The War Years (Becoming A Model)
In my final week at Studio Film Laboratories, I received a telephone call from the model I had known when I lived in Chelsea the first time round. She implored me to go and pose in Toynbee Hall in her stead. . . 'I've telephoned everyone,' she said, 'They're all booked,'. The she added with a voice which carried a faint tone of bitterness, 'you're always saying it must be nice to be a model. Now's your chance.'
The following evening I arrived in Toynbee Hall for a four-hour evening class. I was eager but a little apprehensive lest I should faint as I had often seen models do. . . Though being a model was such a great physical strain, there was a sense in which the work was easy to do. It required no aptitude, no education, no references, and no previous experience. You had only to say 'I do' and you were stuck with it like marriage. . . It was easy work to get. The war was on and I was almost the only roughly male person left with two arms and legs.
Posing was the first job I had ever had in which I understood what I was doing. . . Unfortunately I was not naturally equipped to carry out this mission. I was undersized in all respects except for a pigeon chest and a huge head. When stripped I looked less like I'l David' than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis. . . However I twisted and turned, climbed up the walls of life rooms and rolled on their paint-daubed floors morning, nude and night for several days a week for six years.
The students were furious. . . Unhooking me from the picture-rail, they would say quietly, 'All you have to do is to stand as though you were waiting for a bus.' What kind of an injunction was that when, at a bus stop, I looked as though I were on the dais of some life room. .
One man, working on the Sickert principle, went so far as to assemble a washstand, a cracked basin and a dim gray towel in the hope of toning me down. As I stepped in among these negligently posed props I asked 'And how do you propose to make me look like home?' The instructor who had gone to all this trouble breathed deeply down his nose. 'There you have me,' he said.
Aware of this difficulty most teachers simply turned me loose on the class. As I stood en arabesque on top of a pillar, Mr. McCullough said, 'Now draw that. Wings optional.' . . . More than anything it was the fact that my contortions made their work more difficult that caused the students to manifest such hostility.
The fact that I was eccentric did not prejudice them in my favour. I was peculiar in a manner other than theirs and my naive enthusiasm merely highlighted the fact that I was a generation older than they. I was a senile delinquent: in their eyes an unforgivable sin.
The following evening I arrived in Toynbee Hall for a four-hour evening class. I was eager but a little apprehensive lest I should faint as I had often seen models do. . . Though being a model was such a great physical strain, there was a sense in which the work was easy to do. It required no aptitude, no education, no references, and no previous experience. You had only to say 'I do' and you were stuck with it like marriage. . . It was easy work to get. The war was on and I was almost the only roughly male person left with two arms and legs.
Posing was the first job I had ever had in which I understood what I was doing. . . Unfortunately I was not naturally equipped to carry out this mission. I was undersized in all respects except for a pigeon chest and a huge head. When stripped I looked less like I'l David' than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis. . . However I twisted and turned, climbed up the walls of life rooms and rolled on their paint-daubed floors morning, nude and night for several days a week for six years.
The students were furious. . . Unhooking me from the picture-rail, they would say quietly, 'All you have to do is to stand as though you were waiting for a bus.' What kind of an injunction was that when, at a bus stop, I looked as though I were on the dais of some life room. .
One man, working on the Sickert principle, went so far as to assemble a washstand, a cracked basin and a dim gray towel in the hope of toning me down. As I stepped in among these negligently posed props I asked 'And how do you propose to make me look like home?' The instructor who had gone to all this trouble breathed deeply down his nose. 'There you have me,' he said.
Aware of this difficulty most teachers simply turned me loose on the class. As I stood en arabesque on top of a pillar, Mr. McCullough said, 'Now draw that. Wings optional.' . . . More than anything it was the fact that my contortions made their work more difficult that caused the students to manifest such hostility.
The fact that I was eccentric did not prejudice them in my favour. I was peculiar in a manner other than theirs and my naive enthusiasm merely highlighted the fact that I was a generation older than they. I was a senile delinquent: in their eyes an unforgivable sin.
<-The War Years (An Art Directorship!) | Back to the storyboard | The War Years (Unwanted Attentions)->