Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  6

  LIGHT-BLUE SMOCKS FOR POTTERY

  WE DIDN’T HAVE a proper removal lorry when we moved into my stepfather’s house in Bicknacre so all my mother’s furniture was piled high on to a rickety coal truck. My stepfather’s house was newish, unremarkable and typical of the late sixties, and Bicknacre was ten miles south-east of Chelmsford in the middle of a flat, inconsequential part of the Essex countryside. At that time it had Britain’s only leper hospital and I used occasionally to see people with lumpy, bumpy faces and hands in the village shop. Once I went to the hospital fête and Ed Stewpot, the Radio One DJ, came to open it.

  I was moving into a modern world. In hindsight I see Broomfield as quaint, old, fifties England, pre-consumerism, pre mass ownership of cars, whereas after the age of eight there was something bright and go-aheadish about the architecture around me. The same contrast characterises the metaphors I’ve drawn for my childhood: when I think of my father I imagine plough horses, traction engines, thatched cottages and vicars on bicycles, whereas my stepfather is bleak flats and the tinny modernity of that time.

  Refugees from Childhood, 2001

  My stepfather’s house was called Thorn House because it was opposite a forty-acre wood called Thorn Wood. Curiously, I always found it an unsatisfying and slightly malevolent copse as it was full of thin, brittle, nearly dead trees amazingly infested with ants. There were parts of the wood where the ants’ nests were teeming mounds three feet high; one of them even had a moat dug by the insects. I couldn’t sit or climb anywhere because there were ants everywhere and it was the sh-sh-sh of ants that gave the wood its distinctive character.

  I was enrolled in the local school, Woodham Ferres C of E, assessed as soon as I arrived (‘Read this book!’), then, despite being too young for it, I was plonked in the top class, where I remained for the next three years. It was a tiny school with only sixty pupils in three classes. The headmaster, Mr Wiseman, was God-fearing and strict – he used the ruler on the palm of your hand for punishment. It was a very religious school: first thing every morning we stood in the gym and sang a hymn from a king-sized hymn sheet, like a giant flap-over notebook, that hung by a rope from the ceiling.

  The first year the Christmas play was the Nativity, in which I was one of the wise men. The following year, when I was ten, we performed A Christmas Carol and, being a bright boy who had a memory, I was chosen to play Scrooge. It was a lavish production for a school play with changing sets, elaborate costumes and a specially built stage, made from the gym apparatus and those wooden boxes that all school halls seem to have. Even the blackout blinds were taken down to be turned into the stage curtain. We designed cardboard top hats in art and, as Scrooge, I was given a grey-haired wig to wear. One of the dinner ladies made it by threading silvery string through a skullcap, then brushing it out so it fluffed into big hair. I had to wear the wig in the dress rehearsal to get used to it. There I was on the stage, waiting for the curtain to rise, but because everything was so clumsily made, the curtain rings had been left on the bottom of the stage curtain so as it rose, the curtain rings hooked on to my wig, which was stuck on to my own hair with double-sided sticky tape, and pulled the wig off. Everybody burst out laughing – because I was in front of the whole school – and I was gasping, ‘Ah! Er! Er! Ah!’ As the curtain went further and further up my wig was being pulled higher and higher, and I was supremely embarrassed.

  At the moment in the play when the Ghost of Christmas Future came, I was in bed wearing a nightshirt and long johns. As no one could find any long johns that would fit me and because the costumes were thrown together from old sheets and old clothes that parents brought in – bodge, bodge, bodge – they had made me long johns by cutting the sleeves off a white sweatshirt which were held up by two elastic garters underneath the nightshirt. On the night of the play I lost the elastic garters, got up in one scene and my stockings fell down. I was mortified. It was the most embarrassing thing I could imagine because I was on the cusp of awareness of my body and of my sexuality starting to develop.

  I’ve got a feeling I was chosen to play Scrooge because I was the worst actor. I was able to learn the lines but I can’t remember doing any kind of acting. When the teacher said, ‘Can you act as if you’re sad?’ I’d mumble robotically, ‘Ohhh Nooooooo! She’s deeeeaaaaad!’ so I’m not sure I was very good. I can’t remember emoting very much.

  The following year the Christmas play was an updated version of the Nativity in which I was Gabriel. In this version – it being an evangelical, modern Christian one – Gabriel was the lead. I thought, ‘Gabriel! Yeah … I can be an angel.’ At playtime I ran around the field pretending to be an angel. The school secretary sewed my costume and when she measured my height and my arm span she exclaimed, ‘Oh! How delightful! A square boy!’ One of my earliest stirrings around clothes was over the costume which was a robe made from a white bed sheet with ribbon ties and silver cardboard wings and a halo. One morning I saw all the costumes hanging up on a line in the school hall awaiting the start of the performance and I got a little feeling I still get now when I look inside a woman’s wardrobe or think about women’s clothes, a little flutter of excitement with fear around it. I looked at my costume, realising, ‘I’ve got to put that on in front of everybody. I’ve got to wear a dress in front of everyone and be an angel.’

  I can’t remember any of the everyday clothes I wore as a child. Most adults can reminisce ‘I had a brilliant pair of plimsolls when I was six that I adored’ or ‘I had a favourite pair of blue jeans’, whereas I wasn’t aware of having clothes at all much until I was a teenager. Clothes were to stop me getting cold. I didn’t want to think about clothes getting attention. There was an incident in a shop where I screamed blue murder because I did not want a new coat, I didn’t even want to try it on. Once I got used to my clothes I didn’t want to replace them. On the one side of the watershed of puberty I repressed any kind of display of my inner life, after puberty I did the exact opposite. I thought boys faded into the background, girls got attention. Girls’ clothes were about flaunting, they stuck out, they were elaborate, brightly coloured and impractical, whereas boys’ clothes stated, ‘I’m covered up and if it gets dirty it doesn’t matter.’

  My first pottery lesson must have been when I was eight, maybe nine years old. The vicar’s wife, an old lady, came in to take pottery classes and she told us we were going to make a coil pot. I’d never done pottery before, only plasticine modelling, but not pots, not from real clay. We were taught how to make a little coil pot out of earthenware. I went through the motions in the pottery lesson; I don’t think I particularly liked it, nor did I see it as the significant experience that it was. I made my very first piece of pottery for my mum, which was a sad little yellow ashtray. She didn’t use it. Then I made a couple more things, a clay whale for my Aunty Mary and a small, three-legged bowl for another aunty.

  We had to wear light-blue smocks for pottery. They were made of heavy, rubberised material, similar to oilcloth, had elasticated sleeves and they fastened up at the back with snappers. In my first pottery lesson I had last pick of the smocks so the one I got was tight. The classroom helper, Miss Maple, was sweet, glamorous in a secretary sort of way and always very kind to me. She had false eyelashes and looked like Dusty Springfield – I remember her having a big beehive hairdo. I got into my smock and Miss Maple snapped up the snappers at the back. The combination of Miss Maple doing up the snappers and the squeaky, smooth, unyielding, restrictive plastic garment turned me on. I was being dressed like a small child, it felt very humiliating.

  Humiliation is one of the most powerful turn-ons for me. What is unsatisfying about humiliation, though, is that usually it doesn’t have any consequences. The consequences are only in my own head because embarrassment is a fantasy of what other people are thinking. The only consequence of dressing as Claire at the Turner Prize, for example, is whether or not I blush because I think I look stupid. If I think I look ridiculous it’s horribl
e, although simultaneously, the disgrace is fantastic – it’s a turn-on. Yet the reality of the situation is never as shameful as the fantasy, because my personality kicks in and I’m having a lovely time so I don’t get the abasement I’m seeking. I don’t truly want to be humiliated, I just want the fantasy.

  Most people would admit that reality doesn’t live up to sexual flights of fancy. Real sex is a different experience; it has a visceral here-and-now quality that can’t be faked. I could fantasise about wearing a dress, and that would be exciting and I could manipulate the emotional situation in the fantasy to give me the ultimate ignominy, but the actual experience of looking at myself in a dress is different. It’s similar to the distinction between a real relationship with someone and an imaginary situation. In the fantasy scenario your sex drive insists, ‘Yeah! Make her scream now!’ whereas if you were actually with the person and they started screaming it would be very unpleasant.

  For many cross-dressers their fantasy of outward femininity only becomes a reality when they pass unnoticed. The sole attention a transvestite usually wants is the same attention a woman would get. Some trannies search out the recognition a grown woman attracts, whereas I search out the attention a girl would receive. If you dress up as a woman, you dress with the hope of passing as a woman and then being treated like a woman. Dressing up as a young girl shifts the process from authentic to symbolic because it is almost impossible for a man to look convincingly like a little girl. I’ve only ever seen one or two cross-dressers who could pass for a girl under sixteen. I have to acknowledge that it is a ludicrous fantasy when I dress up as a little girl, yet the boundaries aren’t blurred. People are more comfortable and a lot happier with me being dressed up as a child than as a woman because it is much less ambiguous: I am a bloke in a ridiculous frock and that’s nice and clear. If I try to be a girl I always end up being treated like Grayson in a dress no matter what I’m wearing.

  From Cycles of Violence

  I think of my dressing up as the heraldry of my subconscious. It’s a physical manifestation, an outwardly worn symbol, of what is happening within. It’s also a cry for a specific type of attention. If a man puts on a little girl’s dress, he wants to be treated as a little girl and handled with care. If a man wears a business suit, he wants to be treated like a businessman: with respect. I think we all dress, to a certain extent, in the way we want to be attended to. We want to be surrounded by the emotion we associate with the clothes we are wearing. Little girls don’t have to do anything, or take any responsibility, they can just be and are worshipped for being. They are precious dollies, dressed up like cute pets: merely standing there and looking gorgeous is enough. I love it if a woman treats me like a little girl. It often happens. I take a lot of trouble for my clothes to be authentic. When a woman coos, ‘Ah! What a lovely dress! Don’t you look cute?’ I like it.

  7

  ‘CAN I BORROW A DRESS?’

  ONE MORNING WHEN I was seven I overheard the babysitter tell my mother, ‘I went to check on Grayson last night and he’d made a noose from his pyjamas and tied them round the bedpost.’ I had tethered one leg of my pyjamas round my neck and knotted the other round the headboard, then fallen asleep. The babysitter must have come upstairs, found me like that and untied me. I don’t think I wanted to commit suicide – maybe I was suicidal – I don’t know. It was very dangerous. That was my first sexual experience.

  The first fetish story I read was about a man who went, dressed as a woman, to visit a prostitute. The prostitute strapped him to a crucifix and he had a noose tied round his neck with a stool under his feet that he stepped on and off to be able to have the experience of hanging. While he was hanging, she would inspect him every couple of minutes to see if he was still having a nice time by feeling in his frilly knickers for a hard-on, because if he’d come he would go soft, in which case it would be time to take him down. The prostitute thought he was still enjoying himself but he was dead; apparently, when you die you get an erection. The man hadn’t got back up on to the little step.

  Every night I played my imaginary games with Alan Measles and, within that realm, I would visit my own scenarios. My bondage games were set in a prisoner-of-war camp where I would be bound and humiliated by the prison guards. My internal voices would be very hectoring, mocking and persecuting me. ‘You deserve this punishment, you are a dog, you will be treated like shit.’ I used to talk out loud and openly when I was playing my games on my own in the house. The neighbour heard me once through an open window and thought I had a girlfriend around. Maybe she picked up on the sexual nature of my monologue; maybe it was the tone of my voice.

  One night I stood in my bedroom in the dark while I tied pillows on to my thighs by using my pyjamas. The German guards were punishing me by forcing me to wear a female uniform because I was a spy for Alan Measles. The next morning I asked my sister, ‘Can I borrow a dress?’ It was an innocent request.

  She replied, ‘Yeah, fine,’ and seemed very casual about it. A year or two earlier my sister had ballet lessons, which I was jealous of: I assumed ballet was something I would not be allowed to do. She fetched out a couple of her ballet costumes for me. After my initial request, my sister and I didn’t mention it again: I must have already decided that I would keep it a secret.

  In my first year at secondary school, a boy came round to play and I suggested, ‘Would you like to put on some dresses? It’s really good fun, we can dress up as ladies.’ When he scoffed, ‘No!’ I realised it wasn’t something that everybody did.

  My mother worked for my stepfather on a Saturday helping him with one or other of his ventures, so every Saturday afternoon my sister and I had the house to ourselves. Saturday afternoon was when I dressed up. It became a hobby. I was twelve by then. I surreptitiously cadged dresses from my sister’s cupboard, though they were always too small, then acted out detailed bondage fantasies. I always got a big stiffy from playing the bondage games and I got an extra big stiffy from doing the dressing up and the bondage games simultaneously. The old man was starting to do house clearances and the garage was full of all the stuff he had cleared. I nicked all sorts of clothes out of the garage: tatty petticoats, slips and nighties, and then I would knot myself on to a chair using stockings, pyjamas, scarves and belts. I even found corsets once.

  Another time I chanced upon a prim, demure dress in a distasteful Crimplene material but I loved the repulsiveness of it: my body was responding to the ghastly strangeness of the texture. It felt very feminine, like being furnished. It was the foreignness, the femininity and the feel, the scratchiness and the unyieldingness. There was something about Crimplene: it did not crease easily so it formed a carapace of femininity. I tied myself up in that. Another afternoon I discovered a box of fifteen polyester dresses, trying them all on at once, building up the layers one on top of the other until I was like a fat woman. My sister came home unexpectedly while I was wobbling around the house in all these frocks; I panicked and hid in the stair cupboard until I had taken off all fifteen. I did a lot of almost getting caught because I was quite careless; part of the thrill was sneaking about and coming close to being found out. One afternoon I donned underwear, tights and a yellow dress, put my boy’s gear over the top, then sneaked to the fields behind the woods where I knew I wouldn’t meet anybody. I pulled off my boy’s clothes, stuffed them under a hedge then set off for a walk as a girl. It was the first time I had dressed up and gone out of doors.

  Golden Ghosts, 2001

  I didn’t know when I was dressing or tying myself up that it was a sexual activity because I had a complete vacuum of sexual knowledge. I hadn’t yet had an orgasm. I didn’t receive any sex education at my primary school because it was religious, while at my secondary school we were taught reproduction from a purely biological aspect. When a pupil asked the biology teacher, ‘Miss, how does the sperm get into the vagina in the first place?’ she exclaimed, ‘Oh, I’m sure you all know that!’ I knew very little. The boys at school boasted ab
out wanking, fucking and shagging but I wasn’t sure which was which. I’d had wet dreams but when I did have my first orgasm, I didn’t know what was happening. I had strapped myself to the bedpost wearing a dress, becoming so excited I spontaneously ejaculated. I thought I was bleeding to death, I thought I had ruptured something, although after considering it and applying my scant knowledge, I worked it out. I consciously researched it in the library as well. Then I started to masturbate deliberately and learned how to do it.

  Sometimes I would sit in my mother’s Mini car where there would be a copy of Forum in the glove compartment. Forum was an erotic magazine with a slew of readers’ letters detailing their fantasies about getting off on a bicycle saddle. Perhaps she deliberately left the magazine there as an indirect way of giving me some sex education. I acquired a sexual vocabulary from Forum because I was chatting to my mother about the letter page when I mentioned, ‘That’s masturbation, isn’t it?’ to which she replied, ‘Yes.’

  Soon my fantasies morphed into a new format in which I imagined I was a German PoW in a military hospital with fractured arms and legs held in plaster casts. I laid a pillow on each arm pretending they were casts so that I was unable to move my limbs. I knew that when my mind strayed on to these storylines in bed at night I might get a stiffy. A key dimension was envisaging sympathetic visitors bringing me presents – there is always an element of caring in bondage. It was like being kept as a pet where I was controlled and yet nurtured simultaneously, both immobilised and humiliated. Being fixed in plaster was very appealing. It’s a fetish called casting and Casters are people who spend their weekends hobbling around town with their legs in plaster because it turns them on; some will occasionally have a full body cast. It’s related to mummification fetishes where people wrap themselves in Clingfilm – they use specialist-sized rolls of Clingfilm from bondage shops – until they are completely immobilised with only their noses poking out. I used to wind my bed sheets round my body until I was tightly bound. It was about being held: I don’t remember being touched or hugged by my mum and stepfather. The two requisites for a parent are love plus boundaries: I think sex is the physical embodiment of love and bondage is the physical embodiment of boundaries. The pressure on my body from the restriction and immobilisation, then using my mind to imagine being humiliated or subjugated in cages, reminded me that I was alive.