Bridget Strevens Marzo

Bridget Strevens Marzo interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 11th March 2019

0:05:11 Born in Ongar, Essex in 1956; my father was quite old when I was born as he was born in 1902; he lived in the East End of London; his father was a ship's purser and his mother was a Dorset country girl; not much money and he was the oldest of seven; not much hope for anyone from the East End to get anywhere; very early on he loved stories and his mother would read Dickens to the family; his father would be at sea in more ways than one when he was at home - he liked his rum - but he did bring back from China and other places beautiful objects, prints and wrapping paper, and my father would stare at these, fascinated; he was clever enough to pass the exam for poor families to leave school, so he was allowed to leave early as he knew his "3 Rs" very quickly, and became a messenger boy in the City; there he saw much worse poverty than he had experienced - his family were always well-dressed on Sunday etc.; he was lucky to be too young for the First World War, and towards the end of it got a job with a wine trader who spotted that he was very interested in their collection of paintings upstairs; he was a French wine trader, and that is the story of how he became an artist; he was painting portraits in Oxford in the 1950's and my mother was a Spanish refugee from Catalonia; she came from an family of intellectuals with big ideas; her father was a Freemason, very much for the Spanish Republic, free education for all, and that of course got him into trouble; he was told by friends that he had better leave which he did overnight; at that time my two uncles were fighting in Madrid; the younger was a brilliant mathematician who had been at Barcelona University from the age of sixteen, he was wounded but survived; my mother ended up with her mother worrying for ten years about what had happened to them, stuck in Spain under Franco; they finally met up, I think through the Red Cross, in Paris; my mother was so tired of people looking back to the Spain that once was, a Spanish republic where education was free, and there was separation between Church and State; she wanted to go to a country where nobody speaks about the past, and for her two places that were possible were Sweden and England; her French was very good and she saw an advertisement for a home help for an elderly couple in Cambridge; she came to England not knowing a word of English; she worked for different academics, met T.S. Eliot which is a wonderful story, but decided she had had enough of Cambridge and wanted to discover somewhere else, and decided that Oxford would be very different; she got a job working for Pye's - she'd had enough of working in academics' homes learning to cook with "Mrs Beeton"; she earned enough money to buy a coat as one of the problems of England was how cold it was; she had seen a coat for £30 but as she was walking to the shop she saw a beautiful Spanish guitar; she didn't know how to play as Catalans are not particularly guitar players, but she went into the shop and found it was £30; she forgot the coat and bought the guitar that she didn't know how to play; my father, painting portraits, heard of a Spanish girl who played the guitar; he decided that he must meet her as he really wanted to learn flamenco; they met and he realized to his dismay that she couldn't play but he was happy to teach her; he was a passionate guitar player and co-founder of the Guitar Society; he oversaw Julian Bream's first concert in the Royal Albert Hall and played himself so that Bream could go up into the "gods" to see what the sound was like; so my parents married, my mother became pregnant with me; I should have become a great guitarist but I am not, alas;

7:44:08 I think my father was a dreamer, hating the rough life of people, and injustice, but he wasn't political in any way; he would say of himself that he was an escapist; he loved painting portraits of women and children particularly; he was the one who would read to me as a child; every night we would have a little ritual and he would come up and animate a little group of bears that I had; he had three daughters in a previous marriage - his first wife had died - so I sort of had a grandfather father, and he had mellowed by that time; I think he must have had quite a spirit to end up making his living as an artist; his name was John Strevens and there is a web site about him; he would say that he was second-rate; he wasn't in the vanguard of any movement; in fact he was given just a few evening classes at Heatherley's by an aunt who died - this was in the twenties - and I think it was possibly Roger Fry who had come to talk who was showing the new painting; he stood up and said that he thought art had something to do with beauty, and he left; he was quite a dandy; I now live in the East End and see the tail-end of the hipster, I see young men in three-piece suits wearing ties and looking vaguely Victorian, and my father was a sort of Victorian after his time; my mother was very different; they didn't share the same sense of humour; she was over twenty years younger than him; she adored, venerated him, as the classic artist's wife, but she was very political and although we lived for a while not far from Chingford, in Norman Tebbit land, she would say things to very nice groups of English people about hating Thatcher (who was as bad as Franco); my father would quietly disappear; he said what he thought, but he just didn't like politics; I don't have any siblings; I think my mother would liked to have had another child but was in her thirties when I was born; my father worked every day of the week including Sundays; when I was about six he decided to sell-up; a lot of his clients were American and we took the 'Queen Mary' 3rd class to America; I had this very memorable time starting in New York, and then we took the Greyhound bus; he was a dreaming doer and my mother was the facilitator; she was down to earth, read a lot, was fascinated by Krishnamurti and people like that, philosophy and politics, but she also "did" for my father and was dedicated to him

12:35:18 I think my first memory was being in a cot and looking up; I was probably a baby, when we were living in Moreton near Ongar; it was an old house and I rather romanticised the idea of it; after the war there were a lot of houses for sale that people couldn't keep up; my father rented; his first wife had dreams of grandeur and he bought Moreton Hall; I can just remember looking up at the sun through the leaves; I must have been a baby as I can't think I would have been stuck looking at leaves later; I remember people tickling me in my cot which I didn't like; I also remember, perhaps more clearly, living in another rental place in Kensington of which I have two distinct memories; my father had a big studio there and a balcony that looked over the dome of the Albert Hall; I was fascinated by that but also plants on the balcony; one day I discovered I could put water in the earth round the plant and make a kind of soup; I remember dropping this soup down and it made a mark on the pavement; there were people walking down below and I was fascinated as to whether I could reach anyone with my mud mark; I would have been about three or four at the time; I remember cycling on a tricyle around the flat, cycling under tables and watching how people's legs would move when there was a dinner; I would communicate with people's legs just by watching them

15:47:14 We were in America just under a year; I believe my father got a working visa and we stayed for quite a long time with some clients who became friends in San Antonio; he painted quite a lot of the NASA people including a Dr Campbell who was one of the doctors who oversaw the first astronauts who went into outer space - the ones that tested gravity and whether humans could cope with the lack of it; I remember a book that he gave my father called 'Earthman, Spaceman, Universal Man?', that was the early sixties; when we came back I have brief memories of being in Scarsdale Villa School in Kensington where I was very proud to say to everyone that I was moving to the country, which turned out to be Loughton in Essex by Epping Forest; I also suffered from bronchial asthma and one of the reasons for going to Epping Forest was that I could breath more easily; London was polluted in a different way from now with pea-souper fogs of the early sixties; my health did improve; I have memories of both America and London that I lived on when we moved to Loughton where I wasn't so happy; I went to a lovely little school called Oaklands by the forest with a wonderful Miss Reid who took us for nature walks and taught me about birds; I remember her stopping us to listen to a bird saying "teacher, teacher, teacher", with a little cap and tie and he was a great tit; Miss Law who ran the school was a very Church of England Irish woman; there were only about one hundred children in the school and I have good memories of that until the final year when we had a rather severe teacher of whom I was terrified; I had already become insecure about maths; we didn't do any homework as Miss Law didn't believe in it; one day we were all made to sit down and do these games - visual and logical tests which I loved doing as they were like the things one would see at the back of children's magazines, particularly in America; I didn't realize it was the 11+; I got into the local Loughton High School for Girls as a result of having enjoyed doing all of these games; I had one or two lovely teachers there and my main mentor was Miss Wolff, Tania Wolff who wrote many books including 'Pushkin on Literature'; she was the English teacher; I didn't have her to start with but as soon as I did she opened up a world for me; she was hilarious; she had gapped teeth and identified with the Wife of Bath; she had a sort of mysterious history; she brought rather wonderful writers and poets to our school and a Russian Orthodox priest who got us all dancing in a school assembly; she also wrote a book called 'Lines on the Underground' in which she had collected every single poem about lines on the underground stations and collated it into a wonderful book; it also pointed out to me that I had a very adult way of writing and I really ought to apply for Oxbridge; I really wanted to go to art school so I wasn't too sure about it but I did to extra classes with her for the Oxbridge entrance exam

20:44:22 I was interested in art way before primary school; my father's studio was a rather magical place with a lot of illustrated books; he had a collection of 'Figaro illustré' from the nineteenth century and the 'Strand Magazine'; most of the time he was painting you could argue that he was baby-sitting me, but I was very quiet because I was so absorbed, not only by the pictures in the books, but I was also given a little easel so I had mine and he had his; he stood up at his easel and even had a smock and a proper palate which nowadays is very rare; I remember painting at that easel; because I was with my parents a lot travelling and with a lot of grown-ups, they would just give me pencils and paper; so I drew very early; I was never forced or asked to, I just did it the way my dad did; it was just like breathing; so I drew before I could write, almost before I could talk, I think; by about eight or nine I would be given a little pocket money and I would go into the local bookshop and choose Puffin books; I saw at the end of one particular book 'Join the Puffin Club', so I did and I was a passionate "Puffineer"; it was run by the lovely Kaye Webb; I did have friends at school but not many people liked books and drawing like I did; I had one great friend that I still have, Linda, who did, and she and I both loved painting; I gradually realized that not many people around me enjoyed books and the sort of wacky things that I enjoyed, and through the Puffin Club I was able to realize that there was an outside world with other children who did like the things I liked; so I entered competitions and won at least a couple, oddly, never for drawing, but writing; I loved reading historical fiction - I suppose I must have been about ten by then - and the competition was to write a diary; there was a wonderful series about Queen Elizabeth on television and I think that it must have been that which inspired me, but I wrote the diary of a courtier attending the wedding of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII; because I'd also read Harrison Ainsworth, I wrote it in fake Elizabethan - "'zounds" and all of those kinds of words and I loved playing with that, and I got a prize for that; another prize I got for an essay on happiness

24:46:02 At the Grammer school I specialized in arts' subjects, languages especially, with my mother being Spanish; I also had French cousins and through my early primary school years we would drive through France into Spain, although my Mother never really liked it because Franco was still around, and became very insecure the moment we hit the frontier; we would stay with my French cousins in Paris in one very progressive suburb where one of my uncles had moved with his family which was a new, utopian, town called Sarcelles; so I have very distinct and different memories of being in France; in Sarcelles I joined the cousin who was closest in age to me at her school; I remember being surrounded by French children but I couldn't speak French at that time, aged seven or eight; they looked at me as though I had arrived from outer space; I really felt uncomfortable; I felt what I think most refugees feel when they come to a new country, completely isolated; my cousin had disappeared and I felt I must be purple and green or something for being so odd for everybody there; one or two girls felt sorry for me, but others were about to tease me; I had a strong sense at that point that I didn't want to be like this, I didn't want to be noticed and so my chameleon instinct developed from that I think; the idea that I should speak a language with no accent, and I am very good at picking up the sound of different languages; languages have always fascinated me and I have done some books where the problem of language for children is addressed in different ways

27:35:12 On religion, I think my parents delegated it to one of my godmothers, or she adopted the role, and decided to take me to the little church, High Beech in Epping Forest, which was very beautiful; she would talk about being Confirmed and bought me a little Bible and a cross to go with it; I was very proper with her, and I think this kind of ability to adapt which was a survival instinct from having travelled a lot and having to deal with other cultures, also with my parents and their families being very different, I became a very good little Christian girl when I was with her; sitting in the church, gradually as I became a teen I dreamed that there would be some handsome young boy who would be as Christian as me; but the minute I got home I forgot all about that; my father wasn't religious at all; occasionally he would say he was agnostic and he did have a deep Christian belief because he was raised by his mother; he believed in the power of prayer so we said prayers, but it was not at all strict; my mother wasn't a Catholic because her father was a Freemason; she was told when she was a child that she didn't have to do the rosary at school and in most schools under the republic in Spain children were still following the old practice, going through with the beads and saying "Jesus, Mary, I have sinned"; those who were the children of republicans like my grandfather sat and watched the others saying they had sinned; then they were teased by the others because they apparently didn't sin; so she had a very complex attitude to all that because her mother and grandmother were deep down Catholics; it was her father and his more progressive beliefs that rather repressed that in her; I think all she was left with was a kind of guilt and no ability to confess; for me religion has not meant much but as a set of structures and beliefs; I have a great sympathy with the Buddhists; when I read my Mum's book on Krishnamurti that seemed to feel right, but so does Blake's poetry which my father read, and I loved certain hymns; so I think what religion I have is very aestheticised, and it comes through music and art but not through dogma or practice; I do have a strong sense that there is a spiritual self or element that I think a lot of religious practice does not actually address that well; I have a respect for that and I don't claim to have much more than an instinct about it

31:46:16 On games, I always seemed to be friendly with the arty types who were classified as bad at sport though I rather thought that it was unfair that I was paired with Michelle who never hit the ball back in tennis, so how could I practice; I could do a serve; I had some advantage because I am left-handed, and I did quite enjoy netball; for a while my very best friend, Nicola, was the most sporty person in the class; it was interesting that somehow we were attracted to each other as complete opposites; I did get a medal in Primary school for progress in sport and that's because I learnt to swim quite late on thanks to a very little, fragile, friend I had who had very thick National Health glasses; she managed to go under water and I thought that if she could do it so could I; I held my nose and went under and realized that I could sort of swim under water so I got over my fear

33:11:18 My mother had adored Cambridge, possibly more than her time in Oxford, and we used to do the odd day trip in the car and just visit; I know that when I was about sixteen or seventeen, I remember walking passed King's, and the little newsagent opposite, which is still there, had a shelf on which there was 'A Student's Guide to Cambridge'; this was in the mid-seventies so it was photocopied; I was intrigued because there were drawings in it and I was curious to know about what students would say about Cambridge; I bought it, and it was through reading that guide to the Cambridge colleges done by students, and it was because of an honest, slightly rebellious, unofficial guide that I chose King's; I surprised my mentor because she didn't know that King's had just started to admit women; the first generation had come in 1972 and I was in the second, starting in 1975; Judith Weir came in the first generation; I applied to do English because Tania, my English teacher, insisted that my ability to write was way beyond what was normally expected; I was also doing an 'A' level and 'S' level in English and in French; I have to say that I did adore my French teacher who oddly was called Julie Strevens, my father's name but there were no connections; I read Camus thanks to her, and we read a bit of Bergson and I loved that, to go back to the religious thing I was much more interested in how things worked; so English seemed to be the way in but I thought that I could read literature any time, and you are served a way to do things, how to structure an essay, how to analyse, how to make a synopsis - I knew how to do that, so what more could I really learn; then I thought that King's seemed quite different from the conventional rather fusty old colleges, what if I apply to do something that I don't know anything about; I did want to do art history because I was interested in art, and the other reason I applied to King's was that there was an art room and since I was not going to art school, at least I could go to the art room and study art history; however, art history was not available for Part I only as a Part II of the tripos, so I had to do something else; I thought that I'd love to be there for as long as possible so try and do a Part I that was a two year course; there was an exhibition at the British Museum of Chinese art and I started to read about classical Chinese art and the famous bronze horses that had come over; I started to look at all kinds of Chinese art, and then I thought about learning the culture through the language, and I applied for Chinese language and literature, art and philosophy; it wasn't just the language although that took up a fair amount of the morning; we did classical and modern Chinese so we had a go at translating classical poems; we also wrote about Buddhism - Mahayana and Hinayana - and Taoism, Lao Tse, Confucian, a smattering of a lot of things but actually a lot of work so was buried in it for two years, although a meeting in my second year with a poet somewhat took my attention away; but I could read a modern Chinese newspaper by the end of it; I have forgotten all of it now; I had several wonderful teachers, not Joseph Needham who I thought I was going to have; Dr Sloss was the one I remember the most because in the very first modern language class there were just thirteen of us in the whole University; there were lots of people studying Japanese, but only thirteen of us; this was during Communist China and the "Gang of Four" were just coming up into positions of notoriety, though just before the death of Mao; I remember one of the questions when I came to King's, and it wasn't a Chinese specialist asking it, was what did I think was the meaning of the anti-Confucian campaign in China, because it was the Cultural Revolution in China at that point; I gave the right answer clearly because I got in, but it was a surprise question that made me think afterwards about what was the meaning, apart from just totally rejecting a certain aspect of history; the first thing Dr Sloss said was "ni hao ma" and he seemed to say it with a Scottish accent, he was Scottish, and he explained the retroflex "r" that some Scots have is very similar to the Beijing accent, but not so in Southern China; he was very good; I think he had taught GI's or something, and had a clear way of teaching that got us memorising very quickly; our brains were like putty aged twenty; another teacher was a Polish guy who took us through the lab, and we had Michael Loewe as well; I think he was the classic idea of what an Oxbridge professor would be; I don't have a memory of anything particular he taught me; there was an American, probably a junior research fellow, who took us through some of the odd poems and I absolutely adored that as I did write poetry; I loved the idea that in Chinese these poems could be read in several different ways so he played ambiguity in this wonderful way so that we could translate the same poem and work across three different options; this sort of pre kind of linking that happens in computer thinking, I absolutely adored the fact that you could get meaning out of the same set of visually-based characters in such different ways; I don't remember his name but maybe something like Bartlett; having really got into reading and writing Chinese there was one room in the library at King's where I thought to myself that I was in an ivory tower, and that I would get as much out of it; in those days we were told that when you went to Cambridge it was nothing to do with work and your future career, and this was a pure ivory tower moment when I could delve into this world, escape into it in a way; I then thought that possibly there was a future as there was someone teaching Chinese art in Part II and maybe I shouldn't do art history but work in Chinese art; he was called Dr Cheng; I never met him and he died before I returned for my Part II; the other options were economics, history and things, and they didn't interest me as much as the Chinese art option; then I decided to go into art, but I do regret that I can't speak Chinese any more, I'd like to have kept that up

45:29:00 Mark Elvin was not in Cambridge at the time but Craig Clunas was in the year above me, and my Director of Studies at King's was Peter Avery who interviewed me; he said to me that I must meet this very beautiful boy Craig Clunas, but he was rather terrifying; he was very interested in Tibet and wore a little Tibetan hat at that point, and I know he became a great Chinese scholar later, but I wasn't particularly close to him; there was one girl in Newnham who I became friendly with doing Chinese, but quite a lot of people doing Chinese did have ulterior motives - travelling for the foreign service or MI5, 6, whatever, who knows?

46:29:04 In King's at that time there was the famous orange airport-lounge bar which looked like something from 'The Avengers', being resolutely modern in a very design way though I think the orange seats were plasticated so you couldn't sit on them for too long; it wasn't called the Junior Common Room, but the Bar, and that's where people hung out; this kind of design was impressively cool at the time but also led to a kind of cliquish feel because you could sit in these round booths but could only fit a certain number of people in; there was one booth that was very close to where the bar area was which had rather scarily impressive people; I was actually very shy, especially in my first year, and I would race through the bar to get my post and then race out and disappear into my little corner in the library or in the beautiful Oriental Studies Faculty which I loved, which had lovely birch trees outside; King's was very different from now in terms of the student population; every single male had an enormous amount of hair-growth; in the matriculation photo beards and hair were waving across, and women were trying to keep their hair under control in a high wind; it was much more overtly political and left-wing; I remember rallies for Chile and for needy causes across the world; one that I did not actually support so much was for a crèche, which of course was a feminist move; my father being an artist didn't earn that much money so I had a full grant, all my fees were paid for and my maintenance; suddenly I came into this money, my parents weren't paying, and I thought, gosh, this is just manna, this is precious, why would I ask for more; so I was incredibly appreciative of the fact of coming from a State school I actually had this money to live and I didn't have to work during university time; both my father and mother were very intelligent people but they had not had an education, in one case because of the war, in the other because of poverty; so I became more aware in Cambridge of this enormous division between Public School educated people and people like me, and King's at that point had taken on an unusual number of State School pupils, and were doing this quite actively: I think in my first year we were actually quite a troublesome year; there were a lot of people who drank a lot; for me, wine was something you tasted and enjoyed; to drink to get drunk, why? I still don't understand that one, but I did enjoy the late night bar when I summoned up enough courage to go, because of the music which I didn't know from home; the bar gave a feeling of being up-to-date and kind of rebellious; coming from King's when I went elsewhere I could get teased because I was from King's - showy, left-wing, whatever - and I would defend King's to the hilt; I remember once at Trinity someone saying it was so obvious that I was from King's with all that arty, rebellious stuff, and I thought how arrogant he was; I was a little disappointed that there was the drinking culture; I was friendly with a lot of medics particularly as doing Chinese was as hard as doing medicine; we were the ones who got up very early and went to lectures at nine o'clock compared to people doing English who woke up later and only dipped into lectures from time to time; I got the feeling that we were the workers of the University; at King's there was that division between the workers and those that hung around; I remember being invited by an Etonian to a welcoming tea-party, and we were given tea and felt very much that we were being observed; I think he served the tea and then asked me to serve, and I did something which I learnt later was a non-U thing to do which was to put the milk in first; I remember the girl I had gone with, Virginia Bell, giggling, and then he giggled; I knew I had done something wrong but it was that stupid; so it was still within the history of a progressive upper-class - the Bells and Bloomsbury Group - there was still as sense of what was U and what non-U, the Mitford thing; I think I discovered that when I read a novel - Ian McEwan I think - much later on

53:47:23 I did Part II in art history with Jean Michel Massing who was just starting; we had Virginia Spate who was absolutely wonderful; she had interviewed me and then she left; like the Chinese Faculty, in the Art History Faculty a lot of the supervisions were not in College; unlike archaeology, anthropology, English etc. there were not people within the College to supervise; I am wondering whether Jean Michel came in my second year; for a while there wasn't a Director of Studies in Art History in King's and Jean Michel became that later; as a teacher he was absolutely full of enthusiasm and hilarious; I had a particular empathy with him given his French connection; it was a different kind of French from what I knew from my cousins because he came from Alsace, and there was a slight Germanic feel to him as well; at that time he was fresh out of the Warburg Institute so he was providing a lens onto art history which was very different from connoisseurship and the traditional museum appreciation of arts and objects; he gave me access not only to Gombrich but a way of looking at art in terms of ideas that connect very different things together which was not about ownership but what shapes and intentions can be, and how they can cross cultures, very much the Warburg thing; so I have really loved that; I think he was one of my better teachers; certainly I was very lucky to be in quite an interesting year with Mark Stocker, Barry Bergdoll - great friends still - who became a Professor at Columbia, and still is, specialist in the history of architecture; he was also head of architecture and design at MoMA in New York; he also had this very lovely questioning attitude to art history; chance would have it that before the end of my time here I met Norman Bryson, and I really loved talking to him; structuralism was coming in; people in the English faculty knew about that and a little bit in the French faculty, but not really in art history; again, this kind of idea to bridge art and language, I chose for my dissertation a rather odd thing which was the connection between Mallarmé, the French poet, and the relationship between him and artists of the time, in particular Monet and the breaking up of representation subject and object, that Jules Laforgue identified. That led me to be supervised by David Kelly who was at Trinity, a French lecturer; so I was working between those kinds of ideas and really loved that too; King's allowed me to do that; Jean Michel was totally for it, and I think those were my headiest times, working on my dissertation, I loved it

58:32:23 Although I was only the second generation of women at King's I didn't feel any residual feeling that women were outsiders; I was very aware that even at King's we were a minority. but that was the period where people were starting to explore sexuality in new ways; there were a lot of guys who were gay or affected gayness; at King's, everyone knew that E.M. Forster was gay, and I think there was a general feeling that there was no sexism per se, male or female; now it's a whole other issue of having to stick a label on yourself and find what identity you are; what I loved about King's was that it felt very open; oddly, because of all these men having long hair as well as women, you couldn't tell us apart from the back, and only a few could grow beards so it was not a problem at King's; there were other places where it was; I ran the Young Friends of Kettles Yard and also co-ran the Young Friends of the Fitzwilliam and that took me to meeting people in other colleges and it wasn't the same there; when you walked into a man's college you felt you were looked at

1:00:17:07 The art room was one of the reasons I applied for King's and I ended up running the art room and running life classes there; oddly one or two things happened as a result of that; very early on we had the Chilean surrealist artist, Matta, come and do a collaborative work with us which I think for him was rather disastrous because we didn't follow his instructions; that was the first collaborative piece of art I ever did; later on with the life classes we had one local farmer who volunteered to be the model week after week; I was happy because it was always hard to find models up to that point; he would strike the most amazing muscular poses; then I had a delegation of men come to me to say that they were a bit tired of drawing a male figure, could they draw a female; I love that in art class you don't think about a woman but a male or female figure; I found someone in my year who modelled and they were happy after that; there were one or two, dare I say, arty types like me; I remember someone called Philippe Harari who was responsible for me moving to Paris afterwards; I had been to the Cambridge Careers Advice Service and no one could tell me anything about what I could do in terms of art; I said that I had illustrated for 'Granta', the new 'Granta', the very first 'Granta' that came out in the paperback format which was put together by Bill Buford, Pete de Bolla and others; I knew about the old A4 format, but one day I was asked, possibly by Pete, to do some illustrations, just five pages, which had to be done by that night; that was quite a deadline and I hesitated; I went to meet Bill, whom I already knew as an affiliated student in my year; I was given some beer and some paper and I had brought my rotring pen; they said they just wanted them to be abstract; this was the New York edition which I gather now is very collectable; I did these, very unusually for me, abstract drawings with lines going in different places; they were very happy with them; I think I must have had several beers by the end of that; it was about four in the morning when I finished; I had done cartoons for 'Stop Press' and other things, and I did one for the King's Rag where I represented Simon Goldhill as Henricus Rex as the cover with the statue of Henry on the front lawn; I developed an interest in drawing from that and illustrating for very particular purposes and running the art room kept my hand in it in some way; Kettles Yard and the Young Friends of the Fitz. were also exacerbating my naturally critical side and there's a tension I think with anyone that's making with the academic, and it is hard to keep both together; my first husband, the poet I mentioned, Stephen Romer, who is currently at Oxford but spent most of his life in France, teaching in the French university system, had that same struggle that I had as an active poet but also as an academic; he was a proper academic, unlike me; I gave it up when I left

1:05:12:05 Philippe Harari mentioned that if I could get into the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, the ENSBO they call it, the main national French art school which is opposite the Louvre, a beautiful place, it would be free; I always had this money worry and having had a grant for four years I somehow wrongly thought that I couldn't apply to do an M.A. at art school; I learnt later that I could have done that but Cambridge Admissions didn't know about it at the time; could I have got into the Royal College of Art? - it is one small regret that I didn't do that, but at the same time I did love France; I had an aunt who lived in Paris, I built up a portfolio and got in; from King's to the Beaux Arts, it's another location with an absolutely amazing history; I found myself in Matisse's studio; he had been very reluctant to leave and was still there in his early thirties; alas the teaching after the late seventies was very bad, even non-existent; it was sort of everybody for themself; you could do technical, very brief classes but there was no real feedback; I loved realism at that point; I liked Edward Hopper, had studied the Renaissance, so I was very influenced by Botticelli, Titian especially, and I ended up teaching myself a lot more by becoming a copyist at the Louvre; I copied Titian's 'The Madonna of the Rabbit' and other paintings, and was paid to do so; that was an interesting story too; to become a copyist you get given a card and you have to bring a canvas that is slightly smaller or larger than the original in case you do a quick swap, quite flattering really; I chose the rabbit by Titian because it was down one end of a long wing of the Louvre; then one day I got there and it had disappeared; I told the guards there was a hole in the wall and it wasn't me that had taken it; in those days they didn't have two-way communication but they called from one to the other and asked where the Titian was; it turned out that it had been re-hung opposite the 'Mona Lisa' so I had to finish this picture with the crowds; people would come up to me and say that they liked mine better than the original; another would ask where the 'Gioconda' was and I'd say that was the 'Mona Lisa'; but it was fun and I taught myself more figurative art; it was just at the beginning of a movement called "la nouvelle figuration", which was just a little bit different from me, but I wasn't very good at making contact and I found the whole art world rather difficult to understand, if not mysterious and slightly terrifying; it was different from the art world my father was in; he had never done the rounds of galleries or followed movements; he had come from Fleet Street as an illustrator before the war to submitting to the Royal Academy and then getting in; from having been more or less self-taught it was the Royal Academy that launched his career as a portrait painter; he took a roundabout way and I suppose I did too; I carried on going into the Beaux Arts but nobody noticed or noted me and I didn't finish the final exams; so it was over a three or four year period when I dipped in, but then I met someone on a bus that led to me ending up in a beautiful artist's house, paying almost no rent; I had been paying a reasonable rent in Montmartre, living in an attic room with my poet husband soon-to-be; after we got married I happened to be coming back on the cheap Hovercraft route and met a woman who lived near me, who then fell in love with someone who lived in a lovely little Medieval town called Senlis; he had his own house but was looking after this artist's house; she moved in with him and wanted me to go there; this artist's house was an absolute dream with a big skylight on the edge of sixteenth century ramparts; it was the town where the first kings of France were elected King - the Capetian King in 987, Hugh Capet, was elected there; it was right opposite an old abbey and once again I found myself in a beautiful location

1:11:45:10 On how I kept myself, a good question; I had a sideline which was for a while a mainline, which was translating art history books, among which was a short guide to the Louvre, from French into English; probably most importantly were Claude Monet's letters; it was not through having done the dissertation on Monet but perhaps through contacts I knew running the Friends of the Fitzwilliam; that is still in print, edited by Richard Kendall, 'Monet by himself' it is called; he wasn't a particularly interesting letter writer mostly they are requests for money, he didn't analyse or theorise a lot; perhaps more interestingly in terms of content I co-translated a massive book of nine hundred or so pages on Mattise; there were pictures in it but there is a lot of very dense text and a huge number of notes and appendixes; it was written by Pierre Schneider who was revered by a certain part of the art historians in France; he thought he could speak quite good English and insisted on using words like "numinous" which you can use once or twice, but not too often; he wanted me to keep the "eruption of the sacred" which I thought sounded like acne; what he meant was "the bursting in of the sacred" in Matisse's 'Great Dance', when Matisse is shocked and scared of his own painting; it is a wonderful book in parts; it made publishing history as all of the co-editions came out at the same time and so the layout had to allow for Japanese, German, English and American English; my co-translator, Michael Taylor, who has carried on as an absolutely fantastic translator, was Americanizing my English and I was Anglicising the half of the book that he was translating; we divided the book in half, literally, and then read each other's and then went through with an English and American filter; this is before computers; we had electric typewriters

1:15:03:08 I had my first child with Stephen Romer, a boy; this was in the country; we were very young when we married and both growing and developing in different ways; he came into a bit of money and bought a tiny bachelor pad in Paris, and that is when we started to split up though I don't think we realized it then; while he was in Paris, we had installed a new night storage heater in this lovely sixteenth-century house; there was no central heating but an open fire, and an old stove in the studio; the night storage heater set fire to a curtain; a little friend of my son had posted paper through the grates; I came down and saw a lot of smoke, rescued my son, ran to the next door neighbour; there had been a fire in the fire station the night before so they took a long time to come to us; I lost all my paintings; watercolour art works that was under glass were preserved, but the big oil paintings, piano, a lot of books, Stephen's collection of beautifully bound books, all went; I had to call up the owner because I was renting it very cheaply, and that led to a very nice meeting; the owner, Mr Kindler, based in New York on the news of the fire first asked how I was and how was my child; he then asked about my artwork; I then asked about his house; he said there were wonderful artisans in Sanlis and as we were both insured the house could be repaired; he was sorry that I would have to take some time off to oversee the repairs and that he would come over, but together we would make it better than it was - absolutely wonderful; I ended up buying the house from him as a single mother, which was quite something to do in France at that time; Stephen had gone off with the British Council to work in Poland, and was working on his poetry a lot there as well; we've remained friends to this day; I am friends with all my former partners; I have been married twice before; my second partner is an artist called Mick Finch who has been very instrumental in expanding Central St Martin's now he's back in England, and does a lot for the students and is working with connections across the world; I was with my first husband for ten years, my second, twenty years, and for him too there was a point when he needed to grow out of the shell of the protection we had made for ourselves; he had got as high as he could in the French teaching system and he was painting as well, but something was not right there and he ended up getting a job in London while I remained in France; that led to the split-up; again, he is another friend, and friendly with my first husband; I had a daughter with him; after a while I realized that I didn't want to put my daughter through the French Baccalaureate; my son had been a brilliant success and had got a top result, but I don't think it's an exam that prepares you for life in any way; he wanted to come to England; he got into university here but suffered a kind of culture shock; it's a very different system; the English system is very much more about feeling your way through things; he had been given a reading list beforehand and in two weeks had made notes on most of the books; but what shocked him in his first seminar was that the other students had not read any but a couple and had just dipped in, and yet they had opinions; he called me up asking how could you have opinions unless you had read very deeply in the subject; that's the French system; you are not qualified to have an opinion unless you have read at least ten books properly and analysed them in depth; I thought that my daughter was more hands-on anyway and would be more at home in the English system; I found that there was a free school, the Anglo European School, a comprehensive school, now an academy, just outside London; we decided to put her into sixth form there and I'm really glad she did that; a lot of artists send their children there as there is a very good art department; they all seem to be married to foreign people, and if you come from Europe you have chance of getting a place there; it is free like the school I went to, and what I wish was true for more people than it is, a quality school that is free; although I support the State school system and visit both private and state schools, in the work I do now I do see the tremendous difference in what private schools can offer their children, even primary schools; how much more time and much more relaxed the teachers are, and the pressure that is in the State school system; that is not to criticize the teachers; I just parachute in with my books and do workshops in schools and I see the difference

1:23:04:13 After the fire I had a massive rethink as I realized I would not earn money as an artist; a very good friend, Joe Friedman, said that I should try and earn money in what I loved doing; apart from translation, I loved drawing and illustrating, and I loved children's books; I already had a collection of children's books and he said I should do that; by this time I was thirty and I wrote and illustrated my first three children's books; I was very lucky to find a publisher and it launched me from my thirties onwards into my new career as an illustrator-writer of children's books; after the first three, living in France I got work illustrating books in France and America but not in England; I think it was already very competitive here with a wonderful group of brilliant authors and illustrators, one of whom I discovered much later was at King's, Jan Pieńkowski, who illustrated the Meg and Mog books and has done fantastic pop-up books like 'The Haunted House'; he is a generation above me so he was probably in the King's art studio way before me, but I didn't know anyone in Cambridge at that time who was doing that; now of course Cambridge Anglia Ruskin is famous for the M.A. in children's book illustration which if I had my time again I would happily do; it is taught by Martin Salisbury, Pam Smye and others; every year it expands and people come from all over the world to do it; I am self-taught and learnt on the job really; I have worked a lot for a French publisher called Bayard and became an art director there briefly; I understood, not only, how the French market is, but economy and politics plays into even it's books as they still have a lot of money; the public libraries in France have money to buy children's books which is not true for all over England; the cuts actually started with Thatcher; my first three books were published in England but I had more due, but that was just the time that Thatcher cut the library budgets; but it is also, when to survive, the British publishing industry really put much more energy into Bologna, the International Children's Book Fair, and they rely on foreign co-editions to sell, because you can actually sell more copies of a new English author-illustrator in its French translation than you can sell in England because there is more money in France for buying books

1:27:03:21 I did a workshop two days ago called 'Writing for Illustrators' and part of what writing for illustrators is, is narrative illustration, in other words using pictures to tell a story; the only place really now for that is in children's books and in comic books; in the nineteenth century there was a great tradition, still carried on, of narrative art; ??? in France, but also Delacroix, all the way through until art became much more formalist; actually I love cubism, and a lot of twentieth-century art, but the story-telling is sometimes skirted around; you do get it in contemporary art, there are one or two artists that do play with that, but there is a much wider field for telling stories in pictures; that seems to be mostly in children's books and that's what I love doing; it doesn't have to necessarily be a classic story with a story arc, it can also be an exploration or a cumulative litany of things; there are many ways to play with text and ideas of how you get at child absorbed in something, in looking and thinking about the world, and I am working on that right now; it's not a story but it has a rhythm and a rhyme, and the thing I love the most is that in a children's book you can get an overall theme that is actually not talked about and that you can play music with it in terms of how you turn the page; so the page turn paces the rhythm of the book in a very particular way which we are unconscious of when we read; whether it's Proust or Alan Macfarlane, you are not aware of the page turn, although, of course, people like Dickens were aware of cliff-hangers when their stories were serialized; the physicality of the book and how you can play with that to me is the art, and that's the art I love

1:29:55:15 I am married to Christopher Prendergast who is my third husband; we are both on our third marriage; we met in London and walked for most of the day, from just off Brick Lane where I live to somewhere in Hampstead; I think the French connection was a very important part of it.