Joseph Gray's Camouflage

by Mary Horlock

  Maureen had tried hard to hold onto the fragments of her father. Did she ever realise Mary was doing the same? Mary didn’t just keep all of Joe’s paintings and etchings, she kept all his sketches, cartoons, letters, cards and lists, a book of his ‘bons mots’. Delicate little drawings in ink were folded between torn scraps of paper bearing a few squiggled lines. If one thing mattered, everything mattered. It was simple.

  I wonder if I shouldn’t leave her here, in her cluttered home in Marlow, an eccentric and entertaining hostess. She never cleaned or tidied up if there were people to talk to. She poured them a drink and they’d stay past midnight. She’d be remembered fondly, as a true original, but she became more cantankerous after Joe died. She could always be brittle, a maker of scenes, and as the years passed there was a growing risk that you could say or do a small, seemingly innocent thing and be met with a barrage of rebukes, usually dispensed over a genteel arrangement of cucumber sandwiches. Mary embodied contradictions just as Joe had done, only Joe had softened her edges.

  It wasn’t much fun, growing old without him.

  My mother was living in Australia, and so missed Joe’s funeral and final exhibition. But she wrote to Mary, telling her that she had at last enrolled in art school, and informing her of the births of her two daughters – Sarah Anne and Mary Kathleen. I’d like to pretend that Mary Gray was secretly pleased to hear that her name mirrored mine – but her response was unambiguous: ‘I don’t know why you have called her that, I have never liked either of my names.’

  I wasn’t keen on those names either. There were no other Marys in my class at school, which I took as a bad sign. I remember a friend telling me only old ladies were called Mary. Well, Mary Gray was now that. Victoria visited regularly, finding her both fun and infuriating depending on the day. But after one particularly difficult visit Victoria withdrew, hurt by Mary’s razor-sharp tongue.

  ‘I don’t know how long we didn’t talk for and I don’t even remember why, and of course I felt bad about it because she was old and vulnerable and alone. So one day I just thought it was silly and I picked up the phone and broke the silence. When Mary answered she sounded much like her old self.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve called,’ she told Victoria. ‘But you must come down to Marlow tomorrow. As soon as you can, in fact.’

  Sensing an emergency, Victoria did as she was told. When she arrived, however, things seemed quite normal – the house was as untidy as always and Mary full of life. She ushered Victoria into the kitchen and made her a cup of tea. Then, without further ceremony, she made her announcement:

  ‘I am moving into a home tomorrow. I have had my name down for some time and now they have a room and I should take it.’

  Victoria was amazed. ‘Where?’

  Mary smiled faintly. ‘The Old Vicarage, a place in Moulsford, it’s a lovely little village. I used to go there with your grandfather . . .’ Her eyes glazed over. She lost herself momentarily in a memory she couldn’t and wouldn’t share.

  Victoria had no idea what Moulsford meant and in that moment she did wonder if she knew Mary at all. But what confused her so completely was the state of the house. There was no sign of anything being packed up, there were no cases or trunks or boxes. She wanted to ask about it but then, as if understanding, Mary led her silently into the front room.

  It was the largest in the house but there was no space left to walk around. It was literally stacked wall to wall with canvases, mostly undated, many unfinished. There were also hundreds of drawings, sketches and prints crammed into portfolios propped in corners, and still more lying across a battered table where dust had been dredging for what looked like a decade. It was an extraordinary sight.

  ‘You’ll have to find a place for these,’ Mary said matter-of-factly. ‘After all, I cannot take them with me!’

  Just as Maureen would do decades later, Mary was downsizing, finally shedding some of her skin.

  Victoria, gripped by panic, managed a nod. ‘Are you quite sure about this?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Of course. I will only have a small room.’

  And there it was. Joe was finally coming home.

  It was too much for Victoria. She called Kitty in a panic. Kitty was the sensible sister, the problem-solver, who woke every morning before dawn to deliver cakes to London eateries. Quickly, Kitty hit upon a plan. She rearranged the next day’s deliveries and adapted her little red van for the transporting of art. Collecting Victoria the next day, they drove straight to Mary’s to get to work, not yet realising it would take them several days.

  ‘We were both in shock. We never realised how much Joe had left.’

  I had never realised it either. I had grown up with Joe’s pictures all around me and yet I didn’t question why. I suppose if he had been successful, commercial, well known, we wouldn’t have been left with much. They would have been hung in other people’s homes, and we’d never have had the money to buy them back.

  Imagine that.

  Joe never let go of anything and now we have done the same. Maureen rallied together with her daughters: Patricia, Fiona, Kitty and Victoria. Everything was discussed and examined. Joseph Gray was lost to us, but a Joseph Gray was different. They were framed and hung on walls. They weren’t hidden in attics or stacked up in spare rooms. They became the first things installed in a new home – a good-luck charm. When my sister Sarah and I set up home together in London we were each given a vivid seascape. We placed them side by side in our sitting room, and they looked so out of place people always asked: ‘Where on earth did they come from?’

  Now I have Joe’s haunting self-portrait staring out at me from the wall of my little study. We size each other up for a few minutes most days and I find myself gazing at the curve of his ear or the cleft of his chin. I haven’t framed all his pencil sketches – there are just too many. Delicate watercolours vie with torn figure studies. There are scribbled cartoons of fat old men dozing contentedly, drawn quickly on the back of memos about anti-aircraft defences. There are pencil portraits, sketches of shrubberies and trees. Some are so small and rough they could surely be discarded. I wouldn’t dare.

  Joe once asked what art ever did for us as a family. He didn’t expect an answer and at the time nobody offered one. Now I feel better equipped to try. Art has brought us together and kept us together. It has given us a language in common. It has allowed us to talk about the things Joe didn’t, to question things, to try things. It has challenged us, it has offered us connection, and it has given us comfort. Time will not alter any of that.

  Art?

  The truth is, we couldn’t be without it.

  Notes

  CAB = Cabinet Papers

  CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre

  HO= Home Office

  IWM = Imperial War Museum

  PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records

  TNA = The National Archives

  WO = War Office

  Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 The Daily Mail, 23 February 1966, p. 18

  2 Arts Review, 5 March 1966

  An Ending

  It’s important to know when a picture is finished – that precise moment when adding to it would be to destroy it. A life is not so definite. We don’t know when it will end and we rarely have control; we only hope to make sense of it and console ourselves by creating things around it.

  I’ve been rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard. I read it years ago but now I find myself drawn in once again. It is the story of Rabo Karabekian, a painter who served in US camouflage during the Second World War. (‘We were so good at camouflage that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this d
ay never been seen again!’1) Afterwards Karabekian turns his back on realism and finds success as an Abstract Expressionist, but he is constantly tormented by the question of whether he can actually draw. As the years pass he hides away, spending long hours working on a final masterpiece. His intention is for it to be exhibited only after his death. Eventually, at the insistence of a beguiling new house guest, Karabekian changes his plans. His master work is unveiled and hugely acclaimed. The artist’s talent is recognised and so he has his happy ending. And the mysterious painting? A vast panorama of all the horrors seen on the last day of the war, a precisely rendered picture, ‘so realistic it might have been a photograph’.2

  Joseph Gray achieved no such mastery over reality. He became lost in his own camouflage, and he was real, which makes the ending bittersweet. He never recaptured the eye-watering accuracy of his earliest works, and he never found the recognition he pretended not to want. Of course he’s not alone. There are many artists in the world and only very few achieve the credit that they deserve. But they make their mark in their own way, they persevere. Maureen thinks her father was an undiscovered genius. I don’t think that’s true. Joe was a good artist and he painted some astonishing works – his battlefields still give me goosebumps – but it was in camouflage where he excelled.

  As a man he was self-centred, proud and stubborn, loving and deeply loved. After he died the letters poured in. ‘Dear Joe. We are terribly distressed at the tragic news. We counted him a very dear friend and were proud to do so.’ There were hundreds; Mary kept them all. I am still opening folders, finding loose pages from undated letters. I have read them once and filed them away but now I read them again, just to be sure I haven’t missed something. I suspect I will keep on doing this. Nothing feels very finished.

  It seems fitting that I return to the house where I grew up, a house perched high on a cliff and facing out to sea. When my mother met my father she knew two simple facts about him: that he was training to be an accountant, just like her own father, and that he loved the sea, just as Joe had done. My father was only happy living close to water. When we moved back to England from Australia we swapped one coastline with another. Dad had no interest in art but Joe’s seascapes suited this house, his house, and echoed the views out of each window.

  I was thirteen when he fell ill and Maureen came to stay. She looked after Sarah and I whilst Mum stayed close to the hospital. Maureen cooked and cleaned and took us to school, pretending everything was fine and hoping it would be so. In the end she broke the news that Dad had died. I only had to see the gentle grief etched on her face to know, and I thought, at first, that I might die too. Maureen held me together, literally, and her strength surrounded and supported me in that first terrible year of being fatherless. I saw something then in her then, the sum of a certain kind of loss. I was missing things I didn’t yet know; I wouldn’t grow up under my father’s gaze, fight him or feel his support. Maureen showed that it was possible, and she bridged the growing gap between me and everyone else in the world.

  Back then Sarah and I lived in the attic rooms and kept the curtains closed. Now we are long grown up, and we have made homes and families of our own. The attic is crammed full of battered toys, photo albums, antiques, paintings, books – the accumulations of many different lives. I didn’t marry an artist, much to my mother’s relief, but her own pastel landscapes hover on the stairs, a reminder that, despite Joe’s advice, she went to art school and for a time worked as an artist. Her student portfolios are stacked away in a cupboard, swaddled in polythene. I used to go through them constantly when I was younger, intrigued that my own mother had this special talent, this other identity, this secret life. There was a stunning screenprint of a tiger prowling through grassland – the long stalks of grass mimicking and merging with his stripes. I can see him now, almost invisible but for those piercing eyes. Mum made multiple impressions, testing out different colours. I didn’t know it then but it was my first lesson in camouflage.

  It was my mother who taught me that art was difficult. When I was ten she had wanted Sarah and I to sit for our portraits. We took it in turns, sitting very still for an hour after school each night. We were desperate to see what she was doing, to jump up every minute and assess her progress, but she would do everything to shield us from her efforts. As the days passed her frown wouldn’t shift. She would shake her head, and brush back tears of frustration. They weren’t ready, she would say, they’re not right.

  I don’t know what happened to those portraits – they were thrown away or painted over – but I realised that capturing a likeness wasn’t easy. I also decided that I wouldn’t like to be an artist. Artists were idealised in our family but they were not ideal family members. They were too obsessed with their work and needed to spend all that time alone with it, ignoring everything else, often for little reward. Why do it? Of course, I now understand that to make someone see through your eyes is more than a little alluring. It is like the telling of a story.

  Now, when I visit my mother with my children, she puts us in the two spare bedrooms on the first floor, so we are close together. The largest one is light and airy, and that’s where I am now. On the walls all around me are Joe’s paintings. I cannot escape them, not that I’d want to.

  I stare at a painting I have looked at so many times before. It is a long and narrow landscape of trees beside a river, rich in autumnal colours, framed in heavy, dark-stained wood. My children are busy elsewhere and so, rather furtively, I take it off the wall. It feels strange to do this, almost like I am trespassing. This is a painting that has always known its place and I imagine the roots of each tree have sunk into the wall and now hold it secure. In fact, it comes away quickly. I blow off the dust and turn it over. When I worked at Christie’s the specialists would always look at the back of a painting first, searching for clues of provenance and history.

  ‘Every painting is a puzzle,’ is what they used to say.

  All I find here, though, is Orange Willows written on an old label on the reverse. I return the picture to face me and prop it against the bed. It must be a view of the river at Marlow. The trees are rust coloured, but how can they be willows? Their branches do not droop or sway in the wind as willows should. Instead they shoot outwards, bursting like explosions – star shells. The sky shows an ominous low line of black cloud. It is evening and a storm is coming, or perhaps has already arrived. My eyes scan the murky green of the bank. This one at least is signed and dated: ‘Joseph Gray 1948’.

  Recently, Maureen asked me if I knew why or when Joe stopped signing his paintings.

  ‘I can’t help wondering if he did it on purpose,’ she said. ‘Because if he didn’t sign them then they weren’t “authenticated”, and perhaps he thought they couldn’t then be sold. It was his way of holding onto them.’

  It’s an interesting idea: to sign and date a painting is the ‘finishing touch’, and it’s also about laying claim. I am reminded of something closer to home. There’s a museum of local history near our house, and in the cafeteria can be found a rather moody mural depicting the town seafront. What’s strange to me is that I saw it develop through many stages, in my own home, years ago.

  ‘You painted that,’ I remind my mother when we chance upon it during one visit.

  My words come out like an accusation and she looks suitably guilty.

  ‘Yes, I did. Oh dear. It’s not at all like I wanted it to be . . .’

  She tries to usher me away but I stand fixed firm. I scan the mural from left to right, feeling distinctly uncertain. There’s no signature, but I know she painted it.

  ‘It’s very odd,’ I say. ‘It’s not how I remember.’

  Mum gestures at the smudged silhouette of buildings.

  ‘It wouldn’t be! It was completely different. I put in all the details of the houses here, there was a lot more in the foreground, and the sky was a completely different colour.’ She pauses, lets out a small sigh. ‘It was commissioned by a local designer
and when I presented him with the end result he said it was too detailed and so he painted out over the houses with dark paint, and made me change the sky! I was furious and disowned the whole thing.’ She shakes her head. ‘I mean, honestly, that taught me not to work to commission. But don’t tell anyone! I didn’t know it had ended up here. How strange.’

  How strange indeed, and I’m afraid I’ve just told everyone.

  Back in the spare room and I turn to one of Joe’s large, proud still lifes. As Joe grew older and became less mobile he painted endless still lifes of flowers from his garden. This one is a glorious mix of roses, chrysanthemums, irises and forget-me-nots in a tall vase set on a blue cloth. I wonder if there’s anything on the back and try to take it off the wall, but it’s heavier than I expect. It comes free – nail and all – and for a minute I am swaying with it, about to fall backwards and have it come crashing on top of me. It takes some effort to steady myself and bring it safely to the floor, then I catch my breath.

  This still life and I, we glare at one another for a few minutes. I scrape my eyes across its whole surface, taking in the lively curls of paint. It’s better and more detailed than the willows. I can see Joe’s brushwork exactly. I’ve looked at these pictures so often that I think I know them, but I’ve only ever seen them on the wall, in a frame. I turn the painting around to see the back, hoping to find a few clues there. But whilst the painted surface is full of life, the clean, bare back gives me nothing at all. No date. No title. Not even a label on the frame. All I have is a messy hole in the wall, where it broke free of the plaster.