Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  She later claimed, “I think kids learn more from their parents than their teachers.”5 While in Bush’s case this is undeniable, a few tutors challenged that assumption and did their utmost to make learning fresh and inspiring. The Religious Education teacher, Luke Connaughton, was a highly regarded Catholic journalist and writer who composed many hymns, often pseudonymously, and displayed a more spiritual, searching take on music ‘coming from within’, a notion which would have appealed to Bush.

  The English teacher Mrs Prime, née Miss Helena Organ, was a particular stand-out for the girls. She loved to animate her lessons by reading aloud from texts like Chaucer’s Prologue in order to make the characters live and breathe. She was very much one for acting out the words, plunging into the world described in the text; a very Bushian approach. “She was amazing,” says Mubi. “If anybody ever wants to have a love of literature they should have a teacher like her. She encouraged you to see the characters come alive. If she read you any passage of a book you wanted to go and read that book. She was the kind of person who instilled life into the subject.”

  What most of the pupils didn’t know was that their English teacher was embroiled in a private tale of emotional betrayal and political intrigue worthy of any future Kate Bush song. Between 1969 and their divorce in 1974, covering almost all of Bush’s secondary school career, she was the first wife of Geoffrey Prime, one of Britain’s most notorious spies, who for many years passed on state secrets to the Soviet Union and who was sentenced to 38 years in prison in 1982 for espionage and sexual offences against children. Little wonder the English teacher at St Joseph’s sought to fully disappear into a world of books.

  Bush later recalled a fondness for her English classes, and felt that they helped her find new ways to express herself, but Mrs Prime’s unconventional, inspirational brand of teaching was the exception to the rule. Though Nolan-Long claims that “independent thought was very much prized, and so was creative endeavour,” most other former pupils recall a safe, rigorous, reasonably kind but not terribly stimulating atmosphere at St Joseph’s. Mubi describes the general class routine as “regimented. For example, you couldn’t write your own notes into your book. The teacher would dictate everything, and in that environment there’s not that much discussion. We all got good grades, but some who wanted to experience a more discussion-orientated environment felt constricted.”

  All in all, it certainly did little to stimulate Bush who, feeling bored and patronised, retreated. “I found [school] wasn’t helping me,” she said. “I became introvert. I guess it was the teachers’ system, the way they react to pupils, and I wasn’t quite responsive to that.”6 In fairness, this wasn’t entirely attributable to anything specific at St Joseph’s, but rather a deeper symptom of the institutionalised modes of learning that practically all schools employed. An individualist by nature and nurture, she didn’t want to be told what to read, or handed information by rote. It was the precise opposite of the kind of free-spirited and sometimes eccentric education she was receiving at home, where opinionated discussion was always encouraged and available, liberal sensibilities abounded and there were definitely no set-texts.

  The feeling that school life was pale and uninteresting in comparison to her other life became entrenched as she moved through the years. It was exacerbated by the social aspect, the traditional trial by fire of childhood and adolescence. Years later, she recalled many moments of sadness, acts of cruelty, sarcastic put-downs, brashness and bragging, the kind of ruthless social engineering in which teenage girls in particular excel. “My friends sometimes used to ignore me completely, and that would really upset me badly,” she later recalled.7 It was nothing unusual, and indeed St Joseph’s Grammar School was a relatively genteel environment in comparison to the roughhouse atmosphere of many comprehensives in the Seventies. There was very little physical intimidation, although Bush later recalled being bullied and Connie Nolan-Long remembers a “very nasty” isolated incident where “some older girls picked on a group of younger girls … Kate might have been [a victim] of that.”

  Academically “very bright, noticeably so” and “privileged; Kate never had a problem, she always had the right kit for everything,”8 it’s not difficult to imagine how some pupils might have regarded her as a too-pretty goody-two-shoes and acted accordingly. She found it all a little hard to comprehend after Wickham Farm, where kindness and courtesy were the norm, sarcasm was non-existent and her siblings protected her. She felt older than both her years and her peers and regarded herself as thinking too deeply about things, fascinated by matters of the spirit and the soul.

  But although she often felt lonely, alienated and emotionally cut adrift, she was by no means physically alone, nor was she the kind of crushingly shy girl that has sometimes been portrayed. Friends recall a quiet confidence, a highly developed sense of humour, a love of silliness – she adored Monty Python – an infectious giggle, all married to a kind of serene detachment. “Thinking, dreaming, hoping, waiting patiently, Cathy was never hurried,” recalled Jay.9 Ultimately, school probably toughened her up, rubbed off a few of her more idealistic edges.

  “She wasn’t shy,” says Nolan-Long “If she had something to say she would say it, but I always got the impression she’d think, ‘Well, somebody else has said that, I don’t need to make a noise about it.’ She would merge into the background. She was always a pretty girl, but she was quite content to let other people speak unless she had something to say.”

  Bush was neither at the centre nor adrift on the outskirts. At primary school she’d had good friends such as Janet Willmot, but at nine she became tight with Lisa Bowyer – later Bradley – with whom she remains extremely close; Bradley still runs her fan club today, and has done so since 1978. She was gregarious enough for both of them, and to an extent Bush sheltered in her shadow. “Kate and Lisa were very close, and still are, and if anybody had said to me that one of them was going to be a rock star I’d have put my money on Lisa, absolutely,” says Nolan-Long. “She was the extrovert of the pair.”

  Aside from Lisa she had her small social group, and there was a blurring of lines between home and school. Friends loved coming to the farm, relishing its sense of space and mystery, its offer of escape: there were parties around the swimming pool, Guy Fawkes Night fun with fireworks, the odd confidence shared in the fields about crushes: always older boys, often elusive. Bush had her own den, filled with books, records, posters, dressing up clothes, an old sofa and cushions. It was a private spot, cut off from the rest of the house, a place for her and her friends to talk, play music, read magazines and indulge in typical teenage experiments: séances, ghost stories, role-playing. In the barn they would secretly smoke, scribble poems on the ancient walls, sing and wait for their futures to unfold.

  Outside of home and school, she would meet friends in the We Anchor In Hope pub in Welling or at St Lawrence’s Youth Club, which promised a heady mix of music and ping pong. Physically, she was already instantly recognisable as Kate Bush, pop star. She looked remarkably similar to the way she appeared throughout the early years of her career: tiny, slim, pretty, her face framed by long, auburn hair, not so much styled as attractively arrived at. Not hugely interested in clothes, she wore jeans, jumpers, cheesecloth shirts, smocks, with the occasional leaning towards the weekend hippie – black velvet capes, oversized thrift-store jackets – and the odd lurch into flowing dresses and gaudy, incongruous high heels, bought with a giggle from Ravels in Lewisham. Even as an adolescent there was something innately organic and essentially earthy about her.

  Only Lisa really gained her trust. As became characteristic in her life post-‘Wuthering Heights’, where she quickly learned to adopt a battened-down public façade in order to protect herself from media intrusion and personalinvasion, she hid her true self from view at St Joseph’s. It seems astonishing that practically no one at school – that most febrile of arenas for boasting, bragging and social one-upmanship – was made aware of her recording a
t David Gilmour’s house in 1973, nor her subsequent session at AIR studios in 1975, both of which occurred while she still trotting off to Abbey Wood in her regulation red knickers.

  Lisa would have known, but no one else at school did. Partly it was plain good manners – none of the Bush clan was predisposed to making a big noise about themselves – and partly it was because she didn’t want to “alienate” herself by seeming too different or precocious.10 A self-conscious fear of failure, too, is not to be discounted. Even today, all the hard work is done out of view. “She doesn’t do work in progress, I don’t think, because, well, it’s work in progress,” says Tony Wadsworth, her CEO at EMI between 1998 and 2008. “She’s so proud of her work that she wants people to hear it in the best possible setting.” But mostly it signified an ingrained natural instinct to keep her most precious pursuits to herself. From early on she displayed an innate understanding of the value of secrecy, of invisibility. In a rare moment of true candour she once admitted: “The real me … no one will ever see that. There is part of me I will always keep to myself.”11 She came early to the realisation that the finished article is all she wants us to see of her music; the journey leading up to it is too personal, too exposed.

  As a result, at school she stayed close to the shadows. She was nobody’s idea of superstar material. “I wasn’t aware of anything special about her,” says Nina Brown, and although everybody knew she played music – another former pupil, Chrissie Ashley, recalls that she was “always in the music room with Miss Slade” – nobody had any real inkling about the depth of her talent, nor caught a glimpse of the ambition whirring away beneath the surface.

  “She was not the kind of person to broadcast what she doing at all,” says Shealla Mubi. “Lisa might have been more aware of her ambitions, but as a topic of discussion in the common room, or in class, never. I suppose because her music was so personal, she wouldn’t say, ‘Listen here, chaps, I’m going to try out this song.’ It wasn’t like that. I’d be lying if I said I thought she would get seriously into music. Kate wasn’t part of that ‘serious’ musician scene. I don’t think the school was even aware that she was writing songs and trying to get into music. I can understand that. There were so many depths that she kept hidden, because the school would perhaps not have given her room for that to be expressed. There was really no arena for that.”

  The greatest impression she made on the collective school consciousness was through her writing. Between Form I and III she had several poems published in the school magazine. It did not go unnoticed. “The magazine was important, and not everyone who put work in had it chosen,” says Nolan-Long. “It was quite an honour.”

  The handful of published poems fall into two distinct categories: introspective examinations of her own private nature, and more descriptive narratives primarily focusing on death and religion, both perfectly natural areas for teens (and pre-teens: she was only 11 when the first, ‘The Crucifixion’, was published) to feel compelled to explore. Some of the connections to life at Wickham Farm are obvious. One of her earliest poems was called ‘Blind Joe Death’, published in the school magazine when she was in Form III and clearly inspired by the first John Fahey album of the same name, no doubt snapped up by one of her brothers when it was reissued (twice) in either 1964 or 1967. ‘Epitaph For A Rodent’, meanwhile, sounds suspiciously like a terribly solemn lament for a deceased hamster.

  ‘You’ is more directly personal, an acknowledgement of her dual nature, addressing her public and private selves and the conflict of expressing her true feelings in an unforgiving environment. “Yet inside you there may be great feelings / Of beauty and love fighting to appear…. A laugh, a jeer / The feelings are trapped and you / You – disappear.”

  Her poems are the first tangible public evidence of the overpowering excess of emotion that, hidden away, characterised her private childhood, later described in an unreleased song, ‘Frightened Eyes’, as “latent hysteria”. In ‘I Have Seen Him’ this duality is even more candidly expressed:

  “I have noticed him seven times or more

  But he has not seen me.

  He may have seen a girl called by

  My name –

  But neither he, nor anyone else will

  Ever really see ME.”

  The other prevalent strand in these poems is a dramatic channelling and fusing of the stories, dark fables and endlessly fascinating characters who crop up in old folk songs and classical myths, with a particular fixation on death. ‘The Crucifixion’, ‘Death’, ‘Blind Joe Death’ and ‘Epitaph For A Rodent’ all confront mortality, with some striking imagery: “Silence ceases and murmurs gather quickly, like the grabbing of a hand.” “The blood red sun sinks into the skull of a dead man.” Together, the lines recall the end of ‘The Dreaming’: “See the sun set in the hand of the man.”

  Jay’s influence is clear, but this is a very distinct voice. Not yet fully formed, sometimes precious, over-ripe and clumsy, but impressive nonetheless. What was notable to all was the sheer quality of her writing, her grasp of the form, the ability and self-confidence in her expression, so at odds with the almost painful sensitivity of the words. The earliest of her songs, and even many of the tracks on The Kick Inside, are very much a continuation of the themes of these early poems, though stripped of much of the youthful morbidity. We hear the secret identity and the deep longings of a young girl growing into adulthood. There are many covert assignations, shared moments, fears about going “too deep,” huge sweeps of emotion and, above all, the difficulty of truly seeing, of connecting with the realperson, which has remained threaded throughout her work. In ‘Sunsi’, one of her earliest recorded songs, never officially released, she sings, “You appear so many ways.”

  The poems stopped appearing in the school magazine almost as soon as her musicalvision began developing. She had an epiphany on discovering that the piano offered a more attractive, fluid outlet for her words than plain paper. She had pawed happily at the mice-riddled church organ that lived in the barn, but when her father showed her the rudiments of piano structure aged 11 or 12, and when she discovered it had a logic to it that she understood and embraced, she felt a profound sense of homecoming, a direct outlet for the expression of her private self. “It’s the only thing that I can do where I can really let myself go,” she said. “It gives me great comfort, whenever I’m at the piano, because for the few times that it happens I feel like I’m part of something.”12

  While the violin had symbolised the restrictions of the school’s dedication to learning by rote – what was the point of music if it didn’t allow you to be free? – the piano was a front door into the inner life she had already glimpsed through music, books, films, dance and television. “The piano was a way of exploring music in dimensions diametrically opposite to what the violin must have represented to her,” said Paddy Bush. “Escapism, pure escapism! You know, the command would be, ‘Go and practice that violin, Kate’, but the piano came out instead. I think perhaps we Bushes are a bit like that.”13

  And that was how it started. She began writing voraciously, reams and reams of songs, utterly infatuated with her emerging gift. It was a “release. I found something that I don’t think I’ve ever really found since when I first started writing songs; that I could actually create something out of nothing. It was a very special discovery.”14 There was an immediate and significant epiphany: this was another world. There were no limits beyond those of her own imagination.

  As soon as she became serious about setting her poems to piano, her family afforded her the space and silence to develop at her own pace. She was given that essential artistic privilege from an early age. “To cultivate music you have to spend a lot of time by yourself,” said Paddy Bush. “When there’s a family all in one house and you’re getting your music together, normally the others close the door and try to keep the sound out. When Kate began working on the piano, she’d go and lock herself away and wind up spending five or six hours, seven days a
week, just playing the piano.”15

  It was obvious to the whole family that Bush was musically precocious in a manner that went beyond both her father and her brothers’ talents. “There’s a world of difference between my own plodding compositions and Kate’s fusion of gifts,” said Dr Bush modestly. “She has ‘it’ and I don’t.”16 At first this ‘fusion’ – absolutely the right word for what Bush does – was inexact and unbalanced. She had a clear instinct for composition, though not for performance. Indeed, those who sang with her in the school choir were not terribly impressed with her voice; she sang in tune, but she lacked – oddly, considering her later style – a clear top end. One friend even likened it to a foghorn. “When I first started my voice was terrible,” Bush said. “But the voice is an instrument and the only way to improve it is to practise.”17

  And improve she did, through dedicated rehearsal. Her parents were encouraging without being pushy. Her father in particular would listen attentively when she sought him out to play him a new song, but he did not go knocking on her door. She sailed on the strength of her own determination. “We simply helped her to get her imagination working,” said Dr Bush. “Her songs seemed to write themselves – whole stanzas in her head at a time – while I struggle to put one word after the next.”18