Swiss Women Vote!
This was a piece from Eileen’s first year, imagined but never completed during the second term, probably during March 1971. In fact, suffrage in Switzerland to include women had only just become law the previous month, so this particular work is perhaps the first work by Eileen that could be described as deliberately topical.
Eileen left notes and sketches for the work. Unusually, she left quite a collection of notes, but actually no evidence that the work was ever started, though we have a recollection from Linda that it was, at least over a weekend. It is unclear whether any part of the work or even the ideas themselves were ever submitted to her tutor for assessment, though I suspect not.
Linda explained, “It was hard to know where to start. We sat and listened, convinced she was just having a laugh, but we soon realised she was taking herself quite seriously. I suppose it could have been quite funny, had it ever been made. But what gallery is going to exhibit something like that? I mean, in its original conception, it was potentially lethal, because she had the idea of using a real crossbow! We soon persuaded her to change it to a toy, shooting arrows with rubber stickers, but her original idea was that it should be dangerous. I mean…
“From the perspective of thirty years, I think Eileen could have been described as a cartoonist in three dimensions. Swiss Women Vote! was about as strange an idea as I have ever come across. It started in the February, when we were listening to the news on the radio after college, while we were together in the kitchen preparing our meal. I do remember it exactly, because it’s not every day you hear a story like that. All three of us listened intently, because it came as such a surprise. Charlotte had even been there on holiday and still had no idea.
“None of us knew that Swiss women had never - never! - had the vote. And that was nineteen seventy-one, for God’s sake! The news story described how there had been a debate as to whether the law should be changed. We were flabbergasted! We had a laugh trying to imagine exactly what it was they had debated! A couple of days later, Eileen already had her sketches for the work.
“She was going to sculpt a Swiss man. You would know he was Swiss because she had him in lederhosen, complete with braces with a breast-band, shorts, woolly socks, knobbly knees, boots, the lot. None of your stereotypes there! But she was going to make him out of cheese. Sculpted cheese, for God’s sake! I’m serious! He would be sitting in a chair, strapped to it like it was an electric chair, and out of the fly of his shorts would emerge a giant alpenhorn, which would protrude a good ten feet along a mat made of artificial grass. And the whole thing would be painted. I have no idea - and I am sure Eileen had no idea herself - what kind of paint she would use to cover real cheese.
“On his head there was to be a felt hat with a feather, and on top of that she planned to balance an apple with a significant bite already missing. If she had completed the work and patented the image, she would be very rich by now.
“At the end of the grass mat she planned to place her crossbow, with a supply of arrows in an embroidered quiver that was to hang from the stand.
“Next to the crossbow was to be a controller housed in a little booth with a curtain drawn back so you could see inside. Across the top was the instruction, Swiss Women Vote! and inside there was a lever on a ratchet that would move the crossbow a little at a time with the options, Left, Right, Up, Down - it takes true imagination! One vote, one little movement was the idea. Every hundred votes or so, a button labelled Fire was to light up and the next lucky viewer could dispatch the arrow in whatever direction the previous people had elected.
“Eileen was completely serious. She went to Sainsbury’s and spent a fortune on cheese, Emmental, obviously, because it was the only Swiss cheese available in Britain at the time. She stuck the pieces together until she had a block from which she could usefully sculpt a head, and she did just that. It looked really impressive, a realistic Swiss gentleman, sculpted in cheese, full of holes. You don’t easily forget an image like that! She painted it as well using acrylic. Surreal was not the word. I am not sure what the right word might have been, but I do remember being suddenly convinced that the finished work would be thoroughly impressive. But it wouldn’t go in the fridge because it was too big. We had to put it outside the kitchen on the fire escape.
“It stayed there for the weekend, was attacked by something that ate significant parts and the rest went mouldy. And that’s as far as it got, because she couldn’t afford any more cheese.”
Charlotte, as ever, was reluctant to discuss any of Eileen’s work. I realised early on in the remaking of this life that there existed memories associated with some of these pieces, memories that Charlotte would rather not recall. Eventually, I relied heavily on Charlotte’s recollections, but she was always more willing to discuss the events of their shared life, rather than her reactions to them. Eileen’s own sketchbooks did contain some notes on the work, but they are particularly scant. “A Swiss man full of holes, with all the holes full of shit,” she wrote.
Jazz
I assemble bits. Bits and pieces. It’s what I do. Bits and pieces. Because when we step back and look at life, it’s what we live. Bits. Pieces. Jumble. So let’s call it life, my work.
It was after a night with Mike Osborne that I got the idea. His voice is unique. He makes music of himself. It’s Ornette Coleman. It’s John Coltrane. It’s Judy Garland. But it’s him. Harry Miller, bass. Louis Moholo, drums. They are along for the ride but are as often in the driving seat. And the alto sax, the supreme, silly, jagged, lyrical, tender, wandering, meandering, then stuck in a rut, going wild, screaming, breaking. A beauty of random lines. And then all three go for it, the bass line pulping the surface of silence, lashing the noise. Somewhere Over The Rainbow strikes up from nothing. A blast of colour for no reason other than it surrounds you. It jabs through the anarchy and shouts “Listen!” It’s a hopeless, lone cry. Moholo is thumping the tom-toms so hard his groundsheet is migrating across the floor. Thank God for earplugs. Osborne again. Does this man ever breathe? He’s gone up and down the alto six times and then finished with a top F, sustained, held like a dagger, stabbed. And then he breaks into “If I fall in love, it will be forever”.
There is no reason. No structure. Logic is anywhere, but not here. There is surely rehearsal, but nothing is ever repeated. Osborne does not rehearse his solos. He goes where the moment takes him. It’s jazz like life, controlled by no-one, played by anyone in particular.
And then they finished with that stupidly wonderful riff by Chris McGregor, that kwela signature with its hackneyed little phrase and clenched trills. It’s Jackson Pollock in sound and finishes by conjuring an empty Coke can out of a dustbin. Perfect. An antidote.
North London Poly’s functional space spews us out. We wander back towards Holloway Road, but the pub across the road looks rough. We turn right. There’s a public toilet in the wall under the bridge and there’s no light inside. Random noises, groans and grunts spill out onto the street along with the smell of piss as we pass. Turn right again along Jackson to cross Dunford and Annette to get us back to Hornsey Road. We walk up towards Tollington Road. We can carry on to Finsbury Park and get the W7 home. But there’s a pub. We decide on a drink. Lager and lime and bitter with lime. “You put lime in my bitter?” asks the barman. They always do. “That’s what I fucking asked for.” He doesn’t hear what I say because of the noise.
There’s a ceilidh band. Pubs are for grown-ups like us. The girl doing the ridiculous dancing is probably about twelve. She seems to have rubber legs and a wooden body. And here we are ten minutes off closing time. Disgusting. Then there’s a great cheer and bows, followed by the collection. “Up the IRA” it says handwritten on a card sellotaped to the outside of a baked bean tin that still has half its label. It’s a British imitation brand, not the one of fifty-seven real Wigan-made American thing. The bell rings for last orders and we have another round before the final peal ends the night. Apart from the drinking up time, and that’s needed here because there are blokes at the bar with full pints of Guinness waiting for the lock-in.
Jazz was without doubt Eileen McHugh’s masterpiece. It was the major work featured in her first-year final exhibition. We are lucky to have retained her studies courtesy of the sketchbooks in Marion’s personal effects so we can describe it in some detail.
She began work on the project at the start of the third term of her first year and devoted about eight weeks to it. Now, it’s true that she never kept a diary, but the closest she came to doing so was in those weeks when she planned and prepared Jazz. At the start of their course, these Fine Art students had been requested, even required to keep notes and sketches in order to justify everything they produced. Ideas may come from anywhere, the tutors had stressed, but their realisation, their expression, their form must be described, justified, argued, illustrated. And this process should be both evident and demonstrable in the sketchbooks and notebooks each student was duty-bound to maintain. For Jazz, Eileen did follow the regime and she produced work which her tutor of the time praised effusively. Eileen has recorded that the tutor, herself, was a part of the work’s inspiration. “Alice looks like a walking junk heap,” she wrote in a letter to Marion in March 1971, preserved in the mother’s box. “She’s like a living Jazz riff.”
Alice Childe was, at face value, one of the more conventional of Eileen’s teachers. Had she stayed on in the college into Eileen’s second year, things may just have worked out differently, but that we will never know. Alice took early retirement at the end of that college year and left a profession to which she had devoted over thirty years of her life. Eileen was thus part of Alice Childe’s swansong, her last student group. That she had been a dedicated teacher over the years can be in no doubt. That she was simultaneously anathema to most of her younger colleagues is perhaps even more obvious.
She was in her late fifties by then and was dead some years before the end of the decade, her cancerous lungs testimony to the sixty fags she had smoked each day since her teens. Rothmans, always Rothmans in later years, but it had been Kingsway before that, with occasional and periodic forays towards Kensitas, though she did start, like most kids, on Woodbines and Weights.
Alice Childe - her married name after being a Smith in her youth - was divorced in the mid-fifties, the decade rather than her age. She was about to turn forty when it became inevitable. She was always unwilling to assign blame, noting regularly whenever the subject of relationships was raised, that she and he had started different and then simply drifted apart. By the end, the gulf between them was such that a formal separation was no more than an admission of a reality that included them by default.
She had met her husband in the early thirties when they were both art students. They both became teachers, but together and independently they retained a conviction that it would be a temporary choice, an option to provide a living while one’s true vocation was pursued, a daily grind that was dictated to them until their individual voices emerged. As the years passed, neither wife nor husband ever did realise the dream of achieving the status of professional artist. Though they both produced large volumes of work and did indeed achieve their part goals of mounting exhibitions, sales were at best weak and more usually non-existent. These were war years followed by austerity and rationing, of course, so there was an explanation available.
Ralph was a painter and Alice a sculptor. The family home in Stoke Newington, a cheap London location when they bought, off transport routes and retaining, at least as far as the residents believed, a sense of the village, had enough space to accommodate hers and his studios on a top floor that was only visited for purposes of self-expression. Ralph and Alice, along with their only child, Harold - yes, that is what they called him - occupied the other three floors - yes, three, since the house was one of those common London types from the nineteenth century that had a lower ground floor, with a separate entrance down a half flight to the right of the porticoed entrance. It was a potentially grand house and may even have been a wealthy abode eighty years earlier, when it was built, but it was shabby by the time the Childes assembled a giant mortgage for that time to enable their purchase. There had been a legacy, also, from Ralph’s side. The house was even shabbier when it eventually sold for a no more than modest price at the end of the seventies. The child, Harold, had moved out in the early fifties when he went to university - Oxford, Keble, Physics - and Ralph left into an estranged divorced exile in a flat in Wood Green just two years later. So Alice had the place to herself for over a decade before she became tutor to Eileen McHugh.
We would know nothing of her if it had not been for the vivid and affectionate recollections of her son, Harold Childe, whom I located and contacted via an online professional network. The site revealed him also teaching, but in a university in the north of England. I have to thank him for answering my emails in detail both promptly and conscientiously. His obvious delight in recalling a mother dead for almost forty years was both refreshing and humbling. He also sent a few photos of Alice taken around the time she taught Eileen McHugh. Given she left teaching that year, they are predominantly posed group affairs, but retain a certain feeling of the informality to which the age was trying to aspire. “That my mother had a reputation is beyond doubt,” was how Harold began his recollections.
Alice Childe was a small, compact woman. The pictures show her reaching only shoulder height to the average student. She invariably is shown in a dark two-piece suit with fitted skirt and jacket over a white blouse. The neat dress, Harold confirmed, was consistent with his memories. Alice Childe was a creature of small habit. The shoes will remain undescribed since these photographers generally did not like to include feet. One particular photo, undated and without comment, I can confirm is of that final student group, and Eileen McHugh herself is there, a face from row two poking over the shoulder of others who were clearly more intent on foreground presence than she.
Alice had dark hair, permed, though not the frizz of the time, but set like mid-sixties suburbia, more Toni from a bottle than Woodstock or Afro. A large handbag is prominent throughout, black in these monochromes, but in fact mock crocodile, twin-pearl clasped, clearly stuffed and swinging on a rustic chain from the left forearm, held bent to horizontal across her midriff. And there are glasses, dark-framed, vaguely winged, clearly sometimes worn, otherwise suspended on a cord round her neck, a black strand hanging in noticeable loops on either side of her precisely featured face, lips pursed in a grudging smile. In every shot, however, it is the hands and forearms that are most memorable. She seems to have a ring on every finger and both thumbs, plus several bangles and bracelets on each arm. There are brooches on the jacket as well and dangling earrings, but no necklace. The bag exudes the air of an oft-used purse, often opened, equally often closed with a click one could imagine as determined. One can only imagine what things one might find inside. If the college archives still existed, one might surely expect to find one such photograph for each year of Alice’s service, with each batch of students heading into the past more resembling this teacher of sculpture who probably never changed. It was her only job. All those years in the same environment, teaching the same course in the same way. The students’ faces clearly changed, but one feels that Alice Childe did not. But then there appeared Eileen McHugh and one feels that something did change.
“Your student described my mother as a walking trash heap. I think that was rather exaggerated. The trash heap was at home! It is true, however, that she wore a lot of what we now call accessories and carried a potpourri around in that handbag. She would regularly wear twenty rings and ten bracelets, changing the assembly every day, spending absolutely ages each morning selecting and juxtaposing in front of a dressing mirror to create her special collection for the world to see. She had drawers, never mind boxes full of the stuff, and was forever on the lookout for something new. She called them her ‘bits and pieces’ - that really is what she used to call them, indicating, from your message, why there may have developed a special bond between my mother and the particular student you describe - and she bought nearly everything secondhand. Most of the new things came as presents from me or dad. She used to rummage through junk shops and nearly always found something to buy. And in those days, there weren’t strings of charity shops on every high street. The places were fewer in number, often concentrated in certain areas and more like junk shops than smelling of secondhand clothes and books. There were secondhand furniture shops, however, because so many people in London in those days were in flat shares or unfurnished bedsits. It is certainly possible that my mother went ‘bits and pieces’ hunting with the student you are researching.
“I was always in contact with my mother, and my father for that matter, but visited neither of them regularly. We were always on good terms, as were the two of them. The three of us were really quite different, incompatibles brought together by accidents of romance and biology. Now, from the detachment of decades, it’s even amusing to recall the lack of obvious tensions between us alongside the utter communication failure we shared.
“Both my parents were artists - teachers really, at least from eight in the morning until seven in the evening - but they claimed to be artists the rest of the time. Dad was a painter and mum did sculpture, or ‘bits and pieces’, as dad called them. They were fiercely competitive and appeared to have almost no time for each other’s work, about which there seemed to exist a permanent argument. When I was around, my parents transformed into artists as they went upstairs, only to re-emerge as parents when they came down. As parents, they cooperated without conflict to provide my daily support, three meals, a place to live, material privilege, copious stimulus, homework help and all the attention I demanded. They gave their time to me without question, though perhaps I was quite a self-contained little boy. But when it came to their artistic work, they argued rather than talked. Mum had no time for flat surfaces and dad described mum’s studio as a junk shop. They used to accuse one another of getting in the way, of diverting attention from essential work. We really were three very different people. I was always precise, exact. I planned everything I did. I even used to arrange my food on a plate into neat, separate entities before I would eat it. I never wanted things covered in sauces or gravy. I wanted to see things as discrete entities. And as I grew older, I remember distinctly telling the two of them how they could do things better, more efficiently, more effectively. I must have been insufferable.
“My big and oft-revisited issue with my mother was her smoking. Dad smoked as well, but my mother’s habit was constant. I was in my teens when I started calling them cancer sticks. I was a studious child and I had already read articles linking smoking with the disease, though at the time the causation was far from accepted. I suppose I was trying to protect her. But at the time my parents probably thought it was just another example of my trying to prove how intellectually superior I considered myself to be. She would often get short-tempered with me and tell me to shut up. And then, always after another fag, she would come back and say sorry, at which point the process would start over again. Families can be strange places. We carried on like that until I went to college. I met my wife there and we married as soon as we graduated. We saw my parents occasionally, but after I left home it was usually by telephone that we communicated. I tended to gravitate much more towards my wife’s family, which was much more conventional than my own. And when my parents split up, I immediately began to lose contact with my father, who seemed to withdraw into his own world, self-sufficient and dedicated to his painting. He did survive my mother by a couple of decades, but then he did smoke a lot less than her. I was right all along.
“Yes, she used to wear bangles and bracelets. There was always that particular charm bracelet. It had been my grandmother’s. She always wore it, while the rest was pretty variable, as far as I can remember. It’s not the sort of thing an academic young boy takes time to notice. But I do remember the early morning routine of getting ready to go out each day. She would be puffing away in front of her mirror for half an hour, self-reconstructing, adding a piece, taking it off, holding her arm out so she could assess the effect. I think she never slept well and was always up and about by six, but ready for work only by half past eight, when she would go out for the bus. I think she did not feel dressed without the charm bracelet, and perhaps, looking back, it was important to her that she wanted to hide it amongst the other things. I did try to ask whether the things that hung from it had any meaning. Little pewter animals, a cross or two, she was not a believer, a couple of miniature cottages in painted ceramic, the kind you buy in souvenir shops at the seaside, various single letters in both upper and lower case in a variety of metals and finishes - these were just some of the things I remember. She always said that none of the things had any significance or meaning. I did not believe her then and still don’t. It was always too important for her.
“Of equal status but not importance was that enormous handbag, stuffed with lord knows what. But always in there was her ashtray. That is one thing she would not be without. It was like a miniature jewel box, a copy, I think, of a Louis Quinze commode. It had a good strong clasp and would not open by accident, even if shaken around inside her bag. This was her ‘in transit ashtray’. I’m sure she meant ‘in transit’ in the sense of between ashtrays. She would never dash a cigarette onto the floor, or even a pavement for that matter. She would never stub one out against something else, but she would use the inside of that box. She travelled everywhere by bus, incidentally, never drove a car in her life. She would also rarely use the tube, only buses, because she could bound up the stairs, light up, unclasp her miniature commode and puff away all the considerable time she spent travelling. The jams in London in those days could be interminable. She did read, though, but almost invariably about art and sculpture. I don’t ever remember seeing a novel in her hands. She was genuinely serious about what she did, but always managed to convey an air of frivolity, of dismissing her own vision as worthless, which she herself certainly did not believe. In fact, I would say she had a rather high opinion of herself.
“You suggest she may have developed a special bond with a student called Eileen McHugh in that last year before she retired. I think it’s possible, though she never mentioned the name, as far as I can remember. She rarely referred to any student by name away from college. But from what you have described, this desire to assemble junk into things that have meaning would certainly have appealed to my mother. One source of argument in our house was her regularly toting things up the stairs to her studio, often things she had picked off skips or found in the gutter.
“On the other hand, my dad was the kind of painter who wanted each colour clearly separated on his palette. He was fastidiously neat and clean, at least in his work, and was never the type who would squeeze out a whole tube of paint just to dab it with his brush. In his studio, he wanted everything exact. His art, also, was the diametric opposite of my mother´s. He used to paint animals, especially pets, in minute detail, always working from photographs. He took commissions for pet portraits and did get quite a lot of work, but he never charged a fee that reflected the hours he worked. But in life he was a slob.
“My mother could not have been more different, like a negative image of him. She dressed neatly, fastidiously, and was always polite, clean, neat and tidy in everything she did. But her work was often mucky, cut up, glued together, plastered with wet clay, broken, dirty, messy. She sometimes left things temporarily in the kitchen and he would go mad, but he would never lift a finger to clear things away. It’s distinctly possible this student’s ideas struck a chord with her.
“But it’s also possible that she was being inexcusably cynical. By the time she had reached the final year in her job, she had basically given up. She was ‘fed up to the back teeth,’ she would tell me over the phone and ‘couldn’t wait to get out.’ She was being marginalised by the younger staff. They criticised everything she did and dismissed her ideas to the extent she had stopped sharing them.”
Harold Childe suggested that his mother’s treatment of Eileen’s Jazz might just have been manipulative, her warped way of highlighting what she saw as the pretentiousness of her younger colleagues. I stress here that Harold never saw the work, probably never discussed it or anything related to the assessment of students with his mother and certainly never met Eileen McHugh. The scenario he describes, however, a professionally disgruntled employee, a long-standing teacher resentful of the upstarts whom she considered worthless, a worn out educator rushing towards an early retirement, is unfortunately consistent with the possibility that Alice used Eileen’s experimental work as a way of making her own statement. I admit it’s a thought I had not entertained until my contact with Harold. All I had was the end of term feedback, preserved in Marion’s box, that said, after “End of year assessment – Sculpture”, Eileen’s work has surpassed even her own ambitions. Jazz is an expressive work conceived and executed by a perspicacious, conscientious and talented artist. May there be more of the same. Result - Distinction, Alice Childe. The accompanying signature was a bare mark on the right of the page.
There exist no records of Eileen’s relationship with Alice. Neither Charlotte nor Linda recall anything memorable. Charlotte confirms they did share coffees in the college bar occasionally and that, perhaps several times, Eileen accompanied Alice on an afternoon of rummaging through the secondhand shops in Crouch End. Linda also recalls that Alice was always generous with her cigarettes, often offering them round a whole group of students sharing a coffee break, but according to Harold Childe that would have constituted quite normal behaviour, since she never liked to smoke alone and always carried a couple of new packs of Rothmans in her bag. Harold, indicating he has understandably always preferred to be called Harry, added that he had nothing more of substance to add, nothing that might relate to Eileen, at any rate.
Eileen’s notes for Alice included this reflection on her brief.
“I just want to put two gigs together in my mind. It will help me create a sense of what Jazz needs to express. The first was at the Albion in Holland Park. It’s quite an arty place run by the Jazz Centre Society, sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and happens in the lower ground front room of an immense house with white pillars framing a massive black door on the side of Holland Park in Kensington. Well, it’s more like Notting Hill really, but I bet the people who live upstairs call it Kensington. But we go in via the steps to the left. There’s a through room, front to back of the house, which from outside looks a lot bigger than it is. There’s a grand piano in the bay and rows of chairs running back to the French windows that let out into the back garden, which is the size of a postage stamp. My parents in Crofton have more outside space than this mansion. I worked out that ten of these houses along this long, curved row are worth about the same as all the property owned by the ten thousand people who now live in Crofton.
“Actually, it’s a bit of a dump. You go into a hall and pay your entry ticket. The gig happens on the right. But, straight on, there’s a small room, probably the kitchen for the lower ground floor, created when the place was converted into flats, a room stuck on the back of the terrace’s toast rack prongs. They have a keg of Worthington E set up there with a gas bottle and a tap, so we can get a pint of draught. The beer is the same price as in student bars. We always arrive early, buy a half and go straight into the main room so we can get the front middle seats. It’s a Friday night venue, which is sometimes a problem because Fridays is also Mike Osborne and Friends in Peanuts near Liverpool Street. But the reason we usually go to the Albion, even though it’s further, is the experiment. The particular Friday I want to capture in three dimensions featured a trio, piano, bass and alto, McGregor, Miller and Pukwana.
“Chris McGregor is a pianist. He plays the piano. Pianists do. But Chris McGregor playing the piano can sound more like percussion, so you might not even need a drummer. Like that night. There was no Louis Moholo whirring. Chris McGregor says his piano is his drum. Play piano, hear drum. He uses his hands, of course, but not just the fingers. The palms slap down, crawl sideways across the keys. He uses elbows and forearms. Once I saw him sit on the keyboard during a solo. I think he might have been taking the piss that night. He’s Monk. He’s Taylor. Sometimes, he’s Tyner. But above all else, he’s himself, hard, uncompromising, funny, ironic, often so sophisticated he’s minimal. He’s white. He’s also African.
“Harry Miller is coloured. He is not green. Neither is he purple. Certainly not puce. He’s coloured because that’s what the racist South Africans call him, print on his papers, stamp on his permits. He is not white, not European, but perhaps no-one else calling themselves South African is European either. T