A plate in his head!

1950

     Reflecting on this stage in my life, I've come to recognise that children – when left to their own devices – will be attracted to that which interests them most. They will play with, investigate, discover, and put into practice their developing skills, and so, they will learn by teaching themselves.

     I was left in the care of Mrs Donahue whilst my brother and sister went to school, and my mother and father both went to work. She, Mrs Donahue, was big, strong, and Irish. She would grab me by the hair, yank my head back and, whilst I looked at the ceiling, she would scrub my face in a rapid circular motion with what felt like a Brillo soap pad before letting me go out into the street to play. No fear of danger then, kidnappers, peodophiles and murderers hadn't yet been invented! So, we were just kicked out like the cat to get on with it.

Sometimes, I would travel about 100 yards along the street to where I could seek refuge in the comfort of my own house. I would let myself in using the key that always hung from hairy string behind the letterbox, all you had to do was reach in and get it. Then, stand on an Ostermilk tin that lived in our overgrown front garden to reach the lock.

Once inside I could get up to anything I wanted. I enjoyed jumping up and down on the beds, particularly mum and dad's - and fiddling around with bits of the junk that was kept in the sideboard draws. They were my little treasure chests packed with elastic bands, paper clips, cogs of old alarm clocks, magnets, sticky tape, pencils etc. My treasure!

I would make things with the junk, but pencils were particularly useful if you could find a sharp one. I liked nothing better than when dad brought home some paper from work, and I could draw pictures on it. Mainly ships, aeroplanes, and houses but often I'd include my family – mam, dad, brother, and sister. They stood in the foreground like scarecrows whilst the battle raged on behind them.

     I would often help myself to an OXO cube from a tin on the shelf which I would then nibble as I played in the street (if you ate it all in one lump it tasted awful). Eating OXOs like this was quite common and popular among the other kids, but my mam, with disapproval, would claim that some of them had this "in place of a proper dinner". Dad would always chip in with "well at least they've had a square meal".

My mother soldered circuit boards at the R & M and my dad worked in a factory on the Tyne as an electrical engineer in a place called Hebburn - which I thought was the same place they told us about at Sunday school – the place where Jesus lived. And I was quite proud that my dad went there every day!

At Sunday school they told us Hebburn was a lovely place to be, and I thought, "well it really must be a lovely and kind place to be giving out all this paper for us kids to draw on".

I would often play with Michael Mason from across the street. I told my mother that he talked funny and asked her why (the poor guy had an unbelievably strong stammer - always getting stuck on the letter 'M'… of all letters) and she said that some people just do that, and that he would in time "grow out of it." I didn't understand - it wasn't his height that was the problem but the way he talked.

A plate in his head!

She also told me the reason he didn't play football in the street with the other children was because he had a plate in his head. This absolutely puzzled me and bowled me over with curiosity. But, fair to say, I was guilty of not asking the important questions that could have helped me to understand; Questions like: how did the plate get in there? Why was it in there in the first place? How big was the plate? It couldn't be like the ones in our kitchen because I would've been able to see the shape of it - and goodness knows I'd often examined him up close for evidence while we were playing marbles.

     Although Michael wasn't much taller than me, it turned out that he was a full year older, and one day, I couldn't find him anywhere. My mother told me he had gone to school and that was why I wouldn't be able to play with him anymore. The whole thing ended, and I didn't play with him even after school. I don't know why but he was just different. This 'school' thing had changed him.

At the time, I had no idea what 'school' actually was, it was just a word. But I soon observed a distinct change in Michael's behaviour. I saw that he started to skip along the pavement which he'd not done, and I'd not seen before. Then, one day, while he skipped along, I heard him singing "Bobby Shafto's gone to sea with silver buckles on his knee, when he comes back he'll marry me, bonny Bobby Shafto". It got me angry, it was a daft song matched only by his daft skipping.

I didn't want to go to this 'school' thing because I didn't want to be changed and didn't want to act 'mental' like Michael Mason. I was quite happy just mooching around, filling in the cracks between the paving slabs with my dad's hammer and bits of wood, creating my works of art on the pavement with bits of chalk I'd broken off an old ornament of an Alsatian dog, catching bees in a jar, climbing the council railings at the front of the house, spinning clock gear wheels on the pavement and things like that.

Although I didn't realise it at the time I was driven by a great curiosity - not just about Michael Mason's plate or how he'd been transformed into an idiot, but everything. How the wireless worked, the cooker, the toaster and everything else. It was like having a madman inside of me, forcing me to discover what was in there, how it was made and how it worked.

"You little monkey" my mother would say repeatedly as she caught me taking things apart. I also remember making heroic attempts to put them back together again, but invariably would end up with screws and parts left over. But I just couldn't help it, it was that madman to blame.

     Sometimes, I would hold a white saucer over a candle until the saucer was covered by a jet-black velvety coating of soot. I would then use this as a surface on which to scribe a picture - getting really thin lines with sewing needles and thicker ones with mam’s knitting needles. Years later I tried to do this to impress my kids but it seems candles are made of different stuff these days.

At that point, I had no confusion about art; everybody seemed to understand and appreciate it – even me. I had no questions about it. It wasn't until much later that I realised how little I understood, and I wanted somebody to explain some things to me. But nobody was there to teach me 'The Facts of Art' and there was good reason - no one was qualified… because no one had taught them!