We were all settled in our local schools by now, and it was usually Dad who picked me up in the afternoon. It was there that it first became clear to me that the effect he had on the women we met was rather unusual. Teachers and parents changed around him. They became flirtatious and silly and, all of a sudden, I became a girl of consequence. They flattered me in a way I sensed was for his benefit and, looking back, I’m sure he saw it, too. I found it curious and perplexing. The response I saw came from women of every shape and size, the plain and the beautiful, the brilliant and the stupid. As Michael Moorcock put it: ‘Women certainly fell in love with his sheer beauty. And then with his charm. And then with his wit. And then they were lost.’ I, of course, didn’t see him in those terms. If he’d been a short, stout, balding fellow with the same innards, my feeling towards him would have been exactly the same.
He may have been unaware of his magnetism, or perhaps he had just become used to this response. All I knew was that, from my position at the end of Dad’s hand, they all reacted in the same way. They kept him talking as though a piece of his glamour might rub off on them but, as we walked off together, I felt so connected to him that, instead of feeling superfluous on these occasions, I instinctively understood my weight. Maeve had the same effect on men, and both of them sailed through life oblivious to the fact that this wasn’t usual, that eyes lighting up when you said hello didn’t happen to everyone. Their dual attractiveness to the opposite sex was naturally never referred to but, on one occasion, I got a little closer to understanding from my mother’s perspective what it was like to be married to a man whose looks and talent made him the object of other women’s fantasies. Sailing down Park Lane on a double-decker bus one afternoon when I was ten or eleven, Maeve and I discussed Vivien Leigh. We’d been to see Gone With the Wind and were talking of her luminous beauty. Maeve told me of an evening when she and Mervyn and the Oliviers had gone to the theatre together. Miss Leigh was flirting with Mervyn a little too obviously and a little too disrespectfully for Maeve’s liking. Feeling intensely jealous and extremely threatened, she narrowed her eyes until they were almost slits; green fire billowed from her nose, as she planted a look of venom on Vivien Leigh, a look that said, ‘You go near my man and I’ll kill you.’ To my father’s chagrin, sitting next to Vivien Leigh and oblivious to the exchange of looks, Miss Leigh suddenly gave her full attention to the play in progress.
Joan Greenwood’s crush was a harder nut to crack. Unperturbed by his marital status, she would turn up at the studio, rap on the door and in her wonderfully seductive purr would whisper, ‘I’ve come to see Mervyn,’ brushing past Maeve as if she were the only fly in the ointment of their great passion. I felt oddly flattered that day. My mother didn’t go in for personal revelations and it was invigorating to be told of something so real and adult, about the terribleness of jealousy and how it makes you feel.
I didn’t distinguish between my parents, so the decision about which one to go to when I had a problem or a request was an arbitrary one. If I needed a costume for a school play, it usually ended up with Dad making it. My initial pride in these eccentric constructions was always tempered with more than a twinge of embarrassment when it came to dress rehearsals. At home, my costume seemed entirely obvious, but at school, as our ten green bottles prepared to line up (the brief being ‘a green bottle’), nine similar, emerald-green crepe paper girls walked freely, head, arms and legs exposed, as I shuffled in – number seven, eyes squinting from slits knifed from the neck of an exquisite and elaborately painted absinthe bottle. It wasn’t with any sense of one-upmanship that Dad made these things. He just couldn’t have made a dreary costume if he’d tried and his personal philosophy that ‘everything matters’ was never more apt than on these occasions. Every inch of every costume was made with minute attention to detail.
‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ the cry went up on another occasion and, as the murderous spiders and hens plodded on the stage, the narrator looked mysteriously at the audience. With narrowed eyes he scanned the stage as I, poor Cock Robin, a pathetically put upon, murdered, red apparition, circled the stage in a costume so magnificent in its colour and detail, it was no wonder their intentions were less than honourable. My less-than-starring role as an autumn leaf in another school play had the family looking and learning about the beauty of trees, as Dad sewed an array of fallen, rust, yellow and orange leaves on to a piece of gauze that covered my body and had dried up and crinkled for the second performance.
Even though ‘things’ bored my father, he knew a thing of beauty when he saw it. He liked to spoil people and he loved to treat my mother to strange and beautiful jewellery – an amethyst bracelet the size of a small new potato, earrings so ornate they jangled with cockiness and collided with her chin, two similar-sized stones he found on the beach and polished until they shone. He bored a perfect hole into each to fit the silver wire that would fit into her ear lobes. What interested him were the relics found on his travels. I found it all perfectly natural and became just as excited as he was when he emptied his pockets of his booty – a pair of glasses with a tangled-up frame and one lens missing, a large gentleman’s hankie, a pair of false teeth or a lone shoe. We would have endless discussions about every item. In dozens of cases there were combs with three three-quarters of the teeth missing. I have no idea what he wanted with these things; they just interested him. Someone else might feel the same about a piece of Meissen.
One of the reasons I was so close to my father was that he was always there. He worked from home, so could be located at any time, and the ordinary chat one had in the course of a day was seamless and natural. There were no dispensations for the artist, no tiptoeing feet padded the floor, no indulgent silences or whispering voices made me uncomfortable in my own house. Able to interrupt at any time, my brothers and I were unaware that we were interrupting. We were the raw material for his illustrations. ‘Stand just like that will you?’ he would say as we posed on the spot, then ran off to continue whatever we were doing. He took his work, but not himself, seriously, and that was plain in everything I saw. Twenty-three of his own and twenty-four books illustrated for other people were published between 1939 and 1961, dozens of portraits and thousands upon thousands of drawings were produced. There wasn’t a second when he wasn’t working, yet he was as accessible as anyone else’s father. This modest attitude generated its own respect. This lack of preciousness, mixed with gentle authority, had me loving nothing more than sitting quietly on his lap, watching as a drawing took shape, as a pencil was sharpened, as a shaken paintbrush magically clouded the transparent jam jar into one of rainbow-coloured turps. His fingers moved across a blank piece of paper as nimbly and gracefully as Fred Astaire’s feet across a dance floor. A picture would appear from nowhere, and I would have been there from conception to birth.
The fact that my father didn’t wear his genius on his sleeve might imply he wasn’t serious-minded and consumed. The reverse was true. He was passionately consumed. His head was bursting; he just didn’t let on. He was an artist to his fingertips, but his way of working appeared effortless. He wrote in bed with the blankets tucked tightly round him, or drew with his legs dangling over the side of a chair, smoking a pipe or cigarette, with Maeve reading him passages from his hero, Charles Dickens, or a chapter from The Diary of a Nobody or a poem by one of his favourite poets, Robert Frost.