Freud went back to Benton End in the late summer of 1941 (his parents meanwhile returning to Maresfield Gardens) eager to tell of icebergs and high seas. ‘Lett was on about how he was a mariner in a submarine in the First World War. I had quite a lot of trophies in my room, seaboots and stuff, a hat lined with corduroy and a jersey with flags on it. And I had scabies from dirty clothes: it was painful; you had to shave yourself from head to foot. The balls stung.’ The pathos of Hospital Ward suited the image of this novice veteran. But no sooner was he back in Suffolk than the threat of call-up arose. ‘I fairly soon had to have my medical in Ipswich. Luckily I was passed on a very low grade because I was still pretty ill; I was so run down, very nervous and jumpy.’
Manpower, a government pamphlet on mobilisation, made it clear that the authorities had the measure of those who were determined to prove themselves unsuitable for conscription. ‘An exquisite youth might announce – and genuinely believe – that his life would be misery if he were put into uniform, given a pair of heavy boots and marched up and down a parade ground with a bunch of louts.’ Vetting routines to cope with such scrimshankers had been devised. ‘Elaborate machinery of investigation and appeal was designed to reduce these cases to a minimum.’1 It took Freud a single session to qualify as one of those cases.
‘It was generally thought that the doctors for the medical looked at people imagining how they would fare in the services, and I could not have. I wanted to appear as not convertible into military guise.’ Asked if he had anything to say in support of his exemption Freud replied that he had no objections to the military, indeed he had been boxing champion at his prep school. But there was just one thing: ‘I said to them, “I’d love to be in the army. But” – which was perfectly true – “one thing was very bad in the Merchant Navy and that was being pestered by men, especially at night.” I said that if I was in the army I’d insist on having a room of my own as men treated me like a woman.’ He added, meaningfully, that he liked fires very much. This was enough to convince them that he was not conscript material. ‘I suppose my hair was long. And I painted my boots white.’ Classified Grade III, utterly unsuitable, exempt even from fire watching, he took the bus back to Hadleigh and resumed painting. A rumour developed that he had persuaded the tribunal to release him on the grounds that he couldn’t face being parted from his cat. He had no cat, but Stephen Spender had a photograph of him holding one. ‘Stephen always embroidered. That’s how it got about.
My strength has been on the solitary anarchic side. A psychologist’s report called me “a destructive force in the community”.’
After the war Freud used his convoy experience as a riposte. ‘When people used to be rude, I’d say, “When I was fighting to keep the seas safe, you were wetting your knickers”; I had to stop saying that in the sixties.’ It was a line that served him well on weekends in London. His £23 14s ½d pay-off he spent on a girl. ‘Some of it was danger money: it was enough for me to take someone out for three weeks.’ That someone was Janetta Woolley, a Horizon assistant and at that time married to Humphrey Slater, author of Home Guard for Victory! (1941). Freud went to their cottage near Dorking (‘it was being dismantled’) and when Cyril Connolly lent her his room at Albany, in Piccadilly, she took him there, to Connolly’s fury as he had a crush on her himself. He also took her to the Dorchester Hotel to show her off and show off to her: particularly pleasing as his father had found Clement a trainee job there. ‘I quite liked him being the waiter: he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK. I discussed what the other waiters thought of him. “Terrific,” they said.’
While Hospital Ward had been his recovery picture, Girl on the Quay (appealing enough to be included by Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries in a New Year selection for 1942) was Freud’s venture into the ‘Sailor’s Farewell’ genre, a flat frontal composition worked up to show that he, having served, knew his way around waterfronts and shipping: ‘It was my ship’s rigging and funnels and all my knowledge about where lifeboats are.’ The sea’s seething surface came of having spent hours on watch looking out for periscopes; it was also the result of having discovered that terre verte and cerulean are a rich mix. ‘The idea was a joke idea: the girl I left behind me sort of thing: actually a girl who was at Cedric’s when I came back.’
The girl was Felicity Hellaby. Freud had already drawn her the year before, fancifully dallying with him in the silo tower; she also appeared, looking even younger, in the later pages of his convoy sketchbook and he had written to her from hospital telling her he missed her. ‘I liked her very much. She was very virginal: a terribly well-brought-up New Zealand girl; David Carr did things to try and put her and her family against me.’ Her lasting memory of him was that he used to make everybody laugh. ‘And he knew everyone.’ Although he gave her a drawing of a seaman off duty propping his head on his hand, he told her next to nothing about what he had so recently been through. She remembered him ‘writing about lying in hospital, how lovely it was lying in clean sheets’.2 She was at that point living in Norwich, working on spark-plug production, but occasionally at weekends she and Freud met in London.
The crumpled newspaper lying on the cobbles in Girl on the Quay was not – though maybe it should have been – the Ipswich Evening Star for Saturday 30 August 1941 carrying the headline ‘Suffolk Artist Fined: for Damaging London Theatre’. The artist was Freud. ‘On a weekend from Cedric’s I was caught breaking into the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials. It got into the local papers and I was slightly notorious.’
He was with Mary Hunt, his first buyer (Stable at Benton End) who, further back, had been one of the Coffee An’ regulars that he had not recommended to Stephen Spender as a potential Miss Right. The lack of one foot and part of a leg had disconcerted him rather when she first took it off in front of him; but, as he explained, the reason he ‘didn’t get it right’ on that occasion was more to do with her having been only the second woman he had gone to bed with. Since the previous January she had been married to Ralph ‘Bunny’ Keene, a film producer and picture dealer.
‘Mary Keene, 20, married woman of Park Walk, Chelsea, and Lucian Michael Freud, 18, of Benton End, Hadleigh, appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court,’ the Ipswich Evening Star reported, charged with ‘wilfully damaging, to the extent of £2, an iron bar, at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, on Friday night’. The incident was unusual even for blackout circumstances in the West End. ‘Lance-Corporal Rush of the military police saw a woman disappearing through a door of the theatre. He ordered her to come out and she came, accompanied by a man. Both said they wanted to see the last performance of the show and the entrance was closed. The man and woman must have used their strength together to force the door open. He called the police.’
‘It was a “how about in here?” situation,’ Freud explained to me. ‘We had pushed these iron bars and as we were crashing up the palatial stairs into the darkened circle we were caught by police and dogs and locked up in Tottenham Court Road police cells for the rest of the night. They said, “What do you do?” I said “painter”, she said “poet”, and I laughed and she was very angry.’ A former girlfriend of Louis MacNeice and Henry Yorke (the businessman novelist, whose nom de plume was Henry Green), she resented being admired less for her intellect than for her good looks and tin leg.3 ‘Yellow face and magenta lips,’ Augustus John remarked to Matthew Smith, as one of her admirers to another.4 The Fauve in Smith appreciated her to the extent that, after many years of involvement, he bequeathed her his unsold works. She used to irritate Freud by telling him – assuming that as a Freud he’d be interested – her previous night’s dreams.
According to the Ipswich Evening Star the defendants’ explanation of their breaking and entering was unconvincing. ‘Mr Freud said that he and Mrs Keene had wanted to see the last performance of the show. They did not know that it had ended at five o’clock. “I pushed the door and it opened,” he added. Freud was fined 10 shillings and ordered to pay 30 shillings towards the damage; she was fined 5 shillings and 10 shillings.’
Stephen Freud remembered his brother arriving home the next day and telling their mother that he hadn’t liked being in a cell. ‘“I got kleptomania,” he said.’
Letter to Felicity Hellaby, 12 December 1941:
Darling Felicity, I have just been bitten by an enormous dog in the blackout. I am doing a picture of a boy and a strange motorcar and trees rather like the one of the town but more coloured. How maddening for you that they are so slow about your factory! Are you coming to London at all soon? I probably shall be in Ipswich soon as I may go to Walberswick for a few days but I will ring you anyway. I saw a very good sad film called Honky Tonk. Its very dark here and most people have scars either on their noses or foreheads from walking into posts. I won a jackpot in a machine tonight and 75 six-pences came out. I drew a very old and amazing woman today who was very skinny and stood in edwardian postures with her eye balls just visible in the very tops of her eyes, lots of love Lucian.5
London night life was hazardous Freud found, and not just because of dogs, lamp posts, magistrates and the Blitz. ‘In the blackout it was almost impossible not to catch the clap. I went to the family doctor and he said, “You are going to die of syphilis or become a genius.” He made me take M&B as it was early in the war, before penicillin; he made me take it for too long to teach me a lesson, a modest Jewish lesson. Dr Levy said, “I feel I should let your parents know,” and I was nervous about him telling them. “Extraordinary,” he said, “that a member of your family should …” He lived with his mother, in his fifties, clients like my parents. Had a moustache. His mother told him not to get involved with girls and he was trying to tell me what a terrible thing I’d done.’ Having got the clap Freud took girls to the cinema more, he said, and courted them there.
In the spring of 2011, a few months before he died, the painter Catherine Goodman remarked to Freud how lovely the blossom was: had he never painted it? ‘Blossom? I knew her. In Soho once we found a phone box and I pushed the phone books off the shelf and put her on it and off we went.’
Early 1942, Maresfield Gardens NW3:
Darling Felicity I am just rushing off to lunch to my Grandmother where the Pekinese eats his three-course dinner and coffee. I’ve been distempering walls and ceilings and going for walks in the snow. The night I left you I went to Chelmsford and stayed in a very strange hotel where I had to give a password to get in and I gave the wrong one so they would not let me in but later I went back and gave the right one. They are playing a tune on the radio called ‘Prairie Mary’. Is there any ice-skating in Norwich? I saw the Garbo film yesterday and before there was a wonderful film about a madman who lived in a shack with an old man with one eye who bullied him. It began by the madman being in the far corner of the room and the camera came nearer to him until you saw the texture of his skin and then you saw his ear and by and by you saw right inside his ear where an awful banging noise was going on. I’ll come down to Norwich soon but I’ll tell you when beforehand. Do send me some secret plans of some planes or machines, lots of love Lucian6
‘Darling Felicity’ appreciated the patter. ‘It was never a very romantic affair from my point of view. It was rather fun. We used to go to London to go round the art galleries and clubs and pubs. He loved popping into the Ritz bar. It was very grand there. They all did art, the people there, students in shabby clothes. Lucian loved dressing up in smart clothes: nice suits made by a tailor in Ipswich.’7
February 1942, Maresfield Gardens:
Darling Felicity Thank you for your letter. I shall come down this weekend will you meet me on Friday evening at half past six but Where? In the station Refreshment room or bar. Yesterday I bought a lovely yellow jockeys waistcoat at an auction sale and also six doumier lithographs handcoloured I’ve done a drawing of ‘The Japanese Menace is daily assuming an uglier shape’ which is what Churchill said the other day.8
The Village Boys (1942) could be juveniles up in front of the magistrates for rural misdemeanour, conscious of being examined. ‘Very weedy: nasty but strange’, as Freud described them or, to be precise, what he made of them. They have a background of portraits at various stages of development to be taken into consideration: life drawings (possibly Tony Hyndman) done with the usual mapping pen on a ‘Sketching Pad for Layouts’ – ‘I used a great many of them; they were the house thing at Cedric’s’ – pinned over a horse in profile, and two finished paintings, one ‘a funny figure, Van Gogh Zouave-ish’, the other a self-portrait visible only from the eyes upwards.
‘Images beget yet more images,’ Freud said of The Village Boys. But as they beget they relegate; the replication presented in the picture (a painted drawing and painting of paintings) is secondary to the dual proximity of the two sitters bored with being there all weekend, first drawn then painted, posed as part of a notion. Freud had already done a drawing of a framed portrait on a wall looking down on a group of figures such as these, the idea being that the portrait has more presence than the heads below it. The Village Boys reversed this. The two boys, one seated, the other standing, but diminutive, raise the question of which of them is the more immediate. The smaller figure is superimposed, like a donor in an altarpiece, and set apart, like Seneb the Sixth Dynasty dwarf in a funerary group reproduced in J. H. Breasted’s Geschichte Ägyptens, the Phaidon book of ‘Egyptian things that are not made up’: a gift from either his father or Peter Watson (he couldn’t remember which) that he kept to hand all his working life. Freud’s six recently acquired Daumier lithographs played a part too. For, like Daumier characters, those prime local specimens, the Hadleigh boys are conscripts in an arty set-up. It so happened that at the outbreak of war the doctor in Hadleigh had been landed with a pair of exceptionally troublesome seven-year-old twins from the East End. Could those two have been The Village Boys? It’s unlikely, but their traits correspond convincingly enough. They had fought each other continually and killed the doctor’s cockerel. Freud knew them a bit twenty years later: the premier gangsters Ronald and Reggie Kray.
At the beginning of 1942 Auxiliary Fire Serviceman Stephen Spender, newly posted to a sub-station in a school in St John’s Wood, asked if he and his recently acquired Miss Right, the pianist Natasha Litvin – they had married in April 1941 with Tony Hyndman as witness – might move into the top-floor flat at 2 Maresfield Gardens. Freud had no objection and anyway his father had already said they could. ‘I didn’t sleep there much; I just used a room there. And then Natasha moved her mother in as cook and cleaner. They were both absolutely foul to the rather nice deaf old woman, and when she left they turned on me.’ The trouble was that Freud didn’t get on with Natasha. ‘I started a picture of her. In Ripolin [paint]. I think I destroyed it: there wasn’t enough to be worth keeping. She thought I was an awful little squirt. She assumed – wrongly – I had been, or was, a boyfriend of Stephen; since she felt very much unloved she felt threatened by Stephen’s past, by my finding him a replacement for his first wife. She did, however, behave disgustingly. Travelling in trains during the war she saw sad Jewish people and thought they were spies, so she reported them. They were just refugees. And she said to Stephen, “Stop that silly Schuster nonsense,” meaning that he wasn’t Jewish really. There was no row: to have a row you have to have a degree of trust.’
Natasha Spender remembered being in bed ill one day and Freud coming upstairs with some buttery asparagus. They ate it on the bed, licking fingers, savouring so delicious a wartime treat. After he had gone his mother came upstairs and when Natasha said by way of thank-you, ‘What wonderful asparagus, how good of Lucian to bring it up to me,’ Mrs Freud muttered, ‘Why don’t I ever get to hear of my sons doing something nice?’9 Nothing could prevent what had been a show of friendliness collapsing into hostility. ‘She stopped sitting and I think that Stephen said to me, “Natasha said you have to go.” I felt humiliated and also felt that Stephen should have stood up for me. I was very naive. When he said, “We won’t disturb you in any way,” I’d have said, if I’d been less ignorant, “No, please don’t.” They were away a lot.’
Monday [n.d.]
Darling Felicity thank you so much for your letter with the Kandinsky on the back … I went to see a play called ‘No Orchids for Miss Blandish’ which is perfectly amazing for the London stage. A wicked old woman sits in her horrible room which is supposed to be a den or lair and the walls are made like a spiders web. I might be moving to a rather delishiouse place round the corner from here because Stephen can not work at his poems with the piano’s noise and I have got the only sound proof room in the flat but its rather uncertain yet. I am painting a portrait of a boy who wont sit he thinks he’s developed a neurosis about it, lots of love Lucian10
‘I’d moved chairs – my father’s – up to my flat and when I left, as they had no furniture, they used them. (Stephen was a bit what’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s my own.) They had no eye, so they never wondered, I suppose, what were these strange plum-coloured Weimar chairs doing in their house, or where they came from.
‘I like presents – having things I was given – and Natasha took my letters from Stephen and my Henry Moore drawing of him which Stephen had given me, and my etching – and he was embarrassed about this – the Picasso etching, the one of the boy with the violin being played on his bottom, a Saltimbanque thing. I went to my room and more and more things went.’ Eventually the Spenders changed the locks to keep him out.
‘I hardly ever went there and then my father got them a house and renovated it for them: Loudon Road, freestanding, a good house, where they remained permanently. With my father’s chairs.’
Freud let it be known (‘I slightly pushed myself’) that he was aggrieved and soon enough, sure enough, Peter Watson responded, suggesting that he could have a room in a house near by, on the other side of Abbey Road in St John’s Wood where another of his protégés, John Craxton (‘very friendly with Peter Watson in a different way from me’), was already installed. Freud and Craxton were almost exact contemporaries and, having become acquainted a few months before, were by then companionable enough to be photographed together – along with Tony Hyndman – on the flat roof at Maresfield Gardens. Craxton was slightly ahead of Freud in professionalism and social climbing. He presented himself as a gentleman of taste. Freud was to remark, frequently, in later years how often Johnny used to recall his father’s advice to him, man to man: ‘Always hold a wine bottle by the neck, not – like a woman – by the waist.’
A self-styled Arcadian, exempted from military service, Craxton had already developed a signature manner: curvaceous studies of Dorset countryside graced with phallocentric outcrops and musing lads. Two such drawings, Dreamer in Landscape and Poet in Landscape, reproduced in Horizon in March 1942, attracted Graham Sutherland’s attention, understandably so; they were, essentially, Sutherlands with blandishments. Freud too was impressed and intrigued. Here was someone his own age with an obvious sense of purpose. ‘There was a moment, a spark, especially in the drawings.’ Craxton could become his comrade in art if not a brother in arms, he thought. ‘His mother, Effie, said, “Johnny, there are some men even more dangerous than women.” He did not take heed of his mother’s warning. I never knew Johnny was queer. Not for ages.’
Peter Watson had offered to pay for somewhere for Craxton to work. He took a maisonette in 14 Abercorn Place, the first and second floors of a large Regency terrace house, £40 a year. ‘I told Peter my problem and he said why don’t you take the second floor?’ Craxton used his floor as a studio only and slept at the family flat. Freud moved in.
Vintage postcard (girl whose voluminous underwear is revealed at the pull of a tab) to Felicity from St John’s Wood Terrace:
I haven’t heard from you for so long I’m moving to a most delishiouse flat with John C. Im just rushing off to get a boy a job in a tiny shack where they put wartime ingredients into kakes do write…11
Once he was no longer lodged under the parental roof, Freud assured himself, he would be ‘out of their orbit’. As it happened, around this time Cedric Morris painted Lucie Freud in evening dress and a five-strand pearl necklace, spotted voile veiling the shoulders. It was an awkward portrait, not so much because Frau Freud was hardly one of Morris’ usual Suffolk gentry types but because he was faced with the parent of a remarkably gifted yet peculiarly difficult pupil. For some time he and Lett had been rather hoping to see the last of him. The pupil sensed in the painting a lack of engagement. ‘I felt he was nervous about it; when he did the veil it got awfully sludgy, it just didn’t work. Cedric had got that queer’s thing of going on about “a really good-looking woman: so good-looking I’d love to paint her.” Not good.’ Freud found himself avoiding his mother’s eye and at the same time moving on from the nursery slopes of Benton End. Felicity Hellaby saw what a nuisance he was. ‘I did think he was brilliant, his drawings particularly; we all thought he was special. But he was terribly difficult. Cedric had written to his mother to persuade him to leave. One hears so much of his being admired so much but I know he made trouble. A blanket was cut up to use for something. Blankets were jolly difficult to get hold of then and Cedric was cross about that. Lucian was very difficult to have around. Other people helped in the kitchen with Lett. Not him. He always managed to get women to do things.’12
For Freud the dwindling relationship between him and Morris was nothing to dwell on or worry about. ‘I admired Cedric, but I realised it was useless finding how somebody else did things. Cedric taught me to paint. And, more important, to keep at it.’
It was only after having the best of his Benton End paintings framed at a shop in Swiss Cottage that Freud, not yet twenty, came to accept that his parents had no room for them and that they would clutter up his new workplace. So he asked Ian Phillips, ‘A Cambridge figure, cut rather a swathe, a rich Australian Jew who had a passion for furniture by Thomas Hope’, to store them for him in his fine modern house (designed by Denys Lasdun) in Newton Road, off Westbourne Grove in North Kensington. There they remained for fifteen years until Ronald Searle the cartoonist bought the house and came upon them in the basement.
In the spring of 1942 a chance to exhibit in a West End gallery arose, not that any of his paintings were needed. Two drawings, ‘disjointed things, rather Surrealist in essence’, were added to ‘Six Scottish Painters’ at Alex Reid & Lefevre in King Street in May 1942: Horse at Night, in white ink on black paper and The Town, which was larger: ‘A horrible thing, crazy, sort of Paul Klee-ish and influenced by Tom Seidmann-Freud: very elaborate with bombed buildings and aeroplanes or not aeroplanes.’ Dylan Thomas, dropping in to see paintings by his Scottish cronies the Roberts MacBryde and Colquhoun, glanced at the Freuds and snorted, saying that they were rubbish. ‘He said, “They’re about nothing.” I was terribly young and not taken seriously.’