Life class position

Eduarda was a truly lovely-looking Mexican girl, late twenties, married with a young daughter – what she was doing in Middlesbrough goodness only knows. However we were just glad she was our current life model since not only did she have a good body to draw she had an eagerness and a talent for theatrical poses, frequently bringing in shawls and cushions and other props. She was also totally uninhibited, wandering round to look at everyone’s work without bothering to put on a wrap of any sort.

This being England everyone who came to the evening Life Drawing class always sat in exactly the same place as they’d sat last week, and the week before that, for ever and ever amen. And there being considerably more women than men in the class, the men tended to sit together in one corner.
On the sixth week the men arrived early and deliberately positioned themselves one on each side of the room – north, south east and west – and when we asked why they said they’d noticed that when they sat together the tutor invariably posed Eduarda with her back to them: this way they’d get a turn at drawing her front, sooner or later.

Life class

Martin was an occasional life drawing tutor, i.e. he was a full time tutor who rarely had to bother with us part-timers, but due to an oversight with the timetable it was discovered that we needed a further six drawing sessions and he was the only one available.

He set up the model, instructed us to draw very large on joined-together pieces of paper, and include what was behind the model in the rest of the room. While we drew he walked round and stood behind each of us in turn, commenting or not as he chose – after five minutes in silence behind me I couldn’t decide whether he was stunned with admiration or didn’t know where to start with the criticism, so tended to ignore him.

He had a reputation for being over-attentive to the younger female students (one of the reasons he was so dismissive of our class – we were mostly mature students.) Bob the well-endowed milkman had told me of an occasion in another class where he had been posing: “one lad was really good but Martin just criticised him all the time. But another lass, very pretty, he put his arm round her and said “this is really quite promising ... but if you look carefully you’ll see he actually only has two arms””

Fred might’ve been right – but she was lucky

“Coffee?”
“Yes, please”
“Sugar? – sorry no biscuits”
“Don’t take it ... why don’t you sit here?” ....
“... ?”
“Didn’t think you were likely to ... worth a try, though”

Orkney journeys

The first time we went to Orkney we took the caravan as far as Brora, three children (two with chickenpox) and three days and arrived in the drizzle of a July afternoon.

Later, overnight seemed best – spouse working all day then driving the first stage, me awake to keep him awake, then driving the midnight stint: youngest piteously from the dark of the back seat “I’m all on my own,” his elder siblings asleep either side of him.

Once we stopped in a Northumberland layby: three males got out to pee and I imagined the nearby bus shelter rising with the tidal surge and floating away in the dark.

Just the two of us went to view Scapa Haven, overnight again, needing sleep half-hourly, and the September solstice crossing of the Pentland Firth the roughest we had ever known; when we took a trailer load of furniture up the following Easter I skidded on the icy road and we ended in a ditch.

On my last return from this seventeen year sea view haven, alone and having painted for three weeks there, I hit a post office van who drew out un-looking, smashing the headlight so I had to hurry four hundred miles home before dark.

Next Thursday we begin another three day journey there, ‘doing it while we can’ on a fifty-two year old A10, returning via a cousin in Invergarry and the Applecross peninsula.

Fred might have been right

Fred Brown talked a lot about sex, he was witty with it and it stayed just... just ...on the right side of offensive. His hooded blue eyes challenged you to believe that he told the truth, his smile teased so you suspected he didn’t and he was confident, good-looking and intelligent but due to a degenerative disease his spine was damaged, his years were numbered and his height was only 4’ 11”.

Secretary to the chemists in the plastics research department she’d had a shy and unconfident childhood and despite being three months married, was to some extent naïve and socially inept, so when Fred Brown told her “Every man in the lab gets a hard-on when you walk through” she assumed he was teasing. Every day she delivered the internal post to the laminating plant, where John invariably delayed her in conversation on the day’s topics, to the paper plant where she and Sam talked about music and to the filter section where Dennis asked her about what she’d done at the weekend, and finished up in the chief chemist’s office where he tended to come around the desk to collect his post if she didn’t hand it over and escape as quickly as possible, without being rude.

Dennis occasionally gave her a lift home, which was helpful because it meant she didn’t have to wait half an hour for a bus and walk the last mile, he asked whether she would be away during the factory shut-down, the first week of June, and she said “no” because her husband had to work. One day Dennis said he often thought about doing it with someone other than his wife, just to find out what it would be like and she laughed, as she did when he said he might pop round for a coffee during the shutdown – she was embarrassed when he did as he’d promised because it was a hot day, she was dressmaking and had only a short shift dress on and nothing else at all.

Gallery visit

The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness in Orkney has recently been extended and modernised in a truly exciting fashion. Before this took place the upstairs galleries were reached by a central staircase which had half a flight one way, then turned round on itself and continued with another half flight to the creaking, sloping floor-boarded landing. From this landing, to right and left were small galleries, each with a window at the back, overlooking the harbour, the right hand one also with a window overlooking the narrow slabbed street, across which was a flower shop owned by a Czech called Borek. As well as selling flowers he tuned pianos and sang in the choir ...he was also hugely attractive in a rugged, dark haired, beautiful voiced sort of way.

I was alone in the gallery one afternoon, leisurely enjoying the latest exhibition of sensuous and sensitive small paintings and plaster pieces by Will MacLean, based on writings, maps and sea journeys and very suited to this sea girt and beautiful room. Up the stairs came two smartly dressed women who strode resolutely into the room and, completely ignoring the paintings, went to the window overlooking the street “Ohhh” moaned one, quietly, “no Borek ...” and they stood silently contemplating the shop where he was not for several minutes, before leaving as quickly as they had come.

“A modern day miracle”

This being the third I knew immediately that the transition from first to second stage wasn’t usually accompanied by pain of such screaming quality. The surrounding babble of voices made it impossible to concentrate on identifying what had gone wrong, their exhortations to “push, mother, keep pushing, you’re doing fine” annoyingly intrusive. “Here’s a foot Mother, sit up and you can feel it” – they pulled my hand down to touch, but I was unappreciative ... eventually it was born: “What is it?” “A boy, you’ve got a lovely boy.”

... washing my thighs with warm water ... no, it’s blood, my blood ... “It’s the afterbirth breaking up” and someone tried pumping up and down on my stomach to expel it – my screams must have stopped her although I thought I’d simply said “don’t, please don’t”... “What’s her name? ... Sandra! Sandra! ... there’s no blood pressure and the pulse is fading fast.”

... opened my eyes “He looks Egyptian ... silly man sounds as if he thinks I’m dying ... that’d be a tidy solution – a motherless child and a childless mother ... no – I don’t want her to have my baby ...”

... someone groaning ... pink room instead of green, clock above my head telling an incomprehensible time ... Steve’s laugh outside (that was what had roused me) ... dark blue dress bustles in “I don’t know why you’re making that noise – we’ve just given you some painkiller” ... just like in the books, the groaning was ME “Then it doesn’t bloody work” ... “and you’ve had eleven pints of blood so you’ve no cause to complain” - “eleven???????????? something wrong there.”

[Comment: on the way to the hospital we had passed my sister-in-law coming the other way, she having just given birth to a still-born son]

Dancer

No-one at any rally who spent a night in the bar, when there was music, could fail to have seen him dancing, as I had done several times over several years, presuming him to be Belgian or Dutch.

Something over six foot four, not conventionally good-looking but mobile, warm, interesting features – and no more than mid forties. It was his enthusiasm, his energy and his slimness – his slim hips dancing with smooth fluidity in tight blue denim (probably matching blue eyes but I may have imagined those) - that was memorable, that absorbed my non-dancing attention (spouse does not dance and I was still too sober). But of far greater impact was the shock of his pure white, longer than shoulder-length hair - he was too young for this, too mobile, too fluid ... too sexy ... and the contrast was invariably mesmerising.

At breakfast on Sunday, spouse and I having briefly bickered, I stalked late into breakfast and had to take the only chair between spouse and this man who’d fired my thoughts the night before. His still-damp hair was rat-tailed and not so white and his companion had only a few minutes earlier been described to me as “son of Quentin Crisp” (he’d been in the bunkhouse and we’d been trying to work out who’d shouted out in the night, as if having sex), and he complained - an Englishman that as a result of all last night’s dancing he was suffering from “that disease that alsatians get” by which he meant dislocated hips.

Double Damme – Sunday

Both Belgium’s appeal and its drawbacks are root wrapped in its immediate charming domesticity: unkempt little fields with black and white cows separate mini-brick built houses whose windows are shrouded with thick lace-curtained windows and gardens display close-shaved, excruciatingly tidy topiary.

This Sunday of the May Day weekend Belgium thoroughly merits the oft-repeated, clichéd description of “flat, smells of cow shit and closed”. Along the whole of the 70 kilometres between Velzeke and Damme the only shops open were patisseries, every one with a most mouth-wateringly seductive range of cakes – chocolate and fruit confections in pleated white paper - all regrettably untransportable in either tool-stuffed panniers or dirty-washing packed tank bag.

So we arrived in Damme again, with four hours to spare and the restaurant we chose had battleship grey walls hung with a variety of prints, each with its own strip light above. The floor was black tiled, tables black wood and high-backed chairs black leather – all cool and modern in an old, old room – and behind a pewter-topped bar, on white painted shelves were rows of gleaming wineglasses and whisky bottles with tawny orange labels.

Coffees, then lunch, then more coffees, then musical chairs to the luxurious loo, then a paying of the ‘rekening’; having watched the hail torrent down we made sure to collect up our economically-used blanket-thick serviettes to wipe down wet bike saddles. Returning to the square we discovered that Damme is a ‘book town’ with an event on the second Sunday of every month – on this first Sunday the one and only secondhand bookshop open yielded up A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Matisse Stories’, of which I’ve read one so far.

Double Damme – Friday

Despite its name Damme was haven, not hell, on two occasions.

In just ten miles riding from Zeebrugge, in fine misted rain which blurred a landscape of dyke ditched horizontals crossed by verticals of poplar and pollarded willow and inculcated an appreciation of the horrors of WWI trench warfare, waterproofs of all qualities, from Tony’s top of the range Hein Gericke all-in-one to Den’s bright orange, nicked-from-British-Rail over-trousers were thoroughly tested, and all found wanting.

So having all day in which to cover just 80 kilometres we crossed the canal and parked in Damme’s cobbled main square as the bells on the town hall tinkled out ten o’clock thus alerting apparently closed cafes to our coffee-desperate presence, since doors opened and waiters appeared to sweep the pavements and vigorously wipe down tables and chairs.

The place we chose, for the flaming wood fire we could see through the window, led me to wonder, not for the first time, why it is that the British so often seem to be the only nation totally lacking any appreciation, enthusiasm or taste of colour and of what makes an ordinary room beautiful.

This one had high ceilings above battered wooden beams, painted in a cracked and peeling cream, faintly green-tinged as if under water, and a tiled floor in squares and medallions of dusty pink with Cobalt blue and white. The plain painted walls were matt and earthy cocoa, tables and chairs mismatched and worn varnished wooden; coffee was served in plain white cups, each with a piece of sponge cake foil-wrapped in vivid green alongside sugar lumps and silver spoon, and by the time we’d finished our gloves and scarves had dried on the hot radiators and the sun was shining.

Heartfelt composition

Less than five minutes after starting, the monitor on the cross trainer registers my heart-rate at 153 – I can never remember whether it ought not to exceed 200 minus my age or 220, but in any case was too busy imagining and putting into words the end of a confrontation between hero no.1 and heroine to worry about it too much.

Nine sets of weights, three sets of twenty repeats on each: too much thinking causes me to lose count so I frequently over- or under-exercise, and too often forget which machines I’ve already been on. I hurry round without pause because I need to get home to write it all down.

The treadmill has a chart of maximum heart rate for cardiac or fat burning exercise: after five minutes of a hill programme mine exceeds that of a 30 year old, which I think is probably a bad thing rather than a good one, but I am also composing a ‘losing her virginity’ scene (for the second time to hero no.2) which might have something to do with it. I also suspect the heating is set too high. Straight home no change no shower no lunch until all salient points, all apt and crafted phrases are noted down.

Mayday

May 1st wasn’t exactly a dainty dancing upon a dewy lawn start to the day – dawn was long gone by the time I crunched across gravel chips and oil-rainbowed tarmac to the mud foot-printed floor of the barely functional – and paperless – loo. Overnight, this had been declared ‘Ladies only’ thus depriving us of the clean ones in the newer, unisex Belgian-style block, presumably because someone’s sensibilities had been upset due to an inability to avert eyes from urinals.

May’s eve had threatened bunkhouse hell – greeted by a vista of flat-squab grubby pillows on rucked blue, crumbed and crumpled towelling sheets stretched unfitting over close packed bunk beds in a dingy and depressing gloomy room I went into instant, paralysed shut-down, as I tried to marshal sufficient resources to face two nights within. Impossible, but no other option since the tiny town had “no tourists, no beds” and I agreed to try one night in a lighter but larger – twenty-four bed room, with the promise of sufficient alcohol to ensure sleep.

It then got worse: rumour had it that the man I most disliked in the whole of the BSAOC – a loud-mouthed thieving letch, a ginger-bearded close-to-paedophile - had bagged the bunk opposite mine – I acquired a hammer and a lighter for his beard, should he be his usual obnoxious self - and obtained a couple of promises of tent space if required in the middle of the night.

In the event, this last rumour was unfounded, the half dozen who did use the room were alcohol-defyingly considerate and I slept long and sound, hence despite the aforementioned drawbacks, May’s dawn I considered a good one.