Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  The milkman moved in soon after Christmas and I never went into my parents’ bed again. He left his wife, and the teacher, for my mother, although ironically my mother had a miscarriage, whereas the other two women went on to have babies. When my mother miscarried the doctor thought she had performed an abortion on herself, querying, ‘What did you use, a knitting needle?’ which hurt her feelings so much that my grandmother waded in to give this doctor a piece of her mind, which was a very fierce thing. But then she got pregnant by him again and my half-brother was born at home in September 1967. My brother, Neil, appeared and he was the golden boy. They weren’t married, but in my mind my brother’s birth cemented their relationship. The milkman was twenty-seven, four years younger than her; maybe she wanted to be with him because of his patina of glamour. He was attractive in a brutal, brooding way. He was dangerous, he was flashy and he drove a flash car – a poor man’s Tom Jones. It was a relative glamour, I suppose.

  When I was seven I spent Christmas with my father and his new wife in their small terraced house in Chelmsford and we watched Thunderbirds together. I got a pea-green Thunderbird 2 model for my Christmas present. I remember eating bacon and tomatoes for lunch, and the taste of tinned tomatoes. He kept in sporadic contact for a few years, but then he did what many men did at that time, and still do: he lost contact with his children. Fathers for Justice are a tiny minority. There should be another group with a much larger membership called Fathers for an Easy Life. When parents say it’s too upsetting for the children to maintain contact, I think they mean it’s too upsetting for the parents. My father made the decision not to see my sister and me any more. Seeing us meant dealing with a wound that he couldn’t face attending to, so he let it fester rather than intervening and keeping the relationship alive. Instead, he left us. My dad became a ghost then. When he left, I felt bereft. The rug was pulled out from under me. As far as I’m aware, it is the event that has had the largest impact on me in my life. Emotionally I went numb, I closed down. And that’s when I handed everything over to Alan Measles.

  My stepfather was soon showing his real colours. My first and only nosebleed was from being whacked round the back of the head by him when I was six. We were sitting at the kitchen table and I watched the red splats of blood fall from my nose and clash luminously with the orange and white checked tablecloth. I didn’t know why he hit me, what reason is there to hit a kid round the head? In subsequent violence my mother would implore, ‘Not the head! Not the head!’

  2

  I ABSOLUTELY COULDN’T COUNTENANCE HIM LOSING

  MY MOTHER’S POTTY training technique, which worked, was to plonk me on the potty with the instruction, ‘Don’t get up until you’ve done one,’ so I sat there for hours playing with my toy cars along the edge of the sofa. I enjoyed being on the potty so much I didn’t want to get off, so I shuffled around the garden on it until the base eventually wore out. When I did learn to use the toilet, at first I would sit on it back to front facing the cistern so that I could play with Lego and toy cars on the cistern lid. Years later when my stepfather burst in on me once while I was leaning over playing with a racing car on the mat in front of the lavatory, he snorted disparagingly, ‘Bloody ridiculous!’ because I was twelve by then. It was while I was on the toilet that I first began making my imaginary world.

  The focal point of my imaginary realm was my teddy bear. Alan Measles was bought for me for my first Christmas when I was nine months old. He was a yellow teddy bear, about ten inches tall, with little black bead eyes; a cheap one, not a posh nor particularly flash one, just a workaday lump of foam, but he did the job. One day he got too close to the fire and his ear burned off so the neighbour knitted a new ear. He wore an orange boiler suit that my Aunty Mary knitted for him. He is thin now because he was loved to bits. He’s the only artefact I have left from my childhood.

  My first memory is of meeting the boy next door, Alan Barford, who was slightly older than me, through the fence on the front lawn. I can also vaguely remember having measles when I was three and looking out of the window and seeing deep snow – it was the severe winter of 1963. I had to spend a lot of time in bed and my teddy and I bonded at that point. He became Alan because Alan was my next-door neighbour and Measles because I had the measles, and that’s what I called him, Alan Measles.

  Alan Measles was the leader, the benign dictator, of my made-up land, the glamorous, raffish, effortlessly handsome, commanding character. He was supreme. My aunty knitted me a woolly tortoise stuffed with cardboard to keep its shape, so Tortoise was appointed Alan Measles’s second in command: the reliable, slightly portly deputy, like John Prescott to Tony Blair.

  Between the ages of five and fifteen my imaginary world solidified and its rules were drawn up in my mind. This world consisted of four islands in the Atlantic Ocean. My favourite number was four because cars – with which I was obsessed – have four wheels; so many things in Alan Measles’s kingdom came in fours or multiples of four. The fish-shaped island across the top was Shark Island which, like Russia, was cold. Round Island in the south was mountainous, while Elfin Island to the east was an empty desert island. Alan Measles lived on Tree Island, which was European, forested and homely. It contained the secret valley – my bedroom – where Alan Measles hid with his army. Rebels always live in valleys. My bedroom walls were the cliff faces, my shelf was the ledge on the side of the valley where aeroplanes took off and my bed was the field. Alan Measles’s army camped on my candlewick bedspread – I imagined the tufts were hedges – while Alan lived in an underground house with his six children. Like James Bond, his wife had been killed in a car crash.

  Alan Measles on his throne

  When I was about ten, I worked out the game was set one hundred years in the future in the 2060s and 2070s. There had been a calamitous nuclear war, almost obliterating Planet Earth. Everyone agreed that technology had advanced too far, so an international agreement was forged stating that from now on technology could only move backwards. Armies once again began to use old-fashioned, conventional weapons. It was my rationalisation of how I could use all the Airfix models I was now making, my First and Second World War planes alongside my contemporary jets – which came from different eras – in the same war.

  One of my roles in this world was as the designer, engineer and manufacturer for Kenilworth’s, the factory that assembled every artefact in the kingdom. Alan Measles would command, ‘We must have a really big airliner and four bombers,’ which I would then make. I had been given a basic set of Lego, enough to build a house, when I was four and had started collecting it. Using my Lego, I constructed elaborate models of cars, guns, bikes, ships and cranes. I devised an entire system for making an aeroplane, constructing it, not one Lego brick on top of another but one next to another, so it was like a tower on its side. The plane had a sleeker look when I built it sideways and, because it didn’t have studs along the top, the roof slopes were aerodynamic. The Holy Grail for me was when I was building a Lego aeroplane with a retracting undercarriage or bomb bays, which I was able to do with a struggle after I’d spent hours puzzling out how to adapt the doors and hinges. I was born too early because Lego was still very simple when I was a young child. When my brother was small, he had Lego Technic that included mechanical gismos to make working engines.

  Making things with Lego was a restful, almost meditative, creativity that involved solving technical problems that had no sentimental content. It was an escape from emotional chaos. There were only a limited number of options for how Lego bricks could fit together and that was comforting. I recently made a pot called Assembling a Motorcycle from Memory about how a large number of men are at peace with life taking a motorbike engine to bits, because a motorbike engine is finite. It doesn’t have the infinite possibilities and muddle of relationships.

  Assembling a Motorcycle from Memory, 2004

  As well as being a manufacturer I was also the reporter who narrated Alan Measles’s exploits, particularly ‘The Gran
d Rally’, to an audience of children: ‘Alan got in the aeroplane, took off and was pursued by the Germans!’ The Grand Rally was a sixteen-day annual car race that zoomed around all four islands, during which Alan Measles would have elaborate adventures and spectacular crashes in his racing car. But he would always win in the end. I absolutely couldn’t countenance him losing. As long as Alan Measles won the race then something in me, some spirit, would carry on. As well as racing, Alan Measles was also shot down countless times in battle but he was never killed. Other characters, me included, were dispensable, easily slain and could certainly lose a car race, but Alan Measles had to be perfect, with perfect morals. Alan Measles was the ultimate male presence.

  The Germans were the enemy and the invading force, or they were as soon as my stepfather appeared on the scene. Gradually, the Germans occupied Alan Measles’s realm. As the years passed, Alan became more of an underground guerrilla, more of a spy. In the beginning there had been open warfare, whereas towards the end it was subterfuge. I was the guerrilla fighter. Guerrilla fighters are underdogs battling against invading forces, surviving on their wits, waging a sneaky war of ambush and sabotage to undermine a more powerful enemy, which was what happened in my relationship with my stepfather. I was a stealth fighter, an underground revolutionary pitted against someone who was too dangerous to challenge. I had to be submissive; I had to suppress my power. As I was growing up I progressively bestowed all my noble masculine traits of a high achiever, a winner, a lover even, on to my teddy bear for safekeeping. He was the guardian, the custodian of these qualities. To keep Alan Measles safe, to ensure that he was protected, I adopted the role of his bodyguard.

  I lived in Alan Measles’s realm, carrying it around with me like a comfy sleeping bag I could pop into at any time. I held my make-believe world in my head, returning into it to find ready-formed landscapes, narratives and relationships. If I couldn’t fall asleep I imagined I was on a mission, camping on a precarious overhang on a rocky cliff or flying a spy balloon high over enemy territory. As I grew older my illusory land became progressively enlarged and embellished, incorporating toy cars, Lego, playing outside, drawing, then later on Airfix models and eventually dressing up. I no longer had separate games, they were all facets of the one game: everything was linked to this domain where Alan Measles was a major player.

  I was still playing the game enthusiastically until I was fifteen. Then one day some of my brother’s toy cars were lying around in the lounge, I tried to play with them but I couldn’t, I’d lost the ability. I wondered, ‘Is this what it’s like being an adult?’

  3

  UTILITY MAN

  WHEN MY FATHER still lived with us I often used to stand alongside him in the shed. The shed was a square brick extension to the back of the house; it had a window with a bench and drawers in front of it that my father had made. The drawers were painted white, a very thin-looking white, each one having a different knob on it that my father had salvaged from pieces of furniture, to identify its contents. There was a red knob, a glass knob, a steel knob, a little loop knob. Everything, everything had its place. There were drawers full of brass screws like little maggots, or connector blocks like Lego bricks. My father used to comment, ‘The man who invented Lego must have got the idea from electrical connector blocks because they look just like Lego, don’t they?’ The shed meant my dad and me, just the two of us, together.

  My father tested out all the paints for decorating on the shed wall. There was a large square where he had painted up-and-down stripes to get the paint off the brush or to test out a colour to see if it was the one he wanted. Those particular colours he chose I think of as wine gum colours: black, burnt orange, lemony yellow, bottle-green and a slightly winy red, and I have an affection for them because of the square of brush strokes. He’d painted a fifties Lloyd Loom chair in eau-de-Nil so there was pale-green on the wall too. I can remember standing by the bench, looking over my shoulder at the light streaming in through the shed door and being reflected off the patch of paint on the wall, this abstract painting on the wall, which was the first time I remember seeing a painting, or the idea of painting, as being something I might want to look at. I had no notion of art; the only picture we had in the house was a print of a tea clipper sailing ship that we got free with washing powder. We might have had The Laughing Cavalier too, that we got in the same way. The next-door neighbours had a coffee table with a poster of a bullfight under a glass top, with a gold plastic rim round the edge, set on these conical black wooden legs, and that seemed exotic. I think they’d been to Spain on holiday.

  Some of the tools in my dad’s shed were very distinctive because he’d made them himself. When he was unable to find a screwdriver that he could use with both hands, he put together an extra long one with a carved handle measuring nine inches. He always carried his own toolkit on jobs when he was working on pylons and huge electrical sub-stations. It went back to an era when a man was desperate if he had to put his toolbox in the pawn shop, as in the old nursery rhyme: ‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle, up and down the City Road, pop goes the weasel!’ ‘Pop’ was pawning; a weasel was a pressing iron for tailoring. Pop goes the weasel was hocking your weasel down the City Road, where there were pleasure gardens with gambling and people spending. It was a sign of a spendthrift to hock the tools of your work. Even now, when the bailiffs come, they’re still not allowed to take the tools of someone’s livelihood. My dad’s tools were precious to him and he had a lot of them, one for every job. The only possessions he came back to pick up after he’d left were his tools; that meant he had definitely gone.

  My dad’s shed was dark and within it there was the feeling of all the possibilities, all the options that were open to me; it was like sitting at a vast organ and being able to pull all the stops. Anything could be made with his tools, which was an exhilarating thought. The shed was arranged delightfully with the window in the middle and all the drawers, shelves and tools down the sides and underneath. It was like an altar. I’ve thought later that as a physical template it was very satisfying, as well as being a powerful metaphor for creative thought. My own creativity and art practice has been a mental shed – a sanctuary as well as a place of action – where I have retreated to make things. It gives me a sense of security in a safe, enclosed space while I look out of the window on to the world. The shed was where I first learned how to make things, where my subconscious was schooled in colour, texture and the concept of making. I still have that excitement now, of being very glad that I’m a maker and that my internal shed is always available. I can retreat into my head while in bed or in the bath – wherever I am – to think about things I want to make, and knowing that I will create at least some of them is extremely exciting.

  My father could make or mend anything. He could install central heating. He could wire a house, build a brick wall or make a chair. At one point he even made his own stereo. I always imagined that if he’d had long enough, he probably could have made a car. My father and Uncle Arthur came from an era – I remember watching something about it on Tomorrow’s World once – when men could mend every appliance in the house. Many of my uncles on my mother’s side were skilled manual workers, what I call Utility Men. They did an apprenticeship and learned how to engineer things. They worked with metal, pipes, instruments and lathes. They had skills. They were industrial craftsmen. They were breadwinners. We needed Utility Men then. Nowadays most engineering is performed by robots; if you think of, say, the engineering to construct computers – no one person could make a computer because it isn’t made with a file and screwdriver, whereas my father’s job often involved remaking a machine part by hand. He would look at the diagram for it, saw a bar of metal into the right shape, put it on the lathe and file it. It didn’t daunt him.

  When I was four my father won a sandcastle competition for me while we were on a chalet holiday in Margate. He dug a hole in the sand to form a dungeon, with steps leading down to cells. It was a
conceptual sandcastle. There was something bloody-minded about his approach that encapsulated my father: ‘I’m going to make a different sandcastle. I’m going to make a hole. I’m not going to go up; I’m going to go down!’ I went to collect the prize for Best Sandcastle in Dean’s Holiday Camp and got something in red plastic. I don’t remember what it was but I do remember the colour. Then I ate too many strawberries and cream, and was violently sick in the car on the way home.

  One very clear image I have is of my father bringing home a ball-bearing for me when he was working in Hoffman’s ball-bearing factory. It seemed gigantic, like a cannon ball, though it was probably only the size of a golf ball. It was heavy, shiny and perfect. My dad told me that they made ball-bearings by dropping blobs of molten metal through the air into cold water and, while in mid air, they formed into perfect spheres. My father’s shed was full of objects like ball-bearings: parts of engines, fixings, lengths of metal and cogs, all of which had an element of alien perfection and wonderment. They had something magical about them because they were men’s jewellery. I used to play with the ball-bearing in the back garden until one day it rolled down the concrete path and into a bunch of mint. I couldn’t find it and forgot about it. Months or even years later, after my father had left, the garden was being tidied and I found it again. It was rusty, like an old cannon ball, what had once been this beautiful, shiny, perfect thing.

  My dad’s motorbike was an ex-service BSA, one which he bought from the army. The army used to store the bikes completely coated in oil to prevent them rusting, so the minute they were started up and began getting hot, the oil would combust. My dad said he remembered that the first time he rode his motorbike he was in a cloud of smoke and arrived home completely black. When we were little he put a sidecar on his motorbike, a black, egg-shaped one that was almost like a small caravan. It had a little door, plexiglas windows and a canvas roof that he would open in nice weather. There were two seats, one at the front, one at the back, but because my sister and I were so small at the time – she would have been one and I’d have been three – we used to sit on a plank so we could see out of the window. My dad sat on the bike wearing his goggles, while we went chugging around in it, stopping for ice cream, and I used to poke my head out of the canvas roof.