I'm just turned seventeen and I read in the local paper of an art competition run by the City Council with several categories for various age groups up to 18. I decide to enter the five that I'm eligible for. I make the pictures on paper and badger my Dad to cut me five pieces of hardboard to fit them and he then finds some cheap passepartout paper that I stick around the edges in lieu of proper frames. I was young, my father knew nothing about art competitions and we were fairly poor!
On the required Saturday morning, on the way into town with my friends (a regular Saturday jaunt), I drop off the work at the location that the showing and judging will take place that lunchtime. As we go in I see several large posh cars pull up outside disgorging youngsters who are certainly not the kind of oinks that me and my mates are with large beautifully and expensively framed pictures under their arms. My own work looks, to me at least, small and shabby. We slink off and go about our usual business in the city generally making a nuisance of ourselves!
Late in the afternoon we go back to the venue, there's only a few people left clearing up and putting stuff away...the event is well and truly over with prizes awarded and pictures collected. I find somebody and ask for my work - the certificates start tumbling out with the work - there is confusion as the organisers suggest my pieces are by two different people - brothers they'd assumed! - and it transpires that - after all - its the work and not the supports that attracted attention.
They seem a tad irritated - I suspect simply that I hadn't been there to scoop up my prizes at the allotted time - but being seventeen and irredeemably working class with all that inverse snobbery I decide they just didn't like the fact that I'd won the lot in the over 16 section!
It was an experience that sealed my fate - I had to be an artist - there was nothing else at which I'd ever excelled - and the die was cast.
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