Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  I suspect there have been versions of fetishes since time immemorial; that there have always been people with fetishes and either they didn’t know what a fetish was, or they practised their own peculiar version in private with their mother’s swimming cap and a rubber raincoat. There was a kinky magazine published in the 1940s called Bizarre which had DIY articles on how to build your own manacles, how to sew your own fetish boots and where to buy the best corsets. Many fetish scenarios present themselves in history and in films; Douglas Bader with his legs chopped off is a fantastic combination of Second World War pilot dogfighting and amputee-ism. The Man in the Iron Mask, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Avengers were films that stimulated my erotic imagination. Today there is a comprehensive culture of fetishism; it’s a huge industry. Everyone has a fetish – they might even have one for ordinary sex.

  It is difficult to find a satisfying person with whom to enact a fetish. For every thousand people who like being prisoners, there is only one person who enjoys putting people in prison. There are too few sadists to go round. Certainly among men, there are more masochists than sadists. Most women who are willing to tie men up are professional. Many prostitutes specialise in S & M because it’s a relatively safe market as it’s non-penetrative and they only have to tether the person up in the dungeon – a lot of prostitutes have their own dungeon complete with stocks, cages and bondage equipment. There are plenty of dungeons around and about.

  A fetish, in the particular sense of a technical, psychological explanation, is an object that takes the place of normal human relations. Instead of loving the woman, you love her high-heeled shoes. It is an ability of the mind to think metaphorically, to shift. If the unconscious can’t get what it wants emotionally in a normal way, it will find an alternative pathway to get it. If you can’t express your feminine side as a man, something decides, ‘Well, you’d better dress up as a woman.’ If you can’t get a hug from your dad, you wrap yourself up very tightly in the bedclothes instead, though you don’t equate the one with the other. It’s your body’s and subconscious’s cry. It’s a predisposition, sensitivity or an emotional vulnerability in a person and if that person is brought up in a harsh environment soon the fetish world comes along offering a solution. As a child, not for a moment did I think, ‘This is because of my parents.’ Until I was an adult it never occurred to me to equate my sex life with any lack in my childhood parental experiences. My body and mind only whispered, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, try that.’ It would be a turn-on and the reward was a bit of a stiffy and a bit of a feel.

  8

  BIG, STODGY, SAUSAGY, SCARRED FINGERS

  MY STEPFATHER’S HOBBY was wrestling. He was not particularly tall, but he was strong and hairy in his shiny leotard and covered in rope burns from being flung around the ring. The old man was a member of Chelmsford Wrestling Club; he practised through the week and wrestled in shows at the weekend. On a Saturday we would often drive to a local fair or fête around Essex where there’d be an hour or two of wrestling bouts in a large white marquee that people paid to enter. Sometimes the old man was a solo wrestler, other times he would be in a pairing with his friend Max, which they called the Masked Marauders. He wore a whole-head hood with the mouth, nose and eyes cut out, like an executioner’s mask, with an ‘M’ on the forehead that my mother had sewn for him. Once my stepfather hurled Max out of the ring and he landed on a boy sitting in the front row, breaking the boy’s leg. The other act he performed was called the Man in the Iron Mask for which he wore a catering-sized baked bean tin on his head. A friend who worked in the local metalworking shop turned the tin into a helmet complete with nose-piece and eye slits. He donned a black, swirling cape and he was the Baddie pretending to shout in German, so the Groundies bellowed ‘Boo! Hiss!’. There were many comic incidents and lots of cheering although there was always a moment when his mask got twisted round. The Baddies always lose – I think the Baddies always lose. He was very proud of his wrestling.

  The old man would launch into wrestling matches with my mother and I would be frightened because she used to implore me to help her. I felt I should rescue my mum when she was being throttled although it was too scary a thought to contemplate: I was little while he was a big – very big by this point – wrestler. He wasn’t keen on punches but, being a wrestler, he would grab my mother or me and shake, throttle and throw. I see my mother with sizeable bruises. In my memory, one morning she showed me the chopper she had slept with under her pillow because she was scared he might lose his temper in the middle of the night. It was a lethal combination.

  My mother and stepfather married on the same day as my Uncle Eric’s daughter. My mother made me brush my teeth and scrub my nails, and we had special outfits bought for us, not for her wedding but for my cousin’s wedding. Uncle Eric was the wealthiest member of the family because he had invented the Decimetre, a pocket-sized currency calculator that converted the old money into new pence, so his daughter’s wedding was a big do, Chelmsford Cathedral then on to the town hall function suite. I was eight, my sister was six and my brother was a babe in arms: he was violently sick all down my mother in the cathedral. I can remember my mum’s outfit because I later tried it on. It was a brown-and-white floral miniskirt suit with a white floppy hat to match. My mother and stepfather had got married in the register office earlier that morning but I didn’t know about it at the time and only found out later in the year – although it seemed to me that because my mother had got divorced once, divorce was always a possibility. My mother took my stepfather’s name and my sister changed her surname for ease when she went to secondary school, but I didn’t change my name, I didn’t want to.

  I once asked my mother, ‘Did he hurt you last night?’ to which she drawled, ‘Ow, Yes!’ in a suggestive, Kenneth Williams way. Early on they had love-ins, cuddled on the sofa and were robustly sexual. My mother was always open; she wouldn’t mind me seeing her nude in the bath. She would say things like, ‘Go and fetch me a sanitary towel,’ whereas my stepfather disapproved of me walking about with only a towel round my waist when my sister was about. When my friends visited, my mother would get her tummy out, slap it on the kitchen table and brag, ‘Look at that, you don’t get many of them for the pound,’ or, ‘I’ve had a hysterectomy.’ When she was showing one of my girlfriends around the house she would divulge, ‘This is the room where Grayson does all his wanking.’ My mother was staunchly working class, almost aggressively so, whereas my stepfather aspired to middle-class values. The day Mrs Thatcher came into power was the first time I voted and that morning I went with my mother in her rusty car that she delivered the papers in. We pulled up in front of the polling station in this clapped-out old Mini and the boot fell off with a clang. My mother shouted to the policeman, ‘Here come the Labour voters. Yes, yes, we’re Labour voters.’ My mum voted Labour but my stepfather was Conservative. She would never have voted what he voted. I am sure a lot of my rebelliousness, the style of it, comes from her.

  My stepfather was a man of many fingers in many pies, big, stodgy, sausagy, scarred, knuckled fingers, jabby fingers on a jabbing hand, making assertive, thrusting gestures. He was always packing a wad. My mother boasted, ‘He’s never got less than a hundred quid on him.’ As well as buying a large white van and doing house clearances, he worked as a nightclub bouncer and owned the café opposite Hoffman’s ball-bearing factory in Chelmsford called Brian’s Caff, which his parents ran. We used to visit the café occasionally, though I could hardly bring myself to eat there because I knew the conditions the food was cooked in. My mother worked there – we were all working for him. He liked everyone to work as hard as he did. I had another brother, Daniel, who had been born in 1971, and when my brothers were nine and four the old man would drive them on their paper rounds before they went to school in the morning and they would run out of the van to deliver the papers.

  The old man worked such long hours he hardly ever drove the E-type Jag, so his friend Little Jim – who was ve
ry short – used to exercise the car. Little Jim would take the Jag out for a thrash, then park it on the drive underneath my bedroom window, its huge, shining bonnet up with the whopping great engine ticking, tick, tick, tick and steaming as it cooled down into the night. I used to have the top bunk bed, with Neil underneath, so I could look out of our bedroom window while I was lying in bed at night and watch the car steam. Little Jim would bring his son round with him and the son would sit there pulling his eyelashes out. I thought he was distinctly odd, though I don’t think I qualified as normal.

  When I’ve dreamed about my stepfather in my adult life he yodels a cry of frustration. In my childhood he would indeed let out a frustrated animal scream, usually because my mother had wound him up until he snapped – ‘OOOWWWWWWWWWWWW!’ Then he would grab something or somebody, my mother or one of us. If he grabbed me he would slam me against the wall. One morning I came downstairs to find the sitting room in chaos where he had hurled furniture about and there were holes in the door where he had punched it. Another night he pulled the door shut so very hard he bent the door handle right round. He would throw the electric fire, chairs, even the sofa.

  I was tense in his presence and his was a brooding presence, like a sleeping dragon you shouldn’t disturb. He was a storm on the horizon, which broke all the time: if I didn’t do the washing up or I didn’t do the washing up properly, if I was sick in the car or if I annoyed my mother over something or other, he would be summoned. Mum was like the ground troops; he would be called in like an air strike on a bombing run. I was ordered up to my bedroom, then given the traditional whack on the arse because he administered spankings if there was a recognised crime, like a broken lampshade. There was an animalistic rivalry between us, but I was a scrawny, pale blond; I wasn’t a powerhouse, I was an endurance athlete. My mother frequently commented with some pride, ‘You never answer back,’ to which I thought, ‘Yes! Survival mechanism!’ From my childhood I developed guerrilla tactics – there was no sense in confronting the enemy head on, it was futile retaliating against someone who was much stronger. Messages were coming from Grayson Perry Central announcing, ‘I WILL SURVIVE! This is a war of skirmishes and I will score my points by being clever, by escaping as soon as I can, by not giving them any of my talents. My talents are mine. My achievements are mine. I will not allow them to share in my glory.’ My only weapon now is my forgiveness. It’s invariably awful being on the end of other people’s forgiveness.

  I am My Own God, 1998

  I lived in the same house as my stepfather for fifteen years although I never had a conversation with him, certainly nothing longer than an exchange of a few sentences, usually of a functional nature. The commonest was, ‘Do the washing up or your mother will get upset.’ Often he talked to me in the third person or via a third person: ‘Tell that long streak of piss to get off the sofa,’ or, ‘Could that Herbert do something to help his mother?’ He hardly ever called me by my name, Grayson, it was always ‘you’ or an insult, nor did I address him by his name; I somehow got his attention to say what I needed to say. It was incredibly hard work and extremely tense. It was as if we didn’t exist to each other. I never thought of calling him ‘Dad’, ‘Dad’ would have stuck in my throat. Calling people by their name is the beginning of an intimacy: having conversations, being able to fight back, are important components in forming a relationship.

  My stepfather made his best efforts to have a working relationship with me, I imagine. He bought me an air rifle that I prized for many years until I shot my brother, Neil, with it and had it confiscated. I used to build a lot of little dens with my brothers and we would sit in our den with my air rifle and shoot things. I shot a bird once and felt terribly guilty. I was very much a surrogate father to my youngest brother, Daniel, and I played a lot with him when he was small. He was more sensitive than Neil, who was sporty and played football. I was the one who would mend the punctures on their bikes and build go-karts and play soldiers.

  At Christmas there was always an exchange of gifts and he gave me The Times World Atlas, which I treasured. Christmas Day was symptomatic in our house in that we all, rather sadly, opened our presents in our own bedrooms, which I thought was normal until I went to someone else’s house at Christmas and was stunned that other people opened their presents together – that nakedness was shocking to me. All my presents would be in my room when I woke up and I’d open them, then later on there would be a cursory ‘Thank you’. It was very isolating.

  My first inkling that my stepfather had sadness in his childhood was when his parents came to visit. His mother looked like the portrait in the National Gallery of the woman with the turned-up nose and the horrible, squidgy breasts pushed up in a bodice. They brought some of my stepfather’s old toys from his boyhood but none of them had been played with. There was a clockwork man in its box that was over twenty years old yet still pristine and an untouched colouring book called Sketches of the Stars with a blank page opposite each picture where you could copy your sketch of the Hollywood film star from the early fifties. I don’t think my stepfather had what I had in spades, which was a rich interior life.

  Between the ages of four to fifteen, I gradually retreated further inwards and my internal world became increasingly important to me. I spent most of my time in my bedroom embellishing Alan Measles’s domain. I would go upstairs and free fall almost, riff on what I was feeling, then play out those feelings in my game – so there would be a lot of war! With the Germans. I played out these events in detailed scenarios involving cars, tanks and my ever-growing collection of model aeroplanes. Events were upsetting, terrifying, much of the time and if I had allowed emotion to flood in it would have been overwhelming, so I dealt with the highs and lows by being numb. Any feeling of love I had was shut down. I must have loved my mother. Parents are a child’s survival. When I was a child, how could I countenance not thinking my parents were perfect? The alternative was too frightening to think of.

  9

  STUPIDER THAN ME

  I WAS A child who knew I was cuckoo in the nest, who knew that my parents were stupider than me. Even though I didn’t acknowledge it consciously, I realised it subconsciously. My parents patronised me because they couldn’t understand me. It was, ‘Oh, isn’t he clever!’ It was as if I were a zoo monster wheeled out for guests: ‘Look at the models Grayson’s made this week,’ or, ‘Have you seen his drawings!’ Visitors would be shown my room as if I were a weird Outsider Artist: ‘Here’s Grayson’s room’ and the subtext would be, ‘Isn’t it odd to have this kid in the house!’

  There weren’t any books at home, even though by then we were newsagents too. My stepfather struggled to fill in the children’s crossword in the Sun. I had a few books because I read voraciously, beginning with Dr Doolittle, then James Bond and all the Boy’s Own adventures. My sister dipped into My Friend Flicka and my mother would leaf through Woman, Woman’s Own, the Sun and the Mirror. My mother realised the value of education, though: she was the one who entered me for grammar school. She recognised I was intelligent. My mother often remarked, ‘He’s done it all on his own.’

  My school was a venerable grammar school for boys, founded in 1555 by King Edward the Sixth. Academically it was the best school in Essex, to get in you had to be in the top five per cent in the country in the 11-plus. It had an excellent reputation and a very good relationship with Oxbridge. Unencumbered, maybe I would have studied at Oxford or Cambridge and had a different life, becoming an academic and finding fulfilment in an alternative way. Curiously, the school backed on to a school for the mentally handicapped, which I always thought was ironic. It had been a boarding school and still had the atmosphere of a traditional public school: there were quadrangles, quirky jargon and the teachers wore gowns. It was a culture shock. A well-spoken woman in the village said to my mother, ‘My son is going to King Edward the Sixth Grammar School in September, it’s an excellent school and in the top five state schools in the country,’ to which my mother rejoine
d, ‘Ow! That’s where my Grayson’s going!’ and enjoyed watching the woman deflate.

  The uniform was black, with a blazer that had red braid round the collar for the first three years. It was de rigueur to get this as dirty as possible as soon as possible because glowing red braid round your lapel was a sign of naffness. I had a satchel but there was no chance I was going to be bought a new bag until it wore out, so for the first four years I had this satchel, which was a badge of geekiness. Everybody else had an Adidas sports bag: that was a source of agony and angst for me. As I always lived a long way from school I didn’t have a social life connected with school; I was a bit of a loner-weirdo on the periphery.

  In the first year I was in the middle of my class, in the second year I was top of the class, winning the form prize. For my prize I chose a book called How to Go: Plastic Modelling. In the third year I was sixth from bottom and the school were curious; they wanted to know what had happened. What had happened was that one day the old man had picked me up, banged me against the wall, then almost thrown me up the stairs. I phoned my grandmother in panic, blurting, ‘He’s gone mad! I’m terrified!’ My grandmother immediately called the NSPCC. The school must have been informed by the charity and, with my results plummeting, have put two and two together.