On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  The Brueghel was in colour, golden with the last glow of that setting sun on the blue horizon, far away across a shimmering green sea. This immense expanse of light, flooding from near to far, gives an almost cosmological character to the painting, illuminating the curve of the turning earth and sending shadows into the field’s ridged furrows, so sharp they look as if they could be plucked like the strings of some outlandish instrument. The soil is hard, parched and brown, but spring’s greenness infuses the landscape, sheep are beginning to find something to eat and a partridge settles fatly on a bough. No other painting has ever made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas, in their queer medieval costumes; that we may change but the scenery does not.

  For no matter how strange those shoes, with their clodhopping toes; no matter how odd the pleats of the ploughman’s tunic or the plump knickerbockers of the shepherd staring gormlessly up at the heavens, this is a world we know (at least as far as the stately galleons); a northern landscape through which you or I might clamber even now. An airy globe where the seasons come and go forever, and a horse’s backside looks just the same across half a thousand years, this timelessness will turn out to be part of the picture’s highly original narrative. The scene ought to look as medieval as the workers who appear within it, like characters on a stage, and yet it never looks half as archaic as certain black-and-white photographs taken just a century ago.

  The Brueghel moved from Nottingham to Edinburgh, where my mother eventually had the plate framed. It would be my first picture too in a way; or at least the first I ever saw, other than my father’s paintings.

  James and Betty met at Edinburgh College of Art after the war, in which he had flown as a pilot. Demobbed, and desperate to get back to the easel, he still wore his RAF uniform to classes, as servicemen often did in those straitened times. Instead of the traditional demob suit awarded to each man returning from the hostilities, my father had used his voucher to have a local tailor work with yards of wool cloth bought in Calcutta during the war. But what had looked a rich tawny brown in the dark heat of an Indian shop proved nearer to pink in the cold Scottish light. Better the uniform than the embarrassment.

  James went to the college first as a sixteen-year-old, before the outbreak of war. I want to call him the prodigy he was. My mother revered him for his intellect and draughtsmanship, but he seems not to have sensed it while they were students. A first attempt to woo this beautiful chestnut-haired girl from England went badly awry. Seeing her in the distance, coming towards him down the long corridor by the sculpture court, he mustered the clumsiest form of words. He could get her a ticket, he said, to the annual college revel, where students dressed up in fantastical costumes (often as artists: my father had such Spanish looks he naturally transformed into Velázquez). My mother replied that she was quite capable of getting one for herself. It was another year before they spoke again, twelve long and wasted months. But this time another kind of accident brought them together. My father had locked himself out of his attic studio in a building on George Street (today a boulevard of restaurants and boutiques which no student could possibly afford) and tried to climb back in through a skylight. He fell, broke his ankle in three places and ended up in the Royal Infirmary. By now they were both postgraduate teachers at the college, and almost the only young people in the staffroom. My mother felt obliged to visit my father in hospital. It was here that they fell in love.

  The lives of our parents before we were born are surely the first great mystery. For me their stories are backlit with a silver-screen radiance: my father and mother painting from dawn to last light, sometimes meeting only at midnight; attempting the dangerously steep rock upon which Edinburgh Castle stands – illegal, indeed the police were waiting at the top – and driving through snowstorms in an unheated car to London to see tapestries from Egypt and paintings by Cézanne. My father teaches life classes, among his models the old man who once posed for Eros in Piccadilly and the teenage Sean Connery, then an Edinburgh milkman. I know about my father’s incessant drawing and his selling of a portrait – the only conventional likeness he ever painted – to pay for dinner with Betty at the city’s expensive French restaurant. I know about their deep love of work. Here is my father fairly attacking the canvas, always driven onwards, no time to rest his mind (or cigarette); here is my mother at the sink where the students cleaned their brushes on the wall above in an ever-growing carapace of paint. He teaches night school five days a week; she walks miles to meet him from her digs. On Mondays they go to the Cameo Cinema to see Les Enfants du Paradis, Orson Welles’s Othello and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. My father has a record player but no money for records. ‘Twist and Shout’ is the only disc I remember from childhood.

  In 1953, they marry. He is thirty (a one-woman man, who seems to have been waiting for Betty all his life); she is twenty-six. After living and working together in a series of studios, they move into the Victorian house down by the waters of the Firth of Forth where I grew up. My father had the main bedroom to paint in; out of a chaos of empty cigarette packets and old grocery boxes, paint-encrusted saucers and palettes, oil colours hardening as they oozed from the body of crushed tubes, the radio wrapped in polythene to save it from spatters, he made works of extraordinary serenity and perfection. I loved the smell of turps and oil paint that stole out from beneath his door and crave the faintest hint of it, still, like an addict; it takes me back to him, and the one solace that he was lucky enough to be able to work as he did, abstract and semi-abstract paintings, day into night and even next morning, right up to his early death of cancer.

  My mother no longer painted after she was married. She used to say that there was only room for one painter; but I hope that it was because the warmth of wool drew her to weaving, and the soft warp and weft of tapestry. She worked in another bedroom, her loom a large iron rectangle like an empty picture frame that slowly filled up with images in wool. When I was a child, she wove fire trees and winter landscapes, scenes from poems – Malory and Tennyson – songs and fables. I remember ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ with a puny pink hominid at the centre of a gaping crowd, and a marvellous kaleidoscope of changing patterns and colours that might have been the rose window in some medieval cathedral. She wove the landscape of the Scottish Borders by the light of a sickle moon, a vision of misty hills, sheep and a secret rabbit haloed in its hole; a partridge sits plump in an oak.

  My parents had hundreds of images in the house – photographs scissored from newspapers, reproductions pinned to walls, postcards from distant galleries sent by their friends. Growing up I collected these in a shoebox, beginning with the cave paintings of Lascaux and ending, I seem to think, with Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte sent by an American student of my father’s all the way from Chicago. But the Brueghel was special, sacred, a world both light and dark and plainly mesmerising; a narrative that any child could follow, and yet powerfully strange, even to adults.

  It hung in the hall, and then in the kitchen, and eventually in the small cottage in the Scottish Borders where my parents later went to live. We looked at it by night and by day; by chance and on purpose; on the way to and from school, over meals, on our way upstairs to bed. In the cottage, it hung directly above the old table shoved against the damp wall in the kitchen where we could stare at it while eating Heinz tomato soup and Marmite on toast.

  We see pictures in time and place, and in the context of our own lives; we cannot see them otherwise. So even though I know this painting evokes the first song of spring, it speaks of deep winter to me, partly because of the sepulchral gloom of that nearly windowless cottage by the Tweed. Its furrowed darkness somehow had an affinity with the brown soil of the dank December fields and the grain and dust of Borders farms; and our hut of a cottage seemed completely of that era too, practically medieval to us chi
ldren. Yet the ploughman’s pleats are stiff as a modern gymslip and his queer headgear resembles a motorbike helmet; the dog’s no different than any dog today, nor the sheep, nor the birds. And for me it spoke, and still speaks, of the enticing thrill of theatres as well as the countryside. Brueghel puts us up in the gods, in the balcony with the ploughman, while the play goes on far below in the breeze-riffled waters. There is seating further down in the stalls, where a man fishes the waves without noticing this drama. But nobody bothers with him.

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus was an object as well as an image, and I was aware of the mildew on the mount and the thickness of the paper on which a printer, far away in the Flanders from which this painting originally came, had laid down these rich and perfect tones. As a small child I did not realise that it was a reproduction; it had the same status for me as the pictures in books: small worlds into which one looked, as into a doll’s house or poem. Surely they were all unique? And this picture of Icarus felt right for its size; the little legs disappearing into the sea like tiny joke limbs, as if this was one of Aesop’s fables rather than a solemn Greek tragedy. I did not know that there was an original painting in Brussels; that it was much larger and only comparatively recently discovered when my mother extracted its reproduction from the book. Or that people might one day say that this was a version of a lost original. I didn’t know where it hung or that it was painted in oils. It was a picture, not a painting; a scene, a story, a vision, not a panel worked in pigment. You could take it off the wall and stare down into it, discovering the lone black sheep and the strange decapitated face in the trees through a magnifying glass.

  This picture hangs in my London home now, where my daughters do not notice – as Brueghel surely intended, with his extraordinary pictorial ingenuity, slowing down the action as he slows down the eye – those flailing legs plunging into the water. The fall of a miniature Icarus. The figure is so small as to be immediately overlooked, dwarfed by the prominent rump of the horse. Indeed, most visitors looking at the painting in the Musée des Beaux Arts, which gave W. H. Auden’s famous Brueghel poem its title, miss the tragedy at first; which is the point of both poem and picture.

  There is no real foreground and background here. Every part of this painting speaks to the next. Icarus drowns in the same sea that men fish for a living – the very men you are looking at. The pale yellow sun that radiates across the high sky and the wide waters, the force that melts the wax of his wings, which fells him, punishing his hubris, is also what makes everything visible. Everything is happening at once; everything is connected.

  The ploughman ploughs his magnificently sharp furrow, echoed in his own gymslip pleats. He might be turning the brown soil of any lowlands landscape, Lincolnshire, Flanders, the Borders. Trading vessels sail on across the sea, forging on with their business. The sun casts an extraordinary aura over the indifferent world and life continues, just as death and disaster occur unheeded. The villagers simply go on.

  All of my mother’s images have something of Brueghel about them; she even painted a series of seasons, and of children’s games, just as he did. She sees the world in fables and festivities, and in its full beauty; her humour rises up, evergreen, despite the formative anguish. Auden emphasises pain in his poem about the picture – torture, martyrdom, sudden death, the scenes of horror painted by the old masters, how they ‘take place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. But there is infinite beauty in Brueghel’s scene and even something undeniably comedic about the ploughman’s pudding-bowl helmet, the shepherd who is still looking dumbly up at the sky long after the fall and even in the silly tumbling legs. William Carlos Williams’s great American poem about the picture comes much closer to my mother’s celebratory view of life, which loves the seasons and the sunshine.

  According to Brueghel

  when Icarus fell

  it was spring

  a farmer was ploughing

  his field

  the whole pageantry

  of the year was

  awake tingling

  near

  the edge of the sea

  concerned

  with itself

  sweating in the sun

  that melted

  the wings’ wax

  unsignificantly

  off the coast

  there was

  a splash quite unnoticed

  this was

  Icarus drowning

  Brueghel’s masterpiece makes me think of the way my mother does not quite notice disaster, or at least does not take it in as others might; not the war, the dogfight over Chapel, or the fallen boy-soldiers. She looks the other way, at the springtime not the splash. In her late eighties, never having been ill before, she suffered a heart attack. All the way through the urgent journey across the winter countryside to hospital, through the operation and beyond, she kept her eyes closed so that the last sights she saw would not be the nameless wires and contraptions swinging around inside the ambulance, or the faces of strangers in the hospital glare, but inner visions of her own life and family. She flees death, attends no funerals, does not countenance annihilation. The hollow cake.

  And perhaps it all begins with the claustrophobic silence of home, the sense of abandonment that came with George’s weekly departures and Veda’s retreat to the kitchen, and then Betty’s longing to escape the sepulchral gloom of this walled-up childhood. Home is where nobody ever says anything by way of explanation about loss, death or tragedy; where it is possible for George and Veda to explain nothing about anything, for a whole childhood to pass, with all its racing school weeks and Sunday longueurs, its endless summer holidays and cyclical autumns, without anyone ever telling her anything – for the secret of her own origins to be kept entirely from her. The catastrophe is happening and everyone is looking away. Everyone, except the grandmother who desperately wanted to see her.

  Nobody notices the legs the first time. Nobody sees much beyond the ploughman at the front of the image, and the vast span of sunshine receding all the way back to its source. We might never connect the sun with the legs at all, if we didn’t look harder, look closer, search the image for all of its content. Icarus flew too close to the heat; the sun’s rays melted the wax of his wings and he died. The current title of the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, gets it about right. (Titles are a comparatively modern invention, and susceptible to change.) First there is the enchanting landscape, and then there is the legendary fall. Except that it has already happened. Look closer still, and you may see the hint of a hand thrashing above the waves; Icarus has fallen into the sea and is now fighting for his life. But the green sea is closing over.

  Images hold the world before us, unwavering, unchanging, fixed before our eyes. But we may look again, and again, seeing and understanding more. The focus shifts, the relationships change, the meaning deepens every time.

  My mother discovered the truth about who her father really was by looking at an image; looking and seeing almost by chance. At some point in her teenage years, she began to examine what her adoptive parents had told her; or perhaps she began to question their authority. At the same time she had a growing sense of her own appearance, and a great wondering about where she originally came from; whose face might have an echo in her own. One day, an official photograph was required for some now-forgotten purpose. She took the bus to a professional studio in Skegness. The shot was taken and the picture posted to Chapel. My mother looked at herself and saw George.

  The proportions, the length of the face, the shared cast of the features: all were graphically condensed in greyscale. A mechanical object, with its indifferent eye, had confirmed the truth. Miniaturised and distilled in black and white, on this stiff little card, Betty sees herself as others see her; and the photograph says she is his.

  What she did next has baffled me. For my mother simply contained the knowledge. She did not rush to tell – or accuse – George, not that day or any oth
er, even though he had lied to her over and again. First Betty grew up believing that George and Veda were her birth parents. Then he told her that she was adopted. And then he allowed her to go on believing this for years without revealing that she was his natural daughter. But perhaps my mother got her own back in the end for she never told him what she knew, or that she had learned who he really was through the pure and simple evidence of her eyes.

  Betty would come home from the grammar school, and then the post office, to sit silently opposite her father at dinner. Perhaps the new knowledge was another barrier against him, her innocence reinforced by his guilt. In this moment she determines to be as unlike him as possible; and perhaps we really can will it. For somehow she managed to give me the happiest of childhoods without any pattern or example, having experienced nothing like it herself.

  How did George think he could fly so high above her? How did he ever believe he could keep the truth of his paternity from his own daughter? He seemed to think that this belated story of her adoption, this poor picture of events, would suffice. Did it never occur to him that his clever child might sense the connection between them, observe the similarity, guess at the truth, and that she might then wonder how on earth she had come into being? And that when she knew, there must come an additional realisation that George had betrayed poor Veda as well; that there must be another mother somewhere else. Perhaps she might even suspect that this tale of adoption had been concocted as a fiction or cover-up behind which Veda – and of course George himself – could carry on living their respectable lives in the village of Chapel St Leonards.