Open Writing

During the early forties on cold evenings in winter my brother, sister and I didn’t mind at all not being able to go outside to play. There were lovely things happening in our house which we all used to really look forward to, so much so that these things are still very vivid in my memory.

My parents had an infra red/ultra violet ray health lamp, and every evening in the winter the three of us used to sit in front of the lamp with the main lights turned off. We were all stripped to the waist and wore dark green goggles. Mum used to time how long we had to have these sunrays, which she and Dad said were very healthy for us during the winter months. It was lovely and eerie.

Dad used to tell us stories of what he used to do when he was a boy. I know now that most of his stories he concocted in his mind to get our attention.

One of his favourites, and ours, was a short story about when he and his brother were chased by a lion when they were boys and how they ran like the wind until they came to a big tree. Then the pair of them climbed up the tree with the huge lion close on their heels. When they were safely up the tree, they pulled it up behind them! This and other tales kept us amused during our sessions by the lamp.

Actually my father was a very clever man and wrote many engineering books and lectured on piping engineering in Britain and the USA. He rehearsed for Huddersfield Choral Society concerts and also for the Glee and Madrigal Society, but my favourite hobby of his was painting pictures in oils. He used to put his canvas on the easel, and the three of us used to sit and watch a blank canvas coming to life.

His favourite scenes were what I called Constable scenes, also coastal scenes of boats and pictures of flowers in vases. I have a lovely oil painting of his hanging in my lounge, depicting a glass vase full of long-stemmed pink roses. My daughter has one of her grandad’s first oil paintings of a farmer and his horse ploughing a field, painted in 1933.

My brother grew up to be very good at art, but Irene, my sister, and I were pretty hopeless. I could take up a pencil and draw a swan and a silly cartoon of a bald man with a pipe in his mouth - and that was about it.

However, about four years ago I did enrol in an art class for beginners but, as I expected, I was hopeless. I spent quite a lot of money on paint brushes, oil paints, water colours, Chinese crayons and charcoal, and I felt really determined to try very hard to produce a painting of some kind.

Most of the people in the class were really brilliant and made me feel a real failure. My paintings were so bad, in my eyes, that I used to turn them into cartoons, which usually produced laughs and
giggles from other members of the class.

The whole class had to paint a scene from a photograph (somewhere in Italy) depicting a bridge with a fast-running river rushing under it and a ruined castle in the background. We had a choice of using oil paints, water colours, pastels or whatever medium we wanted.

I chose water colours. I did a pencil sketch of the scene from the photograph and got stuck in. We took our paintings home to work on too, and I really concentrated hard. Everyone’s paintings were eventually completed, and then the art teacher said that he was going to get them all framed and that he had arranged an exhibition of them all at the Huddersfield Sports Centre. There would be no exceptions.

Imagine me! I was mortified, especially as each picture was to have a little sticker on it, letting viewers know the name of each artist. (Please God, don’t let anybody who knows me go to the exhibition!)

But people did go, and a least four people at different times during the next few weeks came up to me in the street and said, “I saw your painting in the exhibition at the Sports Centre. Wasn’t it good? I didn’t know you could paint.”

I thought to myself that they were only being nice to me because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Then I thought if my picture was as bad as I imagined, these people probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.

I wonder what Dad would have thought of my efforts, but I shall never know that. I do know that I won’t try art work again. I have proved to myself that I did try hard, but it wasn’t ‘my thing’. Incidentally, the picture now hangs in a fairly obscure corner of my daughter’s house. But I am sure she only keeps it there so as not to hurt my feelings, or maybe she thinks of it as Mum’s masterpiece.

Who knows? If Dad was alive today, he maybe could have steered me on the way to producing a nice piece of art work, but at least I gave it a go. I would much rather produce pieces for our U3A Remember When class.

I may not be able to paint pictures, but I can do shorthand. In fact I often think in shorthand. And I can type at some rate too, so I am not hopelessly useless.

Getting back to the old days, I can truly say that our winter evenings in our cosy living room with a bright coal fire burning, Mum sitting knitting, the radio on, and our little family all snug, warm and praising Dad’s work, were some of the happiest memories I have of our very happy childhood.