I was never going to make it at school. In the 1940s, when I was being shoved into grey flannel trousers and white shirt, one was either slow or bright. According to my teachers I was the former; the schoolboys said I was thick. Can I blame them for thinking this when life had served me melons rather than lemons? Dyslexia wasn’t in the dictionary then, so how were they to know?
The problem was that neither my parents nor my teachers knew it either, and there was no chance my old man would have ever accepted such a thing as a learning disability as sufficient excuse for coming home with black marks instead of gold stars. Not that he had anything to boast about academically: his old man had had few ambitions for his son, so when he found my dad watching him draining oil from the sump and greasing the pistons of the cars he worked on, he never sent him off to do homework. The boy wasn’t school material he had told my grandmother, and one more pair of hands in the workshop would not go to waste. My father foresaw the same for me, I think.
It was, however, not his view on education, but about toilets which really changed the direction of my life. Toilets should not be in the house. Strangely enough, this view is being held these days by some young eco-friendly couples, I am told, but back then it was more the case that a longdrop near the trees was cheap to construct and the way things had always been done. My mom and I both got very excited about the new water-borne sewage methods available, but he would have none of it. We would do our business there, away from the house where we ate and slept, and that was the way it would stay. Neither my mom nor I would win this fight. She accepted it, but I had a morbid fear of that little dark hut where, alongside the rough-cut hole in a board over which I gingerly positioned myself, stood a candle in its bed of wax, a box of matches nearby. With no windows, the place was always dark and the candlelight offered little comfort to a small nine year old who had made his way to that horrible hut in the dark of night.
Relief, though, came one day in the form of the local public library. As I could hardly tell the front of a book from its back, it was not a place I visited, but my mother was an avid reader and, when she withdrew or returned her books, sometimes took me with her. On one such occasion I had to go the toilet and was guided to the best I had ever visited, new, bright and flush.
It changed my life: I had found a way to avoid the dreaded longdrop. The library was not far away and, telling my mom I was going out to play, I would shoot round the block and take advantage of the public amenity kindly provided by the municipality. The librarians were trusting souls and never stopped me as I flashed past the desk, my fear of books keeping me from even making eye contact with anyone there.
One day, on my way out I caught sight of a room full of paintings. I stopped, and as I did so a man emerged, carrying two of them under his arm. Was he stealing them, I wondered. He saw me staring, halted and said, “Like them, lad? So do I, but you’ll have to wait a fortnight to take them out because they’re going home with me. But you can reserve them if you’d like.”
Back home I told my mother what I had seen and heard. She did not query what I had been doing at the library (I think she suspected the truth) but explained that libraries did not only lend out books but also records and prints of famous paintings. “Would you like me to get you your own library card so that you can take out paintings?” she asked.
So it was that I came to take out almost all the paintings in the library’s collection. Initially it was just the thrill of having something different on my walls, but it was not long before I began to copy them, using the charcoal pencils which my school gave us for art; later I used basic watercolours which my mom bought me when she saw how my efforts were turning out.
This is how my career began. An unacknowledged dyslexia had prevented my finding a home in books, but a natural talent in art emerged in its place. This eventually led me from art college into photography where I became an official photographer on cruise ships. After that I opened my own studio which specialised in shoots for advertising. I continued to paint, but for pleasure, no longer copying others’ work but developing my own style. So, if someone were to ask me how I came to be where I am today, I would say that it was through avoiding the longdrop. Chances are he might not understand me; then I would probably just tell him that I was dyslexic and art suited me more. Which is, I suppose, true, but not half so interesting.
