Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  ‘The Glider Bike Soars over the Railway Cutting’, from Murphy’s Mad Mo’bike

  In the early sixties most children had tricycles – heavy iron ones with solid tyres, spoke wheels and a little tin box on the back to put stuff in, which looked like a bread bin. The boy up the road who had leukaemia – it was always whispered, ‘Oh, he’s very ill’ – had a brand-new tricycle. Mine was more primitive. My dad had bought an old one, then renovated it for me. He could do everything: he was Utility Dad. He painted it black and it had a badge in relief on the headstock that said Triumph or Raleigh, and rod brakes that squeaked. It was a perfectly serviceable trike. The trike wasn’t a disappointment, the disappointment was that he buggered off, let me down and left me in the clutches of the other bloke.

  He Came Not in Triumph, detail, 2004

  I don’t have many memories of my father and sometimes wonder, not that I have faked them, but that they have expanded to fill the space. I can remember fragments, like him sitting me on the tank of his motorbike and driving down the road, which was a risky thing to do with a four-year-old. It was an important four years because I absorbed a lot of him during that time and it was the longest period I spent with him. I have very few memories; they are a series of idealisations really. There must have been touch but I can’t remember it.

  The day after my father left I was playing in the shed pretending to fly a plane, thinking the bench was the cockpit, and the vice with the metal handle that twiddles round was the controls. I even fashioned some earphones. A shed is a male space, a male nest. It’s a refuge for a man.

  4

  ‘VERY SORRY, GRAYSON’

  WE HAD TWO teachers in my first primary school: one was called Mrs Quick, the other Mrs Moth, ‘Quick! Catch the Moth!’ was our joke, and the headmaster might have been called Mr Buchanan because we used to call him Mr Cannonball. Every morning in assembly, Mr Cannonball would make the whole school count to one hundred, recite the alphabet, sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and say the Lord’s Prayer.

  Mrs Moth had a curiously kinky ritual when it was a pupil’s birthday. As the class sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’, she laid you face down across her lap – pretending you were a piano – then tickled you while trilling, ‘DADA DER-DER DA-DA!’ She finished by giving you a number of pretend smacks on the bottom, depending on how old you were. Mrs Moth once gave me a tiny, furry squirrel and I thought, ‘She really likes me because she’s given me this.’ In Mrs Quick’s class I was one of the teacher’s pets and I often brought her bunches of flowers that I picked from our front garden, and for some reason my mum encouraged this. On Valentine’s Day, shortly after my father left, my mother gave me some pennies to buy Mrs Quick a present – some chocolate, she said. I only had enough money for one of those bars that had chocolates with different centres moulded into one bar. It was in a brown paper bag on which I wrote, not very clearly, ‘Be My Valentine.’ I surreptitiously left it on the teacher’s desk and I was mortified when Mrs Quick held up the chocolate and announced, ‘SOMEONE’S LEFT THEIR LUNCH ON MY DESK,’ because she hadn’t noticed the writing. At morning break I huddled in a corner of the playground, crying; I was inconsolably upset because my Valentine’s Day gift had backfired and I felt humiliated. I suppose I was in a damaged state at the time. To my eternal gratitude, and much to her credit, Mrs Quick finally saw the writing on the paper bag and recognised it as mine so, at the end of the day, she called me over and whispered ‘Very sorry, Grayson’ and love was restored all round.

  At school, I was always embarrassed by my name because it stood out and new teachers often said it the wrong way round, calling me Perry Grayson. My mother had called me Grayson because when she was expecting me, my parents went on holiday to a bed and breakfast in Cornwall where the landlady’s son, a friendly chap called Grayson, showed them around the area. My mother liked him and she liked his name. It’s a very uncommon Christian name – occasionally I have heard of another Grayson although I’ve never met one. It means ‘bailiff’s son’. A highly unusual name was self-defining; even at the offset I felt different.

  Most afternoons on the way home from school I played in the cornfield along the back of my house. When I was five, the corn was taller than me so I trampled tracks into it, much to the farmer’s annoyance, to make mazes. I was disappointed when I grew taller and the corn was no longer higher than me. The cornfield was transformed into a colossal construction area in 1966 when I was six because the North Sea Gas pipeline came straight through the middle of it and that summer the building site became our playground. We used to clamber on caterpillar tractors, and over and through precarious piles of cast-iron pipes – if they’d rolled, squash! The workmen sometimes let us ride up and down the field in their diggers and I would sit in the cabin of a JCB as pleased as punch. The tall cranes, the deep pits and the welding of huge pipes were very exciting to a young boy.

  If I wasn’t outside playing, I used to spend a lot of time indoors drawing. Every week I cut all the dolls from the back of my sister’s Bunty comic, then made them new clothes. My stepfather, when he moved in with us, had brought with him a large roll of thin, light-blue paper that old-fashioned airmail envelopes were made from. On Saturday mornings my mother would give Alan Barford and me a sheet of paper and a pencil each, asserting, ‘You’re only getting one piece!’ It would be a sizeable sheet, about A3, so I folded my piece of paper into eighths to make eight small rectangles, then I drew on each one and that gave me eight goes at drawing aeroplane battles with tiny dots for guns firing off. I drew a lot of jets because my only ambition at primary school was to be a jet pilot.

  Look Mum, I’m a Jet Pilot, 2000

  During that first summer holiday after my father left I watched a children’s television programme that demonstrated how to make a hand puppet from a sock. I rummaged around and uncovered a white baby bootee, made the puppet, drew eyes on it and immediately felt very fond of it because it was a toy, a character, and it was made of a sensual material – it had a woolly upper and a vinyl sole as bootees sometimes do. It was feminine and babyish. The sensation of this friendly toy around my fingers, the comfort of having my hand inside the bootee and the joy of being creative, were the first inklings of the fetishism that was to play a large part in my growing up. Only a few days later I had the puppet in my pocket while I was playing in a stream with Alan Barford and it fell into the water and got sopping wet, so I hung it on a fence to dry while we finished erecting our dam. I was upset when I realised, back at home, that I had left it hanging there: that the little puppet was alone on the barbed wire, quivering in the wind, cold and abandoned. It distressed me to think that I had left my poor, cuddly little toy to its fate in the horrible wide world. I had forsaken it and all I’d invested in it – that dismayed me; I cried in bed at night. I can’t remember crying over my father leaving but I can remember crying about my abandoned toy.

  5

  A CURRANT BUN

  AUNTY MARY WAS definitely a currant bun and not a horse. There was a yuppie pub game in the eighties where you waited until someone walked into the pub, then everyone would shout, ‘Horse!’ – horse isn’t an insult – or, ‘Currant Bun!’ There were always people who hovered around the border: ‘No! No! Not a horse!’ It’s a fast way of dividing people into one of two. Martine McCutcheon is a currant bun and Gwyneth Paltrow is a horse. Aunty Mary was a currant bun, whereas my mother was a horse and, for as long as I can remember, Aunty Mary was a currant bun with no teeth. In those days the dentist declared, ‘They’re not worth doing anything with, I’ll pull them out.’ She had all false teeth, whereas Uncle Arthur had one tooth left and a plate that went round it.

  My mother was the youngest of nine children and Aunty Mary was her older sister. She was married to Uncle Arthur and they lived down the road from my grandmother. When Uncle Arthur was courting Aunty Mary, each of her siblings had to give him a portion of their dinner when he went there for a meal because there wasn’t enough food to go
round. Uncle Arthur told me that my grandparents ate the meat and their nine children ate the gravy, and that when one of the children went to the toilet during a meal, they took their plate with them because if they left it on the table one of the other eight would have eaten it by the time they came back.

  My Aunty Mary’s house was spotless and the front lawn was mowed to within an inch of its life. She was the type of person who always did the washing on a Monday, and would hoover, sweep, clean, dust and polish the entire house every day. Aunty Mary was completely ritualistic, which I found very comforting. When she brewed a cup of tea she made it in exactly the same way every time. She warmed the teapot by resting it on the spout of the kettle so when the boiling water was poured into the pot it didn’t cool down. It would always be leaf tea – never teabags – and she would wait for a particular number of minutes to let it brew so I unfailingly had a piping-hot, perfect-strength cup of tea. The tea was to go with my Marmite toast; it was a catchphrase at my aunty’s house: nobody could make Marmite toast like Aunty Mary. She would do it just so. It would invariably be the right sort of fresh, crusty white bread, each slice grilled individually, buttered at exactly the right moment, spread with precisely the correct amount of Marmite, not too much because I liked a very light Marmite texture, with all the crumbs stirred up. As I finished one slice, the next piece would be waiting for me. I think that’s love: love is doing someone’s toast just the way they want it, on cue.

  Aunty Mary’s breakfast bowls were white and reddish-brown, and decorated with a countryside scene of a church, cottages, trees and a few cows, typical English china, but I would not eat my cornflakes out of those bowls. I announced, ‘I don’t want to eat off the pattern bowls. I want a striped bowl.’ I would only eat from Aunty Mary’s blue-and-white striped Cornish ware; I almost had an allergy to the patterned, transfer-printed crockery, which is ironic because I make patterned, transfer-printed ceramics now. I saw the decorated tableware as feminine and decided I was being a sissy by eating breakfast off it. Although I was only eight I would not eat out of an ornamental bowl, an ornamental bowl was girly and I was not going to go there.

  At Aunty Mary’s I was made to wash properly. I had a bath once a week on a Sunday, so on the other evenings Aunty Mary poured boiling water into the kitchen sink while I stood on a stool in front of her, scouring my face until it was red-raw and scrubbing under my armpits with a flannel and soap. She would be watching to see that I did every bit that was necessary, and that I brushed my teeth in the proper way and didn’t cheat. And at Aunty Mary’s you didn’t pee in the toilet water; you peed on the side of the bowl so that people in the kitchen down below couldn’t hear it. My cousin told me that.

  When Aunty Mary put me to bed, I was in bondage. The sheets were pulled down so tightly over Alan Measles and me that I could barely move, but it was comforting and lovely. In the morning I’d be given a cup of tea, Aunty Mary would bring it up to me in bed, I’d read my cousin’s vast collection of Superman comics and it was heaven. To stay with Aunty Mary represented a gold standard of happiness.

  It was Uncle Arthur who gave me Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia – although the twelfth volume was mouldy because the encyclopaedias had been stacked up in Uncle Arthur’s shed and as it was at the bottom of the pile it had rotted. The books, printed in the twenties when the world map was almost completely pink, were massive tomes, arranged into chapters on history, geography and poetry; there was a chapter on everything. One chapter was called ‘Make and Do’, with tricks such as how to peel an apple without breaking the skin or how to balance a penny on your nose. I didn’t much read the writing but every photograph – and the volumes were chock-a-block with early photographs stained blue and white or rose and white – had a caption of two or three sentences which I enjoyed reading. There were countless diagrams and maps, and page upon page of illustrations of different varieties of seashells or British birds, or the internal workings of the steam engine. The most beautiful photographs were those of foreign lands when they were still very foreign: ‘Log Jams in the Canadian Forest’, ‘Tribal Houses’, or Dresden, pre-bombing when it was entirely Gothic. One chapter was called ‘Wide World Wonders’, with pictures of monasteries on rocks, astonishing waterfalls and tribes who dwelt in caves. There was one plate of a woman carrying a great weight on her head while the inscription proclaimed, ‘Man’s First Means of Transport: His Wife’, which gave me an extremely old-fashioned, Imperialistic view of the rest of the world as all Wonga-Wonga Land.

  Claire and Florence visit shrine to Essex Man, 1998

  Colour pages were precious, although they only cropped up every two or three hundred pages, used to illustrate flags or a diagram of flowers that required colour. Later 1970s encyclopaedias that I read, I found slightly cheap and not very beautiful. They had a modern, easy-to-read, flashy approach in which acquiring knowledge became something you did to get a job, instead of the lovely mysterious adventure in a foreign land that learning seemed to me.

  Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedias were a comfort and an escape; I read the volumes in bed, gazing at the fuzzy images of the world. I was fond of the density of the information – the print was minuscule, the pictures compact. The quaintness and richness of these volumes affected my aesthetic, playing a symbolic part in shaping the way in which I orientated myself in the world. As they were fifty years out of date, I idealised the past, perhaps still do in certain circumstances. I was probably romanticising my own past, even by then, even by the age of seven or eight, thinking that the golden age of my life, a pseudo-1950s dream world, had passed.

  There is an old picture book which I love called John Tarlton’s Essex. John Tarlton obviously lived in Essex and took photographs of everyday life in the county from the Second World War until the seventies. One image is of a woman and her children picking potatoes. My mother and Aunty Mary would supplement their families’ incomes by apple picking, planting beans or working in the fields, all back-breaking work for next to no money. I went apple picking with them once. From the book I have a warm, golden, nostalgic view of Essex with windmills turning, shire-horses plodding and nice ladies in headscarves, tatty coats and Wellington boots toiling up and down frozen fields with kiddies wrapped in Rupert Bear scarves, though the reality was probably very different, more like, ‘I got one and nine pence for twenty-three hours’ work.’

  In the fields, from John Tarlton, Essex: A Community and its People in Pictures 1940–1960

  As well as providing me with books, Uncle Arthur gave me my first bike. I had been intensely jealous when my sister was bought a bicycle before me – although soon afterwards he came to my rescue by cobbling together a second-hand cycle. We were visiting Aunty Mary and Uncle Arthur on Christmas Day and, after we had given them their customary packets of Benson and Hedges, Uncle Arthur bellowed, ‘TAR-DARRRRR!’ and wheeled in a bicycle, wrapped up and tied with tinsel. The whole family was watching me. I burst into tears, charged out of the sitting room and hid in the toilet. I felt terrible because I thought I was being ungrateful, though I enjoyed riding the bike afterwards.

  The bicycle had cream and rust mudguards and the previous owner had stuck model aeroplane stickers all over the frame, which I thought was very cool. It was my pride and joy – I was so happy. I taught myself to ride my bike by laying my stomach on the saddle and trailing my feet along on the pavement, then pushing off. On Boxing Day I was cycling all over Broomfield with Alan Barford when I rode over a shard of glass that caused a major blow-out of the rear tyre and it completely disintegrated. I was distraught. Uncle Arthur had to be summoned: a few days later he came to fix the tyre. I felt vulnerable because my happiness was dependent on his mechanical ability. My father was the capable mender of machines but he wasn’t on the spot to repair my bike for me.

  Aunty Mary and Uncle Arthur witnessed what was happening to me – it was Aunty Mary who begged my mother not to go and live in my stepfather’s house because she saw how it would unf
old. I knew that, compared to home, which could be chaotic and frightening, how it was at Aunty Mary’s was how it should be. They knew I needed them, and having them meant I wasn’t as damaged by my family as I might otherwise have been. They were salt-of-the-earth people who were kind and caring, and showed me that the world wasn’t insane.

  Aunty Mary’s council estate, the space, the light, the little houses on little lawns, was the landscape I grew up in. It was not a landscape of slums: these were idealistically built council houses that had bathrooms and indoor toilets, semi-detached houses set in wide green avenues with blackthorn trees planted down the middle. There was a particular atmosphere of an afternoon at Aunty Mary’s, of the mantelpiece clock ticking and the budgerigar cheeping and the gas fire hissing – phewww – while the afternoon faded. The twilight came through the net curtains between the two china dogs and the brass donkey, and time passed, with me lying on the floor with some Lego bricks and a toy car.