21 March 2013

MERE, WILTSHIRE. HEAVY SKIES, UNINTERRUPTED RAIN, COLD EAST WIND. TEMPERATURE 5 DEGREES C.

In many almanacs, 21 March is the official start of spring. This bitter, grey day feels like midwinter but the Birtwistle house is warm and comfortable. The stone building was once a silk factory, in a narrow street in the middle of the town. It is approached through a grille-like gate up a single flight of iron stairs, recessed from the street. Thus the ground floor of the house is above street level. The deep slope down towards the entrance acted as a loading bay for carts to access the raised floor level directly, when the house was constructed, circa 1800. Attached on one side to an irregular terrace of small houses from the same period, it nevertheless has a feeling of privacy, solidity and quiet.

Our first conversation, like many subsequent ones, takes place at Harry's kitchen table. The room is L-shaped. All the cooking activity takes place in the upright of the 'L', where windows look down onto a pedestrian lane: schoolchildren pass beneath the window at regular intervals, their cheerful shouts easily audible. Harry likes the sound of young life, the better for needing no attention. Because the room is above street level, only the heads of tall adults can be seen through the slatted blinds as they pass. The kitchen is well ordered, modern and spotless, surfaces clear and gleaming. Someone comes in each day to do housework but Harry clears away first anyway. He feels threatened by mess.

The dining area is in the foot of the 'L', where windows look out on the west-facing garden. A long table made of poplar, commissioned from a carpenter in France when the Birtwistles lived there in the 1980s, stretches nearly the length of the room. This is where we sit. The paint colours are those of stone or sky. Contrasting bands have been painted round the door frames by Harry, with advice from his youngest son Toby (or perhaps it was the other way round). All is simple and sturdy, light and contemporary but not tubular.

One exception to the general plainness is the sofa at the end, which is covered in leopard-print fabric. This piece of furniture once belonged to Robert Graves - 'apparently', Harry says. 'That's what his widow told me. Or at least, he used to sit on it anyway.' (He would explain how this came about in a later conversation.)

The end of the dining area, beyond the sofa, continues round, open plan, to the hallway and stairs, so perhaps the space is actually more of a 'U' than an 'L'. On the street side of the house, mirroring the dining area, is a rectilinear, library-like room. Harry might be found there sitting on the sofa, watching TV or going through piles of admin papers which he tosses on the floor. Not for long, though. A need for order soon gets the better of him. Where does he put the papers? 'In a drawer under the bed. Then I never look at them again.' By mid-afternoon, when most of these conversations take place, this east-facing room always looks dark. Harry says it is filled with light in the morning, and he once had a plan, short-lived, to eat breakfast there each day.

Outside, under the sullen sky, the trees look bare and melancholy. The long straight garden slopes up slightly from the house then drops down to a long, stone water feature, like a section of a canal, except that the water is moving, tumbling down to a yet lower level at one end. This rill is full of mirror carp. The garden design is the work of Lorraine Johnson, who is married to Harry's agent of forty years, Andrew Rosner. Two gravel paths either side of the water lead to steps up to Harry's wooden studio at the end: the impression is of entering a tree house. The whole effect is enclosed, compact, considered, designed. Houses overlook just yards away, but you soon forget them.

Given the weather, on this first occasion we stay in the kitchen. Irvine Hunt, whom Harry has known since he was in his teens when Irvine, four years older, was already a reporter on the Accrington Observer, is in the next room. He has come to stay for the week. He often does. 'It's good when he comes. He does everything. I can get on and work.' Drawings and watercolours by Harry's oldest son, Adam Birtwistle, hang on the wall behind the sofa. There are works by other artists elsewhere, including some small, delicate watercolours by Harry's late wife, Sheila.

A French armoire made of elm and 'messed about a bit', as Harry puts it, contains glasses. The dominant piece of furniture is a big wooden chest of drawers painted a dark, dusty blue. Two earthenware bowls from Afghanistan, which arrived unsolicited in a consignment from a carpet-seller, sit formally on the table and contain lemons. There are always lemons on the table and if not lemons, limes, or sometimes both.

What are your earliest childhood memories? Set the scene of your first home, your parents, your upbringing.

Sunday afternoons. That's what comes to mind. They were different. We didn't have much room. I remember a big chassis pram pushed under the table. It was my pram, so this might be one of my earliest memories. I had no brothers or sisters. One end of the pram stuck out. When my son Adam was born we had the same kind . And I used to push it under the table, half sticking out, in exactly the same way.

Why were Sundays different?

There was a sort of melancholy. Everything stopped. There was nothing. It was significant even for people who didn't go to church - an idea of 'Sunday best' right down to the clothes and the tea service. I remember the cups we had - they were very 1930s, straight 'triangular', with green lines round the top. My mother went to the Methodist chapel. Or maybe it was Baptist - one or the other. No one knew the difference. I went to Sunday school. I was taught the piano by someone called Ormerod. You can't forget a name like that. Somehow I knew he was homosexual though he was married and though no one had told me about such things and I didn't know the word . Those things went on . you just knew, though no one said anything. I was never told the facts of life. But I'm not making it up. He once made a pass at my father - when he, my father, was about eighty! My father!

[By now Harry is laughing helplessly.]

But I didn't go to the chapel until later when I played the hymns. I think my mother was very keen on my having Sunday suits.

Tweed suits, or what?

Tweed suits didn't come until my rebel days. I suppose they were serge or similar, with short trousers for quite a while.

Did both your parents work?

My parents had what was called a confectioner's shop in Accrington [Lancashire] but really it was a bakery. They baked, both of them. I think they had gone to some sort of night school, or done apprenticeships, to learn the skill - how to make bread commercially.

The downstairs had three rooms where most of the other houses in the row - terraced 'two-up two-downs' - had just the two. Upstairs we had a bathroom, with a bath and washbasin. I remember the roll-top and the big straight taps which were fixed so the water ran very close to the edge of the bath. I can see the green-grey limescale mark. It was probably the only bathroom in the street. But the toilet was outside in the back yard like everyone else's.

Two of the downstairs rooms were workrooms - the shop and the kitchen. The third was the living room. It was always full of things to do with the business. There was a three-piece suite but every two weeks there'd be a delivery of great sacks of flour filling the room .

I remember sitting in a high chair - another of my earliest memories, which is very vivid - and being given lumps of dough to play with. Instinctively I still know how bread should be kneaded and pulled. I can watch someone doing it and know if the result will be any good or not. But that tactile thing of working with dough carried through to my abiding interest in clay and pottery. The idea of turning raw material into something else was part of the appeal.

We had a car, too, which set us apart. My father was quite entrepreneurial. I used to go off with him to the farmers beyond Clitheroe - the Trough of Bowland as it's known - and get eggs and butter. There was a place called Lane Ends, just a crossroads . Sometimes we'd come back with a load of live ducks or chickens so we could sell our own eggs. I can tell the kind of chicken from looking at an egg. And I can tell which hen in a coop laid it by the markings.

So you were, within that Lancashire mill-town community, better off than some of your neighbours?

Oh yes, certainly. In a small way my father made quite a bit of money because of the war. He dealt in what I suppose you'd call the soft black-market economy, getting hold of and selling things that people wanted. You weren't allowed to have all that dairy produce because of rations. Once we came back with a crate of live ducks and he sold them to someone in Accrington.

As the baker and confectioner in a small town, was your father a well-known figure in the neighbourhood?

I suppose so. A bit. He used to make all the wedding cakes - the sort with three tiers and columns and a bride and groom on top. My mother didn't do that. That was his department.

Were you close to your father?

We were different kinds of people. Or maybe in fact we were very similar but our paths diverged, and the context of our lives made us seem more different than we really were. I was his...