Summer in February (2 page)

On he went:

‘Only this last two days I have been motoring from my home in Dedham to Newmarket and back. On Sunday I motored through Suffolk,
and I was looking at skies all the time … on Monday what skies they were! And still, in spite of all these men who have painted
skies,
we
should be painting skies still better!’

Skies! Not kittens with as many legs as a centipede. Skies! Not Picasso portraits, not females with two noses and three tits
and a set of shark’s teeth coming out of their earholes!

Yes, he was into his stride now.

‘But there has been this foolish inter-ruption to all effort in Art, helped by foolish men writing in the press encouraging
all this damned nonsense’ – and this time there was no apology to the Archbishop for ‘damned’ – ‘putting all the younger men
out of their stride. I am right … I have the Lord Mayor on my side … I am sure he is behind me … and on my left I have our
newly elected extra-ordinary member of the Academy, Mr Winston Churchill—’

—elected by me, that is, because he can paint a tree to look like a tree and he can paint a sky to look like a sky

—Winston Churchill elected by the second son of a Suffolk miller—

‘and I know Winston is behind me, because once he said to me, “Alfred, if you met Pee-cass-O coming down the street would
you join with me in kicking his something-something-something?” and I said, “Yes, Sir, I would.”’

Well, that
was it
! There was uproar. Uproar, no less. Alfred felt he’d done the trick, he had really and truly loosened up the whole show.
Gallery Three of Burlington House rocked. Waves of laughter rolled towards him from the back to the top tables. Down at his
end Monty was cackling away.

So that was fine. So far so good. But how was it going down with the pansies? What about the Blunts of this world, with their
manicured nails and their modulated voices and their porcelain expressions? What did they make of Winston and the President
lying in wait in some doorway for Pablo to come down Piccadilly in his beret so that they could jump out and kick him up the
arse? Eh?

The President was feeling in terrific form; he had never felt better.

‘Now,’ he went on, ‘we have all sorts of high-brows here tonight, ex-perts who think they know more about Art than
the men who had to paint the pictures, even those poor devils who sit out and try to paint a landscape and fail.’

Because that, the President maintained, was how you should paint a picture,
en plein air
, as Bastien-Lepage said. It was as simple and as difficult as that. You needed all your colours, your white, your turps,
painting umbrella, rags, beautiful brushes, and with your hat over your eyes and your brushes in your mouth, you picked up
your easel and palette and canvas and went out into the open air in all weathers, wind, rain or shine, in Norfolk or Cornwall
or Hampshire, in peace or in war, you got outside and worked, that’s what he and Laura used to say to each other in Lamorna.
‘Get outside and work till you drop.’

And
what
did you paint?

Paint the real world, paint ordinary men and women, the land, the sea and the sky, not the sick world of some tortured spirit,
not the surreal world of some diseased and malformed imagination. But could you imagine those critics out in the open air?
Just imagine Anthony Blunt out in a field, with his eyes watering, his hands blue and with some dark storm clouds coming up.
Just imagine him covered in sultry summer flies. What would he do? He’d shut up shop and be back to his boys in his Chelsea
boudoir, well, bugger that lot if you’ll excuse the pun, because the President would prefer a basket-covered stone jar of
ale and an oak-ribbed bar, let’s say The Red Lion, some soup, fish and pheasant, or sausage and mash and briar pipes – that
was good enough for him, before the slow walk home.

Everyone could see he was enjoying himself. Any mention of the critics always brought the best out in Alfred.

The
cri-tics
.

‘They are so – if I may use a common expression – so fed up to the teeth in pictures, they move among pictures, they
see so many pictures that their … they … their judgement becomes …’

At this point, as luck would have it, the President saw the offending article. His sight might not be too good these days
but he was sure the offending article was there, third table along at the far end, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. The
President didn’t plan it. He just said, ‘because their judgement becomes blunt, they, yes, blunt. And that reminds me, is
he here tonight? Anthony Blunt, is he here tonight?’

Oh, he’s here tonight all right and staring at his polished fingernails.

‘Who once stood in this room with me, when the King’s Pictures were here, and there was a Reynolds hanging there, and he said
“That Reynolds isn’t as great as a Pee-cass-O”. Believe me, what an extraordinary thing for a man to say! Well, perhaps one
should not mention names, but I do not care, since I am resigning at the end of the year.’

‘Good riddance!’ someone said.

The President’s blood jumped. His fists clenched. Who said that? Someone had, quite clearly, uttered the words ‘Good riddance’.
It wasn’t loud but he heard the words all right. His eyesight might be poor – and who could be surprised at that? – but his
ears were still damned good. ‘Good riddance’, eh? He could feel his knuckles grinding away into the tablecloth. He moved the
weight off his painful foot. His head started to beat, but he fought back.

‘I do not wish to go on with an Academy that says, “Well, there must be something in this modern art, we must give these jugglers
a show.”’

And what about that ‘woman’? Woman, my foot! Ask them about that monstrosity.

‘Here we are in this Academy, and you gentlemen assembled in the Octagon Room, and there was a woman
cut out there in wood, and God help us if all the race of women looked like
that
!’

Yes, they enjoyed that, the diners did enjoy that. And the President enjoyed listening to their laughter, waves of it, good,
warm, male laughter, and they were laughing because they were all men together, and they all knew what a woman looked like,
and they all knew what they wanted a woman to look like, they wanted a woman to look
paintable
, but … did the pansies?
Did the pansies
? Come on, be honest, did the critics? No! What did the modern critics fancy? They fancied Modigliani’s models and Henry Moore’s
holes, Henry Moore’s modern heavyweight holes.

‘The sculptors today … are sinking away into a fashion of bloated, heavyweight, monstrous nudes.’

Blots on the landscape, bloated females, bloated, blote …

Blote—

Oh, Alfred, why did you say that?

His left hand started to tremble, then shake. He didn’t mean to use that word. It was a word he always avoided. He clenched
the tabletop to steady his hand, but the trembling would not stop. It was so easy to be put off one’s stride, wasn’t it, even
when things were going so well. Bloated. He had to blot out all bloated things. But he couldn’t. He could see her face, her
pale face. It was such a silly name, the very last name you would give a beautiful, paintable, elusive girl, but it clung
to her and it clung to him, like anemones to rocks.

There was silence and cigar smoke. But you couldn’t have silence in a speech, could you? If he didn’t speak soon they would
think he’d suffered a stroke. He
had
to keep talking. He could feel the room changing, he could sense a shiver in the subsoil, and the next thing he knew he was
on to ‘Battersea’, another B, oh bloody hell, and
he gabbled on, but his heart was no longer in it. He was thrown, thrown off his horse, and he heard himself saying these sentences:

‘You saw those …
things
exhibited in Battersea Park? Did you? Things put there by the London County Council. We are spending millions every year
on Art Education, and yet we exhibit all these foolish drolleries to the public. And yet I have stood in that park, and I
have been with the public who’ve been there, I’ve asked them questions, and they were disgusted and angered, just as they
were to see this Madonna and Child in a church at Northampton.’

Henry Moore’s monstrosity, they all knew what he meant, Moore’s monstrously modern holes.

‘Because … I would like to ask everybody here to travel up to Northampton to see this statue of the Madonna and Child at this
church. I am speaking plainly because my horses may all be wrong, but I’m damned sure that statue isn’t right!’

At this point there was a kerfuffle at the far end of the gallery. Three or four chairs were being pushed back. Was it a protest
against the President and what he was saying or a brace of weak bladders? The President could not be sure, but it further
sapped his strength.

Stop now, Alfred, he said to himself, you’ve said enough, probably more than enough.

‘Well, I’m not going on too long, Sirs … I would not go on any longer because I know a greater man than I is going to follow
me.’

Mr Winston Churchill, no less. And you cannot get greater than that.

But he didn’t sit down, because he had not yet mentioned Mr Matisse. He had to get Mr Matisse off his chest.

‘But I would like to say that this afternoon I went to the
Tate Gallery, the Tate, the second room on the right with white walls, which is nothing but walls, and you will see this picture
by Ma-tisse. It is called
Le Foret
… the … forest.’

And damn me if it didn’t happen again, and in much the same part of the room, only louder this time. More chairs moved. Mentioning
Matisse had done it. This time their voices were louder. The critical geese were gobbling and honking and stretching out their
long white necks.

‘Best thing in the Tate!’

‘Wonderful!’

‘Lovely work!’

‘A beautiful work of art!’

The President glared.

Beautiful, my backside!

‘I hope,’ he shouted, ‘I hope you hear these other members interrupting me … As I am President and I have the right of the
chair, allow me to speak. I shall not be here next year, thank God.’

‘Thank God indeed,’ he heard.

But no, no, he was not going to bite back, not this time. No, let it go, let it all go. What was it all for, art, all that
toil, all that effort in the wind and rain – and we’re gone. And what did
they
know, what do the critics know about skies and a countryman’s soul, about the head-work and the hand-work, the steady movement
of the scythe, the dance of raindrops? He was trying to explain all that the other day to … forgotten his name … that Old
England was gone, that you couldn’t see the barley ears for thistledown, cottages had given way to villas, sleeved waistcoats
to boiler suits, horses to tractors, fences to barbed wire, and Sargent to Salvador Dali, and what was
his
art, Salvador Dali’s, glutinous watches and sagging pianos, that’s all.

The President held up his hand, like a tired conductor on his very last night on the rostrum.

‘In the
Telegraph
I was reported as having said “Let a tree look like a tree”’ because trees look like trees, don’t they, and women look like
women. Or
should
! We all know a paintable girl when we see one, and we all know how difficult it is to choose between the demands of a paintable
girl and the demands of paint.

‘Well,’ he pointed a thin, bent finger at the packed, silent room, ‘you go and look at that spirit of a tree … by Matisse.
But hear what Robert Louis Stevenson said He spoke of the sound of “innumerable thousands and thousands of treetops and—”’

and
why-oh-why
did he ever risk that difficult word again—

‘“innun … immuner … imminumer”’

He couldn’t even speak now. His hands shook. He told himself to take the horse slowly home along the lanes, very slowly. Try
again, Alfred, very slowly.

‘“in-num-er-able millions of green leaves that were abroad in the air”.’

‘The fellow’s tight!’

‘Of course he’s tight. Always is.’

‘Just a country bumpkin.’

‘Disgraceful!’

The President looked at Winston. But the Great Warrior was looking down at his cigar, at the moist black end of his fat cigar.
On his left, the President felt well-bred withdrawal; to his right, he sensed stares of admonition. He was as drained as he
had ever been. It was time to sit down, long past time. Someone passed the port. It looked blue red purple, like … damsons.

He put his hand over his eyes. Above all else he had to blot out all damsons. If he didn’t blot out damsons he could not go
on.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, trying to smile but feeling his lips
stuck firmly to his teeth, ‘as President, and resigning President, I thank you all for drinking the health of the Royal Academy
as you have done. I thank the Archbishop of Canterbury for what he has said tonight, and I wish you all well.’

With these words, with his head spinning, with his right hand a shambles, and with the cat well and truly among the pigeons,
he sat down.

The buzz, the reaction, the clapping, the outrage, was much the loudest it had been all evening, though no one spoke directly
to the President. The Duke of Gloucester looked glazed and the Archbishop stared steadfastly at the ceiling. Still, the main
thing was he’d got the horse home, hadn’t he?

It was time to move on. It was time now for The Great Man. The President turned to the toastmaster and nodded. This time the
toastmaster, who needed no second invitation, hit the gavel as hard as he could.

He puffed out his chest and bellowed:

‘Your Royal Highness, Your Ex-cellencies, Your Graces … My Lords and Gentle-men, Pray Silence for Mr Winston Chur-chill.’

Even as Winston Churchill was speaking on the air, the BBC switchboard was jammed with telephone calls. Over the next few
days and weeks Sir Alfred Munnings received thousands of letters from home and abroad, sacks and sacks full of support.

One letter was from his old friend, Dame Laura Knight:

16, Langford Place,

St John’s Wood,

London

28th April 1949