LITMIR.BIZ

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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 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

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