AN ENGLISH CUBIST
PAULINE PAUCKER:
Sarah: An Anecdotal Memoir
of Sarah Roberts, Wife, Model, Muse and
Defender of William Roberts RA
Illustrations and poems © The Estate of John David Roberts.
Other text © Pauline Paucker, first published by the William Roberts Society, Tenby, 2012
The Reed-pipe, a 1971 portrait of Sarah with the
pipe she made and played in a pipers group
First encounter
Shortly after we moved into our house, in the 1960s, a motorway-box scheme threatened to destroy it together with a large slice of the area north of Regent’s Park and other areas of London. I was appointed to the hastily organised local protest committee as an extra token woman among the town planners and architects of the neighbourhood.
At one meeting fund-raising was discussed. ‘Coffee mornings? The Archway people have those.’ ‘A jumble sale? Can be quite successful.’
‘I was speaking to Mrs Roberts the other day – you know, the wife of the artist, William Roberts; they’re in St Mark’s Crescent. They’re very anti the motorway scheme, and she said she’d be willing to organise a jumble sale to raise some money … ’
‘But they’re rather reclusive, aren’t they?’
‘No, no, that’s him. She’s very sociable.’
‘Is there someone who’ll contact her? Pauline? Yes? They’re in the phone book.’
When I rang her, Sarah asked me to come to tea the next day.
She was outside the house, on the steps, talking to a neighbour, and gestured to me to wait. Pink-cheeked, a softly wrinkled face, abundant silver-grey wavy hair, wearing a pinny, she looked like an old-fashioned countrywoman.
She ushered me down the sharp-edged flight of concrete steps at the side of the house – how often was I later to scuff my shoes walking down them! – and in by the side door to the basement sitting room looking over the garden and canal.
‘I have to finish my guitar practice, do you mind? Do you play? No? You know, music is a great solace as you grow older.’ Seating herself in a corner by an ornate music-stand, curiously out of keeping with the simply furnished room, she began to play, hesitantly, with many pauses.
‘My son is teaching me by his special method,’ she said.
There was a Roberts painting over the fireplace – gypsies lighting a fire in a wintry wood – and in a corner a watercolour of what could only be the son, John, guitar case on his back, asking the way of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I was used to seeing Roberts’s work each year at the Royal Academy’s summer shows, it was very familiar, but I decided it was not the right moment to make a comment: Sarah was still plink-plinking at her guitar.
Instead, I went over to the bookcases on either side of the fireplace.
A nice selection, mostly linen-bound, with faded backs. George Moore’s Ave, Salve, Vale, in a better edition than mine; Andrew Lang; Edmund Gosse – essays, and his Father and Son. There were the Russians: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and here was the same small-format green-linen set of Constance Garnett’s translation of Chekhov’s short stories which we had. Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Gissing – a very nice collection, I thought, someone to talk to here, people of pleasantly old-fashioned taste. And ah! Seven Pillars of Wisdom, popular edition – surely Roberts had done several drawings for this? Next to it a one-volume edition of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta; well, I had the two-volume set … Here Sarah called me away for tea.
Later, John and Sarah told me that they had felt I was an acceptable friend because I had gone straight to the bookcase to handle the books; but then I too was a collector.
Tea was made, Sarah taking me into the charmingly furnished kitchen: pots and pans on shelves, a wooden kitchen table, chunky cupboards, and a baby gas stove. It was rather strong tea which she brewed – the Robertses favoured the Typhoo Tips brand. She had prepared buttered tea-matzo biscuits and home-made rocklike rock cakes. We carried cups, saucers, plates back to the sitting room to sit at a small, round pedestal table in the bay window.
As we talked she told me of her son, who she was sure would like to meet me – ‘an attractive man of fifty’ she said.
‘And do you have a car?’ she asked.
‘No, I walk.’
’Well, you shall be my walking companion. So many of my friends have cars, they don’t want to walk. So that’s fixed. I’ll call you.’
There had been no discussion of motorways or of jumble sales, but on the day Sarah presided over a stall. The motorway-box scheme was eventually abandoned owing to a change of thinking, lack of money and, we hoped, opposition from the public.
On foot with Sarah: the first outing
‘My friend Norah Meninsky and I are going out walking on Hampstead Heath. Would you like to join us? I’ll come round the corner to collect you and we’ll take the no. 24 bus up. Norah will meet us there.’
Norah, large and handsome, was, as I had guessed, the widow of William Roberts’s artist friend Bernard Meninsky, his second wife. His first, Sarah told me later on the way home, had run off with a very good-looking chemist living opposite them and had left him with two small boys to look after. Norah, she said, had coped splendidly.
‘She was one of Cochran’s Young Ladies, in the chorus, though I wonder how, with those legs, don’t you?’ There seemed no answer to this.
As we walked from the bus across to the Heath, Sarah darted into one or two shops on the Green. Norah called across, ‘Sarah, come out of there, we are here to walk on the Heath. You have a butterfly mind.’
Norah, I found later, believed herself to be intellectually superior to Sarah, who often played the fool to disguise her innate shrewdness.
We were soon moving swiftly towards Kenwood, Sarah then in her late sixties and still a brisk walker, Norah likewise. They were exchanging anecdotes of their pasts, scandalous stories of friends of long ago.
Sarah, feeling I was left out, turned to me and said, ‘You must excuse us. One of the few pleasures of old age – and let me tell you there are very few – is finding out about people you knew, rounding off their lives. You read an obituary or a biography and then you see why she played that dirty trick on you or why he disappeared so suddenly.’
Here she turned back to Norah, who was saying, ‘I’m not suggesting that she was always on the game, but after he left her there was certainly an episode.’
‘Well, it would have been before she went to live with what’s-his-name and probably no more than an episode. Even so … ’
And on they went.
‘I know every path on the Heath,’ said Sarah, pointing out to someone the way.
He who must not be spoken to
When one met Sarah in the street with her husband – ‘Bobby’, as she and John called him – she would stop to talk and he would either walk on slowly or stand a little aside, smiling vaguely, which obviously would shorten the conversation.
Some people were offended by this refusal to speak to them, but surely this was his chosen way, which I respected. Certainly he was never offensive. He was obviously painfully shy, and so was his son, John. They both relied on Sarah to a certain extent for much of their contact with the world.
One day soon after I had met her, coming back from a joint outing to a gallery, I noticed that she had left her umbrella on the bus. I walked back the one stop to St Mark’s Crescent and knocked on the front door of no. 14 thinking Sarah would be there to open it, having just got home.
But the mottled glass of the door panels showed the red and purple blotches of Roberts’s high-coloured face. ‘Who is it? What do you want?’ he called petulantly, without opening the door.
The Card Trick, 1968
I knew that he was ‘he who must not be spoken to’, and that the front door was not to be knocked at – especially after an intrusive journalist had recently gained entry and written a denigrating article for the Observer colour supplement, which rankled.
I shouted through the letterbox that Sarah had left her umbrella on the bus and that I would push it through.
There was a pause, and then he bent down to the letterbox saying, in a strangled voice, ‘Thank you very much.’
This was the first time he spoke to me. He was to speak to me once more.
Introduction to John
I was eventually introduced to John, over tea, and realised that I knew him by sight: a burly, grey-haired man who would walk with a curious swinging motion round the corner of Regent’s Park Road on his way to the Camden Town buses, or be seen in the park, talking to himself – composing a quatrain no doubt, in his role as a poet.
We talked about book-buying: he had been a runner, and was still dealing in a small way. He disapproved of our never having sold a book and preferring to give away any duplicates. ‘Bad for trade,’ he said.
We invited him to come with Sarah and look at our collection of books. After tea he rose and, first wiping his hands on the seat of his trousers, selected a book to inspect, pushing in the books at either side a little before taking the spine of the one chosen by the middle, carefully pulling it off the shelf. He then opened the book at forty-five degrees and squinted at it.
Plainly John was a man to be trusted with a library. We were very impressed.
Parents, brother, sisters
Sometimes Sarah spoke of her parents’ life in Russia. That her father, Max Kramer, had been a pupil of the great Russian artist Ilya Repin was regarded by John with some scepticism: he thought it highly unlikely. I once heard him challenge Sarah on this, and she became very defensive – and annoyed.
Certainly Jews were mostly barred from institutes of higher education in tsarist Russia; but there were exceptions, and her father may well have been one.
Only one small painting by him had been displayed in their Leeds home – a landscape – but it eventually disappeared and Sarah said she could hardly remember it.
Her mother, Sarah told me, had been the daughter of a farm bailiff – Russian Jews were sometimes employed in this way. Cecilia had grown up in comfort on the prosperous estate, but after her mother’s death she found life with her stepmother impossible and joined a small travelling opera company which was visiting the town.
She had a good voice, had had singing and piano lessons, and learned quickly.
The Russian bass Chaliapin had begun his career in just such a company, but no career like his awaited her.
She gave up the stage on marriage, but retained a repertoire of operatic arias and Russian folk songs.
She also retained her faith, keeping a kosher household in Leeds, though Sarah remembered her reading her prayer book at home on the Sabbath rather than going to the synagogue, where the family could not afford seats. Her father, it would seem, had become less observant of the faith over the years.
Sarah often told friends the anecdote of how as a young girl she resentfully had to cross the town carrying a trussed live chicken to be ritually killed by the shochet, something she thought ridiculous. ‘It put me off religion for life,’ she would say. But, obviously, for her mother it was cheaper to buy a live chicken in the market than one from the kosher butcher’s shop. (I wonder how her mother fared when visiting her daughter in London, in a household where breakfast began with forbidden bacon.)
Both Sarah and William Roberts disliked all forms of organised religion, but had their own ideas of what religion should be.
Sarah’s stories of how the Kramer family arrived here echo those of so many immigrants before 1914. The world was then open: no passports, no visas. Sarah said that they had bought what they believed was a passage to New York, but, cheated like so many others, they were dumped on a dockside somewhere in England.
There are some questions about Sarah’s place of birth. Born in 1900, she said, she does not appear in the 1901 census. Was she born in Russia like her brother Jacob? Or on the boat? Or in England? Census forms were often not filled in accurately by fearful new arrivals who had come from repressive police states.
William and Sarah married in 1922, three years after John’s birth, around the time of Sarah’s first trip abroad. Perhaps they married in order to give Sarah a British passport, if she had not been born in England.
On arrival, the Kramer parents made contact with a Landsmann, a fellow townsman, who told her father that there was a job going for an artist, in Leeds. There was a Jewish firm of photographers which found customers in the immigrant community. Specialising in portraits taken from old photographs, they wanted an assistant.
‘They went round knocking on doors,’ Sarah said, ‘and asked for photographs to enlarge, or they would offer to do a portrait of someone’s parents. It was quite lucrative, but they paid their staff badly.’ Certainly it proved to be ill-paid, weary hackwork for her father.
Her parents chose not to live in the Jewish quarter of Leeds, but kept apart from the main community, feeling themselves superior to the immigrant shtetl Jews, the rural and oppressed Jewish poor of Russia and Poland.
Literature, music and art were an integral part of Kramer family life.
Her brother Jacob’s heightened stories of his adventurous childhood were not repeated by Sarah when she reminisced, nor did she speak much of his precocious talents as an artist. She talked rather of herself and her sisters, Millie and Leah – how they would walk against the wind hand in hand on the moors outside the town pretending to be the Brontë sisters – and of Friday-evening entertainments put on by the children for their parents. Millie would dance, Sarah recite, Leah performed in some way, and always Jacob ended by dancing an energetic kazatsky.
Cecilia, Millie and (on the right) Sarah Kramer
Sometimes their mother would sing for them, their father happily smoking, he the evening’s non-performing audience.
Up to London
Sarah was intelligent and won a scholarship to the local grammar school, but was hampered by the family’s poverty. ‘There was hardly any money for books and uniform, and I never owned a hockey stick or a tennis racket. There were other girls in the same position, and we stuck together. It wasn’t easy.’
Jacob, as a Leeds School of Art student, had had contact with a Bradford gallery and could earn a guinea or half a guinea with a portrait drawing. Drawings of Sarah – by now a beautiful young girl, often dressed up as an Augustus John-style gypsy – sold well. Sarah herself bought a few when they came up at auction when she was quite old.
An early drawing of Sarah by her brother, Jacob Kramer
The money Jacob received helped the household to keep afloat, but posing for hours after school meant that Sarah fell behind with her schoolwork and her dream of becoming a teacher faded.
Jacob’s idea was that with her striking good looks she should go on the stage – as a dancer maybe, or an actress. Studying at the Slade, he knew people in London who might promote her.
Now she dreamed of going up to London.
When she was fifteen, and on holiday from school, Jacob arranged for her to visit him; she stayed with David Bomberg and his wife.
‘Jacob’, she said, ‘showed me off to his friends like a jewel. It was very embarrassing.’ One afternoon he introduced her to William Roberts, in an ABC tea room – a meeting that was to lead to a very different life: to ‘love among the artists’ as she called it, a favourite phrase with which she often ended an anecdote.
‘Well, that’s love among the artists … ’
‘Love among the artists’
By this Sarah meant living in poverty, from hand to mouth. She had had some experience of this when living in Leeds, but it was a way of life of which some of her friends who had taken their pretty faces into artistic circles soon tired, and they married wealthy businessmen instead. ‘And yet,’ Sarah said once, describing just such a transition, ‘they still envy me, married to an artist. They’d like both.’
Living in a room or rooms, sharing a lavatory, with a sink maybe on a landing, with a money-in-the-slot-meter gas fire and gas ring for heating and cooking requires skills of a kind Sarah had aplenty.
A Roberts painting of a woman washing a small boy, a basin of water on the floor, may well be of Sarah washing John in their cramped quarters.
‘We knew how to have fun, though,’ Sarah reminisced. ‘Some of us would make up parties to the public baths. Living in rooms, there was no way of washing clothes or having a proper bath. We’d take our bundles and some lunch and make a day of it with the other women – real London types. We’d have a laugh together.
‘But, you know, to be poor – really poor – means that a friendship can be broken through the loan of half a crown not paid back. People today can’t imagine just how poor we were in those days.’
Cecilia Kramer
Sarah said that her mother, to her surprise, accepted her relationship with Bobby and developed a genuine affection for him; they got on very well. His painting of Sarah and Cecilia, Jewish Melody, is – or was – a great tribute to mother and daughter, but now exists only as a black-and-white photograph. For some reason it was destroyed, and only the cut-out head of Cecilia Kramer remains. I once asked Sarah and John what had happened to the painting when we were looking at a catalogue in which it was reproduced. They looked uncomfortable and changed the subject.
Jewish Melody: Sarah and her mother, Cecilia, painted 1920–21
Cecilia occasionally came up to London to stay with Sarah and Roberts. The elder daughter of their friend Esther Lahr (Roberts’s striking portrait of her is in the Tate) recounts a story of the two Jewish mothers, Sarah’s and Esther’s, refusing to meet one another though sitting on adjoining benches in Regent’s Park. Both were mothers of daughters who had broken loose from the restraints of Orthodox Judaism and bourgeois respectability and should have had something in common, their daughters thought; but no …
Afternoon tea
During William Roberts’s lifetime Sarah’s only possibility of entertaining friends was at teatime, but at six o’clock Roberts himself came down and Sarah then had to ask her guests to leave. ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ she would say, and guests left by the side door or, if it had been a fine day, by the garden gate. Sometimes Roberts came down early and if guests were still in the sitting room he would go into the garden and sit on the wall supporting the small lawn; once I noticed him looking at us impishly, waiting for us to go (in what John called his leprechaun mood). In summer, if tea had been served in the garden, he would bumble about in the sitting room, very visible in the bay window, and guests would be shooed out.
Tea-matzo biscuits, buttered, Sarah thought were very nice, and digestive biscuits. The Robertses were connoisseurs of digestive biscuits, and believed that there were certain days when they were delivered to the supermarkets when one could be sure of their being fresh. Sarah, as a Yorkshirewoman, should have been a good baker – certainly she was a good cook. But her rock cakes were all too rocklike. Puzzled, she would say, ‘But everything I put in is good.’
Tea was served at the small pedestal table in the bay window, or, when in the garden, on a folding table; a too-small teapot meant going in and out of the kitchen to refill. Teapots were a problem, and the kitchen shelves were ornamented with failures, often made by potter friends but too liable to drip and so banished.
Guests were a mixture of old friends and new; numbers varied from two or three to six or seven, John sometimes present, sometimes not.
‘Not enough trousers,’ said one disgruntled woman guest, around Sarah’s age, herself wearing trousers as I pointed out to her. ‘I mean men,’ she said crossly. Maybe John didn’t count.
But Sarah was also likely to say, at a party, ‘Where are the men?’
The tea-table test
After Roberts’s death, would-be purchasers of the smaller works would be invited to tea by Sarah and John and shown a small selection of the work they were willing to sell. Negotiations for larger pieces took place in the first-floor front room, where the paintings were stacked.
American buyers were regarded with suspicion, and I, as a frequent traveller to the United States, would be asked to be present when an American was a guest, presumably being regarded as someone who could speak to the natives
Two American Kramer cousins were made welcome and bought paintings, but an American friend of mine had to undergo two tea-time tests and eat her rock cakes before being declared to be ‘a very nice woman – for an American’. She was then allowed to buy two watercolours, though one was withheld for a while in case they could buy back the missing piece in the series of sketch, squared-up drawing and watercolour to match the large painting they still owned. It was a scene of visitors to the zoo, the monkeys gazing accusingly at the people watching them, and my friend, a sociologist, said she wanted that particular watercolour because of ‘the body language’ – which fashionable expression rather disturbed Sarah and John: ‘What’s body language? What does she mean?’ But she was finally allowed to buy it, they telling me that they had been unable to buy back the missing piece they had sought.
One American curator, who wished to borrow a self-portrait of Jacob Kramer, owned by John, for an exhibition in New York, failed the tea-table test.
It was winter, and Sarah had served buttered crumpets. ‘What’s this?’ asked the American woman, looking at her plate with distrust.
‘It’s a crumpet,’ said Sarah.
‘A relation of a muffin,’ I said.
‘It’s a traditional English tea speciality,’ added Sarah. ‘Why don’t you try it?’
‘Uh-uh,’ said the visitor, pushing her plate away.
John looked at Sarah and Sarah looked at John; they were shaking their heads.
‘Now, where’s the portrait?’ asked the curator, all professional.
John went upstairs and came down with the very dramatic self-portrait of his uncle. (‘John resembles his uncle more than he cares to think,’ Sarah once said to me, rather crossly, but I never knew in what way.) He displayed it against his chair, and the vividly drawn head seemed more alive than we were as we gazed at it.
‘Oh! That I have to have!’ said the excited curator.
‘Well, I’m not lending it,’ John said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ And he packed it up, much to the astonishment of the American visitor.
Smoking
Sarah smoked just three cigarettes a day – one after mid-morning coffee, one after lunch, and one after supper – seemingly with great enjoyment. She smoked in the way many women of her generation did: not inhaling but puff-puffing, flourishing the cigarette with extravagant gestures as though performing a daring act.
There is a beautiful watercolour portrait of her smoking: she’s standing, her arms crossed, cigarette in hand, her head arrogantly turned to one side.
Sarah, 1923
Aged twelve or thirteen she had taken to stealing cigarettes from her father’s desk to smoke with one or two friends from school. They would go to Jacob’s rented cottage outside Leeds to enjoy them, feeling, she said, wonderfully wicked.
Her father was a heavy smoker – it was to lead to his early death, she thought, combined with the effects of the fixative used in the photographers’ studio where he worked.
One day he caught her rifling the cigarette box. ‘He put me across his knee, pulled down my knickers, and spanked me. I think it gave him quite a kick,’ she told me, laughing. ‘But I forgive him. I bear him no grudge. And it didn’t stop me smoking.’
14 St Mark’s Crescent
Sarah sometimes wistfully spoke of their pre-war London flat: so pleasant, so nicely furnished – they’d been able to buy things from Heal’s, she said. In 1939 they had evacuated themselves to Oxford; it had been a difficult time. She would occasionally speak of the Second World War as though it had been a personal insult: ‘Bobby was beginning to do quite well,’ she would say, ‘and then came that dratted war.’
‘We were so lucky with this house. When we moved in it was only just after the war, when we came back from Oxford. It was a lodging house then, full of people. We moved into the front room with a bed, an easel, a table and two chairs, and a hotplate.
‘Well, I was used to that: that’s love among the artists – we lived in one room in Albany Street when John was small; Regent’s Park was his playground.’
The people downstairs, with whom they shared the bathroom and lavatory, were a motley, rowdy crew, a family waiting for the husband to finish a prison sentence for bigamy. The grandmother, nicknamed ‘Old Mother Dry Rot’ by Roberts, had had to be bound over to keep the peace after attacking Sarah with a soup ladle. (She appears as one of the mothers in his 1955 painting The Rape of the Sabines.)
The husband came out of prison, chose this family, and off they went back to Wales, the Robertses taking over their quarters. Then the main tenant left, with assorted subtenants, and the Robertses remained as sole tenants protected by the then Rent Act.
‘The owner wanted to get rid of the property, but he couldn’t get rid of us so he offered it for £1,200 and my good friend Victoria put up the money – wasn’t that wonderful? She took some paintings in return, but it was without strings.’
Roberts used his inherited carpentry skills to make cupboards, shelves, dividing doors, a landing stage on the canal at the bottom of the garden for their new-bought boat, and Sarah ripped up the rotting carpets, swearing she would never have any. ‘It took months to get all the nails out, and then I stained the boards with Brunswick Black – you know, the stuff used for painting grates: it polishes up nicely.’ It was particularly irksome that the journalist who later bluffed his way into the house wrote of the bare boards as though they spelled naked poverty.
She referred to this quite often.
‘Why did you ever let him in?’ I asked once.
‘I asked Bobby that – he let him in at the front door. He said he thought it was the milkman, and this man just pushed past him into the house and he couldn’t turn him out. I gave him a coffee in the kitchen, like a mug – in a mug – and then he wrote that stuff for a colour supplement. Did you see it? It was disgusting. Have you seen Bobby’s pamphlet answering him back? I’ll let you have a copy: Fame or Defame. It’s very good.’
They bought furniture from the mixed antique-cum-junk shops then in Regent’s Park Road and from Reggie’s stall in Inverness Street nearby – nice pieces, Arts and Crafts chairs, among them a couple of Gimson chairs and some by Liberty, several nineteenth-century round pedestal tables (they liked these), and Victorian armchairs and sofas. A kitchen cabinet had very solid replacement cupboard doors made by Roberts, and he devised impressive bolt-and-toggle fastenings for the larger doors he made in the house.
A friendly upholsterer in Clerkenwell re-covered chairs and sofas with handwoven fabric bought from weaver friends, in the earthy colours approved by the Robertses: brown, grey, yellow ochre, plain or striped, no patterns. Bookshelves were made to fit in the alcoves; kitchen shelving included racks for trays and teacloths.
They achieved a Spartan elegance suited to the display of Roberts’s paintings in the kitchen, the sitting room, the bedroom.
Sarah had once been invited by a wealthy patron to see the new interior-designed house they had bought in Hampstead. ‘Ghastly,’ she said. ‘We went all over and, do you know, not a book to be seen – must be some kind of savages. But they buy paintings!’
The washing line and dyeing today
Sarah was the last person in the Crescent to hang out washing – something her neighbours did not like. The Robertses had a D. H. Lawrence attitude to household tasks: washing and hanging-out on the line was a ritual of bowls, wooden pegs and wicker peg basket, starting with the careful hooking of the washing line on to a sycamore tree which encroached on the neighbouring garden of Lord St Davids. While sheets and towels were taken to a local laundry, smaller items were washed in the double kitchen sink and hung out to dry. One or two ragged garments were usually included ‘to annoy the lord’, as Sarah would say.
Clothes were dyed to dull down too-loud stripes or to fit in with the muted colours that she and Roberts preferred. Some people referred to their wearing Oxfam clothes, but that was not entirely so. She bought in charity shops because they could not afford to pay much; she was clever with her needle and would alter and dye dresses for herself, also dyeing shirts for Roberts and for John, russet-brown or a dull green the favoured colours. Friends occasionally gave her clothes, and she had also made her own. She had made hats and ties too in the past, and these can be picked out in Roberts’s portraits. Later a friendly East End dressmaker, wife of the upholsterer, made up coats and jackets from cloth also bought from weaver friends.
Dyeing clothes was something she did with skill and enjoyment: bowls of water on the floor for soaking , a vigorous wringing-out of the fabric, plunging it into the dye mixture in the sink, stirring it as though in a witches’ cauldron, and then out on to the line to drip colour on the grass.
‘I’m dyeing today,’ she would say to friends on the phone – rather disturbing to hear when she became very old. ‘Is there anything you would like dyed? It’s green, ’ or ‘ …It’s brown.’ Sometimes it was blue, never red; the dark yellow and pale blue of the upholstered sofas were the weaver’s colours, as were the soft-coloured stripes used to cover the chairs.
Victoria Kingsley: a friendship
They were the same age and had met when they were in their early twenties, studying the guitar. Victoria became quite proficient; Sarah never did. Both had been pupils of a Madame Kramer – a coincidence which Sarah, née Kramer, found amusing.
Like Norah Meninsky, Victoria took a pose of being intellectually superior to Sarah, based on her having read English at Oxford – Lady Margaret Hall, as she would stress.
This needled Sarah.
Victoria, I was told, lived off the income from inherited capital (made in trade, Sarah liked to point out), the capital to be kept intact, if possible, and handed on to a future generation. So it was a very generous gesture of friendship for her to have given the Robertses the money to buy 14 St Mark’s Crescent as an outright gift. In gratitude she was given some paintings, which were later to prove more valuable than at the time, in the late forties.
This gave the Roberts a security which so many of his artist contemporaries like Mark Gertler or David Bomberg never enjoyed, condemned to move from place to place. All three Robertses were to remain in the house till their deaths.
Sarah said that Victoria had made a career as a singer-guitarist, travelling with a varied repertoire of English, French, Spanish songs and folk songs, but in a dilettante sort of way, never having had to earn her living. She had been a pretty young woman with a pleasing voice and an attractive stage presence. When I first met her she was over eighty, a commanding figure, then busily writing her autobiography.
Her chosen title was ‘Flowers in My Bath’, because, she explained to me, on foreign tours the floral tributes from her admirers would overflow from her hotel bedroom into the bathroom, filling the bath.
Sarah one day handed me a wodge of typewritten sheets saying, ‘This is what Victoria has written so far. You read it and tell me what you think. I don’t think it’s very good. It’s very self-regarding and rambling, and she’s got no sense of humour – never had.’
I don’t think it found a publisher.
John made no comment on her writing, but he found her difficult and she him – their views on the guitar were opposed.
The right gesture
One sunny day, after we had crossed the park to Baker Street, a seemingly empty open-topped tourist bus pulled up at a nearby stop. Three unauthorised passengers on the top deck – three young boys who’d sneaked a ride – were being shouted at by the driver to get off. They jumped down on to the metal roof of the bus shelter, the crash as they landed sounding like an explosion – and this was at a time of IRA activity in London.
The few women waiting in the shelter screamed in fright; the laughing boys bounded on to the pavement and ran, ducking and weaving among the people in the street.
Sarah, coming up, put out her left arm and grabbed one of them in a skilled move, swinging her other arm round to clout him on the head. He ran off yelling with indignation.
I was struck by Sarah’s rapid response to the fleeing boy – it looked like a drawing by Phil May for Punch: the snatch, the cuff, the boy ducking, his arm up to shield himself.
‘I’m not saying you did wrong, no,’ said a passing man, ‘but you could be had up for assault. Do you know that?’
Sarah ignored him and marched on to board the newly arrived 274 bus. The women who’d been so startled were already sitting there and telling the other passengers what had happened, pointing to Sarah with approval and miming her actions: ‘She grabbed one of them like this and biff! That lady there!’
Sarah ignored them and pointedly talked to me.
The rightness and vigour of her gestures can be seen in so many of Roberts’s paintings for which she had posed: pinning up a dress, beating a rug, scrubbing steps, washing a child.
‘I can’t come out today, I’m posing,’ she would say. It was obvious that it was not only for the usual portrait that she was the model: Roberts needed no other.
The Try-on – study for Dressmakers, 1931
The parting shot
Sarah was good at parting remarks which left her hearers amused.
One day, passing a shop in NW1 called ‘One Night Stand’, she went in, curious to know what it could be.
Two handsome, rather gloomy women sat there alone, dispirited, a rail of evening dresses on one side of the shop, matching accessories on the other.
‘What are you? Oh, I see, dress hire? For an evening out?’ asked Sarah.
They stared at the tiny, elderly, grey-haired woman.
‘“One Night Stand”? Isn’t that rather vulgar?’ said Sarah, casting an eye on the line of fancy frocks. ‘Well, I’ll keep it in mind – you never know your luck, do you?’ And she bounced out, leaving them laughing.
Photographs
One day John rang me up when I was working at home to tell me that Sarah had not been well: some kind of flu, he thought, unusual for her to stay in bed for a few days.
Could he ask a favour?
He had an appointment at two o’clock, his father didn’t want to miss his afternoon walk, but they didn’t like to leave Sarah alone. Could I come and keep her company?
I could find an hour after three o’clock, but who would then let me in? I asked.
‘My father,’ said John.
‘Your father?’
‘It’s all right, he knows perfectly well who you are. Knock on the front door, not the side. And thanks – I’ll be back by four.’
How to deal with he who must not be spoken to? I decided that I would bow slightly and walk silently on when he opened the door.
I knocked, and his high-coloured face became visible through the mottled glass of the front door, which he opened slowly. He stood back, I bowed and made to move on down the hall, but he put his arm out, like a traffic policeman, to stop me. It was not easy for him to speak – his face became purple with the effort.
In a strangled voice he said, with emphasis, ‘This is very good of you.’
‘Not at all,’ I replied, and tried to walk on.
Again he stopped me: ‘Sarah’s bedroom is the second door, on the right.’
‘Yes, I know – I have been here before.’
Perhaps he thought I might mistakenly try to enter the sacred studio, first door on the right. Even the front door was banned to visitors in Roberts’s lifetime.
His voice was high-pitched, rather Bloomsburyish, an upper-class accent of the twenties. It would seem that he and Sarah had worked on their voices: there was no trace of Leeds in Sarah’s speech, whereas her sister Millie retained her Yorkshire tones.
Sarah, 1922
Sarah was sitting up in bed – the bed they had bought from Heal’s pre-war with its handmade mattress; the bed they still shared.
We heard the front door shut and were now alone.
She had a box of photographs in front of her: ‘I thought they might entertain you,’ she said. ‘But first will you do me a favour? Look under the bed, will you, there are some baked potatoes there. I want you to get rid of them. You see, all they could produce for themselves to eat was baked potatoes, and they served me with them and I couldn’t eat them – couldn’t eat anything. But I don’t want to offend them so I’ve been putting them under the bed.’
She thanked me for the fruit and biscuits I had brought, thought she could now eat something, and I could use the bag I had brought the stuff in to carry away the potatoes, couldn’t I?
‘Now for the photos,’ she said.
She took out first a photograph of herself at fifteen, all goo-goo eyes, abundant dark hair, a peach. ‘How could I have stayed in Leeds,’ she asked, ‘looking like that?’ This was the Sarah her brother Jacob had shown off ‘like a jewel’ as she described it, and the Sarah to whom Roberts had first been introduced in an ABC tea room in London.
She had had offers of marriage while still in Leeds, she told me. ‘I might have married a Jewish businessman and belonged to the Leeds Ladies Luncheon Club. Imagine!’
Her next photograph was one of her holding a small shyly smiling John in her arms, she posing confidently with the look of an artist’s model of the twenties.
Then there she was in Paris, looking very chic, and in a group photograph in London with the Meninskys. ‘That’s Meninsky’s first wife – the one who ran away. I just don’t see how you can go off and leave two young children.’
A posed profile studio portrait puzzled me: it didn’t look like Sarah, but was familiar. ‘Is this Millie?’ I asked.
‘No, you daft thing, it’s me.’ (Sarah used schoolgirl language quite often: ‘You’re a real pal!’ ‘Don’t be so daft!’)
One photograph she found disturbing. ‘I’m not too sure about this one. I don’t remember it being taken,’ she said. It was a studio portrait of her young self, aged about thirteen. She was sitting on the floor, naked but for a strategic drape of fabric, her budding breasts exposed, her lovely head bent down, a thoughtful expression on her face. It was a beautiful study – one could imagine it featuring in an artistic photo magazine of the period: ‘Pensive’ perhaps, or ‘Girlhood’.
Presumably it was made by her father in the photographic workshop. This was not an uncommon pose: semi-nude very young girls feature in popular Edwardian art. But tastes have changed. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said.
‘Yes, but isn’t it a bit … don’t you think? I mean, what you read nowadays about paedophiles and child abuse.’ Frowning, she put it back in the box.
John returned and the afternoon came to an end. Several of the photographs were creased or torn, and I had told Sarah that it was easy for the local camera shop to restore them. After John’s death we found the box of photographs, all cleaned up, but the photograph of young Sarah was now one of only the enlarged head: Sarah had made away with the body.
Telephoning and walking
The telephone was placed in the hatch between the kitchen and the sitting room. When Sarah asked me to make a set of photographs of the kitchen for her friends, she especially asked for one which would show her talking on the phone, framed by the set of shelves which displayed china and casseroles.
She phoned frequently: it was an essential part of her life. She kept up contact in this way with her many friends, but she never spoke for very long. She had social skills of a very shrewd kind. Small gifts of fruit or vegetables would be left on one’s doorstep: a bag of mushrooms, some russet apples from the market. The doorbell would be rung and Sarah would be off – ‘You mustn’t outstay your welcome’ was one of her frequent sayings.
Walks across the park would be fixed by telephone, to meet at the fountain in the Broad Walk, an elaborate Victorian monument (given by a wealthy parsee) which John had featured in one of his poems. We would part at the Baker Street exit or at Great Portland Street, I this way, she that, each bent on her own affairs.
Sarah was often late, calling out apologies as she came down the path.
Whatever the weather she was happy to walk. In a biting wind she would shout, ‘It’s so invigorating!’ and as we looked up at the summer sky cry out, ‘Aren’t we lucky to live here!’
She would sometimes join Roberts in the park for his very early morning walk. Roberts himself became friendly with one of the park sweepers, who would greet regulars with a mixture of friendliness and deference so that they might imagine, Sarah said, that in the empty park they were walking in their own grounds.
Roberts was quite happy to speak to people whom he did not see as a threat, and was very touched when, on his last day before retirement, the park employee stood in a new corduroy suit at the gates to say a formal goodbye to the regular early birds.
In her late eighties walking became more of a problem, but she refused to give in, using a stick which became part of her personality, waving it to hail a taxi, flourishing it to make a point. But gradually her horizons narrowed, her walking became more limited – no more Hampstead Heath, no walking across the park; she took a bus.
The Roberts family were fiercely protective of Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill – Roberts had painted so many scenes of people enjoying the green spaces.
At one point there was a fashion for large, crude plastic sculptures, usually of popular figures, and some had been dotted about the park. Morecambe and Wise, two comedians, had been rendered in bright blue plastic suits and were sited near the flower gardens. John talked darkly of breaking into the park at night and blowing them up – ‘For which’, he said, ‘I would gladly go to prison.’
They asked me one day to come out with them, to help carry bags full of cardboard cartons. When we reached the statues, they began to decorate them with cereal boxes, empty packets, plastic bags. People stopped to look, laughing, and Sarah harangued them: didn’t they think that these hideous statues were an insult to the park?
Soon afterwards all the statues disappeared, and Sarah and John felt that they had contributed to their removal.
Liber Amoris and other tales
Sarah was a great admirer of William Hazlitt, and had handsome editions of his work, in particular of her favourite, the strange Liber Amoris, the account of his infatuation for his landlady’s daughter, a book of such a naked, confessional kind that it embarrassed his friends. It fascinated Sarah as a proof of one of her favourite sayings: ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’
‘I know the type,’ she would say. ‘I’ve lived in places like that and seen the lodging-house-keepers’ daughters, sly pussycats who sidle into the gentlemen lodgers’ rooms, willing to go so far and no further … But how he turns against her at the end, that’s not right. What does he call her? A lodging-house decoy, an impudent whore? By then he must have been crazed.’ She had more than one copy of the book which she had picked up over the years.
Much of her reading, aside from her own library, was haphazard, depending on the books John brought home with a view to reselling. She also picked up books at jumble sales – she had a sharp eye.
One day, discussing Hazlitt’s obsessive desire, she said, ‘You know, in a way it’s like that man Munby, the man who had a passion for working women and for servants, the dirtier the work they did the better. I’ve been reading his life – John brought it home the other day; I found it fascinating. And then there are those men who go for prostitutes, want their company. I could tell you a tale about that … Someone we knew well, he died suddenly, and was found together with two of them. Not nice for his wife. It was hushed up, as these things are.’
She was in a reminiscent mood.
‘Behind a lot of the paintings you see in a gallery there’s often a story – a story of how they got there by way of this and that. They’ve been from this person to that person, someone falls for someone maybe quite unsuitable, and paintings end up in strange hands.
‘I can tell you a tale – but don’t forget it’s my story: I’m keeping it for my memoir.
‘Well, it started when I was still living in Leeds. I used to go to a Lyons tea shop for the cream buns – they had very good cream buns in those days.
‘I got talking, as one does, to one of the young women working there. She had an interesting face, quite interesting – not exactly pretty, but there was something. So I introduced her to my brother Jacob, who was always looking for models, and he did some drawings of her. She sat for him a few times; I don’t think it went any further than that.
‘When I told her I was going up to London she said how much she envied me. She got my address from Jacob and wrote me a letter asking me to put her up for a few days.
‘Like a mug, I agreed. I felt sorry for her: it was such a dull life in that town, and she so wanted to see London – she’d never been away from Leeds.
‘She stayed with us in our flat in Fitzroy Street. You know the kind of place, a flat over a shop. There were two flats, but only one was supposed to be – what’s the word? – residential; ours on the top floor wasn’t meant to be lived in. She played me a dirty trick over that later on.
‘The man who had the flat below was a retired army captain, very much the retired military gentleman of the period, getting on in years.
‘He had artistic tastes, he collected pictures, and he’d bought quite a few from Bobby. He had a lot of good paintings he’d bought cheaply from artists who lived in the neighbourhood.
‘He had other tastes too. He liked little working-class girls, who he’d bring home, and he picked up housemaids, like that man Munby – you know the type.
‘One day, soon after she’d arrived, he saw our visitor walking up the stairs past his open door, and after that he was often to be seen standing by his door as she passed, with her modest look, little hat and short skirts. Within a week she’d moved in with him.
‘He was getting old, she was very determined, and eventually, shortly before his death, he married her. And there she was, a widow with some money, a fine collection of pictures, and an air she had acquired to go with it.
‘She went back on a visit to Leeds and went to see my brother, who introduced her to a local doctor who’d called on him at his studio. He was interested in art and was often there – and here was a well-dressed young widow who’d picked up a smattering of art-talk about her pictures. He fell for her, and she became his wife.
‘And later, when his career led elsewhere, she became Lady Whatnot.’
The dirty trick?
‘Oh, she told the authorities that the flat we lived in was being used for residential purposes and we were thrown out. I suppose she didn’t want us around when she was settling in with her elderly admirer. That must have been it.’
And later?
‘She died and her husband married again, someone or other. Then he died and his new wife inherited the paintings – I don’t know what’s happened to them. Such is life.
‘If Bobby had been a different sort of man – some sort of fashionable portrait painter, say – I might have been Lady Roberts. Not that I care, but sometimes I get fed up with friends who’ve married a title lording it over me. I invited two of them together to tea – you know who: you were there – and I told you then that once I’d introduced them they’d only talk to one another and so they did, completely ignoring my other guests. That’s the way of the world.’
That day, when I went home, I wrote up her Fitzroy Street story, just as she had suspected I might, and found it much later in an old notebook, wishing that I had written up many more.
No prying
She rarely spoke of the famous people she had known, and resented any questions leading that way. ‘Aha! You’re prying!’ she would say, or ‘I do dislike being treated like some sort of monument left over from the past. I like to live in the present.
‘People are on at me, want to interview me, tape-record me, but I’m not having it. What they want is to promote themselves.’
But sometimes she did speak unprompted of well-known people from her past.
‘As T. E. Lawrence once said to me – now there’s a conversational opening for you … ’ she began one day. She was discussing the David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia, which she and Roberts had disliked and were upset by, feeling that it presented a figure they did not recognise, so unlike the Lawrence they had known.
One anecdote she liked to tell to friends was of her meeting D. H. Lawrence. This varied slightly in the telling. To me she had described the encounter as beginning with an invitation to tea with Mark Gertler; Lawrence was the other guest.
Lawrence and Gertler had been sitting, she said, on either side of the gas fire in Gertler’s room, eating toast and drinking tea; it was a winter day.
‘I came in and I was introduced to Lawrence, but he took no notice of me at all – he had eyes only for Gertler. I was very annoyed, because in those days I was beautiful and used to attention, but then Gertler was beautiful too … ’
Once she spoke about Wyndham Lewis.
‘He used to come to his room, Bobby told me, before the war, and poke about among the paintings and drawings stacked along the wall, looking for ideas to pinch. He did that with other artists.’
‘What was he like when you knew him?’ I asked tentatively.
‘Very unpleasant.’
I grew bolder: ‘And Ezra Pound?’
‘Unspeakable.’
One day, discussing food, I asked what the food had been like at the Tour Eiffel restaurant, the setting of Roberts’s early-sixties painting of the Vorticist group. I thought this a safe question: she as well as Roberts must have eaten there often.
‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘Good French traditional dishes, properly cooked. Sad that he went bust, but he’d been too generous to the art crowd.’
She also proffered an anecdote of Augustus John: she was leaving in a taxi after a party, when John got in too and grabbed her. At the first red traffic light she disentangled herself and got out the other side. ‘It was a close shave,’ she said.
A curious glimpse of Aleister Crowley intrigued me. At one point, in the twenties, Sarah had been working for a Lady Somebody, as she called her, who was editing a magazine dealing with the occult. (Sarah was good at picking up odd jobs on obscure magazines, or in mysterious shops, and her interest in homeopathy led to many contacts on the fringes of the rational world.)
Calling at the house, she had been asked to go up to the bedroom, where her employer was still in bed. Seated at the dressing table was Aleister Crowley, in his Scottish mood, wearing a kilt; as he spoke he gazed complacently at himself in the mirror, she noticed.
‘So I’ve seen the Great Beast in person,’ said Sarah. She’d been reading about the current interest in Crowley and that he still had some sort of following, which she found surprising. Sarah was suspicious of all gurus, mystics, self-styled prophets, charismatic leaders.
Gurdjieff
One evening, at a party in my house, we were listening to my neighbour, the costume designer Sheila Jackson, telling us of her recent experiences in Paris designing costumes for a film to be directed by Peter Brook.
She knew Sarah from the days when Roberts was teaching at the Central School, where she had also taught (and she remembered that Roberts was called ‘Drainpipe Roberts’ by his students, referring to the tubular arms and legs of his painted people). Now she was discussing the subject of the projected film, Gurdjieff, a man whom Peter Brook believed had been a great teacher.
‘I’d designed at least three sets of costumes, everything kept changing; it was very confusing. At one point it was arranged that all of us working on the project should see a film of the great man, to sort of get us in the mood, I suppose.’
Sheila’s voice was brisk.
‘I went to scoff, but I have to say that I stayed to listen, and to my surprise I was most impressed. It completely changed my mind: he really had something to say. I could see why he influenced so many people.’
‘Well,’ said Sarah, ‘I saw him in the flesh – it was at the Conway Hall, I think. Like you I went to scoff, but I stayed to laugh. He was just another old humbug. There were so many around in the twenties.’
Bacon and breakfasting
When she joined Bobby in London she found that he was quite fussy about the quality of his breakfast bacon. For Sarah this – eating bacon – must have been a symbol of emancipation from the ritual Jewish traditions of her home, in addition to the thrill of living in sin.
When I first knew her, bacon was bought from Jacksons in Piccadilly, an old-established West End provision merchant. Roberts, on visits to the RA, would cross the road to the shop and buy the week’s supply.
He had a great admiration, Sarah told me, for one of the assistants who worked on the bacon counter, a slight, pale-faced, red-haired young man dedicated to his job, a quality appreciated by the hard-working artist.
Bacon was cut to order; if a side of bacon was not quite up to the standard needed for a certain thickness of slice, the serious young man would frown, shake his head, and go down to the basement for another, firmer, one. I too bought bacon from Jacksons, and was served by the same assistant. Once or twice I had to wait while he and Roberts were having a long chat, perhaps about bacon.
When Jacksons eventually closed, the young man moved a few doors along to Fortnum & Mason, but here the bacon was not cut to order but was sliced every morning before the shop opened and laid out on the counter: streaky, back, and so on. This did not suit the Robertses and it didn’t suit the young assistant – he seemed distraught, Sarah told me. Passing through the shop one day I looked for him at the counter, but he wasn’t there.
‘A funny chap,’ said a senior counter hand when I asked after the young man. ‘Had some sort of breakdown and left. Not coming back it seems.’
Well, here was someone to whom Roberts had regularly spoken.
One morning, earlier than usual, I called on Sarah and saw John eating a late breakfast at the small pedestal table in the bay window of the sitting room.
Outside there were the garden and the canal; the morning sun was streaming into the room, lighting up the marmalade in its jar, caressing the fat brown teapot, the cup and saucer, the milk jug, the crisp pink bacon on the plate. It looked like an illustration for a Victorian novel.
Roberts, an early riser, must have eaten his breakfasts here too, with the essential plate of egg and bacon to start the day’s work. Sarah was content with tea and toast in bed. ‘Ah, tea,’ she would say. ‘Nectar!’
Food: the desire and pursuit of the wholesome
One day, soon after William Roberts’s death, Sarah and John were surprised by a visit from his brother, not seen for many years. He had read of William’s death in a newspaper, he said. He looked, Sarah told me, disturbingly like Roberts himself in old age. They chatted, she served coffee, and she asked him how he, as a bachelor, coped with having to feed himself.
‘Tins,’ he said.
‘Just tins?’
‘Yes. You can get everything in tins these days. Meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, the lot. And they do an excellent rice pudding in a tin too.’
Telling me this Sarah said, ‘I felt so aggrieved. There he was, looking so healthy, living on tins, and Bobby dead. Why had I bothered all those years to cook fresh wholesome food? We could have lived just as well on tins.’
The Kitchen, 1942–5
Seeking fresh wholesome food, cooking well, even on a gas ring, a flirtation with health-food shops (here an obvious link with Roberts’s long-standing patron, Ernest Cooper, for whose health-food shops she wrote a recipe booklet), all this had taken much of her time.
When I knew her the pursuit of lovingly reared organically fed meat and poultry still needed dedication, as did the buying of fresh fruit and vegetables. An occasional visit to a supermarket would see her returning to hand back a ‘funny-tasting yoghurt’ or some rank butter. They must be putting stuff in the yoghurt, she thought, and the butter had been too long in storage ‘somewhere in the Common Market’.
‘How many hundreds, no, thousands of meals I must have cooked,’ she moaned to me one day when she was in her eighties. ‘I’m getting fed up. I’ll go anywhere for a meal if someone invites me. Whatever shall I cook tonight?’ This was a frequent question that she usually answered herself with ‘I know, I’ll cook savoury rice’ – this said with much emphasis: it was her standby.
Living in Primrose Hill, they seldom ate out, long gone the meals at the Tour Eiffel or Pagani’s or the cheap Soho restaurants of between the wars.
Roberts himself favoured tea shops, his favourite spot being the ABC café then still in Camden Town. Diana Gurney, a neighbour and friend of Sarah’s, remembers their sitting at neighbouring tables enjoying a cup of tea and a bun after they had both finished their teaching sessions at the Central School, each aware of the other but not speaking: rather, Diana said, preserving a companionable silence
The Diners, 1968
But the Regent Fish Bar in Regent’s Park Road was an occasional evening stop for both Sarah and Roberts. The owner, Sarah said, would pick out the better pieces of fish to fry for them. Walking back home in the summer, they would make a detour via the well-known Marine Ices ice-cream parlour to buy cornets to eat on the way.
Sarah became very friendly with the mother of the Italian owners of Marine Ices, who, when she retired to their home town of Amalfi, urged Sarah to come and stay with her there. This was an offer Sarah never took up but liked to toy with. ‘Do you think I’d like it? she would ask. ‘Southern Italy? I’m not sure … but she’s very pressing. A week maybe?’
The Italian Trattoria Lucca in Parkway they had known since the days when it was a working-man’s caff, when La Signora served minestrone for two shillings and sixpence (parmesan cheese, sixpence extra); liver, bacon and chips, four and six; egg and chips, four shillings; jelly and cream, one and six – ‘Non e veramente crema, e crema di tin,’ as the owner was once heard telling some Italian friends she was entertaining there. ‘Those were the days,’ said Sarah. ‘We could get a cheap, decent enough supper there. Now that it’s all done up and serves fancy Italian food we don’t go there unless someone takes us.’ But she remained friendly with the handsome and hospitable Signora.
Very friendly too with the charming Chinese woman who greeted customers at her family’s restaurant on the other side of Parkway. The Phoenix Chinese Restaurant had been serving old-fashioned anglicised Chinese food for many years, though I never saw William Roberts there – perhaps he was wary of Chinese cooking.
‘You can see them buying vegetables in the market every day,’ John said. ‘That’s a good sign – fresh stuff. And the two of us can eat for under £15 – only £11 the other evening. Gives Sarah a break.’
‘She knows what I like,’ Sarah would say: ‘chicken and cashews. Always brings it to me without asking. And a soup. Such a nice little woman, I’ll be sorry when they retire.’
It was to be the place of Sarah’s last outing.
‘They went out for a Chinese,’ said a peremptory friend who was driving us back after Sarah’s funeral. ‘Two days before she died. Can you believe it? And she got up the next day to make a cup of coffee for a friend who’d called. I ask you!’
Once, long after Roberts’s death, we were formally invited to supper at St Mark’s Crescent. Sarah felt that she and John had accepted too many invitations to eat with us and some sort of return was needed. This was to be the only time we ate there in the evening. (As for myself, how many lunches had I eaten at the kitchen table, how many sitting-room teas!)
‘Do you like sprouts?’ was the question.
‘No. I hate them.’
‘Ah, but the way I cook them you’ll like them.’
We came in by the front door, were offered sherry in small glasses of assorted shapes, and then we sat at the kitchen table.
There were three small yellow Cousanges casseroles which were usually displayed on the shelves behind us – she had brought them back from a holiday in Provence in the thirties. Now she brought one to the table; in this she had cooked a delicious liver stew. In another casserole were the sprouts – sprouts which she had transformed into an edible vegetable, buttery, unsproutlike, as she had promised. In the third casserole, potatoes.
We had a steamed pudding she had made, and coffee in the Roberts’s style: freshly roasted beans from the nearby Delancey Street coffee-roasting shop, hand-ground, then brewed in a jug
How many good meals were served at that table; how well they ate, lucky William Roberts, lucky John.
I bought one of the yellow casseroles in the final sale of the left-over household goods at no. 14, the prices stipulated by the Treasury Solicitors – John had died intestate – so I paid £5 for a chipped sixty-year-old enamelled dish. But it is not just a memento of Sarah: everything I cook in it turns out well, as though she herself was supervising.
I haven’t tried to cook sprouts.
John the book man
From time to time I would be invited to lunch, after Roberts’s death, ‘to talk books to John’.
Lunch was sometimes a soup, always cheese, a wholemeal loaf and apples; water to drink. I would gruffly be asked what we had been buying, and hear what John had recently found. Paying between £5 and £10 for a book, he had stopped going to the big book fairs because he felt they didn’t want his custom. ‘I go to the smaller fairs – they’ve got more time to talk, different stock. Sarah and I have been going lately to one by Tower Hill – you can pick up some good things there.’
He collected books on London, nineteenth-century politicians’ memoirs, autobiographies written by actresses of the twenties and thirties, books on publishing, novels by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, the tales of Ambrose Bierce. If he found a first edition of these writers he sold it and replaced it with a later one. It was very much a dealer’s library: he had once been a runner for a London bookshop.
I had given Sarah a set of Trevelyan’s history of the Italian Risorgimento, having bought a better copy; she had seen it lying about and asked me for it, knowing we never sold a duplicate.
‘She’s not going to read that,’ said John.
‘What do you mean?’ said an aggrieved Sarah. Later she told me that John had cheerfully sold it the same week. ‘He shouldn’t have done that. I told him so.’
Books bought for resale were stacked in a small bookcase near the door for visitors to inspect. Sarah once presented me with one she thought I might like. It was a collection of interviews with well-known women authors of the 1890s – well, once well-known: Frances Hodgson Burnett would be the only one remembered today. They were written in a style still popular: a mixture of fawning and impudence. I was fascinated. After a few weeks Sarah asked me for it back, then later gave it to me again, and again asked for it back.
John the spare man
After Roberts’s death Sarah and John were free to accept invitations as a couple. John’s lack of social grace was countered by the fact that he was that useful article a spare man. Sarah, who sparkled at a dinner or a party, was well aware of John’s lack of enthusiasm for what is called society. However, one lunchtime I found them arguing quite heatedly, Sarah berating him.
The evening before they had been invited to dinner by their friend known as Mouche, someone whom John respected as a woman of worthwhile achievement, a lecturer in dentistry and an amateur of music who was a music critic for Hampstead’s local journal, the Ham & High. They had originally met her at a concert.
But apparently that evening he had not spoken to anyone at her dinner party.
Mouche, Sarah said, was furious with him and declared she would never invite him again.
‘You said nothing at all to anyone the whole evening! When you’re invited out you have to sing for your supper. I do.’
‘Look, Sarah, be honest, was there anything said last night that was worth saying?’
‘Well, no, not really.’
‘Well then … ’
‘Music is a great solace.’
‘Music is a great solace as you grow older,’ Sarah had said to me when we first met, but music had always been part of the Robertses’ lives.
There were twenty-six guitars in the house, but Sarah never really mastered the playing of them and there are doubts about John’s skills, though he was a serious scholar of guitar history. No recorded music, but frequent concert-hall visits to hear chamber music – the Wigmore Hall the preferred venue for Sarah and Bobby. After Roberts’s death, Sarah told me that she would have a quiet weep whenever a favourite passage of his was playing in a quartet or other chamber-music piece.
The visits to the Wigmore came to a sudden end. None of the Robertses cared for contemporary music, and they objected to the sandwich type of programming in which a modern piece is placed between two classical works: they thought the modern piece should be played at the end, and let those who wished stay for it.
At one point John began to bring a book to read while waiting for the piece they disliked to finish.
He and Sarah would sit in the back row, and were well known as regulars. One evening the hall’s manager came to speak to John. ‘Mr Roberts,’ he said, ‘your custom of reading a book during a concert is disturbing for the public and the players.’
‘Well, I told him,’ said John to me, ‘the players can’t see me at the back – besides, they’re busy playing – and who exactly are the people who’ve complained? Were they sitting next to us? The people in front can’t see me, and no one in the back row has ever said anything to me.
‘The man had to agree with me: no one had actually come to him with a complaint – it was all his idea. Anyway, we’ve decided to give up the Wigmore and go to the Conway instead. It’s cheaper, and the players are younger, fresher too.’
So they became Conway Hall regulars.
Two sisters: Millie and Sarah
Millie and Leah, the two other Kramer sisters, had nothing of Sarah’s striking looks or Jacob’s dramatic appearance. Leah, who was what in those days was called ‘simple-minded’, was not able to live an independent life, whereas Millie – intelligent, sharp-faced and sharp-tongued – had made something of a business career in New York and at one point was considering marriage with a long-standing companion there.
But, said Sarah, Millie had always adored her brother Jacob. One of her happiest memories was his asking her to go with him to France when he made his portrait of Delius in 1932; Millie had taken charge of the trip. She had so wanted to be his companion, to be part of his life.
While Sarah as a young girl was his favourite model, portrayed again and again, there are only one or two Kramer portraits of Millie, and one notes that in the memorial book she put together for Jacob not one portrait of Sarah is reproduced.
When Jacob, after their mother’s death, asked Millie to come back to England to look after Leah she came at once, leaving her New York life for good. A terrible mistake, Sarah thought.
A small drawing of Leah by Roberts shows her sitting in a chair, in hat and coat, smiling vaguely. She was sweet-natured and placid, I was told, and, like Millie, a great walker. At weekends they criss-crossed England, staying at hostels on the way. It seemed a pleasant life.
When Leah’s sight failed, a place was found for her in the Jewish Home for the Blind on the south coast. Visited regularly by her sisters, she seemed content, Sarah thought.
After Jacob’s death Millie dedicated herself to producing a handsome memorial book, funding it from her savings, writing to everyone she could think of for contributions to the text, and was involved in the 1973 retrospective exhibition of Kramer’s work at the Parkin Gallery.
This was where I first met her, at the private view, smartly dressed, severe, a formidable defender of her brother’s reputation.
The next time I saw her was very different.
Sarah Millie’s keeper
Sarah asked me one day if I would go with her and John to visit Millie in Friern Barnet, the Victorian mental hospital in the north of London.
Living alone, fretting about Leah, who had died in the home for the blind, she had become subject to delusions of break-ins, of violence, had become very fearful, and her neighbours had alerted the Robertses.
It was the beginning of dementia, a condition Sarah refused to recognise, feeling that if only Millie – intelligent Millie – ‘pulled herself together’ after being in the hospital all would be well.
The great building was set among romantically beautiful grounds. We plodded up the long drive – John, whom at that time I hardly knew, silent.
Millie was sitting up in bed, flushed and feverish, alone in the ward. She began talking rapidly to John, telling him that he was her heir, she’d seen to it that there would be something for him.
I was touched by John’s tender response and soothing manner, patting her hand: ‘That’s all right, Millie, don’t worry your head about it. Just get better.’
Sarah was talking to the nurse in charge. It was a curious topic they were discussing.
I knew that Millie was a serious collector of Victoriana. She had a collection of parasols which Sarah gave to Leeds City Art Gallery after Millie died – later regretting she had done so – and of Victorian dolls. It seemed that she had asked for her favourite doll to have with her in the hospital – a surprising request. The nurse with whom Sarah was talking was very much against it, saying, ‘It would lead to regression. A great mistake. I say no, definitely.’
‘Funny,’ said Sarah on the way back: ‘when I asked my women friends what they thought they all said, “Oh give her the doll, let her have it.” But the men I ask say no.’
Millie never got her doll, and her collection was sold towards funding her care.
Once back at home Millie’s condition worsened, and Sarah had the idea of her changing her Wandsworth council flat for one in a sheltered housing complex for the aged near St Mark’s Crescent. By energetic attacks on bureaucratic councils she got her way. Millie’s Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac were transferred, and Millie was installed. Sarah would visit her every day. Perfect, she thought.
But after a short while Millie became more and more confused, causing problems for other residents, and Sarah was told that she had to leave, go into a home.
Now Sarah began the search for a suitable – and affordable – place, taking a different friend each time she viewed a possible one.
One day she asked if I would go with her, saying that other friends could bear no more; the shock of life at the end had reduced some to tears of misery.
‘I’m hoping you’re tougher,’ she said.
The places Sarah took me to were depressing: privately run, smelling of urine, a half-circle of the old sitting propped-up in chairs around a twittering television.
‘Why does it have to be like this?’ she asked. ‘Surely there’s a better way.’
One home which had accepted Millie was such a miserable place that Sarah and a helping friend removed her bodily, despite the aggressive attempts of the home’s owner to stop them.
In between homes, Millie was with the Robertses – no easy time for them.
A final home was selected. It was clean; it didn’t smell; Millie had her own room.
The problem now was money. How long would Millie’s own money last, and how to raise more?
‘Do you know what Bobby said last night?’ Sarah began. ‘He said, “If the worst comes to the worst we’ll have her here and look after her ourselves.” Isn’t that good of him? I was surprised, I must say: most men wouldn’t hear of it. It isn’t as if he doesn’t know what’s involved – we’ve had Millie with us between homes, rambling all over the house at night, doesn’t know where she is or what time it is.
‘And I must tell you, he’s given me his gold medal to sell for Millie.
‘Isn’t that nice of him?’
‘Buying and selling are two very different things.’
Selling Millie’s goods took some time.
Sarah had taken Jacob’s easel from the Wandsworth flat to put in the hall of no. 14, using it as a stand for sticks and umbrellas; John had taken the large Victorian sofa which had been in Jacob’s studio for his own sitting room; but many of the good nineteenth-century pieces Millie had collected had been taken to furnish her flat in the sheltered housing complex, which now had to be cleared.
Here Sarah called on Paddy Walker, an old friend who had an antique shop in Camden Town. He priced the items for her, and bought some of them for his shop. The money raised went to fund Millie’s stay in the various homes.
One piece proved hard to sell. This was a small, round rustic wooden table which Sarah said was a Welsh cottage table. ‘I’d like it for myself, but where to put it?’
It ended up in the space under the stairs, and there it stayed, home to baskets, pegs, gardening tools, even the oars for their boat, until it was resold in the general sale of the contents of no. 14 itself after John’s death.
Two other items for sale, Roberts’s RA gold medal and a small drawing by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, were rather different, one donated by Roberts himself, the other inherited by Millie. The small but imposing drawing of a reclining figure headed a letter addressed to Jacob.
‘Come with me when I sell them?’ Sarah asked. ‘You’ve never had to sell your stuff I suppose. It’ll be an eye-opener for you.’
It was.
I was struck by the rudeness of the people she approached, who must have known who she was, selling her husband’s inscribed gold medal. The man – it was always a man – sitting at the desk would hardly look up as she showed what she had to sell, then casually mutter a sum and look away again, intent on his papers.
‘Thank you very much,’ said Sarah each time, with dignity, and we went on our way. I was also surprised by the marked variation in the prices offered, but she said that was to be expected.
However, at Spink’s a charming young man, pink-cheeked and golden-haired, walked up to her and said, ‘Hello, Mrs Roberts.’ He offered the best price, and she clinched the deal. I had a vague idea that this might be a young Mr Spink, and certainly Spink’s dealt from time to time with Roberts’s watercolours so there may have been a connection.
‘Come with me again?’ Sarah asked another day. ‘It’s the Bond Street quarter for the Gaudier-Brzeska.’ She’d tucked it into a white envelope, and in the galleries she took it out to display it, explaining that the letter had been written to her brother Jacob Kramer.
She was treated as before, barely acknowledged by the person in charge, the price again varying markedly each time.
‘I’m tired, let’s have a coffee,’ she said after a few such encounters, and as we sat in a place off Bond Street she spoke to me about having had to sell items of jewellery, their books, their household goods all too often in the past, to pay the rent, to buy some food. ‘Buying and selling are two very different things. If I were buying you’d see how they’d make up to me. But that’s the way of the world.’
‘But at least one would expect common courtesy.’
‘Courtesy! Well … ’ And then she gave a cry. ‘I’ve lost it! Whatever shall I do? I must have dropped it! Whatever will Bobby and John say?’
She looked distraught. I suggested we go back the way we had come, retracing our steps – it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would stoop to pick up, just an envelope.
We walked back along Bond Street, Sarah bewailing, our eyes on the ground, and there it was, trodden on by passing feet.
‘We’d better go straight home,’ said Sarah. ‘Promise me never to tell Bobby or John.’
She eventually sold the drawing for a fair price to a friend who owned a gallery of which she approved, who bought it as a present for her husband.
An outing
One afternoon she called on me to join her in taking Millie out to the park. It was a fine summer day, and the inhabitants of the home were in the garden, sitting on the terrace in the standard semicircle of chairs, blankly facing a small lawn.
‘I’ve come to take you out,’ she said to Millie. ‘We’re going to have tea in the rose garden.’
‘I want to go too!’ cried one old lady. ‘So do I!’ shouted another, standing up.
They were dressed in smart clothes, seemed well cared for and obviously well off – it was an expensive home. ‘Take me!’ cried another. ‘Me! Me!’ By now they were all shouting, one wetting herself in her excitement.
‘Oh, God, no! No! I can’t stand this!’ Sarah shouted, and she stamped her foot, clapped her hands.
‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Shut up! I’ll come back and I’ll take you all out.’
Now they began to weep, like children, quietly, unhappily.
‘Quick, grab Millie and we’ll get out – the taxi’s waiting.’
The taxi driver was very understanding of Millie’s reluctance to enter or to leave the dark interior of the cab, of having to be coaxed in and out. ‘Take your time, the meter’s not on,’ he said.
Millie was able to enjoy the sunlit park, the roses, and her tea and cake, and was safely returned to the home.
‘It was a good cake,’ she said. ‘I’m a Yorkshirewoman and I know what a good cake is.’
‘Yes, you still know that,’ Sarah replied.
That Millie no longer knew how to write, or to speak coherently, or where she was or what time of day it was, Sarah found inexplicable.
How long Millie’s own savings supported her I don’t know, or how much money Sarah had raised for her, but she lived for less than a year afterwards.
A funeral
Arranging Millie’s funeral, Sarah rang to ask me if I knew how to find a rabbi willing to take a Jewish service at the crematorium, cremation being forbidden to Orthodox Jews. Millie had had Jacob buried in the Jewish cemetery in Leeds, and Sarah thought a Jewish ceremony for her too would be in keeping.
I suggested the college where the Liberal rabbis were trained, and a very nice-looking young rabbi turned up on the day, obviously puzzled at seeing only three mourners, Sarah, John and myself.
He read the Hebrew service, and we followed it in the books provided by the undertakers: Hebrew on one side of the page, English on the other. Millie was compared to the traditional good woman above rubies, the service ended, the coffin vanished, and the rabbi remained standing, uncertain of what to do next.
Sarah stepped forward towards him, put out her hand to shake, and said briskly, ‘Thank you very much. My sister would have liked that,’ and we all went our ways.
‘She didn’t even stand me a lunch.’
This was a favourite phrase when telling me of the resale of paintings which had been bought for a little, sold for a lot. A friend who in the past had bated down the price of a picture from £20 to £18 had now sold one for £25,000.
‘Told me with such glee,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s what annoyed me: “Makes a nice nest egg for my daughters,” she said. And she didn’t even stand me a lunch.’
One day she seemed very cross. Norah Meninsky had told her, gleefully, said Sarah, of having just sold an album of small drawings by William Roberts for a substantial sum.
‘I’m very angry with her. You know, Meninsky, when he was teaching at the Central, used to go crawling round Bobby’s life class after he’d left, asking the students if they’d give him the sketches Bobby made on the corners of their life drawings – it was the way Bobby used to teach. They’re lovely little things.
‘Some of the students would cut them off and let him have them, and he’d go home and paste them up in an album. Well, that’s what Norah’s sold, and I call it theft – downright theft. And she didn’t even have the decency to stand me a lunch on the proceeds.’
Medical matters
Sarah dabbled in alternative medicine, mostly homeopathic remedies, and very occasionally she visited a well-known Harley Street consultant who held extreme views on diet, putting his patients on a regime of hot water, no tea, no coffee – something she would not consider for herself even after consulting gratified patients in the waiting room who declared themselves invigorated by this method.
She made several friends among those who promoted similar ideas, and would visit a homeopathic pharmacy in the West End, talking to the customers.
However, when she felt something was really wrong she sought traditional medical advice. The long years of John’s recovery from the accident of his having been dropped as a small child, the years in hospital, the desperate search to find a surgeon able to fix his back – all this must have given her an insight into the medical world.
She herself was rarely ill.
Very late in life she found herself in a crowded ward in the old University College Hospital. It was for a hip operation, which was to prove no great success as far as walking easily or the relief of pain went; but she was determined to try and the doctors confident of success, though she was by then aged ninety. Of course she was the liveliest person in the ward, and she had a succession of visitors bringing nourishing soup in flasks, biscuits, raisins, fruit. There were animated conversations involving the occupants of neighbouring beds.
One afternoon she was up and about and was overheard asking the ward sister, ‘Sister, do tell me, what exactly is the matter with the fat lady in the corner bed?’
‘Mrs Roberts, Mrs Roberts, one day your curiosity will be the death of you!’
‘Oh no, Sister. That’s where you’re wrong – it’s what keeps me alive.’
‘ … and now he’s dead.’
One afternoon – it was in 1980 – John rang me up to ask if, as a favour, I would join him and Sarah for a walk in the park. She was a bit down, he said, and a walk in company might cheer her up a bit.
I came, we walked, I talked aimlessly about the park, the birds on the lake, the flowers, the planting; Sarah joined in at intervals, but seemed subdued.
I think it was ten days later, walking together via the park towards Baker Street, where we would separate, when she stopped suddenly at the point where one leaves the Broad Walk for the path cutting diagonally across the open, grassy ground.
‘Bobby loved this bit of the park,’ she said abruptly, ‘and now he’s dead.’
She gulped down a sob, while I stared at her.
‘He was my husband, my lover, my friend. He taught me everything I know – and now he’s dead.’
‘But what, where, Sarah! When did this happen?’
‘Oh, it was the day before you went walking with us in the park – you remember. John thought it was a good idea to ask you – someone else to talk to.
‘That evening we’d been to a stupid party – we shouldn’t have gone out, leaving Bobby alone like that.
‘He’d been talking about his childhood after breakfast, something he rarely did, and they say, don’t they, that it’s a sign of impending death if you’re old – well, folklore really … When we got back that evening he was dead in his chair – a heart attack. He’d died alone. I shouldn’t have gone to that stupid, stupid party.’
‘But whatever did you do?’
‘Oh, we called the police. They were very kind, I must say. It was a private cremation, as Bobby would have wanted. But I blame myself for his having died alone.’
‘Well, it must have been mercifully quick, as we would all wish to die. He would have hated to be ill, in hospital, in a public ward.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’ She swallowed a sob.
‘Oh, come on, come on – I’ve got so much to do.’
And we walked on.
… and afterwards
The urn with the ashes was placed on the mantelpiece of the studio where he had worked; they proposed, John said, to turn it into an exhibition room.
‘We decided to bring him home.’ John gestured towards the urn when telling me this.
A green blind was put up at the window, and tall metal struts were fitted with clips to hold small drawings and watercolours which had been simply and cheaply framed. About fifty were displayed – a changing exhibition – and paintings were propped up on the easels and on the mantelpiece, including a portrait of Sarah and a self-portrait of William.
Friends were invited to inspect.
‘Bobby told us not to sell too many paintings at once after his death,’ Sarah said – ‘just sell enough to live on.’
News of Roberts’s death seeped out, and there were obituaries in the press. But what pleased Sarah most was an invitation to a Royal Academy lunch where tribute was paid to Roberts by fellow artists. Carel Weight, after the lunch, had embraced Sarah saying, ‘He was greater than all of us and it will be recognised one day, I know.’ This had touched her very much.
Now she and John sought venues for exhibitions, very pernickety as to where they might be. The most successful was perhaps ‘An Artist and His Family’ at the National Portrait Gallery, this on Sarah’s suggestion and confirmed through her persistence. The poster advertising the exhibition was a reproduction of the double portrait Roberts had painted of them when he was in his eighties, she still in her seventies. ‘What is the paper he is showing to you?’ friends asked. ‘I don’t know. Marriage lines maybe?’
The Artist and His Wife, 1975
Sarah would sometimes be found sitting on a bench in the exhibition rooms, surrounded by images of herself, her husband and her son. For John the exhibition was somewhat disturbing, the few portraits of himself showing a troubled adolescent. ‘I don’t feel comfortable,’ he said. But Sarah relished the display and the varied portrayals of herself at different ages.
Having her portrait painted so often, she had once asked Roberts why he didn’t get a younger model. ‘But your face changes all the time, I don’t need anyone else,’ he told her. The vividness and enjoyment of life one sees in the face of the child Sarah in a Kramer family photograph stayed with her into old age.
Once, I had left her at a bus-stop shelter together with several other old ladies, whose gloomy faces contrasted with hers. ‘What a lot of old miseries!’ she mouthed at me.
Several exhibitions of smaller works were held at the nearby Gillian Jason gallery. For one of these, at the private view, Sarah turned up charmingly dressed in a striped frock given by a friend, which had been subjected to a dye dip to ‘tone down the stripes’. She held a small bouquet of the garden flowers she preferred to shop-bought blooms; a notice pinned to them said, ‘No kissing because of germs.’ The then recently introduced custom of kissing one’s friends annoyed her very much. ‘Why are they all kissing me? I’m sick of it – it never used to be like this. We’re not in France.’
An exhibition in Reading disappointed them – ‘Not enough publicity,’ John thought – but they were very gratified by a Cambridge exhibition, Sarah enjoying her reply to all those who asked, ‘Kettle’s Yard?’ ‘No, the Fitzwilliam.’
Making a statement
One day I was with Sarah in the Anthony d’Offay gallery, a gallery of which the Robertses approved – there had been a show of William Roberts’s work there some years before. The walls were full of large paintings by the then newly fashionable Gilbert and George; d’Offay’s had taken a selection to New York, and these had now just returned. ‘Very successful … A great hit with the critics,’ a couple of the gallery’s women employees were saying to one another loudly and emphatically – women of a startling chic and slenderness, recently back from accompanying the paintings to the USA.
Sarah, her business with the gallery done, was talking to another employee, a total contrast to the older women, perhaps employed for that reason. She was from Scotland, small, plump, deliciously rustic in her prettiness with her pink cheeks and tight golden-red curls, and she was so obviously enchanted with being in London, working in an art gallery, meeting well-known people, almost popping with delight as she spoke to ‘Mrs Roberts’ in her neat, precise Scottish voice.
Sarah gazed at her indulgently.
‘And what do you think of these?’ she asked, gesturing to the Gilbert and Georges.
The young woman put on a serious face.
‘Oh! I think they’re important. They make a statement.’
‘Get along with you!’ said Sarah.
Travels abroad …
In the twenties she and Roberts had been to Paris and to Provence, staying on a farm. The farmer’s wife (as Sarah liked to tell those who criticised her small gas stove) had taught her how to cook a meal, Provençal-style, on a charcoal two-burner grill, skilfully fanning the flames.
There had been a visit to Germany where, Sarah told me, Roberts had pointedly refused to acknowledge the obligatory ‘Guten Morgen!’ of the German hotel guests at breakfast, and there were visits to a spa near Padua where Sarah enjoyed the treatments on offer and trips to Venice on the bus; Roberts himself did not indulge in the mud baths.
Later travels took them to Spain, the setting of some of Roberts’s most vivid small paintings: beggars at a café; John asking the way of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a guitar slung on his back. One, of Spanish peasants enjoying a siesta under a tree against a yellow-gold background, like a small Florentine painting from a predella, hung permanently in their bedroom, opposite their bed; they woke up to it every morning.
These Spanish visits can be traced in John’s book Guitar Travels in laconic notes such as ‘Said goodbye to Sarah and W.R.’ and ‘Parents having breakfast on the corner, near the Station’ and ‘“O for a beaker full of the warm South” said W.R. sarcastically,’ this visit seemingly not such a success.
They accompanied John most years to the Emilio Pujol guitar masterclasses he attended, Sarah also taking part with her guitar, as recorded in Guitar Travels.
On one of these trips they put up the money to buy John a former donkey stable, now lived in as a sort of scruffy house, on the outskirts of Bedar, in order to have somewhere to stay, but John’s allowing a gypsy family to live there in his absence did not turn out well.
Stories of Bedar, told by Sarah on their return, made it sound like a truly Spanish village, but my meeting a Bedar friend for tea one day at no. 14 revealed a flourishing community of British and American expats who had bought up the local houses.
One of the friend’s anecdotes gave a glimpse of the Bedar hippie era: ‘Do you remember, Sarah? He really shouldn’t have done it.’ It seemed that Sarah had once unwittingly eaten a hash cake served to her as a joke by one of the lively young Bedar Americans.
‘I never noticed anything,’ she said. ‘It was a disappointment after all you hear about the stuff.’
Visits were also paid to the Spanish estate bought by the patron Ernest Cooper on the proceeds of the sale of several Roberts paintings. The final visit by Sarah and John was a disaster: there was a row, angry words were exchanged, they were told to leave. and John never forgave, despite Cooper’s attempts to placate him.
After Roberts’s death Sarah and John had set out on long journeys each year, leaving their house in the care of a trio of neighbouring friends who sometimes wondered if they would ever come back. There would be perhaps one postcard in six weeks.
Air travel was not to be considered, though Sarah sometimes wistfully thought it would be nice to come with us to New York ‘ … but John wouldn’t hear of my going.’
Boat across the Channel, then train, bus through France, sometimes staying at a friend’s villa on the way, down into Spain, returning to Bedar and problems with the donkey hut – now a sort of scruffy house – and then on to Morocco, where they would stay in small hotels in the kasbah, avoiding the tourist quarters.
‘The Arab men,’ said Sarah, ‘when they find out that John is unmarried, has no children, and is actually travelling with his mother, well, they just roll about with laughter – can’t stop. They find it hilarious.’
She brought back photographs of herself with Moroccan women, all smiling, said how marvellous the Moroccan bread was, how fascinating the life of the streets.
She told of adventures in Spain: stolen luggage, chasing thieves across a bridge, aided by a man on a motorbike who caught up with the robbers, she following ‘ … and I got my holdall back!’
Home from one journey, she told us of their being invited by an elderly Moroccan they had met to visit his tomato farm. Gazing thoughtfully at Sarah, he had said she would be the ideal person to smuggle drugs: as a respectable old lady she would pass unnoticed.
‘I was foolish enough to ask him where would I hide them, and he told me … Well, you live and learn.’
On her last trip she was already ninety.
The board says ‘Paradise’. The train will wait;
there’s time to get a sandwich and some wine.
We travel onward through the dust, elate,
to stay at some small station down the line.
Travels nearer home
These were mostly visits to friends. Holidaying in the T. E. Lawrence cottage in the thirties was sometimes mentioned, but post-war it was Tenby, Hastings or Hove, Oxford or Cambridge. There was a Leeds visit for a Kramer show, and this had included an interview for Yorkshire Television. ‘I look awful,’ Sarah told us on her return. ‘I’m laughing all the time in the silliest way: “Ho ho ho!” and “Ha ha ha!”’ – here she imitated herself – ‘I look ridiculous.’
Tenby was where her good friend Marion Hutton, who had formerly been a neighbour, was now living, Sarah took a lively interest in local affairs. She and John came back from one visit with photographs of their presence at the unveiling of a plaque at the birthplace of the artist Nina Hamnett, someone known from Fitzrovia days.
Hastings they recommended for its health-giving air and for a friend there who was a nurse, which somehow added to the atmosphere of well-being and recuperation. It was John’s last projected outing before his sudden death: ‘I’ll be going down to Hastings for some air,’ he’d said, but he never went. From one of these visits came his Hove Notes, which he sent to selected friends; clumsily typed and clumsily hand-bound, it contained hilarious comments on modern life.
Cambridge was the home of a very old friend, Caris, with whom they sometimes stayed. A handsome elderly woman who wore flowing robes, as an old friend she was once allowed to stay overnight at St Mark’s Crescent, in Roberts’s lifetime – a rare privilege – when on her way to India to visit her guru.
One Oxford weekend visit that John and Sarah made was to a very old friend who was the wife of the master of one of the Oxford colleges. ‘The last evening’, said John on their return, ‘they gave a party, sort of in our honour as house guests. But when Isaiah Berlin arrived all the guests huddled round him in a circle, listening to what he had to say – we were ignored totally for the whole evening, sitting in the corner. Not that he had anything special to say – it was all Oxford gossip.’
‘What will they do when I’m gone?’
She had been asked to go into Sotheby’s one day: someone wanted her opinion on a drawing either by Roberts or by Bomberg.
We were served tea in a small cubicle; we seemed to be behind the scenes: the electric kettle had a frayed cord, the cups were mismatched, it was very cosy. The drawing was shown to Sarah. ‘Hard for me to say,’ she said, ‘as it was before my time. The problem is, as students, Bobby’s and Bomberg’s work was very similar and they used to sell drawings for ten shillings each, often not signed. I’d guess this one’s Bobby’s, but I can’t be sure.’
As we left she asked, ‘What will they do when I’m gone? They’re always asking me questions; soon no one will know the answers. All sorts of things, not just attributions – I ought to write them down: commissions, that sort of thing.
‘You know about the Sitwells? Well, they commissioned quite a few paintings when they were living in, where was it, Carlyle Square. Gave themselves out as short of cash, their father didn’t allow them enough it seemed, or so they said.
‘So they paid Bobby in driblets – he had to call round for half-crowns or five shillings every week till they’d made up the sum. Humiliating really. There’s lots of stories I could tell.’
She left it too late to write a coherent memoir, but John collected two folders of her attempts, which he labelled ‘Possible’ and ‘Impossible’ – to read, that is. The anecdotes in the ‘Possible’ folder were disappointingly no different to the few she had told before.
‘People come round and want to put me on tape,’ she would complain. ‘They think they can make something of it for themselves. Or they interview us, pump us, and then write badly about Bobby. We’re not doing it any more. I can leave it all to John.’
Who alas was not to have the time.
‘Sometimes I forget all about you.’
‘I’m so enjoying life,’ said Sarah one day as we were walking across the park. ‘I’m having such a good time – isn’t it a pity it has to come to an end? And do you know, sometimes I forget all about Bobby.’
Here she stopped, threw back her head, and shouted at the sky, ‘Do you hear that? Sometimes I forget all about you!’
After her death I told John what she had said that day.
‘You mean she apostrophised the heavens?’ he asked in some surprise.
‘Indeed she did.’
Over ninety, talking of death she would say, ‘Well, when I go, I shall go out like a light.’
One topic was who would ‘go first’, she or her friend Victoria, who was the same age. Victoria’s large, handsome house in Swiss Cottage had a basement flat which in her old age housed a couple who cared for her – something Sarah found enviable.
‘She’s looked after. But then I’ve got John.’
‘I was visiting Victoria last week, took her some fruit,’ said Sarah one day. ‘She wasn’t at all well. I wonder … I think she’s failing. Maybe I could live to a hundred – what do you think? You read about more and more people who do nowadays, but would it really be such a good thing?’
By now she was frequently in pain and would sometimes cry out, twisting in her chair but turning her exclamation into an exaggerated laugh, waving her hand dismissively.
I would find her sitting on a wall near her home, exhausted, clasping heavy shopping; she was unable to believe that she was no longer the brisk, sturdy woman she had once been.
John would be waiting for her, tut-tutting, a kindly bear who took her parcels, ordered her to lie down after lunch, ready to respond to the ringing of the handbell she kept at her bedside, to bring tea, to bring comfort.
The last time I saw her she was standing outside the front door of 14 St Mark’s Crescent to say goodbye to me after a teatime visit of farewell before I travelled to New York.
‘Come back!’ she called. ‘Come back safely.’
Now ninety-two, she looked very frail in the sharp sunlight and I would have liked to turn back and kiss her but knew how she would have disliked it so I waved and walked away, turning for a last glimpse. She was still standing there.
Out like a light
A day after our return from New York we found a thin scrap of paper which had been pushed under the front door. The typed message said, ‘Sarah died yesterday.’ John had apparently typed this curt note several times on a sheet of paper and had cut it into strips for distribution by hand.
‘She had been unwell for a couple of days,’ he told me when I went round to see him, ‘and in the night she was in such pain that I called the doctor – some sort of locum. He said it wasn’t too serious, wrote a prescription, and told me to get it at the all-night chemist. “Will I be as I was?” Sarah asked him, and he said soothingly, “Yes, yes, of course, I don’t see why not.”
‘I went out to get the prescription, but when I came back an hour or so later she seemed to be sleeping. I spoke to her, called her name, once, twice, but there was no response – she was dead. So I called the police as we’d done when Bobby died. They were very helpful. The police surgeon signed the death certificate, and that was that. But, you know, the prescription was for a common stomach remedy which we had in the cupboard anyway, and going out for it meant I wasn’t with her when she died.’
Slight the farewell that she took
– my mother – she just ceased to live.
Without one word or backward look;
we were not so demonstrative.
A funeral and a farewell
For the funeral at Golders Green crematorium we and a couple of Sarah’s friends living nearby were asked to collect Victoria Kingsley from her home. She was standing at her front door; the Polish couple caring for her stood on either side of her, protectively.
‘We have had to dress her,’ said the wife in a low, intimate tone. She couldn’t be relied on to dress herself, it was implied; but they had not done a very good job.
Victoria wore a long, shiny belted mackintosh and curious headgear rather like a baseball cap. She was clutching a small bunch of tightly budded pink roses. ‘I thought roses for Sarah,’ she said with emphasis, though Sarah had hated shop-bought flowers.
She looked very cheerful as she took her place in the taxi, and began to prattle happily after greeting us all. ‘What a nice scarf you’re wearing – did you knit it yourself?’ and ‘Really quite a lovely day, don’t you think? Much nicer than it’s been for some time.’ Sarah’s friends were quite put out by her manner and made grimaces of the ‘How can she talk like that?’ kind as she babbled on.
On arrival at the crematorium she grasped my arm firmly, saying, ‘I’m sticking to you – you seem to know your way around here,’ which was alas too true.
I steered her towards the reception room, where we saw John sitting sadly with his bookbinder friend Sally Lou Smith. ‘Good God Almighty, it’s Victoria!’ he said loudly; but Victoria, still cheerful, ignored him and released me saying she wanted to make sure of a lift back: ‘Some of these people must have cars – it won’t be so easy finding a taxi here afterwards,’ showing that she in fact knew the place rather better than she had implied. She had the air of being at a party as she approached the other mourners.
It struck me that the death of a contemporary can be quite enlivening in extreme old age; Sarah would surely have had a shrewd comment on this.
We took our places in the small chapel, John sitting in front, and all sat in silence. No canned music – the Robertses strongly disapproved of this. We waited and we waited till John turned round in his seat and addressed us, his arm over the back. ‘I was going to make some sort of speech,’ he said ‘but now I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. You will all of you hold Sarah in your hearts, in different ways. Maybe this is the beginning not the end.’ And the coffin vanished.
As we left, John told me that he had a hospital appointment for that afternoon and would not be coming to the wake organised by their neighbour and good friend Diana Gurney in her house in the Crescent. ‘Opportune really: I couldn’t have faced it. Make my apologies.’
Some time afterwards, when John was showing me the paintings still on display in Sarah’s bedroom, I saw that the urn with her ashes had been put on top of a chest of drawers. It was resting on a small piece of clumsily cut upholstery material which John must have found in the house. A flowering twig from the garden was tenderly placed on it, changed every day as I later discovered.
John himself was to live less than three years more, dying suddenly at home one winter evening.
My hand supporting and but two steps more
before the turn,
my thoughts go back to forty years before –
she went so lightly up those self-same stairs!
A talent for living
‘I wish I could draw,’ Sarah had said one day, looking at a beautiful Renaissance drawing in an exhibition. ‘I wish I had a talent. Though of course I do have one – it’s a talent for living.’
Sarah aged fifteen:
‘How could I have stayed in Leeds,
looking like that?’
The poems quoted come from Poems for Sarah by John David Roberts, published by Hearing Eye, London, in 2003. These were selected from a manuscript found in the house after John’s death, chosen from those he had marked for possible publication.
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