Somewhere Towards the End (8 page)

A
S WELL AS
relationships there are, of course, activities, which are almost as important. There was a time, about twenty years ago, when if you lived in London it was possible to take, almost for free, evening classes in a vast number of subjects. For years I had felt snobbishly that such activities were not for me, but when I became too fat to find ready-made clothes I liked in any shop I could afford, it occurred to me that I might learn dressmaking, so I made enquiries and my eyes were opened. I was awe-struck, when I went to the local primary school in order to enrol in a dress-making class, to discover how many subjects were offered: painting, several kinds of dancing, plumbing, languages including Chinese, Russian and Latin, motor mechanics, antique collecting – you named it and you could learn it. So soon a group of us were crouched like gnomes at tiny desks in the infants' library every Wednesday evening, stitching merrily away. We were probably uncommonly lucky in having dear Biddy Maxwell for our tutor, who not only taught us very well, but also
became the central figure in a cluster of friendships that endures to this day, but it seemed obvious that we were not the only class having a good time.

About six years later this abundance of almost-free classes began to shrivel. It had started to be under threat a bit earlier: if fewer than ten people turned up at any class it was closed down, so from time to time we had to hijack an obliging husband, give him a scrap of material and tell him to look as though he were making himself a tie. But finally the whole of that particular system ended; though there still, of course, continued to be institutions running evening classes for those willing to pay, and as far as I was concerned classes for adults had become a welcome part of life.

It was my mother who first caused me to associate the idea of them with painting, because in her mid-seventies she had taken up Painting for Pleasure classes. Some of her fellow students were content with making careful copies of postcards, but some, among whom she was one of the bravest, were more adventurous. She produced many bold still lives and one quite startling self-portrait, and she enjoyed it very much, so when I reached my mid-seventies, and after dress-making had been closed down, it seemed natural to follow her example. I had always loved painting lessons at school, had once enjoyed a short fling as a Sunday painter before realizing that my job simply didn't allow me time for it, and was still aware that if I wanted to draw something I was able to make some kind of stab at it. I was still at work when I joined my first life class (I didn't retire until I was seventy-five), and soon realized that the necessary concentration called for more energy than, in those
circumstances, I could command. But after I had retired I found an agreeable and well-equipped life class just round the corner from where I live, and that I continued for some time.

I think I was almost the only student in that class whose aim was to reproduce the appearance of the model. What most of the others seemed to aim for was marks on paper that gave what they hoped was the effect of modern art. To them my attempts must have seemed boring and fogeyish; to me theirs appeared an absurd waste of time, and I still think I was right. This may be because I am old, but being old doesn't necessarily make one wrong. I am pretty sure that it is not only the old who are unable to regard as art anything that does not involve the mastery of a skill.

Given a lot of money I would collect art, both drawings and paintings. There are many ways in which a painting can be exciting, but a drawing that thrills me is always one that has caught a moment of life. Drawings are what artists, great or small, do when they are working their way towards understanding something, or catching something they want to preserve: they communicate with such immediacy that they can abolish time. I possess a drawing by a Victorian artist of his wife teaching their little girl to read by candlelight; in a book about Pisanello, who lived in the fourteen-hundreds, I have four quick sketches he made of men who had been hung. Each, in its different way, makes one catch one's breath: one might be there, looking through the eyes of the men who did those drawings. (Perhaps oddly, drawings presented as works of art are less likely to have this hallucinatory effect than private notes or studies.)

Many people will never have hands and eyes that can collaborate in a way that allows them to draw. A few specially gifted people have them from the start. In some of us they don't work effectively to begin with, but might possibly be trained by practice – and surely the purpose of a life class is to do just that? It is to teach you how to look, and then how to make your hand reproduce what you are looking at, eventually with such confidence that the lines it draws are in themselves pleasing (or perhaps exhilarating, or scary, or whatever) as well as explanatory of the object drawn. Once that degree of skill has been achieved, off you can go and take as many liberties with appearances as you like; what you produce will never be inert.

It was only when I tried to draw a naked body that I began to see how difficult it is, and how important. When you have a naked person in front of you, calmly exposed to your concentrated study, you see how accurate the term ‘life class' is. What you are looking at is precisely life, that inexplicable and astounding cause of our being, to which everything possible in the way of attention and respect is due. That is why most people find it more interesting to draw other people, or animals, or plants and trees, rather than man-made objects such as architecture or machinery. (There are, of course, fine draughtsmen who specialize in those – and no doubt it's a foolish quirk of mine that makes me suspect they will be bores.)

Since I first tried to draw a nude figure it has seemed to me that what determines the quality of a drawing is the attention and respect, rather than the ingenuity, that an artist has devoted to
what he is looking at. One should become as skilful as possible in order to probe the true nature of the object one is studying.

An object, of course, is needed for such probing, or sometimes a subject embodied in objects – think of Goya's
Disasters of War
or his bullfighting sequence. To make a flat surface interesting to look at simply for its own sake – turn it into an artefact that will hold the attention, move and/or give pleasure to others as well as yourself, does naturally require gifts – you must understand colour and be inventive about pattern, which are not common abilities. But quite often what it chiefly seems to need is taking yourself very seriously. Only a person with a gigantic sense of self-importance could, for example, produce a large number of canvases painted in a single flat colour, or even in two or three flat colours, without being bored to death. That is the kind of non-representational art that strikes me as absurd. Other kinds can be very pleasing in the same kind of way as a good piece of interior decoration, but to me they do not grip, as works that probe, question, celebrate or attack a subject can grip.

Much as I enjoyed that second life class, I gave it up when I saw that only if I worked at it every day could I hope to draw better, and that even then, being a word person rather than an image person, I would never amount to more than an illustrator. I fear that it was a kind of vanity that caused me to lose interest once I was convinced that my best could never be better than second rate. I do still sometimes amuse myself by trying to draw, and wish I had the energy to do so more often because it remains an absorbing occupation. And however far from being an artist my feeble attempts
have left me, I am grateful to those classes for one positive result: I am now much better at seeing things than I used to be. That is something often said by people who have tried to draw, and it is a good reason for making the attempt, even in old age, because it adds such a generous pinch of pleasure to one's days.

N
O LESS INTENSELY
than drawing, but much more consistently, gardening has been an activity which has given me, and still gives me, great pleasure. In my early youth it was something done for you by employees: a head gardener with two men under him in my maternal grandparents' household, and one man in ours – a full-time man to start with, becoming increasingly part-time as money dwindled. But even my grandmother, who certainly did no digging with her own hands, knew exactly what was happening in her garden and how and why it should be done. Certain things she always did herself: cut back the lavender, for instance, and spread it to dry on sheets so that the flowers could be rubbed off for lavender bags, which were kept with her linen; and spray her roses against greenfly with a big brass syringe which lived in the flower room (a little room with a sink where she arranged flowers for the house, and where the dogs slept). Her spray was nothing more lethal than a bucketful of soft soap dissolved in warm water, and the roses were always pristine. As children we loved the roses,
watched eagerly for the first snowdrops, stroked the velvet of pansy petals, had our other favourite flowers, but the garden was not simply a place to be looked at. We
inhabited
it: climbed its trees, hid in its bushes, fished tadpoles and newts from its stream, stole its peaches and grapes (which was a sin and therefore more exciting that eating its plums and apples from the branch, which was allowed). And we were given regular tasks such as picking the sweet-peas for Gran and the strawberries and raspberries which were to come to the table that day. Towards the end of each season such tasks became a bit of a chore, but they were never disagreeable, and because they always involved delicious tastes and smells and pleasant leafy sensations, a garden was naturally accepted as a source of sensuous pleasure as well as a place full of beauty.

That was also true for my mother and her sisters before me (it was a family in which the women were more concerned with gardening than the men). All four of them became enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners, and they did more gardening work than their mother had done because none of them married a man as rich as their father. As I grew up, however, I moved away from my childhood and their continuing involvement. I went away, first to Oxford, then to London, and although on my visits home I appreciated the several gardens my mother made over the years, I looked at them rather than inhabited them, and I never worked in them. I never so much as pulled a weed or sowed a seed, and I became ignorant. Once, when I was staying with a friend who had just moved into a new house, she showed me a clump of leaves in a neglected flower bed which she wanted to restore, and asked what I
thought they were. ‘Pansies, I think,' said I; so we separated the clump and planted bits of it all along the front of the bed. And what those pansies turned out to be was Michaelmas daisies.

The London house, the top flat of which I moved into early in the 1960s and where I am still lucky enough to live, has a small front garden and a back one slightly larger than a tennis court. When my cousin Barbara bought the house the back garden consisted of a lawn with a fairly wide border the length of one side of it, an ivy-swamped raised border across the end, and a scramble of weeds that had once been a border next to the steps leading up to the lawn. The long border was full of still floriferous but very old and gnarled roses, which my cousin kept weeded and from time to time was nudged by her mother into pruning, but otherwise, apart from keeping the grass cut, she let the garden look after itself, which meant that the laurel bush and the fiercely thorny pyracanthus which grew against the wall opposite the rose bed grew almost to house height and plunged most of the space in shade. The lawn served a useful purpose, however, as a playground for her young children and a home for their guinea pigs, and that was what she minded about.

Twenty-six years ago her job took her to Washington, where she was to live for six or seven years, and it was agreed that I should find tenants for the bottom part of the house while the middle flat should be the preserve of her son, who was then at Oxford. Just before she left she asked me if I could ‘sort of keep an eye' on the garden so that ‘nature didn't quite take over'. And the next morning, leaning out of my bedroom window and surveying what had
now become my territory, I suddenly and absolutely unexpectedly became my mother. ‘There's only one thing for it,' I heard myself saying. ‘I must take the whole thing out and start from scratch.' And that is what I did. I paid someone to do the heavy digging and cutting back, and for new brickwork in the front garden, but all the planting I did myself, and as soon as the first plant I put in with my own hands actually
grew and flowered
, I was hooked.

For a long time I spent most of my evenings and weekends working in that garden, which became quite adventurous and colourful, but gradually digging and mowing became too much for me, and about five years ago I reshaped it into something more sober which could be controlled by a gardening firm coming in once a fortnight – dull, but soothing to sit in on a summer evening – and lost interest in it, although I am still proud of the huge white rambling rose that submerges the crab-apple tree, the magnolia and the three other roses. But by then I had half an acre of garden in Norfolk to think about,
real
garden, rich in possibilities, belonging to the little house my cousin inherited from her mother in which she has generously granted me a share. She loves to sit in it, but is happy to let me run it, and building on my aunt's original creation is a continuing joy.

For some time now most of the work has to be done by other hands, so my cousin employs a young man who mows the lawn and keeps the hedges trimmed, while I have employed a sequence of three serious gardeners, all women, all much more knowledgeable than I am, and each in her different way a wonder-worker. I can afford help only one day a week, but what they have achieved! The
first two did a tremendous amount of structural work, and my present treasure is a sophisticated plantswoman with whom I have a delightful time choosing what to plant where: to me the part of gardening that is the most fulfilling. And still, each time I'm there, I manage to do at least a little bit of work myself: tie something back, trim something off, clear some corner of weeds, plant three or four small plants, and however my bones may ache when I've done it, I am always deeply refreshed by it. Getting one's hands into the earth, spreading roots, making a plant comfortable – it is a totally absorbing occupation, like painting or writing, so that you become what you are doing and are given a wonderful release from consciousness of self. And so, for that matter, is simply sitting in your garden, taking it in. The following is from a short-lived diary I kept at a time when Barry was ill. I had not been able to get to Norfolk for two months, but now his brother had come to stay so I could snatch a weekend.

And still I can see those flowers in my mind's eye, serene beings, quietly living their own mysterious lives, and know that in a few months' time they will be back and with any luck I will be there again to see them … Yes, I am much the richer since Barbara asked me to keep an eye on her garden.