There were, however, one or two problems. To begin with Kenneth’s parents, James and Louisa Hockney, were not religious and were quite unconcerned as to whether or not their children attended chapel on Sundays, a trait she found worrying. Then there was the fact that, while her parents were quite fastidious and kept their house spotlessly clean, the Hockneys were the very opposite. “When I first went to his home,” she later told her youngest son, John, “it was awful. His family lived in St. Andrew’s Villas and we’d been walking out for a while before he took me there. It was a lovely big house, but his mother didn’t see very well and she didn’t hear very well either. I’d never seen anything as grubby and untidy. It was horrible.”7 What she did notice, which confirmed her belief that she had chosen the right man, was how much smarter Kenneth was than the rest of his family, and how much his sisters, Harriet, Lillian and Audrey, admired him. A small man, about five foot four, he was both handsome and dashing, with brown hair and greenish eyes.
Kenneth Hockney was a bit of a dandy, whose strong character was reflected in his clothes. This was the era when Montague Burton stores used to offer a “five-guinea suit for 55 shillings” and every working man had one. The fashion was for three-piece suits, usually worn on a Sunday, but Ken wore his every day. His waistcoats were made with lots of pockets, which were always full of bits and pieces, and he had the knack of brightening up his outfits with his own unique touches, using great ingenuity to look smart on his tiny weekly wage. He bought paper collars from Woolworths, specially manufactured for shirts with detachable collars, and covered them with an adhesive material on which he could paint checks and different patterns, and then easily wipe clean (his white collars, invariably black by the end of the day because of the smog, he used to clean with toothpaste). He would buy plain bow ties, and stick coloured paper dots onto them to add colour to his outfits. His shoes were always beautifully polished, and he never went out without a trilby hat, or a cane, of which he had a large collection, a fashion statement inspired by his great love of Charlie Chaplin.
Laura was soon faced with a dilemma: Ken was somewhat slow in coming forward, a fact that drove her to distraction, and after twelve months of dating and no sign of a proposal, she was unsure of what to do. “There was nothing wrong,” she said, “but there was nothing happening. So one day I went to my mother and said, ‘Is it possible for a girl to say something to a boy rather than for the boy to say something to the girl?’ ”8 Her mother’s advice was that she should write to Kenneth to find out if he felt the same way about her as she did about him. After the letter, things began to move faster, and in June 1929 they became engaged. He bought her a bar of chocolate every week, took her to London to visit the zoo, gave her a leather overnight case and a leather sewing box, and, on 4 August, put down £100 of his savings on a tiny house in Steadman Terrace. They were married on 4 September 1929, at the Eastbrook Methodist Mission, walking down the aisle to the strains of the march from Wagner’s Lohengrin.
Kenneth Hockney, circa 1928 (illustration credit 1.3)
The marriage did not receive the enthusiastic support of Kenneth’s mother, who believed that her elder son, Willie, should have been the first to marry. She was also reluctant to lose the twenty-five shillings she received weekly for Kenneth’s board and lodging. “So because Ken wanted to get married very quickly,” Laura remembered, “she put it around that he’d had to get married because I was pregnant, and there were a lot of people who talked about it.”9 This did little to endear Laura to her new mother-in-law.
Number 61 Steadman Terrace was a typical West Riding working man’s terraced house, in one of row upon row of such houses, built of grey-yellow stone or soot-blackened brick. At the top of a very steep street off Leeds Road, with panoramic views across the city to the Pennines beyond, it was mercifully free from the smog that hung about the lower ground. There was no garden at the front, just steps up to the entrance, while at the back there was a tiny yard, just big enough to hang a washing line and to house a small shed for coal and one for the outside toilet. Laura paid her father a shilling a week to furnish their new home with second-hand furniture from his shop, starting with four dining chairs, two armchairs and a sofa. It was to be their home for the next fourteen years.
David Hockney was Laura’s fourth child, following Paul, born in 1931, when she was thirty (then considered quite old to have a first baby), Philip in 1933 and Margaret in 1935. Four children under seven meant that space was at a premium in the tiny house, a “two-up two-down.” The front room was furnished with the dining chairs, armchairs and sofa, as well as a marble-topped mahogany sideboard and a large glass-fronted bookcase. It also housed a “Yorkist” coal-fired range, upon which water was heated both for washing-up and the weekly bath. There was no bathroom; instead, the kitchen or the back room was dominated by a large wooden board used in the week for storage space and for preparing food, then lifted up on Friday nights to reveal an enamel bath. Friday night was bath night, and wartime restrictions dictated that everyone shared the same water. After Kenneth and Laura, the boys all got in the bath together, while Margaret, being a girl, had the luxury of having it to herself. The waste water was used to flush the outside toilet, known as a “Tippler.” On the upper floor, there were two rooms, one shared by the parents, the other by the children.
Money was as tight as space, the only income in the family now coming from Kenneth’s three pounds a week job at Stephenson Bros., where he had graduated to the accounts department. Every weekday morning he would leave home, walk down the hill to Leeds Road and catch a tram to Listerhills, where the business was based. Laura stayed at home looking after the children, cleaning, cooking and sewing. She made all the children’s clothes. If she took them out to the country at the weekends, she had them all foraging for wild berries and salad leaves, and in the spring she would bring back bundles of young nettles to make non-alcoholic nettle beer. When David once sprained his ankle and had to be off school for a couple of days, a friend came to the house to visit and found him sitting with his foot in a bath of foul-smelling liquid. “If this was in medieval times,” he told him, “your mother would be burned as a witch!”10
In the evening, Kenneth would return home and the family would sit down together for tea. On Saturdays there were trips into town to look at the shops in the Swan Arcade, an elegant Victorian shopping arcade, with stone and ironwork swans incorporated in its Market Street entrance, or a visit to St. John’s Market to watch the salesmen give their various spiels, and eat a plate of peas with mint sauce. For a special treat, they might go to Robert’s Pie Shop on Godwin Street, celebrated for its meat-and-potato pies, and for the giant pie, nicknamed “Bertha,” which was always in the window, and which was, as Priestley wrote, “a giant, almost superhuman meat pie, with a magnificent brown, crisp, artfully wrinkled, succulent-looking crust … giving off a fine, rich, appetising steam to make your mouth water … a perpetual volcano of meat and potato.”11 In the summer, they sometimes took a tram ride to Roundhay Park in Leeds, or went for a picnic at a local beauty spot like Shipley Glen, which had a little funfair with swings. Sundays were reserved exclusively for chapel. With the baby David in a pram, the whole family, in their best clothes, would walk down the hill to Leeds Road, to Eastbrook Hall Methodist Chapel for the Sunday service, and back home for lunch. In the afternoon, Kenneth would attend the Brotherhood.
In spite of their relative poverty, there was never any feeling among the children that they went without. On Sunday afternoons, for example, Laura instituted a tradition whereby, as soon as they went off to junior school, each of them could invite four or five friends for tea. “My mother did all the baking,” remembers Hockney, “and Sunday teas were big, with cakes and buns and jelly all laid out on the table. We thought they were terrific.”12 His brother Paul remembers “this one friend of mine, Duncan. When we used to go to his house, all his mother used to give us was two sardines on a plate on a piece of lettuce, and when he came to our hou
se for tea he thought it was wonderful—it was a real feast. It might have been plain stuff, but there was always plenty of it and she always made it herself.”13 Being a girl, Margaret benefited less from these teas than the boys, as she was always required to help.
What mattered to Kenneth and Laura more than anything, how-ever, was education. The children started their school life aged three in the babies’ class at Hanson Junior School, a ten-minute walk from Steadman Terrace, and were encouraged as they grew up to work hard in order to better themselves, under the close and united eye of their parents. Kenneth and Laura, too, continued to learn from everything they saw around them. They both had a healthy respect for culture. Laura was a keen reader, and there were always books in the house. Kenneth had never stopped educating himself, visiting museums, the theatre and opera, reading anything he could get his hands on and taking advantage of any experience that came his way; in 1927 he travelled to Giggleswick, for example, when the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, set up camp in the school grounds to observe the total eclipse of the sun. He was a member of the Bradford Mechanics Institute in Bridge Street, which had a library with a large selection of daily newspapers. Kenneth paid them five shillings a year to let him take away all their papers after two days, and he read these voraciously. The world was in a state of upheaval and being a very religious man with a natural inclination to take up extreme causes—he became a member of the Independent Order of Rechabites, a strict anti-alcohol society—he found himself deeply affected by accounts of the Spanish Civil War, and fearful that the unfolding events in Hitler’s Germany might lead to another world war; his brother Willie was a constant reminder of the horrors that that might unleash. Though he never actually joined the Communist Party, he was fired by its ideals. He stopped attending chapel, and became vehemently anti-war, announcing in September 1939, when war on Germany was finally declared, that he was a conscientious objector and would not fight. He adopted a position of moral absolutism, and refused to engage in any work for the war effort, even working as a fire warden.
This was an impossibly difficult time for Laura, seven months pregnant with her fifth child. As a “conchie,” Kenneth was an outcast in a world that was convinced of the rightness of going to war. He was physically attacked at work, and found himself ostracised wherever he went. People spat at him in the street and scarcely a morning went by without Laura having to scrub away the words YELLOW HOCKNEY painted during the night on the front steps by one of their neighbours, a policeman. Philip began to suffer from recurring nightmares. “I used to dream,” he remembers, “that the Germans had landed and had herded all the children onto a piece of land, and were asking, ‘Who is going to protect the children and who is not,’ and my father would always say, ‘I can’t fight,’ and I thought, ‘We’re not going to be protected,’ and would wake up night after night terrified.”14
It was especially hard for Laura because Kenneth’s refusal to fight meant that she received no war pay, while his rejection of any kind of work connected to the war meant that there was no other money coming in, when they needed it more than ever. A yawning gulf opened up between them. “He refused to do any fire-watching,” she later commented, “which he could have done really even if he was against the war. My way of looking at it then was that he could have been protecting his children, and he would have got five shillings a night, which was a lot of money and would have helped us a lot. He wouldn’t talk about it at home … He didn’t share his troubles, and I think if he had done it would have been much nicer for us. Perhaps I would have understood things better.”15
To begin with, the children were spared the knowledge of what was going on, because, since the authorities were convinced that Bradford was sure to be bombed, it was thought safer to evacuate the family until the new baby was born. While Kenneth remained in Bradford, the heavily pregnant Laura and their four children were sent to Nelson in Lancashire. A bus took them from the train station to a local school, where they waited with hundreds of other evacuees to be allocated to local families. Paul and Philip, dressed in little red blazers, with white shirts and socks, and navy-blue trousers, all made by Laura, went first. “We were sitting on this kind of grass verge,” Paul remembers, “waiting to be allocated somewhere and this lady came by in a car and she said she’d take two little boys. So they gave her Philip and me. She just took us off and that was it. We’d never been in a car before.”16 Nobody wanted a pregnant woman with two small children, so Laura was the very last person to be chosen, and then only reluctantly, by a woman who was mainly interested in the food she had brought with her—a carrier bag given to each family by the authorities and filled with corned beef, cocoa, dried milk and tea. Her name was Mrs. Lund, and she lived across the road from the school with her husband and daughter, both of whom worked in the local woollen mill. “She was a very strict person,” said Laura, “but very kind.”17 The Hockneys were given a room with a double bed for Laura and Margaret, and a cot for David. They sat at the same table as the Lund family, but cooked their own meals, and Kenneth was allowed to visit once a week. It was not mentioned that he was a conscientious objector.
Two weeks after the birth of the new baby, a boy they named John, Laura and the children returned to Bradford and David was enrolled in the babies’ class at Hanson. Because of the blackout, wartime school started late and finished early and it was drummed into the children that if the air-raid sirens started while they were on their way to school or home, then they should run as fast as possible back to whichever was nearest. The school day was also punctuated with routines like the daily gas-mask practice. All the children, of whatever age, had to have a gas mask and know how to put it on, and they were given little cardboard boxes to carry them in. To Laura Hockney, these did not seem quite good enough, so she made her children special leatherette cases to provide adequate protection in the rain. They never actually had to wear one.
With no job and no prospect of any other kind of employment, Kenneth was thrown back on his wits. He had always been good with his hands so he decided to start a little business reconditioning prams, both dolls’ prams and babies’ prams, which he found through the advertisements in local papers, like the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, or the Dewsbury Gazette. Laura put her dressmaking skills to use repairing or remaking the hoods and aprons, while Kenneth put new springs on them and painted the bodies to make them look new. Though this work brought in relatively little money, with careful use of her ration books, Laura was able to make ends meet. A family of seven was allowed one book for each member of the family. She had three books for meat, and since she was a strict vegetarian, all her ration went to the children. With the other four books, she could get plenty of cheese, milk and butter or margarine. “She was very good at feeding us,” Margaret remembers, “and she certainly didn’t expect us to be vegetarians, though she did make very nice vegetarian food.”18
The family had scarcely been back a few months when the bomb struck that nearly annihilated them. It was one of 116 bombs dropped on Bradford that night, doing considerable damage to the city centre and surrounding areas. Lingards, the great department store, took a direct hit and was gutted, as was the adjoining Kirkgate Chapel. Rawson Market was badly damaged, and in Manchester Road a bomb crashed through the roof of the Odeon Cinema, then the largest in Britain, landing in the front stalls and bringing the ceiling and heavy metal chandeliers down onto the seats. Miraculously, the audience for It’s a Date, starring Deanna Durbin and Walter Pidgeon, had left ten minutes earlier. Robert’s Pie Shop had its front blown off, but when Priestley visited the city a month later, at the end of September, just after the Battle of Britain had been won, the giant pie was back in the window, still steaming, “every puff defying Hitler, Goering and the whole gang of them.”19
Then, quite suddenly, in 1943, Kenneth announced that they were moving house, a decision which angered Laura, who had not been consulted. Kenneth’s reasoning was that, with five children, they needed more space,
and that it would be good for the whole family to get away, since the cruel taunts of their neighbours in Steadman Terrace were not going to cease. The new house, 18 Hutton Terrace, was in Eccleshill, a suburb high up on the northern outskirts of the city. It had a proper cellar, a kitchen with an open range for cooking, and a separate front room. Upstairs there were two bedrooms on the first floor and two attic rooms, and it had a bathroom and an inside toilet. There was a decent garden at the back, the air was fresh, and the front looked out over green fields, with extensive views across the Aire Valley. It was certainly a good environment and in time, Kenneth believed, Laura would come round to it, but night after night Margaret, who had the room next to them, would hear them arguing into the small hours.
Kenneth set up his pram business in the cellar of the new house, and with the extra space it afforded, he also began to buy and restore bicycles. When work was completed and they were ready to be sold, he would advertise them in the local papers, giving the number of the nearest telephone box and telling prospective buyers to call it between a certain time. Then he would take his favourite chair and set it up outside the box and sit down and wait till somebody called. For the young David, this seemed logical. “People considered him eccentric for doing this,” Hockney says now, “but it just made me think…‘What a sensible man. That’s just what I’d do.’ ”20
It was in his father’s pram workshop, watching him at work, that the seeds of Hockney’s ambition to become an artist were sown. “The fascination of the brush dipping in the paint, putting it on,” he later wrote, “I loved it … it is a marvellous thing to dip a brush into paint and make marks on anything, even on a bicycle, the feel of a thick brush full of paint coating something.”21 And on another occasion he recalled how “he’d put silver paint on the wheels, but the one thing I remember was he’d paint a straight line down the bar. He had a special brush and he would hold his finger along the brush so he could paint a perfect line. I thought: incredible that you can make a straight line like that with just your eye. It’s like watching Michelangelo draw a circle.”22
David Hockney Page 2
