The Lives of Lucian Freud

by William Feaver

  Conventional pets were allowed so Lucian kept guinea pigs (‘Ginnipigs’, he wrote), not that he liked them particularly. They fought all right but were less interesting than the ferrets sent down rabbit holes and much less involving than horses. ‘I trained a Shetland pony to come to the gate and take me down to the farm.’ Children could stable their own horses on the farm. Lydia Jacobs for one. She was two years older than him. ‘Fat Lydia: I thought she was ridiculous, big and fat, kept a horse. I used to be pleased, as it was a horse that farted and she went on it in big breeches and it would fart.’ Another girl attempted, with Lucian’s help, to teach her horse, called Bill, dressage. And there was Starlight.

  ‘Starlight, a grey, partly Arab, came with a boy who knifed someone. He was oddly, extravagantly, un-English and was sent away, and I decided Starlight was mine, as the parents never sent for it. They were possibly French, anyway too wealthy to bother. I felt it was mine and rode it in a way that nobody else could ride it, very heavily on the left rein, so if anybody got on it, it would veer that way, unsteerable, like a car or ship with a list. I couldn’t bear the idea of someone else riding it when I left. I used to ride nearly all day and got further and further behind.’ He used to sleep with the horses, himself and horse under one blanket, keeping watch over any one of them that was ill.

  In February 1934 Lucie Freud drove down with the parents of another boy, Frank Phillips; there was a crash and she broke her leg and was taken to hospital in Yeovil. It was feared at first that she had fractured her skull and, although this proved not to be so, she took months to recover and the boys were unable to go home for the Easter holidays. For Freud this was not a hardship. ‘It meant I could have more horse life.’

  He wrote home urgently asking to be sent some of the albums of Hiddensee photos so that he could show them to Jo and to ‘Briget’ (Bridget Edwards, his new housemother), Bob the young farmer and others. He wanted to show off an idyllic past to those who, he felt, took an interest in him. In schoolwork, meanwhile, he positioned himself as a non-starter. One of his school reports, pithy enough for him to commit to memory, read: ‘Lucian doesn’t seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German. This seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.’

  In time the English proved to be no problem. He retained for the rest of his life a German tinge in his speech and residual German syntax, but treated the switch to Englishry as a pretext for veering away from being saddled with academic accomplishments. Letters home, written on Wednesdays – with the address usually typed by the housemother – were in German, though English soon began seeping in. He wrote about native customs: the Devon Show, feasts on the Dartington Estate, the pressing need for a torch (‘All the other children have them’), a pair of breeches (‘Briges’) and the right sort of sleeping bag (‘11/6 from Gamages, waterproof’). ‘To night I will properly sliepe outsiede in my new Sleeping beg.’2

  His new English handwriting was, and remained, unschooled, each word as boldly executed as in a note to the milkman. Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at boarding school and, later on, in London: wilfulness passed off as extreme individuality. He came to regard England as a place in which to be a lone operator, a resourceful Crusoe observing the natives. ‘I thought of Joseph Conrad, in my father’s yellow-bound books. And I was really excited about the names. They seemed so exotic. A girl called Kim.’ That Kim Ebbels had the same first name as Kipling’s boy spy may have been stimulating but no great friendship developed, though he lent her his comics.

  One of the attractions of the school was that children each had their own bedroom. ‘I had this passion for Marjorie Brown and wanted to have the room next to her. Marjorie used to protect me. I’d hit people and there was a rule at Dartington – “Privacy of Rooms” – which meant that you weren’t allowed to be got at so I would kick someone and rush into my room but they came in anyway and got their revenge. She used to protect me and I’d give her my comics. Hotspur, Wizard, Skipper and Adventure. The lot.’

  Lucian’s best friend, his only friend, at Dartington was a boy called Michael Schaxons, with whom he stayed during the holidays on the family farm at Ilstead in Sussex. ‘They had a spaniel called Sue, the first dog I ever liked.’ And there were horses. ‘We rode up to Bertrand Russell’s house on Telegraph Hill, quite a long way – lost my watch – to see Kate and John, and he was there. A lively old figure, he seemed: there was a red-haired woman he was chasing round the place. It was almost the first thing of sex I’d seen. Very abandoned. They barely stopped for tea.’ Staying with the Schaxons gave him further insights into English behaviour. ‘It was fascinating, compared to my home. For example, someone would come to the house and ask, “Where’s Michael?” “I’ve no idea,” his mother would say. If someone came to us, my mother would know where I was and what I was thinking: everything. How marvellous, I thought. How casual and generous and daring. I remembered my terrific battle to go to school alone in Berlin.’

  Cousin Jo, two years older than Lucian, arrived at the school. Since 1933, when Dr Mosse left and went to Shanghai, Aunt Gerda had acquired a boyfriend (‘called Möring, looked like Göring’) to whom she became an embarrassment, as he wanted to get on in Nazi Germany. The Mosses came to England with just the £5 allowed to later émigrés and Ernst Freud got them a house (‘Aunt Gerda could never forgive my father for keeping her’) and a place at Dartington for Jo. ‘She went out with a boy called Peter Stone and I said, “A rolling Stone gathers Jo Mosse.”’

  In June 1934 Jo wrote to her Aunt Puzie, as she called Lucie Freud, after a school camp by the sea. ‘The camp was heavenly. I (all of us) came back well content, bronzed, happy and dirty.’ She enthused about Vic, Victor Rosenbaum (‘terribly nice, isn’t he?’), who played hockey for France and ran the camp. ‘Once Vic stayed in our girls’ tent until 3 in the morning, talking to us. In fact we never went to bed punctually.’ As Victor Ross, Vic was to write for Reader’s Digest and, Freud remarked, ‘Foreigners’ Guide to England books: jokes about mistakes made. His mother, Erna, was the psychoanalyst of Burgess and Maclean and friendly with Aunt Anna.’

  ‘Luckily and through sheer happiness,’ Jo wrote, ‘I have completely forgotten that the Nazis are there – it’s terrific that they are all shooting each other now, isn’t it?’3

  At the end of the summer term Stephen left Dartington. ‘My mother told me he wrote a letter saying, “Take me away from here, I’m wasting my precious youth,” and I thought, hmm, he didn’t have a precious youth.’ Stephen was awkward, with a nervous tic and glasses, Lucian maintained. ‘A queer fish: he had such a bad time.’ Clement, who also left, went to the Hall School in Hampstead, a prep school for St Paul’s, where both he and Stephen ended up. ‘They were at Dartington three terms perhaps; I was there two and a half years. That makes the division more: they were always together and I was on my own. I was always athletic rather and they never were.’ Stephen thought of Lucian as a fine rider and good at cricket and that was about it, but Clement, needing protection, looked up to him as a champion: ‘Being insufficiently fluent in English to counter insults, he went for people: hit them, wrestled them to the ground, gave and got black eyes and bloody noses and I, who loved him a lot and had no other friends, stood on the perimeter of the fight crowd and cried.’4

  Stephen recalled an event that sparked the one thing all three brothers were always to have in common: a love of the turf. ‘An older boy gave us a tip for a horse called Cotoneaster, so we clubbed together and put our pocket money on it. It didn’t matter that the horse lost. We were hooked.’5 Hooked maybe, but not united: Lucian’s instinct was to edit his brothers out of his life. ‘I never remember anything about them. Lots of things I suppress.’ Certainly they featured less and less. He took to teasing them across the fraternal divide, every so often remind
ing Clement that he had the same birthday as Hitler.

  ‘I beat up my brother – Cle – in Walberswick and my mother said, “You’ve ruined the whole holiday.” Oh good, I thought.’ The Freuds began holidaying in Walberswick in 1935. A village on the Suffolk coast, it was reminiscent of Hiddensee in its relative isolation, hemmed in by river and sea. Initially they rented a beach hut, one of many lined up along the River Blyth, eventually to be washed away by the tide. Theirs was the largest. ‘Nicknamed Buckingham Palace as it was a long bungalow, with several rooms. It belonged to a painter called Tom Van Oss who wore tweeds and did landscapes, portraits and satirical illustrations. I rummaged around in the huge studio: nothing that interested me. Vlaminckish slashes of palette knife sea and sky: “Run up some brilliant seascapes,” as people would say.’ Walberswick became a second home to the Freuds. ‘My parents fell in love with Walberswick. They actually went to the pub.’ In 1937 they bought Peganne, a converted barn, and renamed it Hidden House. ‘It is typically Jewish not to renounce anything and to replace what has been lost,’ Ernst Freud wrote to his father. He named a guesthouse in the garden Hidden Hut.6

  ‘Walberswick was very much a slightly artistic place: ladies with amber beads doing watercolours on the green and Leach pots in the crafts shop. And then there’d be R. O. Dunlop, RA, painting on the bank of the Blyth.’ The film-maker Humphrey Jennings, born in Walberswick, recalled his childhood there as ‘a time of artists and bicycles and blue and white spotty dresses’;7 Lucian remembered that and more, noticing particularly the most outré: ‘Peter Upcher with dyed hair – so extreme – who drove a chaise. His father was a baronet and owned a huge amount of land around Southwold, so he was sort of the Walberswick Stephen Tennant. He adopted Frank Norman, who wrote Bang to Rights and Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be; Frank was with him as a sort of … Peter Upcher had been a visitor in Borstal. How naive people were.

  ‘And there was a famous queer, Alfred Holland, who had a hut by the river, before all the huts were swept away: a studio, which I went into, with a Max Ernst in it – one of those jungly forest things – and D. H. Lawrence paintings. It was the first time I was alive to such things: I just saw reproductions before. And I heard Cab Calloway for the first time. Alfie charmed my parents; he didn’t treat them as foreigners; they didn’t realise, though I did, that they were snubbed a bit. And he kept horses and had money. I was about twelve, thirteen, and I used to go racing at Newmarket in his dark-green Lagonda. We went through the card and he asked if I wanted to place bets. “Do you want anything?” “Yes, I’ll have two shillings with you,” and I had eight pounds as a result and bought my first suit – grey flannel pinstripes – at Dunn & Co. in Tottenham Court Road. My parents were slightly worried, he taking me to the races and being attentive, but they knew how wilful I was. I was aware of his being … I felt I was living. And he was a gent, tall and freckled and dressed in shooting clothes, a lively mind and laughed a lot. The Lagonda had a gear lever with a flat rubber knob and I said I liked it and he laughed and laughed. Afterwards I wondered about that. Zoe, a pretty girl in Walberswick, was madly in love with him and dressed as a boy to appeal to him. The fact was, everyone knew Alfie had been to jail for queerness. He was friendly with people at the garage and he told me that a Lagonda or Bentley was brought to the jail when he got out and he was worried that he’d forgotten how to drive. But it was all right, he just got in and drove off.

  ‘Being horse-mad, I got up at six to exercise ponies and quieten them for when people came to ride them during the day. And I’d ride the carthorse that pulled the cauldron of tar making the road from Walberswick to Southwold. Every few minutes it moved on.’

  Sixty years later, when we were looking at Constable’s The Leaping Horse, in which a boy on a barge horse clears a twelve-inch barrier on a tow path, Freud turned to me exclaiming: ‘Oh, it’s the greatest painting in the world!’

  Towards the end of the 1935 summer holidays Ernst Freud went to visit his parents in Austria. Having refused to go two years before, and Clement having been in 1934, it was now – ‘children are keen on equality’ – Lucian’s turn. They took a detour to avoid Germany. Sigmund Freud was no longer fit to travel so the grandparents were spending some months in a villa in Grinzing, a suburb north of Vienna, with a garden where he could sit out and in the evenings play cards, a form of tarot called ‘Killing the King’. Lucian’s Uncle Martin, a former soldier and by then a lawyer acting as his father’s business manager, took Lucian off to the Prato riding school to test his boasted equestrian skills. ‘I went on a horse and trotted around and made it change its legs and different things, but I couldn’t make it do very much as, very sensibly, the Prato horsemen had bridles and saddles but no bits. And I said, “I’m afraid I can’t show you very much about controlling this horse because it has no bit and all I could do was control it with my legs.” At that, my uncle – a terrific figure, dashing – went up to the man and shouted at him and practically hit him and he cowered.

  ‘I remember odd things about Grinzing. Being photographed posing with a cigarette. Driving into Vienna in a car – my father didn’t drive – for something or other. A sunny morning. Sunday. Not much traffic. Wide main road, hill, and two motorcyclists going rather fast, having a race backwards.’ He envied such daring.

  In the new school year at Dartington Lucian was more involved in set activities, particularly those that demanded physical effort. In ‘Agility’ he learnt to somersault. ‘I’d dive head first over horses, and I loved that thing of jumping on to my feet from a lying position. People said I’d be really sorry later on, arthritis at least.’ The school library, which had what he called ‘a foreign department’ with German books, also attracted him. ‘I read a rather salacious book about slum life in Berlin with whores, and a song being sung, and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. And then someone lent me The Picture of Dorian Gray: my mother having heard of Oscar Wilde and those plays burst into tears and confiscated it. I remember her saying it’s a wicked book and me really wanting to read it, especially Lord Henry Wotton’s remarks.’ Wildean epigrams, voiced by Lord Henry Wotton, were an incitement to flippancy: ‘A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her.’ And, even more appealing to the twelve-year-old worldling: ‘What a fuss people make about fidelity. Why, even in love, it is all a matter of physiognomy.’

  The sculptor Willi Soukop, formerly of Vienna, came to teach. Lucian found him encouraging but that wasn’t enough to get him to sculpt or paint. ‘The art master was too arty.’ Mark Tobey, the artist in residence, a convert to Bahá’í philosophy, was away in China and Japan most of the time Lucian was there and he was barely aware of him; Bernard Leach the potter appeared once or twice – ‘the old boy was like an amazing fossil’ – and his son David initiated Lucian into pinch-potting and throwing and salt glazes.

  As it turned out, the high spot of Lucian’s spell at the school was his performance as the Young Mariner in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the Dartington Eurythmic Players. It was the most dramatic role imaginable (‘Alone, alone, all, all alone …’) and a photograph captures the moment when, stripped to the waist, Lucian resorts to prayer and his punishment ends with the albatross (a stuffed gull, absent from the photo) falling from his neck as the ship’s crew, that ‘troop of spirits blest’ gathered in front of a Cubistic iceberg, look on in fitting amazement.

  Lucian Freud (far right), as the Young Mariner in the 1934 Dartington Eurhythmic Players production of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, when young, broke a taboo; Freud acting innocent of convention, scored a success, his broken English leapfrogged by his agility. But he had no future at the school. ‘I liked the word “bad-tempered” very much. They used to say that I was bad-tempered and I suppose that was why they took me away. My parents said I’d been kicked out. In fact they’d taken me away but, understandably, they didn’t tell me because I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise. They didn’t te
ll me, and I was terribly upset. I had this absolute passion for a farmer.’

  The young farmer, Bob Woods, was his tutor. He had been considerate and perceptive in allowing Lucian to ride every day, often all day, thus evading timetable and academic bafflement. He wrote sympathetically to the Freuds. ‘His letter said, “He may well be unhappy but I don’t think he’ll ever be as happy again as he is now.” Which was sort of true. I don’t mean “My Tragic Life” but it was certainly very true for then. It was obvious to take me away because I didn’t go into school at all. You didn’t have to, but you were expected to, and I was on the farm all the time. I was twelve when I left Dartington.’

  Coincidentally, and on similar grounds, the school goats were disposed of, for ‘breaking bounds and indiscriminate appetites’, the headmaster reported.

  In London the Freuds now lived at 32 St John’s Wood Terrace, ‘one of the century-old houses of the Eyre Estate being modernised and enlarged’, as Noel Carrington described it his magazine Design for To-day. A narrow house, it needed enlargement; even then Lucian had to share a bedroom with Clement. Carrington interviewed Ernst Freud who by then was, in effect, resident architect for the Estate, employed mainly on renovations and minor jobs for fellow émigrés. He was photographed for the magazine seated at a table in his newly built study extension examining a plan, behind him a Zimmerlinde plant and, on rosewood shelves brought from Berlin, a Tang horse and other antiques, trophies of a collecting habit derived from his father. This tableau of modern interior design transferred from Berlin to the early Victorian elegance of St John’s Wood is a display of capability and flair. Electric ceiling panels heated the rooms. Carrington asked what he thought of English open fires. ‘I love them. But I by no means consider them a suitable form of heating.’ There were large sliding windows ‘on noiseless tracks’ looking out on to a patch of lawn and lupins galore, a Synkunit kitchen and, besides the Freud furniture, a Gordon Russell sideboard. ‘I myself would never design “period furniture”,’ he told Carrington, who featured in the 1938 edition of Design and Decoration in the Home his glass-topped coffee table with telescopic legs.