1973 – aged 17
Lilly was happy. Her course at art college filled her with joy!
It was a dream come true to spend her days studying beautiful paintings, learning the techniques of sculpture and collage, her two chosen modules for this year, and listening to experts debate the hidden meaning behind classic works of art.
And she’d made a friend, a best friend, no less.
Glenda Brooks was a Londoner, like her, who lived with her mum and dad in Enfield and commuted in and out each day.
Feminism and the push for equality hadn’t quite reached Glenda’s street, and while Lilly had joyfully attended the protests against the Miss World competition, Glenda had declined the invitation to come with; her sole ambition, it seemed, was to get married and have kids.
She spoke about it often, stating how she couldn’t wait to bag a husband, leave home and get a house of her own where she could start her Pyrex collection.
This would give her the freedom her strict parents denied her.
Glenda had explained the hoops she’d had to jump through just for them to give her permission to attend art college.
Her parents were persuaded, finally, by a conversation with the local priest, who extolled the virtue in honing a God-given talent, and how Michelangelo himself had only grown closer to God as he painted the Sistine Chapel.
And by the ace up his cassock sleeve, the fact that Luke himself, one of the four evangelists, was indeed an artist, ta-dah!
Glenda was a skilful ceramicist and Lilly hoped that marriage, whenever it came, wouldn’t curtail the successful career that beckoned, firmly believing that in this new day and age it was far easier for women to have it all.
Her plan was to carry on working for Bertie, curate her own exhibitions, maybe get her own work to a standard that meant it might sell and, like Glenda, she too wanted to get married and have babies.
I mean, who didn’t? But all in good time.
‘So, do you go to church and stuff?’ One of the first questions Lilly had asked her new friend, after hearing how the priest had swayed her parents.
‘Do I heck as like!’ Glenda’s eloquent response kind of told her all she needed to know. ‘My parents practically live in front of the altar. My mum has her nose so far up Father Shaun’s arse I’m sure she’d know he had haemorrhoids before he did.’
Lilly had laughed out loud at her friend’s crude and confident humour.
She and Glenda were quite unlike most of the girls on their course, who lived in shared flats, delighting in the new and unexplored playground of London that, for girls like Tilly who had grown up in Shropshire, Liz who was from Harrogate, and Julia from Bath, was nothing short of one adventure after another.
These girls hung out in coffee shops in the West End and went out with boys who had very long hair, boys who wore suede and fancied themselves as poets.
Boys who smoked grass and liked to hypothesise about utter bollocks while confusing the reading of Kafka and Sartre with actually being Kafka or Sartre.
These girls were pleasant enough; it was just that their lived experience and hers was so very different it was hard to find common ground.
The main difference, she quickly came to understand, was money.
Tilly, Liz, Julia and others like them had grown up with it, and she had not.
A shared love of art could only take them so far, but when they had, on a whim, decided to go to Paris, booking flights as casually as she’d buy a bus ticket, Lilly knew she was not in their league.
Her job at the B’Art gallery in Pimlico did, however, buy her a brief whiff of popularity, as Bertie Barnes was momentarily famous, or infamous, depending on who you asked.
This was after his alleged affair with a senior-ranking Tory was splashed all over the News of The World.
The person who looked the least impressed in the rather grainy paparazzi shots being said Tory minister’s wife.
‘Have you seen this?’ She had rushed into the gallery with a copy of the paper in her hand, brandishing it in the air like a flag.
‘Oh, don’t! Yes, I have.’ Bertie had covered his face with his hands. ‘My nose looks big, don’t you think? It’s a most unfortunate angle. Do you think my nose looks big?’ This apparently was his most pressing concern. That, and how upset Beautiful Jack had been by the indiscretion.
Bertie continued to be a friend and a huge influence in her life.
He was a fount of knowledge! His expertise was broad, covering a variety of subjects from how to style her hair and the right choice of accessory to pep up any outfit to where to find the best cappuccino this side of Watford.
She worked in the gallery on weekends, the odd evening and during her holidays and, frankly, would have done so for nothing; the fact that Bertie paid her handsomely was just a wonderful bonus.
He was, she came to realise, terrible with money.
It was quite typical when he sold some artwork for a hundred pounds and immediately treated himself to a Murano glass chandelier that set him back nearly two hundred.
‘Can we afford it?’ she’d asked tentatively, as he admired the stunning twisted loops of glass in greens and blues.
‘Don’t be so vulgar! We never talk about affordability!’ He had thrown the Tatler at her in protest.
‘Is talking about affordability more or less vulgar than knitted loo-roll holders, pampas grass and Viennese Whirls?’
‘Oh, Bob! You have the best memory! How I love that boy, Beautiful Jack!’ He closed his eyes and clasped his hands. ‘Do you think he’ll forgive me?’
‘I’m sure he will.’ She hoped it sounded convincing.
‘Maybe I should give him a call . . .’ he’d murmured as he wandered off.
This was her favourite kind of day, warm and breezy.
With her easel set up on the towpath and the sun casting nets of diamonds out over the surface, Old Mother Thames sparkled!
The only fly in the ointment was the dust and noise created by the plethora of workmen who toiled in their donkey jackets to widen Vauxhall Bridge.
A mammoth undertaking that upset the rhythm of life on this side of the river.
She lifted her hand in a wave to the other side of the bank.
It was as she pondered her palette, trying to imagine the colour combination that would perfectly capture the way the light seemed to be coming from beneath the water, that not for the first time she got the uneasy feeling she was being watched.
Quickly turning her head to the left and right, she held her breath, more than a little unnerved.
Finally she narrowed her eyes across the water, figuring her dad was right, that it was most probably someone in one of the flats or offices opposite, just as in love with their stretch of the river as she was.
Maybe they, too, were drawn to the tiny cresting jewels being pushed up to the surface, no doubt by a river nymph, or maybe that leviathan whose head they’d once spotted, trying to show the world that he was in fact a nice guy.
‘What are you painting?’ A man’s voice made her jump, so lost was she in her imaginings.
This was not an unusual question. There seemed to be a certain fascination for anyone passing the moment they spied her, brush in hand.
‘Oh.’ Lilly looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the midday sun with her hand.
With his back to the light his face was in shadow, but his shoulder-length hair, curls – dark curls – were part hat, part halo.
This made her smile, thinking that if you swapped the shadow for an apple, he was a walking Magritte.
She didn’t like anyone looking at her work when it was underway, not really, didn’t like talking to anyone about her art mid-progress.
Especially strangers, who typically didn’t really want to know about her style, materials, inspiration or perspective but rather wanted to use her work as a vehicle to talk about their own technique; what they liked or didn’t like, how they hadn’t painted since school, or once went to an exhibition, yada .
. . yada . . . yada . . . Everyone was a critic.
‘Just the river, the water.’
She kept it vague, doing her best to sound polite, responsive but with just the right amount of dismissal to her tone that might encourage him to shut up and go away.
There was something about sitting at an easel that was akin to opening her diary and inviting the world to come and take a look.
Trouble was, she hadn’t yet figured out how to paint in this, her favoured spot on the towpath, without such interruptions.
‘Mind if I sit?’
Yes! Yes, I do! I mind very much! Please just leave me alone! was her mental response; ‘erm’ the rather pointless word that actually left her mouth.
The man seemed to take her lack of decisiveness as consent and perched on the wall by her side, but said nothing.
It was a silence that was odd. The kind of quiet that might occur when you were well acquainted with someone but not when you were total strangers.
It made the whole encounter most peculiar, if a little energised.
Not that she was a stranger to peculiar or odd, having been called both, and recognising both within herself.
Bertie had said not to think of herself as odd, but rather unique! This was the mantra she repeated when her confidence was flagging, and it helped, a little. Glenda had roared her laughter when she’d shared this trick with her.
‘Unique? Sweet Jesus, we’re all unique, Lil, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Some of us are unique and bat-shit crazy, some of us unique and absolutely miserable! I’d settle for being bloody average. Not too many highs, very few lows, but bloody average, that’d do me.’
It struck her as the oddest of ambitions, that and wanting to get married quickly so she could start collecting Pyrex.