I have never understood why my parents agreed to let me do it. I think Mummy must have found out that he was a very famous painter, because as I have said, she was quite the social climber and delighted by celebrities. Daddy might have disapproved but, ultimately, when he saw the determined females ranged against him, he gave way and he did as he was told.
I stipulated that my parents were to deliver me to the house in Fordingbridge and then they must go away and come back a couple of hours later to drive me back. That’s what we did.
Beforehand, I practised taking off my clothes quickly in my bedroom. I remember that I wore a blue and white polka-dot dress, which had, as it were, easy access and I could get it on and off without fuss. I didn’t wear stockings, just some socks and my sandals. So off we drove — it took over two hours to get there but when we arrived at his beautiful old house — a big country manor — my parents, at my request, dumped me on the doorstep and drove away.
I rang the doorbell. Nothing happened for about ten minutes, and I was beginning to get rather anxious, when suddenly from around the side of the house came a very strange, tiny old lady with fine, wispy, white-grey hair, wrapped in a Mexican blanket.
She saw me and said, ‘Oh, hello. Have you been waiting long?’ She rang the doorbell again, and Augustus John came to the door and opened it. He was smoking a pipe, and he was tall and imposing with that full white beard and the shock of straggling snow-white hair I remembered from the television. He wore what I used to call dungarees — it was a boiler suit made out of denim — and he had a little, dark, flat cap like a beret on his head.
I said, ‘Hello, I’m Miriam.’
Augustus John said, ‘Oh, yes. Come in, come in!’
He seemed very well-to-do and commanding, with a great booming voice. The house was dark, messy and muddled. Dorelia insisted, ‘We must have some tea before we start.’ So, we three went into the kitchen. I sat down nervously and Dorelia said, ‘Do you like bread and jam?’ And I replied, ‘Yes.’ She carved me a couple of slices of brown bread and covered them with jam — and it was nice jam, homemade, although I was so anxious that I remember finding it hard to swallow. Then — and this is the thing I really remember — I noticed on the wall there was a painting of a woman sitting in a chair with her back to us. Augustus John said, ‘Do you like that painting?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do, I do like it. Very much.’ He said, ‘Well, my sister Gwen painted that, and one day people will come to realise she was a much better painter than I am.’ And he was right, I think they have.
He asked me if I knew how to play shove-ha’penny. I’d never heard of it and said so. He brought out a little board and taught me how to play it. I’ve never played it since. He asked a bit about me — what did I want to do, and what was I doing, but I can’t truly remember much else of the conversation because I was so wonderstruck. I was very much in awe of this man who seemed to fill the landscape — he really was a big chap. Some people dwindle with age, but he didn’t seem to: he was still immensely physical, and very present.
After this slightly awkward chat, Augustus said, ‘Right, well, we’ll take you into the studio now.’ We went out of the house and into the studio, which was an extraordinary white modernist construction at the bottom of the garden, with two storeys and a strange, curved, snailshell-like staircase. His studio space was on the ground floor. It had a high ceiling, tall windows with clean, white upholstered window seats (where, I supposed, his models must have posed), and lots of dazzling light. Like the house, it was higgledy-piggledy and not at all tidy.
Augustus said, ‘I’m doing a study of bathers by the sea. You might as well take your clothes off now.’ And so, without any curtain or anything, I speedily divested myself of my polka-dot dress in front of him. This was the moment I’d been waiting for; I was nervous but excited too, in a good way. I’d never stripped for anyone before, certainly not for a strange man. I wasn’t wearing a bra. I wanted to keep everything simple. I took off my socks and shoes, then finally my knickers, and I stood there naked, feeling quite embarrassed, hoping my plumpness wouldn’t put him off.
Augustus John looked at me, stroked his beard contemplatively, and said, ‘Very nice. Very nice.’ Then he said, ‘Your skin takes the light.’ I thought that was a fine compliment; I treasure it still. Then he said, ‘Good! Well, I think what I’d like you now to do is to climb that ladder.’ And I thought, ‘Blimey, I wasn’t expecting that!’
I looked to where he’d indicated and there was a library ladder, which had steps and a pole you could hold on to. He wanted me to go up and down it. I walked over to the ladder and somewhat awkwardly I clambered up and down. All the while, Augustus John stroked his beard and stared at me. Then he started to draw. I suppose I was there for a couple of hours doing different poses — not all on the ladder. He didn’t talk much when he was drawing as he was concentrating, but he was always avuncular, like a humorous uncle, gentle and so sweet. It was a wonderful experience and I cherish it, and one that I later recounted to Michael Holroyd, his biographer.
I remember little of the journey back. Of course, my parents were very interested to know if Mr John had behaved himself. And he had. I had nothing untoward to report on that front, because he’d comported himself quite impeccably. I’m not sure that I shouldn’t be insulted that he didn’t attempt at least a quick grope, or whether it was Dorelia’s watchful eye that ruled out any unseemly advances, because I later discovered that Augustus John’s insatiable sexual appetite had allegedly resulted in his fathering up to one hundred offspring. Supposedly, whenever he walked down the King’s Road in Chelsea, he would pat any passing ragamuffin on the head ‘in case it’s one of mine’.
I wrote to him again afterwards, and very sweetly he wrote back and said that it had been very nice to meet me and that he’d like to do some more sketches. But shortly after that, in 1961, he died. I have those letters somewhere. And I never did see the drawings. I don’t know what happened to them. They must be somewhere in his oeuvre.
I’m so glad I had the courage to do that. But possibly the thing that clinched the deal was that I said I would do it for free, because most people would have expected money in return. So, the lesson of this story is, I suppose, that it’s sometimes worth taking off your clothes for nothing.
Miriam Kibbutznik
Being Jewish, I’ve been lucky enough to have two distinct linguistic influences in my life — English, obviously, because I was born and brought up in Britain, but the cadences of Yiddish are also deliciously familiar. As a little girl, I was always hearing the sounds of people whose first language was not English. As the only Yiddish-speaking GP in Oxford, the many refugees from London and abroad who found my father did so with relief. For many, German was their mother tongue, but they didn’t want to speak that language anymore; it reminded them of the Nazis and how they had suffered at their hands. They preferred to speak English, albeit brokenly, with the German-Jewish accent which, whenever I hear it, brings back a vanished milieu. My father’s patients would try hard to be English and would say things like, ‘How are you? Very nice to meet.’[8] When we brought Gertrude Stein and a Companion to the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1985, I heard those same accents in the theatre foyer and all over Swiss Cottage. Death has silenced those voices now but I remember them and love to imitate them so they live again.
8
One of them, Mrs Kemp, used to say, ‘Dr Margolyes, I put my leg down!’ — instead of ‘I put my foot down.