Stargazing. Peter Hill
architecture of the art school. This is how my demise happened, and to describe it I have to describe my early beginnings.
I grew up in Glasgow in the early Fifties, born on the fifth of June 1953 – a slow news day shortly after the Queen’s Coronation and the conquest of Everest. Throughout childhood everything seemed either black or grey until winter came and things briefly turned white – an exaggeration, of course, but for much of the year colour didn’t seem to exist at all. Glasgow’s buildings were black with soot from the industrial revolution, so uniformly black that most of my childhood I unquestioningly accepted that this was the natural colour of stone. Some tenements stood like jagged black teeth courtesy of the German war-time bombing of the Clyde, and one of my earliest visual thrills was viewing the patchwork of wallpaper and mantelpieces exposed to the elements down whole sides of opened tenement walls. It looked as good as any installation art I have ever seen, and perhaps it was no coincidence that Joseph Beuys was in the luftwaffe at the time.
Television was black and white, text in books was black on white, crossword puzzles, dominoes, Buster Keaton movies, and all the images from the past, from history, came down to me in grainy death camp black and white or nineteenth-century etchings illustrating Dickens, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or scenes from the Crimean War. I wanted colour. I absolutely longed for colour. And in my naivety I think deep inside me I just accepted that colour had only come in to the world with the invention of colour photography. So I actively searched for colour. I found it in tubes of paint. Liquid colour, screw off the cap and there it was. I found it in tropical fish shops only a ride away on Glasgow’s underground across the Clyde to Cessnock – neon tetras, Siamese fighting fish, red-tailed black sharks, fan-tailed guppies, and the subtle oyster-greys of the kissing gouramis. I found it at the Odeon Cinema at Anniesland in Mr Magoo and Roadrunner cartoons. And I found it at the University baths, I found it especially and gloriously at the university baths, the blue expanse of the swimming pool against the clean, cream tiles – broader than any colour field painting, a bigger splash than Hockney would ever paint. At art school I revelled in colour but hated the drawing classes. Later I would come to love drawing for its rigour, structure and sheer difficulty. But as a teenager with a mind full of social issues – Vietnam, Biafra, Vietnam, apartheid, ecology, Vietnam – drawing, for a while, was the domain of the enemy: tonal values, sticks of charcoal and conte; cross hatching with HB pencils; aerial passages; the bone beneath the skin. No colour allowed. My attendance at drawing class, I honestly regret to say, was so bad as to be almost invisible. I would stay in my bed-sit and paint. Come the end of the year I passed sculpture, and textiles, and painting, and graphics, and photography, and three-dimensional design, and about six other subjects. But I failed my drawing – not surprisingly – and had to repeat the whole year. My attendance got worse, as did the wars in Vietnam and Biafra, which probably occupied more of my waking thoughts than did copying fake Renaissance statues.
Towards the end of my second year, as spring turned to summer, my life took a significant change in direction. And it happened through a chance meeting at the Tavern Bar.
It was that time of a Friday night when the merriment was really just beginning and the hour hand of the clock was approaching ten, which meant closing time and last orders. Everyone was trying to buy carry-outs to take on to parties, dances, or just back to bed-sits in small groups. ‘Eight cans of McEwans Export,’ I shouted for the umpteenth time at a passing barman, but it was lost amidst the din. ‘Eight cans of …’ I tried again, standing on tip-toe to bring me up to shoulder height with the competition, but it was like being in a crush at a football match and trying to get the time off the referee. It was hopeless, and I could see my friends Lincoln, Albi, and Jogg weren’t having any more success than me. I decided to duck up the street to Frew’s Bar on the corner, gloriously free of art students, and buy my provisions there.
Once purchased, I couldn’t get back into the Tav and waited around amongst clusters of others for my pals to emerge. With my armful of cans I joined May, Chris and Kath, three of the most alluring pre-Raphaelite beauties, who watched over my antics like concerned big sisters – usually rightly concerned. They were chatting with a few others on the subject of ‘the ideal job’.
‘What would you most like to do Peter?’ May asked me.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘If you could choose any job at all, anything in the whole wide world.’
‘I’d be a lighthouse keeper,’ I replied, quick as a flash. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.’ It was true, next best thing to being a spaceman, probably better.
And all of this might have been just another conversation borne on the wind and scattered in the darkness of the Hawkhill Road, if it had not been for May coming into the life-drawing class the following Monday (and me even more surprisingly being there) with an advertisement from Saturday’s Scotsman newspaper seeking full-time lighthouse keepers.
‘Why don’t you write to them,’ she encouraged, ‘and see if they take students on for the summer?’
And so I did.
I remember with great clarity the day in late spring when I received the letter summoning me to Edinburgh for the interview for the position of relief lighthouse keeper.
I was living in an old house on Dundee’s Perth Road which had been split into bedsitting rooms. It was situated diagonally opposite the art school so what I saved on travel I made up for in extra sleep, often until well past noon. The house was occupied by fifteen different art students, their lovers, pets and occasionally children. The name ‘Greenfield House’ was inscribed in faded gilt letters on the glass panel above the front door. In some quarters it is still as famous as Picasso’s early gaff, the ‘Bateau Lavoir’.
The house was constantly full of visitors, coming and going, at all hours of day and night. Lincoln lived in the room above me; Albi Sinclair was directly underneath; and Euan Heng right opposite. During one long summer two elderly house breakers rented Albi’s room from our landlady (a rather grand dame who looked like Barbara Cartland and ran a string of antique shops along the Perth Road) while he was away and nicked my Fidelity stereo record player which was my most essential possession. It was eventually returned to me, and they to Perth prison.
There was a strange and regular visitor who had befriended the only non-art student in Greenfield House, a civil engineer at the university. We nicknamed this visitor ‘The Harbinger of Doom’. He had a thin, weasel face, an equally thin tie, short hair (unlike the rest of us) and chain smoked Gauloises cigarettes. It was rumoured that he owned a gun and it was known, through a nursing friend of Albi’s, that he had worked as a mortuary attendant. Whenever he climbed the stairs he kept very close to the walls and seemed to merge in and out of the shadows. Equally exotic, but far more intellectually stimulating, was a friend from Jogg’s school days called Duncan, who later became an investigative journalist. In the early Seventies he was in trouble with the forces of law and order himself for making free phone calls to far flung parts of the globe by using secret British Telecom numbers. I also remember, over large mugs of Nescafé and to the backdrop of George Harrison’s Bangladesh, Duncan talking at great length about some book called Beneath the City Streets. I had met my first conspiracy theorist.
But he was only one of many remarkable characters who entered the hallowed hallway of Greenfield, as the house was generally known.
And in that hallway, sitting on cracked linoleum that in its old age looked more like the mosaic tiling it was originally supposed to imitate, sat a large wooden table on which was dumped all the mail of the day. Fifteen sets of bank statements, grant cheques, letters from home, and postcards from abroad were mixed in with at least as many