It’s one of those dimly remembered but vivid movie scenes. Sometime back around 1958, so perhaps when I was seven years old, I caught the last few minutes of a film on our black and white Bush 24-inch 405 line television. It must have made quite an impression on me but how accurate are my memories from 60 years ago.
I never knew the name of the film but scanning today’s listing for the Talking Pictures channel I’m sure that No Room at the Inn, 1948, about evacuees billeted with the ‘savagely nasty’ Mrs Voray. That’s got to be the one.
I’ve drawn my memories of the scene so that I can compare them with the actual film.
On this day, 7th May, in 1995, we invited my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, and Barbara’s mum and dad, Bill and Betty Ellis, to reminisce about VE Day for the 50th anniversary. My mum was a primary school teacher in Sheffield who, in the early stages of the war, took evacuees to stay in rural Derbyshire to escape the bombing. In the Sheffield Blitz my grandad’s house was bombed but my mum, grandma and grandad were safe in the Anderson Shelter in the back garden. My great grandma next door wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t like the shelter, so she hunkered down in the cellar but the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit and demolished her house. Luckily great grandma and her pet bird in a cage were rescued via the coal shoot.
What the three of them reminisced about 25 years ago, I can’t tell you as we no longer have a cassette player in the house. My mum celebrated in Sheffield, Barbara’s mum was in Horbury but I’ve forgotten now whether Bill and my dad, Douglas, were on leave at the time.
When the lockdown is over, I’ll get the cassette transferred to digital.
My mum, Gladys Joan Swift, as she was before her marriage at the end of the war, somewhere in the Peak District, c.1946.
Robert and Jane Bell at Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound in the 1950s. Colour added at colourise.sg. In real life the bricks and pantiles were terra cotta red, the paintwork green and creamy white.
My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.
After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.
As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.
The ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’ prompt in my writer’s notebook.
Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.
Grandma’s Cupboard
The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.
Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.
The silhouette of the woman in headscarf and long coat made a welcome contrast to the men in jacket & jeans and anorak & cords that I’d just drawn. A woman walked briskly by, clutching a cake box, mug and a potted artificial succulent, adding a touch of drama in comparison with most of the shoppers who went for the easier options of a trolley or a basket.
I drew in pen, making brief notes about colour, which I added later when we stopped for a cup of coffee and a Debenhams’ orange and cranberry scone.
Twenty Twenty
WordPress themes ‘Twenty Nineteen’ and ‘Twenty Twenty’.
I’ve just updated my blog to the latest version of WordPress and couldn’t resist trying out their latest theme, Twenty Twenty. It’s a contrast to all the themes that I’ve tried previously as it’s got a tinted background – a neutral creamy shade – instead of the pure white that I’ve always used, but I like the way this sets off the watercolour in my drawings.
It’s easy to read too. I like the variable typeface Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson.
The drawback of the Twenty Twenty theme for me is that by default it shows a reduced version of images, so I’ve soon gone back to the Twenty Nineteen theme.
As I was drawing my self portrait, this fly settled on the page.
If portraits were postcard size, you’d be able to fit the shortlist of the BP Portrait Award into Horbury’s telephone box art gallery. This self portrait, from forty years ago, is from one of the ‘Bushey’ 7 x 4½ inch landscape sketchbooks that I used in the late 1970s, as are all but one of the fourteen sketches in this post.
The red pullover was knitted for me by my old friend John Blackburn’s mum, Barbara. Mrs Blackburn was a thrifty knitter and, when you’d grown out of a jumper, she could unravel the wool and use it again. In this way, a batch of wool could be recycled through several generations of jumpers.
In the background, you can see my home-made bookshelves in the alcove. When I drew the portrait, I sat at my work bench on a utility Windsor kitchen chair, which is why I look as if I’m leaning on a gate.
My room in a shared flat. I assembled my work bench – complete with vice – in the room so when I moved out a few years later I had to saw through my built-to-last mortice and tenon joints in order to bring it down the stairs! Now in a cut-down version, it is hinged to our garage wall.
As an exercise in the Open University’s FutureLearn ‘Start Writing Fiction’ course, we were asked to write a story based on the first subject that we heard when we turned on the radio.
There was a bit of user bias in my starting point, as I knew that it was tuned to Radio 3 and that I was about on schedule for the afternoon concert. Sibelius’s 5th Symphony was described by his old friend Granville Bantock as bringing the listener ‘face to face with the wild and savage scenery of [Sibelius’s] native land, the rolling mists . . . that hover over the rocks, lakes and fir-clad forests . . .’
Perfect!
You can download the whole story, all three pages of it, via the link below. I used the ‘Modern Novel’ template in Pages and dropped in my text and the drawing of pine and juniper from my April 1977 sketchbook.
Original drawings in my pocket-sized A5 (landscape) sketchbook
It’s rare for me to sit and draw from life but I get the chance this morning as I wait for my appointment at Specsavers on Little Westgate, Wakefield. Perhaps because we’re still in the holiday season, there aren’t as many people in town as I’d expected. This is a good thing because instead of picking out a favourite character from a crowd I have to draw, at random, whoever happens to be walking past. Often there’s only one person in view.
After my course in web comics, I realise that every person embodies their own short story. Each person has a particular walk. The man with the striped trousers is the most determined and confident, while others are more diffident. The woman in the centre pauses at the threshold of a shop as if debating with herself whether she should enter.
Watercolour added later. I remember the colour of the carrier bag better than the colour of some of the footwear and trousers.
As we entered this archway under by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, a man was feeding the birds on the bridge above us. Along with bird seed for the pigeons, he’d brought a can of sardines; he flipped open the lid as a heron warily sidled up to him along the parapet and it leant forwards to take one from his hand.
For me, walking through this archway from Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens is like stepping back in time; for three years I was lucky enough to have this as my lunchtime walk. After a morning of close-up work as a natural history illustration student at the Royal College of Art, next door to the Royal Albert Hall, all I had to do was cross Kensington Gore by the Albert Memorial and I could walk under ancient elms (soon to succumb to Dutch Elm Disease) and sweet chestnuts, down to the lake near the Peter Pan statue.
We were back in London for the day in December for the preview of Elizabeth Butterworth’sWings and Feathers, a collection of new paintings, at the Redfern Gallery on Cork Street. As usual when we’re in a city, we walked for miles, ten miles in total, from Kings Cross, much of that through parks: Regents Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and Green Park although Barbara insisted that we take the bus from 221B Baker Street to Marble Arch.
This park shelter on an improbably lofty scale, near the fountains at the top end of the Serpentine, stuck in my memory from my first visit to London in 1958, when I was aged seven. What also stuck in my mind, and apologies if I’ve told this story before, was that as we queued up outside the Science Museum on Exhibition Road, my mum explained to me that the building across the road, the one with the Arts & Crafts mosaic sign and its intriguing entrance through an archway, was the Royal College of Art.
Sweet chestnut, Kensington Gardens
“If you work hard at school, you might go there,” she suggested.
The prospect of drawing every day was enormously appealing to me! On that day we also visited the Natural History Museum where a group of students were laboriously drawing the dinosaur skeletons. I remember thinking that, if I was drawing there, I’d make things a bit more exciting and I’d bring the dinosaurs to life.
A day in my life as a student in my next post . . .
I had a reputation as a naturalist amongst the local children; once I was presented with a specimen of a dragonfly that had been trapped in a conservatory and on another occasion a neighbour’s son reported seeing a large black cat near the quarry in the wood, at a time when ‘The Black Beast of Ossett’ was roaming the nearby countryside.
Children assumed that I’d know what to do with orphaned or injured birds. In fact the only birds that I ever kept, two Bengalese finches that I bought, hoping to breed, when I worked on the illustrations for Ways of Drawing Birds, died when I allowed them to feast on too much lettuce. The best I could do was to phone a friend, a headmaster who lived in Horbury, who kept silver pheasants and owls in an aviary. I didn’t record in my diary what became of the hapless nestling.
Walking along the road in April that year, I was recognised by two skateboarding children. The girl pointed me out to her companion: “It’s Richard Bell, he’s an artist.” The boy must have confused me with another artist, perhaps the only one he’d so far learnt about at school . . .
Testing different pen tools and brush tools in Procreate for iPad.
People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.
Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.
It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.
Pencil, Pen & Paint in Procreate
I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.
I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.
Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.
