Autobiography, part 4: 1973-4 - art school, poetry, arson and drugs

Back from Liverpool I returned to education, briefly, but was I born to tip my cap or was I a fire raiser after all?

Transcript

I returned to Clare, Suffolk at the beginning of September 1972 and enrolled late onto an ‘A’ level and ‘O’ level course at West Suffolk College, Bury St Edmunds. At that time, this FE college had a liberal philosophy and the staff were engaging, interesting and interested. Aside from qualifications we had liberal studies, which formed the basis of some quite lively discussions.

My plan was to get ‘A’ level art and five ‘O’ levels, to place myself on the Foundation Studies course at Ipswich School of Art the following year. I was already running behind by four years but hey, here I was at twenty actually enjoying learning, and many of the staff and students.

Some of the time I was given a lift in by Peter, a lapsed skinhead. I managed, somehow, to have friends from a variety of backgrounds. For myself, the hippy dream died with Hendrix in 1970. However, there were some big time hippies at the college, alongside those who just didn’t cut their hair. However, I quickly learnt that there were those who could be Conservative (with a large C) and still enjoy the excesses of a supposedly alternative culture. The dress then was loons and clubby stacked boots. To my shame I went along with the fashion.

I was writing poetry – alongside my studies - and early in 1973 ‘A pebble’ was published in an anthology. There I was in print! Next, a student had put together a duplicated college magazine with seven of my poems in it – ‘Vultures,’ ‘History of Research,’ ‘Tractor Love,’ ‘Love in a pebble,’ ‘Fly You Pester,’ ‘Greenfields’ and ‘Eating My Toes With Depression!’ Oh my God, that embarrassing feeling looking back. Still, the head of English liked them but, to this day, I don’t really know what they were about!

These early poems point two ways: poems about the self and poems about specific subjects. Also, ‘History of Research’ indicates a route I took later: writing as a character, rather than myself – tied into my other passion, drama.

By this time I had read all Sylvia Plath’s available poetry and I had read Voyager, a biography of poet Hart Crane by John Unterecker. Of middle class parents, Crane – without the university education of his peers – struggled to be taken seriously as a poet. He also struggled with his identity, personality and sexuality. Crane was gay.

A poet and a homosexual pitched against his father’s Christian Scientists faith and his father’s desire for Hart to work in the family firm; and he was ever the underdog in the 1920s US poetry scene. His ‘Bridge’ poems are fantastic. Today, we’d probably diagnose Hart Crane with bipolar disorder, because of his mood swings – not helped by his binge drinking which led to him being beaten up and put in prison in Paris.

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from the S. S. Orizaba off Florida in 1932. He was 32 years old.

This is from To Brooklyn Bridge, the opening of The Bridge sequence

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes   

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

The ‘A’ level Art exam was 15 hours in duration (over three days). Unbelievably, we were allowed to smoke (tobacco) during the exam! Finally, I had cracked it: I had an ‘A’ level and five ‘O’ levels!

My first term at art school loomed.

Way back in the 1940s my mother Muriel had made a compromise with her dad that rather than pursue painting, she would train for a career in illustration. That is, painting sounded like crazy self-indulgence, while being an illustrator seemed a good, steady job which could be had.

Despite my parents’ liberalism, I made the same mistake to appease them. Rather than enter Ipswich School of Art to undertake a more ‘arty’ foundation course, I chose to pursue a three year diploma course in Illustration and Design.

Think of the benefits? I’d be out and earning in three years, while I’d face five years of education if I wanted to be an artist or sculptor. 

In retrospect, this was the worst decision of my life. My fellow students on the course were fine but the tutors came over as conservative and overly disciplined. Yes, the first term was bearable with introductory courses in typography, photography, screen printing and product design but the only discipline I really enjoyed was a weekly life drawing class. 

Product design was all about selling a product, not about exploring ideas, which is what I wanted to do, while learning skills in different media.

Also, I’d taken on my first bedsit. Well, it was a room in a large house I shared with the landlady. She’d converted the room with a tiny kitchen area but there were rules: in by 11pm and guests out by 10pm. 

Though I wrote poetry, read and drew a little in the evenings, to alleviate my boredom, a fellow student gave me an entire cannabis plant – all dried out and ready to smoke! I think it was in lifting my boredom that I set fire to my bedsit!

Cooking my supper on my Baby Belling, suddenly not only were the plastic curtains on fire around my mini kitchen but the fat in the pan was on fire too! And pouring water on a fat fire is not what you should do! Flames vaulted up to the ceiling in an instant!

Was I about to set fire to the house? In handcuffs for fire raising and possession? Oh my god! For a second, everything seemed to be on fire!

Somehow – and I don’t know how - I managed to extinguish the leaping flames with the application of large wet clothes and towels! Phew! I don’t remember wetting the pile of textiles – just that incredible sense of relief that I wasn’t heading for prison. But the plastic curtain now hung in smouldering black and gloopy strings and everything stunk!

Removing the curtain was my best form of cover-up. And of course there was much scrubbing of the walls and the Belling, and fanning the foul air towards open windows. After hours of cleaning, only forensics could thereafter establish my act of arson – and theft of a Woolies plastic curtain would not be a top priority – so perhaps I was going to be ok? 

The moral of this story is of course: don’t cook and smoke ganja at the same time!

Events were about to overtake me though: a letter from the local education authority stated that my grant had been reassessed downwards and I would no longer be able to reside in Ipswich. I would have to make the thirty-five mile trip from Clare by bus each day – that’s nearly six hours travelling!

Thus my second term began in 1974 getting up at 5.30am to arrive at the art school in Ipswich at 9am but often I was late; and, with the wind behind me, I was back home by 7pm.

I hated product design sessions with a vengeance. My lack of work and the poor quality of what I produced led to an assessment. A 6B drawing of miners collaged in with a portrait of Muddy Waters saved my bacon. But for what? I loathed the course and, whatever the flak from my parents, I left art school on completion of the second term. I’d flunked it.

Twenty-one years old and up shit creak again. What now?

There was only one place to go: the factory gates.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,         

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.