By 1981 we had moved to Edinburgh where there were better prospects of employment…
…I had managed to secure the studio of no less a sculptor than the late Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson – the very studio in which he had made sculpture of Robert the Bruce which now stands in Bannockburn. But for an itinerant environmental artist like myself there simply was no work to be had, and for a while his gracious widow even allowed me to work as her gardener in lieu of paying rent. But eventually I had to give up that studio, and found work firstly as a milkman, then as a scenic artist and property maker with the Royal Luceum Theatre in Edinburgh.
During that time I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that I had entered an art gallery, the walls of which were pink. There, on a raised platform was a hexagonal table, around which were seated six large pink mannequins – or rather automaton type figures – for each of them was able to move albeit in a stilted, jerking manner. The thing was that these were not six different figures but rather one figure reiterated six times, for they were identical in every way, right down to the smallest gesture or expression.
(Before I relate the rest of the dream, I should perhaps say that I had been thinking a lot about Salvador Dali’s painting ‘paranoiac-critical solitude’ and had been trying to understand the mode of working which he called paranoiac critical method. I must have been very serious in my efforts to comprehend the method, because one night my brain offered its own symbolic solution in the form of the dream.)
The point is that each figure in the dream moved identically and simultaneously with all the others, and that each, being critical of the figure to his right, turned to confide in the figure on his left. With hand shielding mouth and thumb pointing backwards over his shoulder, in horror he discovers that he himself is also the object of criticism.
I knew that the dream was important and had started work almost immediately on a half life sized study of one of the figures, with the idea that I would replicate it six times…
…but in the event this work was never completed, and many years later I made an image with myself as a model, to show roughly what the sculpture might have looked like…
By 1981 Rosi and I were driving vehicles of a very different kinds around the streets of Edinburgh…
I was delivering milk on a small electric float in the middle of the night all around the West End, and by day Rosi was driving a vehicle of an entirely different class…
The Edinburgh Social Work Department had a small and select band of workers called Playbus leaders – one of whom was Rosi. These were mostly women who drove buses which had been retired from public service, and had been kitted out as mobile play areas for pre-school kids in outlying areas of the city. Rosi and her colleagues were experts in leading play for under-fives, using all the on-board equipment you might expect to find in any playgroup.
Driving these buses was definitely not for the faint hearted. Rosi’s route took her from the depot in Leith to Gilmerton, with gruelling uphill starts and double de-clutching all the way. Although she has a strong heart, she is quite small of stature, and it was quite usual for her to have to stand up to release the clutch at the top of Leith Street! (at the East end of Princes Street). Once at this busy junction her playbus even brushed roofs with another service bus at that place.. she and the other driver just smiled and shrugged.
Meanwhile, at 3 o’clock most mornings I was to be found driving my battery powered milk float up the Royal Mile and down to the other end of Princes Street, before gliding down the cobbled streets which lead to the Stockbridge area. One morning, on one of these cobbled streets I got bored and decided to see how fast the float would go. I actually got up to quite a speed on that hill before discovering that milk floats are not designed for chicanes. As far as I know the lamp post at the foot of Dean Park Crescent was only slightly bent. I didn’t last long in the dairy business.
By this time David Harding had moved from Glenrothes to lecture in the department of Art in Social Contexts, at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, and I was invited there for two extended visits to work with students on their public projects.