Art
Now that we were in Herefordshire, trips to London became expensive and rare. As Mum didn’t like driving, we would sometimes take the bus from Leominster, which was run by a tiny company with the lovely name of Primrose Motors. Then we would arrive at Victoria Coach Station. Even then, coming into London from the country, one felt slightly like a refugee. This effect was increased by the plastic bag that Mum would be carrying, because we could not afford proper luggage. At one time we were collecting Green Shield Stamps, which you got at the petrol station and which could be exchanged for goods displayed temptingly in their catalogue. Anything large needed essentially infinite stamps, but once we did get a very cheap navy travelling bag with a plastic bottom, which lasted maybe six months.
Coming back to London was a treat for Mum. We could stay at my godfather’s. He and his wife — they had married late — lived in a big house with spare rooms in Richmond. When we were in London, we had seemed about equally rich; now we were poor relations, although they never treated us like that, and were never anything but hospitable and kind.
One day we went to the National Gallery. Mum covered my eyes and led me through the rooms until she said “you can open them now.” We were standing in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. It was her favourite picture. I loved it too. She told me a saying of Leonardo’s, that light was how a painter represented the infinite. I realised that the Old Masters, people from long ago, had not only painted pictures, but had opinions and thoughts about what they were doing. Until that point I had assumed they just painted by instinct.
Her own paintings were not as good as her poems. Mostly she painted very simple landscapes: trees in the garden, or Herefordshire lanes she had walked along. She did a tiny still life of a jasmine, which I liked very much…. At boarding school I had some of her paintings on my wall. My best friend, who was artistic and critical, was dismissive of them. I thought he didn’t understand and was fixated on whether things were Art.
When she travelled, she would take a sketchbook not a camera. Her sketches had a wonderful sense of scene and life: a man, presumably Mr Iqbal, standing outside Iqbal’s Hairdressers in Brick Lane; oxen in Pakistan; at home in South Lodge, the great bull in the next door field, lording it over his herd of cows; at Wivenhoe, the boats anchored in the estuary, with the little clinking bells that told you if the wind was blowing.
I suppose all these things embodied the idea that art mattered, and I picked it up without noticing. At least, art seems to be the best compensation for the troubles of life. But what art exactly? Its centrality, as a kind of substitute religion, or religion in a different language, was an idea of her generation. “Art is play,” she once said, and she never bothered much with its pompous aspects. Any artistic film she would fixedly reject. When I took her to see Trois Couleurs: Rouge, she walked out after ten minutes. In general, she mocked intellectuals but loved the Higher Things themselves. Her favourite book was Cold Comfort Farm, whose independent heroine pities the pretentious Mr Myberg, but puts herself to bed with the Abbé Fausse-Maigre’s The Higher Common Sense.
In art she was early modernist. She read Rilke and Apollinaire, in the original of course. She didn’t keep up with things much, about the latest being the copy of Marat/Sade in her bookshelf. She knew large chunks of classical poetry, had once memorized all of L’Allegro and had hoped, she told me a little sadly, of writing a poem as good as Lycidas herself.
She liked classical music, but she didn’t listen to it on the radio much. When I put art posters on my wall at school, she didn’t approve of that either… she was against the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”. It was that dreamy, gentle Monet picture of waterlilies at Giverny, a green place you could run away and hide in.
Mum loved Beethoven. I preferred Mozart.