by Wendy Jones
I replied, ‘Sounds like a good idea. How do you go about that then?’ I had no conception that there was a formal, academic training to become an artist. In that moment I made my decision, wrote it on a piece of paper in my mind, put it under a mental mattress, slept on it and never needed to look at it again: ‘I’m going to be an artist. I’m going to spend my life drawing for a living.’ It seemed like a fantastic idea because I loved drawing. I went home that day and announced, ‘I’m going to go to art college.’ I think my mum was disappointed because art wasn’t thought of as a proper career and until that moment I was still intending to go to Sandhurst.
The academic requirement to get into college was five O levels, which I already had, so I let my Geography and English A levels slide, although I worked hard for Art A level. I scraped through Geography and failed English. In English A level we studied stolid classics: Shakespeare, Chaucer and Jane Austen, very hard work for a testosterone-loaded seventeen-year-old. We read Emma but I was the wrong sex and an emotional illiterate. It seemed to me the most boring, trivial of books with no action at all. We studied David Copperfield and I enjoyed that, but not Emma. When we did King Lear I can remember thinking, ‘There’s a bit of something going on here.’
The building on the new house was soon finished and we moved out of the caravans and into Pant Ken. The house was called Pant Ken because the River Pant flowed along the bottom of the field and Ken was my stepfather’s middle name. It was substantial, five-bedroomed and hideously ugly, without any architectural merit, like a clumpy Barrett home. The lounge had an elongated York-stone fireplace, ranch-style, surrounded by beige shag-pile carpet so long you could lose a cat in it. The carpet needed raking rather than hoovering.
The old man had a routine in Pant Ken. He drove to Braintree to collect the papers from the train, came home at half past five, we sorted them out, then he did his round at Wethersfield American Air Force Base where my Aunty Audrey had been chopped up. He’d come back at lunchtime, flop on the settee, wake up in the early evening, watch telly still sprawled on it until late into the night until he fell asleep again, then get up at four. I can remember all the sofas we had because they were the old man’s thrones of power. The first was a mammoth thing covered in grey velour. It weighed a ton, but at least it meant that it wasn’t hurled around the sitting room. In the new house there was a sofa in cracked cream vinyl studded with five fat buttons. He would watch TV reclining on that sofa, wearing baggy tracksuits trousers. My mother moaned at him for not washing. He didn’t eat meals in the dining room with us; instead, he ate lying down on the sofa, so one of us would be dispatched to take his food into his lair. I always dreaded it when she asked me to carry his dinner through. My mother would fetch his dirty dinner plate, come back out, hold up the knife and exclaim to us, ‘Look! Clean! The knife’s still clean!’
One day the old man had foraged through my bedroom, falling upon a couple of leftover Forum mags that I’d borrowed, and he exploded, haranguing me for taking these magazines. He was standing at the top of the stairs and had me pinioned against the wall. The stairs were open-tread, polished mahogany and very slippery. These shiny stairs were stretching away behind him and I thought, ‘Yeah, one push, one good push.’ I glanced over his shoulder and I braced.
He must have caught my intention because he muttered, ‘I’ll kill you …’
He owned a shotgun by this point. He walked around Pant Ken and the fourteen-acre field in a Barbour jacket, flat cap and Wellington boots. The only thing I can remember him shooting was a seagull. He bought two horses, for my mother and him to ride; they were huge black shire-horses, and my sister had two horses because she’d had an operation and the doctor had advised that riding would be good exercise for her. At one point she had three horses and I had a rusty old bike that was falling apart. The old man treated my sister differently; he never physically attacked her – I probably saw being a girl as a more acceptable way to win affection. So we had four horses, a couple of cats, a pair of springer spaniels and a beautiful shaggy dog called Maeve with hair the same colour as mine. We also had ducks, chickens, a rabbit and a goat, a bloody goat that was the most trouble.
The goat was there because of my mother’s sentimental streak, she had seen an advert in the local paper: ‘Baby goat for free. Otherwise it will be destroyed.’ My mother brought home the kid, cooing, ‘Oh! Isn’t it cute!’ not quite realising that a male kid would grow into a great beast that could drag me across the field if it wanted to. It was a handful, this goat, with its mad, keyhole eyes. I built it a wooden hut with a curtain across the door because goats hate the rain. It was a sturdy box that I could heave round the field, but it was weighty enough so that when I chained the goat to it, it wouldn’t topple over. The box stayed in the same place for a few days while the goat ate a circle of grass round it, then I would roll the box across the field and he would eat another circle. I couldn’t let the goat off the chain because it was a big, powerful beast and it would climb everything. The next-door neighbour was a little old lady who had taken her driving tests eleven times but still hadn’t passed it. She was pulling out of the drive with her driving instructor when the goat leapt over the fence and jumped on to the bonnet of her car, utterly horrifying her. He was called Nuts because we had to have him de-nutted. I remember wrestling with the thing, holding it down when it was having its toenails cut. It strangled itself in the end on the chain, unfortunately.
Up the road from Pant Ken was an empty Victorian mansion with its own grounds within a walled garden where I used to walk the dogs. I stowed a bag of ladies’ clothes I’d siphoned from the youth club jumble sale in this Victorian house and every so often I would go there on a quiet summer’s afternoon to try on the women’s clothes, then wander through the gardens of this derelict villa, feeling excited. I once found a gardener’s mackintosh made from rubber and put that on too. Sometimes I would go there in the evening, dress up and amble in the moonlight. The grass was damp and dewy, and I was very aroused. They were raw moments.
I was tottering around the mansion one Sunday afternoon in this ensemble of women’s clothes when I heard voices. It sounded like a family. I slunk into an overgrown summerhouse, crouched down and hid behind a pile of wood. Suddenly their dog bounced into the summerhouse and began sniffing me. I was whispering, ‘Fack off! fack off!’ to the Labrador because I was thinking any minute now they are going to come in here searching for their dog and find this seventeen-year-old boy dressed in an awful nylon dress and too-small stilettos. Eventually the dog wandered off, but I nearly pooped, not my pants, but somebody else’s!
Getting up early every morning I’d see a lot of wildlife: foxes, owls and deer in the dawn. I would come home from school at six and take the dogs for a walk in the dark across the fields. I was never afraid of the dark. I saw a moonbow once. A moonbow is a rainbow cast not by the sun, but by a very bright full moon. Because there was very low light at night my eyes couldn’t separate the colour into its parts, so I only saw a white rainbow: a moonbow. I caught sight of it walking the dogs across a stubble field and I wondered, ‘What’s that? That’s amazing!’
Collage, 1983. Early work containing several examples of my personal iconography, crashed car, shed, pill box, pylon and girl with doll in Essex landscape
12
CHELMSFORD WAS QUITE A HOT-BED OF PUNK
ONE SUNDAY MORNING I was delivering the newspapers when I saw the front cover of a supplement with a photograph of punks at a Sex Pistols concert. I was amazed by it, I thought, ‘Fucking Hell! This is good!’ I decided then and there I wanted to be a punk rocker. There were a lot of other boys at school who wanted to be punk rockers as well, one of whom became our hero because he was on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine in a ripped school blazer. The headmaster was infuriated – a boy from King Edward the Sixth, in the school uniform, with safety pins!
The glorious amateurishness of punk meant that I could make my own outfit. I ripped the sleeves off a gr
ey school shirt, then stencilled ‘HATE’ all over it with a home-made stencil. I bought plastic sandals, wore the school blazer covered in badges and put Vaseline in my hair. My pièce de résistance was from a bag of horse tack my brothers found in the loft that had been used to hobble carthorses to stop them running away. It was a huge horse collar with whopping great brass studs, very brutal-looking, that I wore round my neck, extremely proudly. It was massive. The downside was that it had three great big metal chain links attached to it so when I pogoed they used to smack me in the teeth.
Chelmsford was quite a hot-bed of punk. It had a lot of gigs to which my mum gave me a lift. I never drank or took drugs at gigs, I didn’t have enough money. Instead, I put my heart and soul into being a pogoer, I used to go bonkers, getting extremely sweaty and adrenalised leaping up and down. When the Boomtown Rats played in Chelmsford, I was the best pogoer, so Bob Geldof hauled me on to the stage to dance, which was a proud moment for me. The Vibrators dragged me on stage because I was so mental it looked like I was having a seizure. That summer, a three-chord-wonder band called Crispy Ambulance played the Social Club at Chelmsford Football Ground and when the mosh pit became a sweat box, I pushed through the fire exit, sprinted out on to Chelmsford football pitch, in the centre of which was a colossal lawn sprayer, and raced round and round and round following the sprayer until I cooled off.
Chelmsford had a very healthy punk scene so, in the summer of 1977, a misguided person organised an all-day festival of punk at Chelmsford Football Club. I was excited, especially as The Damned were headlining and I put on my home-made punk outfit and the horse collar. I can remember the name of two bands that played and they were both atrocious. Bethnal were Prog-Rock but had realised punk was the future so punked themselves up and the Fruit-Eating Bears consisted of two guitarists with their legs as far apart as possible playing a single chord. Any group that wasn’t hard-core punk, like reggae, was booed off. It was badly attended with a few people milling about at the front. And it was atmosphere-free; it became apparent halfway through that it was a big flop. When the scaffolding contractor who had built the stage realised he wasn’t going to get paid, he shimmied to the top of the stage in the middle of one of the acts – and they were awful, awful acts – and started dismantling it, dropping heavy pieces of scaffolding into the well at the front while the band was playing. Then the police came on stage and arrested him in the middle of the set and the band kept thrashing, ‘DRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!’ The most punk thing of the whole day was that.
Punk was amazingly refreshing and gloriously amateur. I loved the home-madeness, the aesthetic of the record covers and the fanzines, and the combination of daftness and scariness. Before punk, I’d never seen anyone with a Mohican or blue hair, and pierced ears seemed exotic to me. Early punks looked like I looked: a Sixth Former in his school blazer with a few badges, a school tie at half mast and slightly messy hair, even early Joy Division look like Sixth Formers.
I listened to punk rock and heavy metal on Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station off the East Coast, and went a couple of times to the Radio Caroline Road Show in Braintree. The entertainment consisted of DJs playing air guitar on stage – or air organ when the organ solos came on – along with the audience. Every so often they would put a ghastly chart hit on a chopping block, then hack the record up in front of the baying crowd. It was funny and it was a chance to get sweaty and do youth culture.
My sister had started going to the local youth club and I went with her once a month to the Friday night disco where boys and girls, all with a Coco-Cola and KitKat, huddled at opposite ends of the hall. We both loved the disco and – despite being a punk rocker – it rapidly became the most exciting thing in my life because I enjoyed dancing and it was the height of disco. The disco in the town hall played chart hits, with a couple of smooch numbers to establish relationships, some rock’n’roll, a Heavy Metal record, back to disco and smooch numbers at the end. During ‘Once, Two, Three Times a Lady’, I went for a girl from the village called Hilary and we snogged – she had braces on her teeth. I fancied her so we used to go to the local playground and canoodle, until we started doing a lot of babysitting together, which was an opportunity for a free settee to spoon on while earning a bit of money at the same time. We used to spend many hours snogging and fondling – nothing more – to Roy Orbison on a velour sofa. One night one of the kids came downstairs while we were lying there in the nude. Years later I found out from the parents, ‘Yes, he remembered that.’
During the skateboarding craze, I found being a rural skateboarder was very frustrating as there was no smooth concrete in the village. The first time I saw a skateboard my friend was riding one around the village. I asked him what it was. He told me and said, ‘I bought it off a bloke at the American Air Force Base.’ I immediately went to Chelmsford and bought the cheapest possible plastic skateboard and became obsessed. Then, a few months later, when I had saved enough money from my paper round tips, I made a special trip on my own to London to buy a good-quality skateboard. Even though Chelmsford was near London, it seemed very far away and I had only been there twice before on tourist trips with the school, but I desperately wanted a cool skateboard.
The most thrilling experience on my new skateboard was skating down a very steep hill into the centre of Bardfield. At night gangs of us gathered at the top of that hill before bolting down it like a shot, straight across the T-junction and, when we were going fast enough, up and over the hump-backed bridge. Then we dared each other to go down the hill again, this time backwards, lying down or holding hands. Once I’d passed running speed, I couldn’t jump off because I would fall over but in those days if I fell over I just bounced.
There was the frustration of there being very little to do in the village. To while away the time we lolled around the local bus stop egging one another on to jump on the car roof of the gay couple who owned the pub to taunt them, or daring each other to drive around the village green on a moped in the nude, or in underpants, because naked would be going just too far. Once we grabbed the smallest boy and hung him over the edge of the church tower so he could put the village clock back an hour. We were bored. I remember consciously thinking about the lads I was fraternising with, ‘Fucking hell, these are thick people! God! I’m bored!’ and if I used a word with more than two syllables they’d say, ‘What? You swallowed the dictionary, or something?’ But they were the local company so when I wasn’t playing with my brothers at home, I hung out with ordinary lads. Now I look at the boys lingering in the square in front of my house and remember, ‘I was there once and I was bored shitless.’ One night someone had the idea of holding a steeplechase down the back gardens of a row of houses, leaping over the hedges. We must have been tipsy. One of the hedges was a thorn bush; I was still picking thorns out of my knee two years later. Other times we’d be lolloping down the lane to the youth club when a car would come along, so we’d all pretend to be having a terrible punch-up and it looked like they were driving past a horrible fight. Then, when the car pulled to a halt, we would scoff, ‘Yeah …?’ I was out at night and feeling mischievous because I’d had half a lager. We all went to the pub at fifteen because the pub was happy for our custom. I was once in the pub when the barman asked me, ‘How old are you, then?’ and I said, ‘I’m sixteen!’
The last bus out of the village was at six o’clock in the evening so the boys in the village were obsessed with motorbikes because they were a ticket out of Bardfield. Several of them had Yamaha Fizzy mopeds. We used to career from one rural pub to another and sip a half of lager in each one. The only topic of conversation in the pub was who saw sparks fly when they scraped their footrest going round the corner and who definitely saw eighty miles an hour on their speedometer. At the end of the summer when I was eighteen, I announced to my mum, ‘I’ve got two hundred and fifty quid saved up from my job. I’m going to buy a motorbike today.’
She answered, ‘You can’t just go and buy a motorbike, it’s not like buying
a packet of fags or something.’
I said, ‘Yes you can.’ I looked in the small ads, found a suitable one, a Suzuki GT 125, mum drove me to Chelmsford and a very nice gentleman showed me his bike. I didn’t know anything about bikes but it seemed all right so I bought it.
He asked, ‘Have you ever ridden a motorbike before?’ He let me have a go around his back garden and I drove it into a rosebush. And ploughed up his flowerbed. ‘You’re not driving that home, are you?’ he asked.
I wanted a full-face crash helmet but my mother insisted, ‘You don’t want to spend all that money on a crash helmet!’ so I got the cheapest one I could buy, an open-faced polycarbonate helmet, which was fourteen pounds. I didn’t have proper bike kit or a leather jacket either because I couldn’t afford it. Instead, I borrowed a sheepskin coat from my mother. I spent a whole day swapping the buttonholes round from the left- to the right-hand side. I ruined the jacket – sheepskin was the most impossible material to try to sew and the jacket gaped and leaked ever more – but I was paranoid about appearing to wear a woman’s jacket.
13
A FOREIGN WORLD I WAS ENTERING
THE FIRST THOUGHT that struck me when I started Foundation Course was, ‘Oh God, Art lessons are full time now.’ Suddenly I was at Braintree College of Further Education on a forty-hour art-making week, whereas at school I’d spent eight hours a week, at most, making art. I thought, ‘I’m going to do art, all day, every day now’ and I treated the Foundation Course like a job.
Braintree, which I thought was an amazing name, was nine miles from Bardfield and once vilified for having the ugliest people in the country. The college had a very small Foundation Course with thirty students in a year, all straight from school, doing the one-year course to decide which branch of art they would specialise in at art college. Mickey Green, who ran the Foundation, was striking-looking with his big, round, David Hockney glasses and his colourful, stripy seer-sucker blazer. He was a sixties arty person with a geezerish vibe, from what I thought of as the School of the Denim Shirt with a Bit of Grey Chest Hair Poking Out. He had Swinging Sixties London culture mixed with a sprinkling of Guardian-reading progressiveness. Probably screwed one of the students. There was an overlapping of values, bohemian yet still vulnerable to the vagaries of male competitiveness.
