Jim Boswell was my father. Paul Hogarth describes him as 'big' but physically, he wasn't although he was a giant in other respects. He was hugely admired by men and women alike and I spent a lot of my life basking in the knowledge that however he behaved with everyone else, to him I mattered most.
When I was old enough to understand what Jim was doing with paint, I thought he was achameleon. It's only now, thirty five years after his death, with access to more paintings than I have previously seen together that it has dawned upon me that practically every painting he did was produced in not more than twenty years and all fall very neatly into place.
Before the war, Jim was not a painter. He was a sublime, satirical illustrator but he was not a painter. His post war flashy girls in Camden Town and his slightly seedy shop fronts were illustrations in oil paint but they were not paintings. It was later, in the very early fifties that he became dissatisfied with his own skills and decided to start from scratch.
He was learning and learning meant experimenting with what other people had done before, examining minutely how they did it and exploring their methods. It was a relief to me after he took me to a Jackson Pollack retrospective, that his studio was too small for him to experiment too enthusiastically.
It has become clear that each style he developed came to represent something which was happening in his life. This was not strictly true of his drawings which didn't appear to be much affected by his personal life until very late in the day when for the first time, his drawings and paintings began to have a close identity with one another. The only way that it made sense was to hitch each style onto what we as a family were doing at the time.
Jim was born in New Zealand, a place he was eager to leave, although thirty years later, he was transferring memories of the coast where he grew up onto canvas, to dramatic effect. He fled to Europe, bringing with him practically nothing but a large bamboo-root toad which is now my dearest possession and is the first thing I would grab if the house was on fire. His artistic achievements during the period before the war are already well documented and since I wasn't there, anything I said would be hearsay. Although politically he was deeply concerned about the condition of the world and this was reflected in his work, his personal life was cheerful and busy. In 1934, he married Betty Soars, a pretty art student and part-time waitress in a cafe called Megs where any student - of music, art or literature - could rely on a free meal in times of desperation. In 1936, I was born, just in time to make him think twice about going off to fight in Spain. He was no fool and could see clearly what was happening in Europe. For this reason, there were no more babies. There was just me.
He was drawing but not painting. There wouldn't have been room anyway. Betty's family supplied money for a layette. Jim blued the lot on a plan-chest, the top of which Betty was allowed to use as a nappy-changing table. The available space increased when we moved to Parliament Hill in 1940 but by then, painting wasn't a priority .
War broke out, Jim waited to be called up and eventually vanished to Peebles and then Iraq. I was sent to boarding school much against Jim's wishes but this freed Betty who worked in a shop sending books to troops and then ran a canteen for Canadian servicemen. Bombs dropped but not on us. Jim came home just before Christmas in 1943, sporting a red beard. I was seven and didn't like it. Before he did anything else, he shaved it off.
He drew quite a lot those days and there were some memorable paintings too over which he laboured when he came back from Iraq. I can only recall them as very different from other things he did and they were hard work for him. These were the paintings which are now in Tate Britain. I know there were other paintings because there was a cellar under the stairs filled with racking but I can't recall what most of them were. In 1947 he went to Lilliput and for three or four years life was one long party. He produced several oil illustrations which were fantastic but were possibly not exactly what he wanted to be doing although at the time I doubt he knew what he wanted. We had holidays abroad and endless meals at The York Minster where the food was terrible but the company was wonderful. The rule was never to have sherry trifle at the end of the week because by that time the waiter had drunk all the sherry and watered it down. Jim smoked Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and there was never a shortage of wine. The house was full of artists and writers who came because they thought Jim was wonderful - and because Betty was a good cook.
In 1950 the Lilliput party finished and the learning began. Jim had a tiny box of a studio . Part of his learning process included the use of egg yolks mixed with paint. The mixture deteriorated and stank the house out at a time when eggs were still in fairly short supply. In 1951, he painted a huge mural for the Festival of Britain which included a shoal of herring. Until he had learned how to paint a lot of herring very fast, the house stank of decayed fish. Eventually, he needed space so he rented a studio which gave him the opportunity to employ models and study life drawing again, which might not have been so convenient at home but the studio was an expense he couldn't really justify. In 1954, I suggested he had my room and I had his tiny box. It meant that I got the en suite sink although it never stopped Jim washing his brushes in it but above all it meant that Jim's paintings got bigger.
When we wanted a short break or just a day by the sea, we went to Brighton. Jim loved the textures of the beach and the sea front hotels. The new techniques which he had mastered were put to good use. About 1953 he began a series of paintings of the beach and the groynes, all painted in considerable detail. It isn't easy to deduce what was in his mind at the time but in all probability, this was just part of the learning process. The need to eat, drink and be merry was met by his becoming editor of Sainsbury's house magazine, a publication which was extraordinarily professional and quite unlike anything produced by other major companies.
We had some great holidays. Lugano, Padua, Verona, La Flotte on the Ile de Re before anyone else went there and Beg Meil in Brittany. Maybe it was the effect of France and the opportunity to see some French galleries but quite abruptly the pebbles were abandoned and Jim's painting was a riot of colour. He was exploring Fauve. This was followed in about 1956 by a series of tranquil green paintings which looked like the sun shimmering through a canopy of early summer leaves. Accounting for these is difficult but I suspect the tranquility is the clue - not that anything in his life was ever tranquil. Financially he was fine. He gave up smoking and was fitter. There were no pressures. I disgraced myself by falling for a young man Jim considered far to immature for me. I disgraced myself even further by announcing that I intended to marry him.
In 1957, everything began to fall apart. The short break love affair with Brighton turned into the nightmare purchase of a substantial, Edwardian house in Hove. Betty had some family money, Jim got a somewhat surprising mortgage and the two of them left London. I flatly refused to go and stayed in Parliament Hill in a bizarre attic flat in the house opposite where I had grown up. The day they left, I went into the empty house and destroyed a collage which Jim had created over several years from old scrap books in order to disguise an asbestos wall - a relic of the War damage Commission. I couldn't bear that it should be left for anyone else although I've never quite forgiven myself for what was nothing but an act of wanton vandalism. Even empty and scruffy, Parliament Hill was still more of a home than Hove ever became. Where Jim and Betty were concerned, leaving London was a disaster. Later, Betty would claim that it was Jim who wanted to go but it wasn't. Jim was an out and out Londoner and didn't want to go at all, certainly not into suburban respectability in Hove.
The new house had a substantial room for a studio. Betty would arrange Jim's life so that when he was not in London, he could 'go up to the studio to paint', but he couldn't do it. Jim painted when he felt like it and not to order. When he felt like it, the results began to be spectacular. He headed down to the low tide line on the beach and collected coarse sand in old Lyons coffee tins, brought it home, rinsed it in the kitchen sink and baked it dry in the oven, much to Betty's annoyance because he used her roasting pan. This he mixed with paint and used as a thick, gritty medium. These paintings are wonderful. They look like the creation of the world, like the eruption of magma from the bowels of the earth. Some of the paint was metallic - bronze, copper and silver. But all of them are disturbing, brilliant but disturbing.
Jim was not happy. He missed London. He confessed to me that he felt a year younger with every mile in the train going up to London and a year older with every mile on the way back to Hove. Betty would prepare dinner for him and he always missed the train so the meal was wrecked. She never learned and never forgave him. Eventually the traveling became too much of a hassle and Jim rented a small flat in London. This helped because he tended to be in London during the week, living as had always lived, lunching lavishly with friends and with me and being the Jim we all knew and loved. The weekends became a time of rest in Hove where he could shut himself up and paint because he felt like it and know that come Monday, he would be on the way back to London.
By 1962, he needed an assistant because his workload was too heavy. She came in the shape of a married lady a year or two older than me with three children. This was Ruth.
I can recall exactly the moment when I looked at Jim and Ruth and knew that everything had changed. I got caught in a thunderstorm with my four year old son Simon and went to Jim's flat for shelter. Ruth was there, took one look at my soaking wet child, stripped him and put him in a hot bath. I sat and watched her, she made tea to warm me and Jim was curled up like a cat that had got the cream and was deeply content, surrounded by his favourite women. The relationship filled me with relief. Ruth was exactly what he needed. Then, as if he was making a declaration, his paintings changed. The disturbing, metallic creations of the world were no longer bronze, copper and silver. They were gold.
One day in 1966, Jim rang me and told me he had left Betty. She blamed me, not Ruth somewhat to my astonishment and I tried to be understanding but it wasn't easy. The relief for Jim must have been enormous because after this, his painting and his drawing went from strength to strength. Even towards the end of his life when everything was a struggle, his paintings and his drawings reflected his emotions. He wanted to paint and draw because he was happy.
