Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [34]
He said, “Piss off, you great poofter.”
The masters at Newgate were men who’d had the Time of Their Lives (good, bad, ugly, or all three) during the Second World War, or, in some cases, the First. Several of them were homosexual. (I use the term deliberately. Back then, gay still meant “energetically happy” or “brightly colored.” Moreover, it could not have been applied, accurately, to the tweedy, closeted buggers that taught us.) While it was puzzling that it needed three masters to supervise the boys’ showers after PE, I’d like to put it on record that I never witnessed any sexual abuse. (Some of them may still be alive and in touch with their lawyers.) And, as I recall, the homosexual masters were rather more kindly than the other sort, but I may be sentimentalizing. All masters wore black academic gowns that gave them a batty appearance. They smoked incessantly, even in class.
On Wednesday afternoons, they transformed themselves into army officers, the prefects turned into sergeants, and we boys became their toy soldiers. We wore itchy uniforms that were too big for our bodies, black berets too big for our heads, and incredibly heavy black boots. The playground became the parade ground. Assembled on it, we looked like rows of thin brown mushrooms that had been dipped in ink at either end. We were marched up and down and back and forth for half an hour while the Gestapo screamed incomprehensible orders and abuse. Then we were marched, shouldering disabled First World War rifles that were longer and heavier than we were, to the school playing fields, where we attacked one another. One miniature platoon, bleating cries of bloodlust, would attack the long-jump pit while another would defend it. The masters/officers would spin wooden football rattles to simulate the sound of machine-gun fire while smoking their cigarettes or pipes.
I survived these inglorious battles, and others. In large part, I owe this to the art master, whose name was Julian Farrow. (School nickname: Jiffy.) Which is odd, really, because we never greatly liked each other and he was usually disappointed with my work. Jiffy was a small, intense Welshman whose bird-bright gaze glimmered at you from beneath tangled luxuriant eyebrows. He always wore harsh clothes in shades of murk. Bristly tweed jackets the color of cow flop. Dun flannel trousers, brutal shoes like dead dogs’ noses. He dressed that way, I now think, because at Newgate, art was seen as a mimsy, girlish subject and he was desperately determined not to look effeminate. (“Bender” Bendick, the geography master, often wore gay cravats, but that was okay, because geography was a manly subject with military implications.) Inside Jiffy’s coarse carapace dwelled a passionate heart that pumped paint. He was a lover of violent color. The gods he worshipped were Cézanne and van Gogh and a Russian painter called Chaïm Soutine. Jiffy showed us the improbable colors — purple, rose, orange — that Cézanne found in a perfectly normal French landscape. He waxed lyrical about the slathers of thick paint that van Gogh used to depict the streetlights outside some café. He relished the sickly yellow, lurid red, and bilious green flesh tones in Soutine’s distorted portraits.
I didn’t get it. My favorite artist was Frank Bellamy, who did the Dan Dare strip on the front page of the Eagle comic. Bellamy’s art was clean and bright and hard-edged and knew what it was doing.
Jiffy would say, “What is Cézanne/van Gogh/Soutine telling us, boys?”
And I didn’t know.
I loved, love, the surfaces of things. What things actually look like. Or, rather, what they would look like if we were looking at them for the first time. Or if we had been suddenly cured of blindness. Back then I believed (and on my good days still do) that art explains the things that words can’t manage, merely by delighting in them. Fire flame reflected in the brown belly of a teapot. The echo of the eye in a spilled tear. Warped reflections in a car’s chrome fender.