5. What It Felt Like

As my mother's exhibition at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind closes, I open pages from the Visitor's Book

The idea for this Substack was to go through Papers of Note in date order. Ideally, I should be doing another birth certificate. And I will, next week (I have a tasty one lined up) as changing plans is so much more exhausting than sticking to them. I say this with feeling as I’m married to a man who is completely plan-phobic: he is the opposite of that famous palindrome that goes, “a man, a plan, a canal, Panama.”

He refuses to commit to anything more than about a fortnight in advance apart from children’s weddings, whereas I love what Jilly Cooper calls, gaily, “black diary”.

I’m also married to a man who teases me about this and says things like, “shouldn’t you be writing your new Substack? Surely the world is waiting for fresh news of Tante Yvonne!” or, “you said in your trip to Cornwall newsletter that there was nothing so stupefying as other people’s relations, why do you think everyone wants to read about YOURS..” Well, quite.

Anyway, a couple of things just happened that have made me change course today and do this rather than a paper of note proper though there is a page at the end that almost fits the bill.

For one, yesterday, some canvases I’d lent to the exhibition of my mother’s 1974 work were returned all the way to Exmoor by the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. This was a complex operation that required me sending the Museum’s director who was kindly organising their rentrée a long, written set of directions to the farm. This document includes all the roads that would send you round the houses if you took them (sections include, “after five miles on past the Methodist Chapel there is a fingerpost sign to Dulverton on the left, DO NOT TAKE IT, continue for another mile and a half until you see the sign saying Winsford,” and “go through the village for a couple of miles and when you see a dovecote on your left, slow down...”)

This is important as the postcode actually takes you (“you” as in delivery drivers or indeed the armed police during the murder-suicide in 2020 I mentioned in my previous newsletter) over the hills and far away in the wrong direction. As well as the copious written directions I sent the what-three-words for good measure.

At lunchtime, lo, the four paintings that had been shown in public for only the second time since my mother painted them in a basement boiler room of the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell (aged only 32, with four children) came back home.

The second thing that happened that made me think I had to write this was that the new chairman of the board of the Bethlem, Dr John Curran, sent me the visitors’ book today.

This was strangely moving. No, not strangely. Seeing the effect your late mother’s work has on others was always going to be moving, and also make me sad that she was not alive to see the powerful response to her paintings from “the public;” and to read Janice Turner call her the “visual equivalent of Sylvia Plath” in The Times.

She would have loved that, but she would have loved the Visitor’s Book reviews just as much. Here are some excerpts from the thousands of people who trailed all the way (I speak obviously as someone who irritatingly “divides” my time between Notting Hill and Exmoor) to darkest south London to see my late mother Charlotte’s work while she was in a mental hospital or what we call now a psychiatric facility (as per this nib in the Art Newspaper) and painted 78 canvases in only eight months.

Someone called Kasper said, “What a brilliant artist, and what a distinctive style, loved the vintage feel as they seem to conjure up the period of the Seventies so well…” Yes. My mother’s paintings while an in-patient in 1974 are nothing if not Seventies, and have a very much Seventies vibe.

Underneath, someone who was perhaps somewhat traumatised by the experience wrote, “A very disturbing depiction of her state of mind, brilliantly portrayed…”

Many said they were upset, even changed by seeing the pictures. “I don’t feel the same as I did before I came, I feel quite changed and see things differently,” for example. Here’s just a random page, one of so many:

I’ve just seen that on the page just above this one, someone has scrawled “Extraordinary paintings. Such a talent…These would be great viewed at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Hayward or Barbican. Too much Bacon and Freud. Let’s have more Johnson-Wahl.” I can hear her sardonic “hah” at that notion - she was uninterested in fame, and status, and report, and only ever desired recognition for her painting, which was her main interest - but I know she would have enjoyed reading that almost as much as I did.

Black-and-white papers of note pale in comparison to her vivid tumult of a legacy. Such a body of work.

One of the visitors wrote “Peace dear Lady Peace” at the end of her entry.

I’m afraid that would have made her laugh too, as most things did.

More Rachel Papers and that birth certificate next week.