Last month we sold our little flat in Hampstead, North London. In and of itself, not exactly an earth-shattering event, but in the context of my life, an extraordinary moment. The reason being, that for the first time in my then-64 years and 11 months I no-longer had even a toe-hold in the city of my birth.
Regular readers of these posts will know that I have always endeavoured to keep my blog as free from controversial subjects as possible, despite the fact – as those who know me well can testify – I am highly politically aware with a range of opinions, some strongly held.
Given the recent and current state of the world, this policy has not always been easy, but this blog, originally intended to publicise my books and my art, is not a forum I wish to use for expressing my views on putting the world to rights. Ultimately, from my own experience of sampling and following other people’s politicized sites, one inevitably ends up with a corrosive and destructive clash of echo chambers. Thus, our reasons for leaving London will remain known to only our intimates.
Presented here is a photo-record of the first 30 years of my own personal London life (several suitably grainy and scarred), from times past, when I could never have dreamed that I would ever cut my ties with my once-beloved city “north of the river”.
I was born in Edgware, in the county of Middlesex in 1960, strictly speaking, before it became part of Greater London. Famous for its eponymous Roman road, as the composer Handel’s temporary home, and being at the end of the Northern Line Tube, it was where I grew up. This picture shows me as a baby, with my mum, Hannah, older brother Michael and my great auntie Ray at my grandparents flat…
My final day at nursery in 1963 with my mum (left) and a friend. I seem to be clutching a postcard though I have no idea who from…
Apart from a bout of glandular fever when I was six, my childhood was exceptionally happy. Although my father had departed the scene when I was a babe-in-arms, my little family was a more than adequate compensation for his absence. Here we have Hannah and her parents, Becky and Harry, me and my brother Michael (my uncle Sidney took the picture), in my first home…
Purim at my primary school. I’m a rather lame-looking Robin Hood sat between cowboys and GI’s…
Between the War and my birth, my mum’s family lived in Hendon. Many of our closest family friends remained there, and this is Michael and I during a visit to one of them. We’re sitting on the bonnet of mum’s first Ford Anglia – eat your heart out, Harry Potter!
We took our snowmen very seriously back then…
Our second house in Edgware had a large back garden and by “London-clay” standards, half-decent soil. Sidney and I were both keen gardeners, something I remain to this day…
My studio space at Saint Martin’s, with friends and fellow students. The guy on the far left is my lifelong friend Simon – not an artist, just visiting. Next to him, looking at the camera is Robert, a hugely gifted portraitist, and the girl is Piyawan, another very talented painter and cartoonist. Judging by the coats, this was at the end of the day and when we would typically be preparing for a visit to one of the many local Soho pubs…
My final act at St. Martin’s was to undertake this temporary mural commission (I describe the story here) in James Street, Covent Garden…
My grandparents were moderately observant Jews (outside the Haredi communities – and even they differ from one another – there are as many nuances and degrees of “observant” as there are Jews who observe), and the traditional Shabbat supper was always partaken of. Here I’m “making Kiddush” (the blessing over wine) on one such occasion. By this time we had left Edgware and moved to West Hampstead, also North London, but closer to the centre…
I lived at home (in West Hampstead) well into my late 20’s, and this was my painting studio, which we built at the end of the garden…
I met my future wife, Dido Nicholson, in 1988 and we married two years later. This was her cute little mews house in Lancaster Gate, close to Paddington Station and Hyde Park. She inherited the Alfa GTV from her uncle Leonard, who sadly died while playing real tennis at Lords (the “HQ” of world cricket)...
Like most Londoners, I was rarely happier than when visiting one of my local pubs, like the Holly Bush, here in Hampstead, which has turned out to be our final London Address…
A melancholic New-Years-Day scene on the tow-path of the Regent’s Park, one of our favourite regular walks, and a fitting image to end this homage to a lost city.
The title picture is the top of Primrose Hill. It offers, arguably, the best view of London from north-west of the city. I always found the scene somehow reassuring, and no more so than one misty autumn morning in 2010, when my mother had just left for the airport on her way to Dignitas.
I was only five years old when my first headmaster, Chaim Beckman, described me as “the complete illustrator and cartoonist”. However accurate he was in that appraisal there was no doubt that I was certainly able to capture a person’s likeness – in comic or serious form – from a precocious age. And, although I never made much money from portraits it was nevertheless a skill which served me well in some quite surprising ways.
Because I’d been living abroad for most of the previous year I missed being streamed in that first fateful year of English and Welsh comprehensive education in 1971 and so found myself “defaulted” into class “G” at my local ex-grammar school in Edgware (north London). Nearly all my friends from primary school had been streamed into classes “A” and “B”, with the few relatively “dumb” ones ending up in “C” – so you can only imagine how isolated and strange I felt finding myself cast five rungs further down the intellectual ladder. The fact that all of my new classmates were from the other side of the north London social and cultural tracks, and that I was the only Jewish kid in the group made for a potentially dangerous educational experiment – dangerous for me that was. But fortunately, my drawing (and my portrait skills in particular) was to prove to be my guardian angel.
On my very first day in class, the alpha male of stream”G”, a boy-mountain called Kevin approached me menacingly. Towering over my desk – and in what was my first personal experience of antisemitism directed at me – he said, ‘Oi you – Jew boy!’ But before I had time to feel fear or shock, he continued; ‘I ‘ear you’re-a-bit-of-a-fucking artist’ (he used that expletive or worse in every utterance he made), to which I mumbled back something like; ‘er…yes…I guess so…”
‘Well fucking are-ya-or fucking arnt-ya?’ he demanded.
‘Yes’ I replied, perplexed and intimidated in equal measure, ‘I’m quite good at drawing’
‘Fucking draw me then!’
‘What?’
‘Are ya fucking deaf? I said draw me ya little Jew bastard!’
‘Er…draw you? When?’
‘Fucking now!’
It’s never ceased to amaze me, the things we can achieve whilst in a state of abject fear.
Somehow or other, I remained composed enough to invite Kevin to take a seat at the vacant desk next to my own, remove a new pad of lined paper from my brief case, take a felt tipped pen from my inside school blazer pocket and even to ask Kevin if he wanted me to do a caricature or something more serious.
‘A carick-what?’ he asked me.
‘Like a cartoon…like in the comics’
At this he smiled for the first time and said ‘Yeh! Make me into a cartoon, and put me in an Arsenal strip!’
Fortunately Kevin didn’t yet know that I was a Spurs fan. That heinous fact on top of everything else might have pushed him into doing something rash before I got a chance to win his favours with my drawing. But, to cut a short story even shorter, and spare you all from more of his expletives, my drawing of Kevin’s head on George Graham’s body, doing amazing things with a football impressed him so much that from that moment on, apart from having the honour of being “Kevin’s Jew” I was also designated by Kevin to be stream “G”s official artist. “Working for Kevin” (that was the way he termed it) was a bit like being the court artist to Henry VIII (they even looked a bit alike), with all the pressures and stresses that particular job must have entailed – only it was more the threat of having my head “beaten to a pulp” than having it removed which kept me on my toes.
As things turned out I only had to survive two terms at that school, but by the end of my time there, Kevin had – albeit somewhat inadvertently – helped me hone my drawing skills to a whole new level.
This selection of portraits (including sketches of one or two quite well-known people), covering about two decades and done in a variety of media, formal and rough, is dedicated to the late Chaim Beckman (one of the subjects presented here) for believing in me from such an early age, and also to Kevin, for teaching me to work well under pressure. Sadly, I don’t have any of the dozens of drawings I made of Kevin as he kept the “fucking” lot…
ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA 