Christina and Patrick - journey between two worlds
© Billy Marshall Stoneking
like a huge egyptian cat
his paws folded
in the silent tomb of his garden
the pear tree wept
her fruit
uneaten on the ground
- Christina Conrad
"One cannot look directly at the sun.
An oblique approach is necessary." Hayman was a gentle pacifist, yet acutely aware of an aggressive, eruptive side of his character. "Go back to Palestine" and other experiences of anti-Semitism at school kindled his ire at injustices. "They said I had Jewish eyes. I was afraid my father would not want me. I sent a photograph of myself. I looked like a Red Indian. I wore a white feather in my hair. I told him about my broken marriage, my abortions, my lovers, my children, my self-imprisonment. I said: ‘life is a glass mountain I keep climbing up; I keep falling down.’ I said ‘I live in a dream world. I turn everything I love into a fetish. I erect this fetish in the centre of my life. From this I make my paintings."
"When I was 33, I met a man. He took my hand. He said: ‘the lines on your hand are a map of your life. We are born with these lines. They can be changed by inward-working’. He stared at the lines on my hand. He said: 'the man who you think is your father is not your father. There is a secret surrounding your birth'. I crept away.
"Many moons later, I came to my mother’s house. The boat slid between the huge sleeping hills. Seagulls screamed over my head, their eyes cruel. I said to my mother: ‘who is my father?’ My mother said nothing. For a long time, noting. Then she said: ‘your father is the Jewish painter, Patrick Hayman’."
Patrick Hayman, the English/Jewish painter & poet, was born in London in 1913. In the Malvern College library – built to the memory of those who died after the first few months in the trenches – Hayman began a strenuous self-education. "The terrible irony of reading the First World War poets in such an environment affected me for life." Two, sympathetic instructors clandestinely told him of their appalling war experiences. So began a life-long interest in the realities of war and violence.
In 1936, his father booked him passage on a ship sailing to the Antipodes and, at nineteen, Patrick arrived in Dunedin, New Zealand. For the next two years he worked in the office of Hayman & Co. – Importers; then, in 1938, he left his father’s company to “explore the wilds of New Zealand”. It was to be a journey from which he never entirely returned. On long walks in the hills, Hayman experienced a mystical sense of what he called “no feeling”, a sense of nothing. On his return to Dunedin he began to paint.
In 1942 - the year Christina was born - Patrick Hayman was living in a bed-sit overlooking Wellington Harbor. For him it was the most phenomenal place he had ever lived. He was in the love with the ships. Great steam ships like children’s drawings with orange and red hulls and gigantic stacks puffing smoke. He remained there – "apart from home-guard vigils spent lying on huge, empty beaches" – until the end of the war.
The war years were extremely fertile for Hayman. The adventure of artistic discovery and his desire for isolation drew him ever further from the child he had helped to conceive. More and more he began to feel himself outside time and place, outside events.
In 1947, he reluctantly returned to England, found a small cottage on the outskirts of a tiny fishing village in Cornwall, and immersed himself in his painting. In July, 1949, he met Barbara Judson. A life-long partnership began. Eventually they moved to a Spartan-like flat overlooking Carabis Bay. “The dark pine trees, the azure sea, the hills and wide expanse of ocean reminded me of a miniature New Zealand.” It was during this time he became associated with a colony of artists and writers in St Ives that included the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth.
"My father wrote to me. He wanted me. I wanted him. He had no children. Only me. He wanted me to come and stay with him in London. I was afraid of the world. I did not wear clothes very often. I did not eat meat. I lived high up in a hidden valley within a circle of hills. A great river rushed down the valley and met another river. The land was full of foxgloves and stones. I lived in an old, goldminer’s house by the river. I wrote:
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