Open Writing

I have every sympathy with the late Lady Churchill and her demolishing habits and only wish I had the same courage and powers of concealment. To destroy some of the family howlers that are kept in my mother’s photo box has been my intrinsic desire for years.

Me at the age of thirteen, wearing a garter for a hairband, so tight I could only wear it for an hour if I wanted to stay alive. The photograph must have been taken at five to the hour, judging by the row of white blisters forming at the base of each root.

The one showing me in a bathing suit at the age of ten, my posture suggesting an impending pregnancy.

The photo of my sister and me taken when I was seven and she was three, her smiling sweetly and all melt-in-the-mouth, me at her side showing my ugly doorstep teeth in a sickly leer.

I never mastered the knack of smiling when I was not enjoying myself, a cause of much suffering during dancing class days. “You,” our teacher would shriek giving my thighs a fingernail prod that made the eyelids prickle, “smile.” Quick grins are easy but dancers were supposed to leer for ten minutes at a time, which seemed impossibly idiotic to me.

For one photographic session I decided to stop forcing inane smiles. Why not surprise everyone with a natural expression? Unfortunately the day of my appointment dawned drizzly grey. When I removed my headgear the carefully coiffeured hairstyle had disappeared. In its place was a head-hugging Rudolph Valentino affair.

I sat on the stool with my driest side facing the camera. The photographer sighed impatiently. “Give me your best side, please,” he begged.

“Er ... I don’t think I have one, I’m a bit wet.” He seemed to agree with this and after a lot of posing he decided to risk his camera.

Collecting proofs is always exciting. When I looked at mine I was reminded of something my mother used to be fond of saying when I was younger, something about her being able to sit on my eyebrows and ‘that bottom lip’. What had become of the dreamy eyes and the hint of amusement I had allowed to play around my lips? This was a picture of a consumptive depressive with haunted eyes pleading, “Let me die, let me die.”

“Don’t open your mouth when you laugh, Mum,” I am usually advised during family photographic sessions. “We can see your fillings.”

On one family portrait, I was fifteen and hoping to pass the result on to a boyfriend. My father had us grouped in the corner of a local park rose garden. Impulsively I pulled a rose branch close to my face. “Where are you?” asked my mother when we examined the developed film. I was the headless body with the foliage face.

The only portraits I ever had painted were done by our children, who all saw me as a large circle with a red triangle in the centre, two black eyes and as much black scribble as the paper would allow, for hair. Perhaps there’s some significance in the fact that children never seem to draw fathers. Is this because they are harder to draw, or to please? I wonder.

It is only with the utmost self-control that I have not done a Lady Churchill on some of the bizarre ensembles sewn by our enthusiastic teenagers during their needlework sessions. But the thought of cost can slow down the mutilating instinct in some of us.

When our middle child stepped into the dining room one evening with her pinned-together, wide-legged culottes swinging at half-mast, spirits rose considerably. Trying to swallow our honesty, we managed to keep silent. But, unable to bear the suspense, she eventually prodded for comments.

No one actually got around to saying anything. I feel deeply ashamed at the part I played in the stomach clutching and rib shaking that ensued. Seeing as the material had cost me four pounds, I don’t know what I had to laugh at anyway. Thankfully we dreamed up some suitable compliments and she did wear them consistently for a week.

In an interview last year Graham Sutherland said, “Only those without physical vanity, educated in painting, or with exceptionally good manners can disguise their feelings of shock or revulsion when confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful painted image of oneself.”

Well, speaking for myself, I wouldn’t have minded a few extra curls added to old photographs or a few front teeth extractions.

Of course what appeals to one doesn’t always have the same pull for another. I have a floral effect on my kitchen wall, a dried flower arrangement glued on a brown cork plate, which I think looks most effective, even if our son does say it looks like a flower-trimmed beefburger.

I suppose one advantage of a surrealist portrait is that no one can ever confront the artist and say, “I think that middle eye is a bit low” or “That hole is in the wrong arm.”

All artists are inclined to be sensitive about their work. Looking out of the window just now, I saw our dog add his liquid contribution to the snowman just completed by our youngest, who has just been puzzling over the deep yellow stain blighting her creation. We all have to suffer for our art and it looks like the dog is next.