Psychovertical Read online

  The only thing I ever fished out of the docks was Robin, who would always end up falling in – usually because I pushed him. One summer he got a second-hand bike for his birthday, a yellow Raleigh Boxer, and we cycled down to the docks so he could show it off. When he wasn’t looking, I tied a piece of old rope to it, attached the other end out of sight onto a rusty iron bollard by the edge of the drop, then, shouting, ‘Hey Robin, watch this …’, I chucked it in. Unfortunately, before I could haul it back up again, he burst into tears and ran off home. Twenty years later he still can’t see the funny side of this.

  One of our most popular, and hazardous, pastimes was swimming in the docks, something that generally ended up with somebody getting hurt or almost drowning. You would strip down to just your shorts, then line up along the rounded stone edges and try to find someone brave enough to jump in first. It was never me.

  Taking a running jump, the first boy would launch himself out into the water, disappearing with a loud splash and a cheer from the onlookers, who would then remain silent for a few moments until he bobbed up from the blackness.

  Eventually it would be my turn and, trembling a little with fear (fear of the cold water, fear of what lay beneath it, fear of not coming up), I would step forward. Those who had already done it would stand shivering as well, arms crossed, watching until everyone else had jumped. You knew you had no choice, you were going in one way or another.

  Taking a few steps back I would do the running jump and launch off into space with a scream that was half bravado, half fear, shooting out high over the water, eyes closed. The drop was several metres and you seemed to be in the air an impossibly long time. As you fell down towards the water you would feel that thrill of the freedom of the choice being made, there was no way back, you were committed to fate. Then you would hit.

  The impact was hard, the cold stunning, the water so black you expected to bounce, but down you would go, deep. There was always the anticipation of hitting something, until finally you stopped and, following the sounds of your friends, swam upwards towards the surface, where you would climb out via a ladder and stand, arms crossed, dripping dirty oily water, like the rest.

  Of course, the trick to swimming in the docks was not to swallow any water, or get entangled on anything below the surface, or bump into a dead dog or worse. I would often imagine the zombied bodies of dead tramps or murdered prostitutes crawling along on the bottom, trying to catch my feet – perhaps more of an indication of my video choices than of a vivid imagination.

  Every summer, kids would drown, and the headmaster would give a stern warning in assembly about not going near the docks. The worst thing that ever happened to me, and the last time I jumped in the docks, was when I landed on something very sharp and cut my feet so badly I couldn’t walk, and had to be pushed home on someone’s bike, blood dripping out of my Dunlop trainers all the way. Up until then, whatever the dangers, these things never stopped me. After all, it was an early lesson in life, that games without risk are just that – games. Anyway, the local swimming baths had been bulldozed to make way for a new bypass. For us it was the docks or nothing.

  Someone once told me that a wilderness was an area of several thousand miles with no infrastructure or human impact. They were wrong. Looking back I think the docks, Little Switzerland, and the bombed-out buildings gave me something immeasurably valuable as a child, something that I would hang on to for the rest of my life. These industrial wastelands of cut stone and dank water were a wilderness as precious to us as any tundra. They were where we explored both without and within ourselves.

  The early years of my life in Hull seemed to be one long hot summer: the roads were always quiet, and weekends and holidays never seemed to end. We were poor, but so was everyone else, so this never seemed much of a problem. Mine was probably the last urban generation to have an old-fashioned childhood, fairly free of consumerism save for the odd Star Wars figure. It was consumerism that later created real poverty and, worse still, the realisation of how poor people were. Back then, everyone on the estate was hard up, so we were all equals. Having a TV that was rented, and required you to feed it 50p coins to make it work, was normal, as were free school dinners and grants to buy clothes with. Nowadays I reflect on the fact that I still get free clothes – only now they are from outdoor companies and I get paid to wear them.

  Unlike the mothers of most of my friends, my mum would always try and save enough money to take us to the seaside for the day at least once a month on the train, our family British Rail railcard making it possible. I used to wonder how we could be a family, without our dad, but obviously BR was pragmatic on such sticking points. We would arrive in Scarborough on the earliest train possible, and disembark carrying everything we needed for the day. ‘Now,’ my mum would say as we walked towards the beach, ‘we have £5 to spend, and when it’s spent that’s it.’ It was amazing how far that money could go.

  She once said that we were never poor, but that she was poor, and it’s true that she kept many of her hardships secret, well apart from the need to make ‘hen’s meat’. Nevertheless, growing up I was aware that life for her was a juggling act between paying bills and having money for trips to the seaside, toys or little luxuries that made the flat a home for us. Her life was full of small disasters, unexpected bills, lost or damaged clothes she had to replace, and I would often see her despair, only to rally later and fight back. One of her most common sayings was, ‘If that isn’t the story of my life!’, used whenever something went wrong. She seemed to have so much bad luck, with life constantly making her tough life even tougher. It was only later that I understood that poor people tread such a fine line that even the slightest thing can push them over the edge, yet each time she climbed back and carried on. ‘Never mind, it’s the story of my life’ became so common that it seemed like an automatic defence, an acceptance of what life threw at us. One such occasion was when, on our way to Scarborough, the train began sounding its horn, then slammed on its brakes, eventually coming to a sudden stop, depositing the passengers on the floor. ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the guard as he walked through the carriages. ‘We seem to have hit a cow on the line.’ Our nice day out ruined, Mum just looked at us. ‘Well, if that’s not the bloody story of my life.’

  If my early memories of Hull seem to be captured in rays of summer sun, then the years that followed are cast in autumnal gloom, beginning when I moved up into senior school. This was an all-boys’ school, the classes packed tight, the atmosphere tense. Its hallways and balconies were like a prison wing. It seemed as if I had been taken from a small, hard-working and positive school, where children felt special and valuable, and then poured into the grinder of a factory for the disillusioned and bewildered. A school system should attempt to bring to life that special gift each of us is given at birth, to blow on that ember of skill and help you to realise something you perhaps could be. This school, and many like it, simply tipped the lot of us into a bucket and stirred for five years.

  Overnight I went from being a happy child who had a few problems with writing and reading, to a ‘REM’. I was stuck in remedial classes where teaching was simply about containment. Kids ran wild. They pushed teachers out of their classrooms, they set fire to desks, they threw their books out of windows. The threat of physical violence hung in the air. All you could do was hide behind bluff and show, or slink to the furthest corners at breaktime. No one could show any interest in learning for fear of being labelled a swot and ostracised by the pack. We were all going to hell.

  At the end of our time there, it was decided that our failing school would be amalgamated with another failing school, thus doubling the problem and halving the resources to deal with it. Many teachers were just seeing their time out, ineffectual, exhausted and plodding. You felt they hated teaching us just as much as we hated being taught by them. What was lacking was passion of any sort, but then, with three-and-half-million unemployed, they knew they were serving out a sentence just like us and thou
ght they weren’t paid enough for passion. They went on strike for more pay, and soon the kids joined them, the local radio station coming down to interview them standing at the gates, not realising the strike had in reality already been going on for years on both sides. With so many unemployed, there was an air of pointlessness about the whole thing. Why weren’t we learning? No one gave a fuck.

  Worst of all, I suddenly seemed to be bad at every subject, swamped and drifting along. I became aware that my mind didn’t seem to be working as well as everyone else’s. In the first maths exam, I spent the fifty minutes trying to work out what number June was in the date-of-birth box at the top of the paper, more afraid of looking like a fool at getting that wrong than of failing the paper itself; trying to write out the months of the year on a scrap of paper, unable to remember all twelve, or the order they came in. The harder I tried to think, the deeper the answer sank from view.

  I had always loved school, and my young mind had gobbled up knowledge. I was a ‘mine of useless information’ as my mum would say. Now I hated school, and felt sick each morning knowing I had another day of bedlam ahead. I wanted a teacher who could look into me and see my potential and help me draw it out, but no one had the time. There seemed to be no future for any of us apart from youth training schemes, dead-end jobs, going on the dole or crime.

  I didn’t want to sign on. Deep inside me I held the ember of self-belief that I was better than that. I didn’t want an ordinary life like the parents of my friends, signing on, doing cash-in-hand jobs, living off the proceeds of goods that ‘fell off the backs of lorries’, having kids, trying to pay off the catalogue man for their Christmas presents. I wanted to be free of it all. But how?

  I went to the careers adviser and told him I’d like to work outdoors, but the only thing he had in his file was working in forestry. I saw a poster for a careers day about being an officer in the army, but was told by the adviser I couldn’t go as I probably wouldn’t be able to get enough O-levels to qualify for a place. This felt like a slap in the face. I was angry. I wanted to prove him wrong, but knew he was right. I wasn’t clever enough.

  I began to think about joining the Marines, probably because it was the only option that offered some way out, and maybe because it also offered some way back into the comfort of military institutionalisation that I had felt so attracted to as a child. Robin had applied to the RAF, and had been accepted to join as soon as he was old enough. I understood now why my dad, his dad, and his dad before him had joined. There simply wasn’t anything else they could do to satisfy the urge for a life less ordinary and depressing than this. The only problems were that I hated ironing, I doubted I was tough enough, and I feared I was too much of a dreamer to hack it.

  The only thing I knew I was good at was drawing. I had so many ideas in my head, and it seemed that only a pencil offered some way of letting them out. It was this ability to draw that had always pulled me through the hardest times. No matter how bad my maths-test results were, no matter how many red underlinings there were on the pages of my English books, at least I could draw.

  There was never any talk of university or college at school. I was so ignorant of higher education, I thought ‘Oxbridge’ was a university, but I began to focus on trying to get into art college. I had no idea what I would learn there, or how I could possibly make a living, but none of that mattered as long as I had some grace before I entered the crush of the real world.

  Exams came and I got O-levels in art, history, technical drawing and, amazingly, English, probably due to a story I wrote in answer to the essay question. Entitled ‘The Dream’, it was about what the bomb-aimer of the Enola Gay dreamed of as he slept on the way to bomb Hiroshima. My head had always been full of stories but, unable to articulate them in any way that was legible to a reader, I’d stuck to drawing cartoons. On that day, I had somehow shown enough talent, despite my misspellings and poor grammar, to earn a grade.

  I failed my maths O-level, but I signed on to go to sixth form, even though my friends told me not to as I’d then become ‘overqualified’. Some of the teachers, more realistically, doubted I was clever enough. I also doubted it myself, and so picked my strongest subjects, history and art, for A-level and tried to take my maths O-level again, having been told it was vital if I wanted to go to college. I failed it at the end of the first year, and again in my final exams, along with both art and history, thus proving my teachers right. I really was an idiot, but at least I wasn’t going to have the problem of being overqualified.

  Then I got an interview for a foundation course at Hull College of Art, a one-year intensive course where you would be taught how to paint, sculpt, take pictures, and see if you were good enough to go on to a full course at the art college. Without an A-level in art, and no maths qualifications, it didn’t look good, but I collected up my pictures and went to the interview.

  The room was set up with tables where people could show their work, and the crapness of my schooling became apparent as I looked around at proper canvases, sculptures, framed photos and assorted offerings by trendy-looking kids from all over Humberside. My table held a collection of pencil and pen pictures, mostly on a sci-fi theme, my main source of artistic instruction having come from comics and film posters. The lecturer walked around the room, talking to each person and looking at their work, until eventually she came to my table. You could tell she wasn’t impressed either by me or by my work, which looked neither trendy, intelligent nor artistic. This just wasn’t my world. Then she focused on a picture that stood out amongst the rest. It was a dark hand-drawn picture on a long piece of white card I’d found, and off-cut. It was a depiction of the inside of a whale, with organs, ribs, intestines. The picture was carefully drawn to look as real as possible, and I’d created a kind of surreal mishmash of shadow and light. What stood out, more in the centre of the picture, was the pure white tip of a harpoon, which created an interesting composition of dark and light, soft and hard lines. It was so different, and frankly so odd, that she picked it up and asked me about it. I told her I’d got the idea after going to the nearby whaling museum and seen the harpoons on display, and imagined what they would look like when they were inside a whale.

  For the first time since I’d left junior high school, I felt a teacher look at me and see some potential there. She made a note, telling me it was very interesting, and moved on.

  A few days later I got a letter telling me that I had made it onto the course. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  The one-year course was intensive, and I found myself amongst keen, intelligent and well-educated students, and, more importantly, teachers who seemed to dote on us and would give us more praise than we could handle. The difference was dizzying, and I know in that one year I learned and grew more than I had in seven years of senior school. Most importantly, I was exposed to the positivity of the other students, who seemed to have so many more reference points than myself. Overnight my world of films, videos and science fiction was replaced with one of books, music and the normal things of a teenager’s life. I noticed there were other people like me on the course, who had held onto their drawing skills, found themselves here, and now felt equally out of their depth. Very soon most of them had left, condemning art as being ‘up its own arse’, but for me life had never been more amazing. My schools had been all-boys, but now I found myself working next to girls, who shone and brought a sparkle and electricity to life.

  As the course progressed, so did my work. I had no money for paint, neither oils nor cheaper acrylics, let alone canvases to paint on, so I made do with the contents of the ‘free cupboard’, painting on sheets of wood with a mixture of PVA glue and powder paint, which, although unconventional, did make them stand out from the other students’ work. I began doing abstract paintings on a biological theme, based on what someone had told me: that ‘the human body disintegrates at 12 miles per hour’. These pictures were all red fury, often with sand mixed in to give texture, and although odd for
me they had a kind of pleasing composition. Very often I would just work by instinct, with no clear idea of why I put paint here or there, and it was only afterwards that I would have to justify it. Sometimes it’s refreshing to know that you do what you do just because it feels right.

  Around me I would see other students who seemed to have prodigious talents, yet made so little use of their time, whereas I gave 100 per cent, feeling my head strain as my potential, pent up for so long, was drawn out. The culmination of the year was to get into a degree course, something that not only would allow me to carry on this amazing and thrilling adventure, but also to get a grant and move away. The only sticking point was the fact that I had no real qualifications. The course ended and I got an ‘Upper Credit With Distinction’. I thought that with this I would wing it at the interview the following week at Sheffield University, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and, more importantly, in a city I knew had good climbs close by. I was going to fulfil my promise to return.

  A few weeks after the interview, I got a letter from Sheffield University. I felt that I was on a roll. I was amazing. I was talented. Then I ripped open the envelope and saw they didn’t want me. In that moment my world came crashing down. I was worthless again.

  ‘You’ll just have to get a job,’ said my mum, ‘or sign on the dole.’

  I felt sick.

  Within a few weeks I did sign on, and then I moved out to live in a squat with a friend, unable to live at home any more, feeling distant, alienated. My stupid dreams of going to art college had been dashed. My only skill had come to nothing.

  I threw away my paints and pencils, and my paper and sketch books, and from that moment, for years and years, I didn’t draw another thing.