a poor introduction to a North Atlantic crossing, for we had only just traditionally toasted the Captain (which it is well to do early in a trip, as one might not feel so enthusiastic later) on the old Empress of Scotland, then creaking and groaning into the last of her days – when we ran across the tail of one of those hurricanes with women’s names. This is a nomenclature against which Women’s Lib might well raise its voice. (Why not Hurricanes Edgar, Freddy, Gerald, Hector?)

  Anyway, the night was rough-going. We went to our cabins after dinner, the tablecloth soaked with water by the stewards, so that the glasses might not slip about, to find the deadlights up in our stateroom. We were awake for the greater part of that night. Sleep was impossible. The furniture and luggage kept falling down. I remember making to Charles, with the idea of heartening us both, the idiotic remark – ‘Worse things happen at sea.’ I discovered that if I went to the lavatory, I could only get back to bed by taking a running jump, which, Charles assured us, was a funny sight. The ship creaked horribly, and the gales roared. We were not being helped
by the fact that, at intervals, our Irish steward would come in, cross himself, and say, ‘By the grace of God, we shall come through.’

  Luckily, neither of us had (or has) the least tendency to be seasick. Whether Charles was scared, I don’t know: but he read a book about the Lake poets serenely enough. I prayed for a bit, then read Nicholas Blake’s The Whisper in the Gloom, which was remarkably successful in holding my attention. I think I had one minor triumph over Charles, for at five a.m. I had had enough of the other Blake’s invisible worm, that flies in the night in the howling storm. I laid myself down, and slept deeply till nine o’clock when – I admit – Charles got up to breakfast (bravado, I always feel, as the ship was still listing at 30 degrees) but I did not. However, by ten-thirty he and I and George Bosworth – the last seemed to have had a thoroughly placid night – were up on deck. (At the end of that voyage, we were presented with little cards, showing that we had been in a 9-force gale, so that nobody could doubt our travellers’ yarn.)

  When the storm had calmed down, we sailed on a lake-like sea for hours, it seemed, past the island of Anticosti, where I was told there were bears and – could it be? – a ruined opera house, like the one in Manaos. Charles finished the Lake Poets.