Athens

It was 1967 and I was in Athens with Jim. I had been commissioned to make a map of the Greek islands to include their mythology, the local gallery owner had said he would exhibit anything I cared to produce. I was earning a little money from sketching portraits in the cafes beneath the Acropolis and I had managed to pay for a room in a hostel

Jim could be back at any time. I needed to get away fast. I went to my room and packed my rucksack. I looked out of the windows. It was still early and there were very few people around.

I had spent the night thinking and planning.

The time had come for me to get permanently away from Jim and to set up on my own. I had work and an income, I had made useful contacts and some friends. I would be able to survive.

I had, in fact, already been offered a flat in the centre of Plaka. The owner of the art gallery had put me in touch with an artist who wanted to sub-let his flat for a few weeks and I had gone to look at it.

It was cool with wooden floors and long windows at both ends of the main room which ran from one alley to the next but, scared to be alone with Jim, I had turned it down. But now that I was independent, I decided to go and look at it again. With my wad of cash, I would be able to pay the full rent.

It was still early morning when I stepped out onto the street with my rucksack. I would enter the alleyways in Plaka and disappear in its protective warren.

I had not even reached the camouflage of the little alleys when Jim sauntered towards me from the shadows of the closely-packed houses.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.

I didn’t reply, just walked faster and with more determination towards Plaka.

‘You need protection,’ he said running beside me.

I still didn’t answer.

‘This is no place for a girl to be on her own,’ he said.

I could have given any number of answers but I knew the best one was silence.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

I kept on walking.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘You need protection.’

‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘I need to be alone. Please go away.’

I knew there was no hope he would obey me or even hear me.

I was too shocked to think clearly. I had made up my mind to go and rent the beautiful flat and even though I was now being shadowed by Jim and knew I would not be able to get away from him, I stayed faithful to my decision. I reached the flat and rang the bell at the front door on street level. No-one answered.

‘Never mind,’ Jim said circling my wrist with his hand. ‘I know where we can go.’

I had a notion that Jim had a secret life that I knew nothing about. There had been plenty of times when he had disappeared sometimes for hours or even a whole night.

Telling me that he would take me to another flat owned by another artist, he led me along seedy alleys and dismal streets past mangy cats and half-starved dogs and opened the door to an unlit concrete entrance. He called out to someone in the basement and then, feeling our way along the wall, we descended the concrete stairs.

The only light came from a bare bulb on a wire. It showed us a concrete space containing a sink, a toilet and a cooking ring. This was both the kitchen and bathroom. Beyond it was another space where we could just make out a figure lying on a mattress on the floor. He reached for his cigarettes and getting heavily to his feet, retched then lit one.

He was a jowly, flabby man in his late middle-age wearing no more than a vest and pants.

The artist’s art was not on display and nor was any art equipment. What was on display was his sexuality in the form of a very young boy.

He was a street kid. His body was stiff and strong and upright without the bendiness and suppleness of children and his personality was the same. I suppose he was a survivor since he was surviving but though he had been picked up from the streets he could be sent back there at any moment or could choose to go himself.

I had never heard of pederasty or paedophilia. Those words were not in common currency and the concepts were unknown. And yet I did have some awareness that the artist’s interests in this kid were sexual. It was obvious they were not philanthropic.

I tried to make a relationship with the kid. There were no other women in his life. But he had no time for me. He was perpetually suspicious and focussed only on what was immediately ahead of him. There was no time or space for fun or play.

Over the next few days while I slept on the concrete floor in what might just as well have been an underground carpark, I watched the street kid come and go. He seemed so much more sorted than I was. He had a purpose, rushing out for what seemed to be assignations, coming back a little wealthier.

It might have been around this time that I too had an assignation. I am not sure how it happened but I was driven – I’m not sure who by - to a Bauhaus-style house on a high hill and introduced to its owner, another man in his late middle age but this one well dressed and sophisticated. I had been told that he had a magnificent collection of art and I had been under the impression that I was being taken to see his Fauvists.

Whoever it was who drove me there left me alone with the art collector and it became immediately apparent that he had requisitioned me for other purposes than to appreciate his collection.

He was civilised and polite though taken aback by my blind naiveté. He accepted my refusal both of his kind offer to make love to me and of his kind offer of money and ordered me a taxi.

While we waited we chatted about art and literature and he gave me a silk dress and a book of poetry while I admired a blue and red painting of a horse by Macke.

It might have been that painting that inspired me to get hold of a large canvas and some paints and to embark on a full-scale oil painting. My subject was Jim. He sat for me on a chair in the basement and I produced a work of rich dark colours in which I could see the influence of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon, neither of whom I had any feeling for.

I had become involved in the painting and I didn’t want to let it go. I had finished the subject but now I developed the background. It was a deep blue tinged with purple and without thinking I found myself adding stars. It was the night sky that I had become so used to while I had been in the yet-to-be polluted Athens.

But, my logic went, adding stars made it no longer a portrait. I decided the painting was no good and, although the gallery owner had known I was working on it and had asked to see it, I never showed it to him.

Van Gogh might have destroyed himself but at least he finished his paintings - and added stars. I was intent on destroying myself, set on putting myself down and keeping myself there.

This self-destructive urge could be bolstered by making a philosophy of what I saw around me. The fundamental problem was that I was female and there were no such things as female artists.

No-one had mentioned any at my schools or even at my art school, not even Frida Kahlo who, if referred to at all, was dismissed as primitive, vain and self-obsessed. The fact that she had started painting when she found herself lying flat on her back in a great deal of pain following a road accident and the fact that her only subject was a reflection of herself in the mirror her father had rigged up for her above her bed was never mentioned.

There was no need to explain anything about a female artist’s circumstances because there was no need to include any female artist in any collection, book or lecture on art. They were all missing from the history of art as thoroughly as dissidents were missing from the history of the Soviet Union, and it would be decades before we would hear about them.

Women artists were as anonymous as male artists’ female models. Male artists’ male sitters wore suits; male artists’ female sitters were naked. Male sitters sat; female sitters lounged. Male sitters were upright on chairs facing the artist and the viewer; female ones lay on couches or in baths averting their gaze. Male sitters had status; female ones had none. Male sitters also and fundamentally, had names. Female sitters had no names and therefore no individuality, no personhood. Male sitters were sitters; female sitters were models.

The major difference was of course that male sitters were sitting through choice, either in response to a request or as a commission. Female sitters were, on the other hand, paid although often the pay came in the form of board and lodging with the artist himself.

The female model was a girlfriend, wife or prostitute and posing naked was one of the less onerous aspects of the job.

Was I an artist or a prostitute?

The divide was quite clear and the female artists of an earlier generation – whether in the field of literature, art or music – knew which side they were on.

Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Ottoline Morrel, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, had several things in common. They were tall, thin, lesbian-orientated, wealthy and posh, even aristocratic. And they were figures of both fear and fun for the masses.

Like the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and virtually every woman writer you could name, they were childless (Charlotte Bronte dying from complications in her first pregnancy).

I hadn’t taken the oil painting to the gallery, I hadn’t started the research for the map, I hadn’t rented the perfect flat. Instead, I was dossing in a slum with a violent and aggressive man, a drunken paedophile and an abused street kid.