Gabriel Marchant:

Writer's Notes, Reviews and Extracts

As he tells the whole tale of how he became a painter Gabriel Marchant celebrates the liberating nature of art in hard-pressed lives and the role of people like Archie Todhunter those magical change-makers of lives like his own. WR

And some reviews:

Amazon 5 Star (1) Review ‘Light At The End Of The Tunnel.'  We see Gabriel develop as an artist from the early use of charred larch wood given to him by his grandmother and his blind copying of Rembrandt drawings to become an accomplished painter; Tegger learns to fashion his love of words into fine poetry. 'Gabriel Marchant' is a rites of passage story sympathetically revealing life in the raw. Gabriel matures not only as an artist but discovers at Archie's Settlement 'the complication of women' through Rosel, art teacher and older woman, Marguerite model and Greta the gauche, clever schoolgirl who makes a pact with Gabriel to do 'the thing that men and women do.'

- And always in the background is Archie, working to release the butterflies from their chrysilis state, a gifted group of young people desperate to escape the web of ignorance that could condemn them to life in the dark as black as any mine.
A very good read. Highly Recommended.'

Amazon 5.0 out of 5 stars Review  (2)  A Must Read.

 'An exceptional evocation of the pit: it's darkness, its amazing colour (here is the big surprise), the earth and its ghosts and the men who worked there, especially Gabriel the man who would be painter - wonderful.'

Extract - Chapter 3

(here is Gabriel....)  I have wondered from time to time whether I got my profound love of drawing and painting from my Aunt Susanah, wife to the Priorton schoolteacher Jonty Clelland.
Susanah’s own story is interesting. She was related to me because she’d been first married to an uncle of mine who died in Wormwood Scrubs at the time of the Great War. They said he’d been beaten to death. He had once been a great footballer: a hero in the district. But after his death no-one spoke of him because he refused to take up arms and was what they called a conchie, snarling the word.

Another, surviving conchie was my Aunt Susanah’s second husband a schoolteacher whom she married after my uncle died. This one, called Jonty, still dabbled in politics twenty years later. He’d got into bother a while back over some Blackshirts and went to prison. It was in the papers.

Aunt Susanah herself drew and painted pictures. She was known for it. On the wall of the house I shared with my father there was this picture of hers. Kingfishers by Glittering Water by Susanah Clelland. She gave the picture to me for my fifth birthday. But she lived in Priorton, some miles away, so I didn’t see much of her.

So you might say there was a chance that I got my delight in drawing from Aunt Susanah. But, although she  would never have called herself an artist, I think it was much more likely that it was my grandmother who set me away She knew nothing about the arts. But she knew enough of politics to feel a deep chilly anger at having to feed her family on strike wages, or later on no money at all. This anger was distilled into fury at seeing her daughter–in-law die of hunger, forcing her grown son home again trailing his motherless child.

This child was me.

So me and my Dad came to live there with my grandma in nineteen twenty seven.  She fed us and took care of us for three years. Then, after five years she fell ill herself. And then she died. They said it was pleurisy but I’ve no real way of knowing, as she was never attended by the doctor before he came to give us her death certificate. When she died she was still wearing her usual crossover apron. In her coffin she looked like a silver haired doll.

We were actually called lucky because by then I was in the pit so we could keep the pit house

But in those early years when my father and I lived with Grandma, her narrow house seemed to me to be flooded with colour and distinctive shape.  It was Grandma who - when she made hooked mats on Hessian canvas - showed me it was possible to recreate the sun and the moon with plates and tin lids for templates. She showed me how to create balance in a square and order in a rectangle; how you could make explosive red stand out against dense black; how yellow lives bright when set against green.

Her choice of colour was bold and uncompromising: for her there was no settling for the safe blacks and greys of a mining life. Such a freight of colour burned in her head that neither wall nor picture frame could hold it. She was indeed an artist. Her canvasses were the circles, squares and rectangles of Hessian canvas - you couldn’t call them carpets – that she made to cover the floors in this meagre house.  These mats survived for many years, eventually faded but still doing service as a barrier to the damp coming up from stone laid straight onto soil.

When I was very small I would sit underneath this stretched Hessian, peering up at the shadow of her prodding hands and watching the stubby back of the mat grow and grow. From there I could see the sun and the moon in negative: the underside of outrageous sunflowers and plump sprawling geraniums. Later, when my hands were bigger she would let me wield her big scissors and cut useable strips from old clothes and discarded furnishing cloth. She would let me poke and prod the cloth through the stretched canvas and make my own world of colour.

One day my grandmother smiled with quiet glee when a neighbour brought her the end-pieces of green velvet curtains that had been cut down in a house where she worked. She hoarded this treasure and when Easter came she made a small stepping mat with a design of trailing ivy set against pale grey flannel. A graceful present for the narrow house.

Grandma didn’t always confine herself to the colours that came to her second-hand; she did not just cut up into strips the discarded coats and dresses she bought for pennies from the junk stall on Priorton market. She had her own ways of making her palette of colour. For months she’d be haunted by an image of the next mat in her mind and would save to buy penny dyes to colour some plain unpicked cloth. In even harder times she would strip berries from bushes and floral lichen from stone walls and squeeze them to a coloured juice. Then she would infuse the dull cloth with startling brilliance so she could punch purple suns and blue trees into the Hessian.

I would help her to mix and stir the dye, dipping my fingers and holding them up to see how the light made my flesh glow through these vivid colours. One day I swirled my dripping fingers across my father’s’ newspaper, and made an image of a coiled red snake. This was before he had read is precious newspaper, so I got a beating with his thick leather belt for my troubles.

My grandmother kept the paper image of that red curling snake and later that year copied my snake design for a stepping mat that she made secretly in the dark hours of the night. When it was done she parcelled it up for my Christmas present. That mat is on my wall now, alongside my own early painting of the White Leas colliery wheel.

She also charred larch wood in a fire pit on the green at the back of the house and made charcoal for me.  I used these stubs to draw on more sheets from the butcher.

Those first pictures were messy but it felt very good, making that hard black mark. She bought stubby pencils for me, using her eternal ‘tick’ – her credit - from the corner shop.

On one birthday she persuaded my father to buy me my first tin of paints. Sacked from the pit, he’d obtained a month’s work with a company that moved furniture for families who were going to the Midlands and the south of England to find work. They would pack two or three households to a wagon. ‘In my wagon,’ he’d say, ‘are packed the lives of twenty people. You don’t have to live inside a stone tent like we do if you can pack your life in a van.’

He enjoyed this work. ‘You’re your own boss out on the road. You see a bit of the other bright world away from the North,’ he said, a rare smile flitting across his face. ‘I wish I’d known that before. I’d not have spent those years underground.’

Then this moving company went bankrupt and he lost that job as well. That was the last time he worked and probably the last time I saw him smile.

As for me, at least I had my paints and now I began to make my mark on things. I would paint on old newspapers and broken-down cardboard boxes. The woman at the Co-op kept back big sugar bags and flattened them for me. They were poor things, those first daubs: scrappy copies of my grandmother’s mats; pictures of things around the house; pots and pans, my father’s old bent boots; my grandma’s Singer sewing machine.

On my first day at school my mother took one of my drawings to show the teacher. I won a prize for a painting in my first week there. And I was always a good scholar. Every teacher encouraged me and told me I had a great future with this talent to draw. At the grammar school, where I’d won a free place, more than one teacher took me to one side and told me that with this talent I was really too good for the pit. My talent would be my salvation.

All this made not one jot of difference, of course, to my future. 

When I turned fourteen my father got wind of a job at White Leas Colliery, the second largest pit after Brack’s Hill.. So I left school and went to the pit.  I had to go. I’d no great confidence in my teachers’ judgment. My father called what they said flattery: people looking after their own jobs. My Grandmother was dead by then and I had no one to fight own my corner.

So it happens that on the first pay-Saturday after I start the pit I turn up at home to see my Aunt Susannah standing four-square on my grandmother’s sunflower rug. My father stands, arms folded, in front of my Aunt, whose first love had been my conchie uncle. The crackle of a recent quarrel zings in the air.

In her arms she’s clutching a large flat parcel. She smiles when she sees me. ‘I have this for you Gabriel,’ she says, placing the parcel carefully on the table.

My father lifts a stoneware milk jug and a cup from the table and brushes past me as he takes them through to the scullery. I stand uneasily on the hearthrug. She looks at me. ‘You still have smell of the pit about you, Gabriel’ she frowns. ‘Sad in one so young.’

I curse myself for blushing. I glance up and catch sight of myself in the mirror above the mantelpiece: this stranger, this pit boy. The black pit-dirt is in the pores of my skin, on the inside of my reddened eyes.

‘So how was the pit, Gabriel?’ she says.

I shake my head, wary. ‘It’s the pit,’ I mumble. ‘You know.’

I can hear my father in the scullery clashing about and avoiding coming into the kitchen because my aunt is here.

She shrugs. ‘Sad, I was, to learn that you’d had to go down there. My own brother Davey changed forever the day he went down the pit.’ Dewi. She says his name in the Welsh way. There are a lot of Welsh folks around here. Come up for the work.

‘Davey?’ I say. I’ve heard of no Davey.

‘Killed in the Great War. He liked the army better than the pit.’ There’s this dark look on her face. ‘Much better than the pit. Davey turned down the pit for the army, just like your uncle, who they killed in prison, turned down the war to fight for peace.’

I rub my chin. It’s itchy. Bristles are poking through these days. ‘I can see what he meant.’ I say.

She turns to the parcel. ‘I was sad, hearing you’d left school, you being such a good scholar at the grammar school. My Jonty’s friend teaches there. Mr Jackson, his name is. He says you are a good artist. And clever it is, too.’

I sniff and cough, holding down the dusty air of the pit screens. ‘I needed to work. I need the work. My dad can’t get work. They won’t let him back.’

‘I know that, Gabriel. Your father is a man of principle.’

Now she pulls a great flat book out of its brown paper nest.  The book’s slate coloured cover is scrawled across with the name Rembrandt.  ‘This man is a genius. This is a book of  his picture plates. I bought it at an auction of the property of a schoolmaster in Priorton. I thought it might just do for you.’

She opens a page and tips the book towards the window. ‘Look!’ she says, turning the pages.

Many of the plates are black and white but have shades and depths that make them glow. Others are coloured. Such colour! Such harmony of flesh and light. I feel drenched in sweetness, as though I’ve drunk a cup of Golden Syrup all at once. The colours lambast me from the page: the glow of the glistening flesh, the subtleties of the folds in the garments; the mysterious life in the eyes of the subjects.  ‘Crikey!’ I say.

‘As you say. Crikey!’ There’s a small smile on her face.

I don’t know what to say. ‘Thank you,’ I say loudly. ‘Is this really for me? I’ve never had nothing like this before, like.’
She looks around. ‘Is there anybody else in this house who is an artist? Of course it’s for you.’ She’s staring at me with odd concentration.

I shake my head. ‘Me, I’m no artist.’

‘Oh yes you are. You’re an artist and a good scholar, and if that… if your father wants to forget that then you must not.’ She pulls on her gloves. ‘Well, my Jonty’s waiting for me at the station. We’re off to Durham. We have a Labour meeting there.’

‘Don’t go, I... Something to drink? Some tea?’

She laughs a contented, confident laugh. ‘Indeed I think your father’ll only settle when I get out of this house, dear Gabriel.’ Her Welsh voice sings in the air in the narrow cluttered room. She puts her clean glove on my dirty pit jacket. ‘Promise me you’ll draw still, and paint still, Gabriel. In spite of the pit? In spite of those men there who’ll think it’s - well - a cissy kind of thing?’

‘Well, I...’

‘Promise!’

‘To be honest Aunt Susanah, I don’t think I can stop myself. The drawing and painting thing.’

Her laughter rings out and she reaches up and kisses me on my blackened cheek. For minutes after she’s gone I can feel the soft imprint of her lips on my cheek.  My heart aches now for my mother, even though I don’t know if I really loved her and am not sure that I remember her properly.

If my father sees the tears in my eyes when he comes in with the clean pots, he doesn’t say. He puts the pots in the press, and with his back still to me he says gruffly. ‘What was that about then?’

‘She brought me this book of paintings. Dad ...’