The school was amazing. It was all squashed up with the main art school for adults in a terrible old building because the air force had taken over the real one. Auntie Pam took me and I got enrolled quite easily. She just signed me in. We had a poke around and she said, ‘Jesus Christ! Rather you than me,’ but it was tremendous, really, because all the partitions made a lovely maze that came in quite useful, and having to cart buckets of water all the time was pretty good, too.

The best thing, though, was the ‘Head’, who was big and fierce. She gave a speech when we started and it was the best one I’ve heard.

She said, ‘If you want to be artists you have to learn to stand on your own feet and never let anyone boss you around. Don’t ever be wishy-washy and lily-livered. Be original and stick to your guns.’

Dad would have liked it, too. I knew then that art was going to be my true vocation.

It was weird at first with all those kids around expecting you to talk to them, and learning to splosh your paint and throw yourself into the clay and just strolling around in class whenever you wanted, looking at what everyone else was doing. It was good, though, and the teachers were fun and never got cross. You could get away with a lot because the head said that being a little devil was good for your art. She did get cross quite often, but you were supposed to stand up to her to strengthen your character.

One day I heard something that opened my eyes. It was the head who said it. She’d been warning us that the school inspector⁶⁸ was due because all they were were a lot of old Mathematicians! I asked straight away.

‘What is wrong with mathematicians?’

‘They don’t know anything about art.’

I was stunned. How true!

‘But what if an artist is good at maths?’

‘They never are,’ she said.

Well, that dished my dad, and I suddenly realised how fatal it could have been to my future if I’d gone to a real high school. I might have got good at maths before I realised. It can make you feel quite sick.

But best was learning how to be silly. There was this girl called Dixie Flynn (Rubbish Bin for short) and she started us off. What you did was tramp in a long snake around all the corridors chanting, ‘Flippety-flop, here comes the mop. Flippety-flop, here comes the mop’ over and over again, and you had to waggle your hands in the air in time. It was very liberating. We did it all recess time for weeks. It drove the adult students crazy.

Then you realise you can invent your own things, so we started wearing our clothes back to front and spending all lunch hour running up ‘down’ escalators and down ‘up’ ones in big city stores and going without shoes and wearing nothing under smocks. (I drew the line here because I was writing back to Grandma every week and I was having enough trouble with what to leave out. As it was she was getting crotchety about lax standards.) You could do whatever you liked out of the buildings because there wasn’t any yard; just the city streets and shops and things. I had never had so much fun in all my life!

The whole of the first term I kept on getting lighter and happier and sillier like a gas balloon starting to take off. Having fun isn’t at all easy, and sometimes I got pretty scared, but you have to be firm about these things and commit yourself. Artists aren’t like other people.

Then it got to be nearly end of term. It was almost time to go home to Grandma and I started to think about it. Well, not so much that as trying not to, but it wasn’t much good. I started getting stomach aches and having to shoot off to the lav.

The head asked me what I’d been eating, and I said: ‘What if I’m made to leave school?’

‘Rubbish! You’re going to get a splendid report.’

I sort of smiled and started to go. She peered at me.

‘We’ll think of something,’ she promised. ‘We can’t have money messing up our kids’ chances.’

I left it at that. I was pretty sure that if Grandma came to the school saying I had to leave because art was rot the head would probably punch her on the nose, but nothing was going to change Grandma’s mind.

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