I’m trying to draw ducks’ feet. Earlier in the day, Mum took me to the park and now I’m figuring out how to transfer what I’ve seen to the page. The curves of webbed skin between the ducks’ toes are proving quite a challenge.
Lying here on my tummy, surrounded by paper and pens, with the gas fire breathing its endless sigh, everything is as it should be. High above, a collared dove perched on the chimney pot has begun its afternoon recital; a muffled, woolen call that floats down the flue and out of the fire: “woohoo-hoo”. I love that sound, so soft and benign.
Next to the stereo system is an LP with four men on the cover, looking down from the balcony of a building. The men have long flowing hair and whiskers. On the back is a picture taken in the same location when they were younger, in neat suits with short hair. Maybe that’s where they live. I am already aware that they are deeply important. Their story is the story of a generation – my parents’ generation. In time I will get to understand more.
These afternoons are soft and blissful. Mum is in the kitchen making nice smells and I’m in here, with knights and monsters flowing from my pen. We’re separate but together, each doing our own thing. Dad is at work and my sister is at school. Some days there are trips out, for nursery or play-dates, but mostly I treasure and want to be at home, where time recedes into a mist during endless afternoons of horizontal drawing. Here, I am safe in a womb-like world of creative contentment, nothing intruding or interrupting, except maybe “Do you want a drink love? Everything ok?”
The men on the album cover are called The Beatles. Their legend is part of the fabric of the culture, referenced over and over on radio and TV, in magazines and the collective consciousness. Dad has a book that tells their story. Their music stirs deep feelings of collectivity. Their tale seems to embody growth, ambition, and loss of innocence. It has a painful, difficult end.
We also have a copy of John’s post-Beatles solo album Imagine. He looks out from the cover wearing the round, wire-rimmed glasses that seem to crystalise his new, liberated persona. He channels freedom, peace and justice, although he still carries a lot of pain. Sometimes we go down to London with lots of people to walk down the middle of the road shouting, and lots of the men have glasses like John’s. There is a song on John’s album about Paul. It’s not very nice. He and Paul didn’t get on and decided they had to live apart.
I wonder if I was the only kid for whom the dissolution of the Beatles prefigured the experience of family break-up. The final act of their story, continually retold and kept alive in popular memory, for me resonated on an unconscious level. Those songs, so redolent of home and certainty, remaining sweet in the following years but carrying a painful resonance.
I don’t hear much of the unravelling, but I will increasingly become aware of a background of sadness in the house, hanging in the air and seeping into my body, and a queasy, strained pretence being kept up that everything is fine. Soon, my Dad will start wearing the round glasses too.
As I grow up, music will provide my pathways of identity. More so than films or literature, the dramas, myths and characters that help me to understand and imagine myself will come from popular music and the culture surrounding it. Music will enfold and nourish me, becoming my means of expression and my soul’s purpose.
But for now, it’s all about the visuals. Drawing and painting is my world. I keep trying to capture the webbed feet stored in my memory, my creative determination having endless time to bear fruit. There will always be time to get it right. Looming somewhere up ahead is the suggestion that I might be expected to do other things. There is talk of something called ‘reception class’, but I can’t see the need for anything like that. What could be better than this?
Tom George 