You made me acknowledge the devil in me
I hope to God I’m talking metaphorically
Hope that I’m talking allegorically…
…I’ve never known a girl like you before
Edwyn Collins, A Girl Like You (1994)
‘On my parish visits, I have been shocked,’ Father Martin pauses for dramatic effect before continuing in his unforgiving Ulster firebrand volume and delivery, ‘shocked, I repeat, to be confronted on the walls of some homes, not by images of our Lord or His blessed mother, but by lewd and indecent pictures masquerading as art.’
Up until he spat out this final word as if it had been the devil himself, I had been blocking out the priest’s ranting sermon as I did every Sunday at Our Most Holy Redeemer, the church serving the Roman Catholic faithful at the lower end of the Welsh valleys’ town of Pontypool. But this sudden dramatic denunciation of the unwitting (but unnamed) pornographers of the parish had me immediately sitting straight-backed on the church bench and looking directly into the small, dark, piercing eyes of the not unhandsome curé, the smooth skin of his rounded cheeks betraying a hint of cherub-red. The cause of this coloration, whether from anger, embarrassment or excitement, was unclear. And now, as I stared, as often happens when someone declaims from a stage or platform, it felt as though the beady eyes of the speaker had fixed their glare on me; were boring into me, as if me and my conscience (or, if I had one, my soul) were the objects of his accusation and wrath.
Typical of my then religion to make the innocent feel guilty, I quickly lowered my gaze. It was then that I became aware that the priest’s words were having a tangible effect on my father, sitting next to me in the pew. I could sense his whole body stiffen; hear his breathing become suddenly more audible and short; feel the force being applied to suppress what sounded like a painful cough. I was not surprised. My father was always a prude – commanding us to ‘shut eyes!’ at any kind of nudity; tuttingly switching channels at the first hint of anything risqué; leaving the room if a taboo subject, like childbirth, was ever mentioned. No wonder, then, that this allusion to something carnal, in front of his family, and, worse, in such a public place and spiritual context, was going to get him shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
After further admonishment on the kind of artwork inappropriate for the decoration of good Catholic family homes (though presumably acceptable for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), the robed celibate blessed his congregation (well used to being unsettled by his weekly diatribe dressed up as homily) and got on with the rest of this familiar weekly theatre of ritual.
I cannot remember how soon afterwards – whether on the car journey home, or while we sipped our traditional Sunday morning coffee with its splash of rum, or later as we tucked into the unfeasibly overcooked roast and overboiled vegetables – that I noticed my father was bristling. Being a man quick to temper on the least provocation, this was not unusual. But while his ire was normally sparked by one of us, his three children, knocking over a beaker of squash, say, at the dinner table, or my mother, mercilessly crunching a gear change in the car, or some trade union leader or Labour politician spouting pinko nonsense on the telly, this was different.
Somehow, I could tell that my father was angry because he was embarrassed. And it all seemed to have something to do with Mass that morning. The inevitable explosion at my poor mother wasn’t long coming.
‘No one tells me what I can and cannot put on the walls of my own bloody house. Who the hell does he think he is? For God’s sake! there’s a picture of the damn Pope on the wall opposite!’
And as my father raved profanities, the truth dawned.
On one of the walls of our sitting room, hangs a framed parchment, sent from the Vatican in 1964, a papal blessing of my parents’ marriage that year, signed by Pope Paul himself, his photo at the centre, hand poised in benediction. Directly opposite the pontiff’s picture, above the fireplace, on the wall immediately facing anyone who enters the room, hangs a framed print from Boots the Chemist, the original painted, coincidentally, in 1964. Depicted in a shaded woodland setting stands a sultry young woman, long black hair swathed over a naked shoulder, a hand caressing the ridged bark of a tree trunk, dark eyes looking right into those of the viewer. In our house, those smouldering orbs constantly burned into the facing portrait of the Vicar of Rome for some thirty years. And, on one specific occasion, clearly stirred the emotions of a sex-starved cleric dropping by for tea. This was Tina.
Father Martin’s sermon had been directed much closer to home than I realized in church that morning. For it was our walls that were apparently daubed with filth; ours, the guilty home; we, the accused pornographers; poor Tina, the painted Jezebel.
I will never know if anyone beyond my family ever made the same connection. For my mother’s sake, I hope not. At the time, I felt defensive of Tina and, unusually, in sympathy with my father’s outrage that anyone, even a priest, should proselytise upon and dictate what should and should not adorn his walls. After all, a Welshman’s home was as much his castle as that of his English compatriot’s. There were, surely, far worse outrages to taste in the orange, brown and mustard swirls of our wallpaper, carpets and lampshades than a mass-produced, mildly erotic picture by a minor twentieth-century British artist, available to millions from a popular high-street pharmacist. But gaudy excess being a hallmark of the insides of many Catholic churches, and an obsession with sex equally characteristic of the insides of the heads of their clergy, it is no surprise that it was not my conservative parents’ 1970s psychedelic interior décor that got the knickers of our parish priest into such a twist but rather their kitsch, one and only, toe-in-the-water dip into the pool (or swamp) of sexual liberation in which the era notoriously swung.
The item of kitsch in question is now an iconic image of the 1960s, painted by little-known British artist, Joseph Henry (‘J.H.’) Lynch. ‘Tina’ and other paintings of similar subjects and with suggestive and anachronistic titles such as ‘Woodland Goddess’, ‘Nymph’ and ‘Rose’ (the latter ironically, the name of my mother) were so popular that prints sold in their thousands if not millions in places such as Boots in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Long after I had left home and developed an appreciation of the retrobilia of my childhood, I was thrilled to find the cover of Edwin Collins’s 1994 single, A Girl Like You, sporting the image of J.H. Lynch’s ‘Tina’ which had gazed upon me and my family in our front room for over two decades.
In recent weeks, my brother and I have been sorting through our Mum’s flat after her move to a care home where, because of her dementia, no memory of that infamous Sunday morning (almost) naming and shaming remains, either to upset or amuse her. Among a mass of ‘60s and 70s kitsch, we come across the Pope’s blessing, though, frustratingly, not his voluptuous roommate, whose picture did not survive my parents’ move from their first family home twenty years ago.
But my brother does send me a photo he found on Facebook of a typical 1970s home. Flanked by curtains of floral browns and yellows, and above a teak cabinet displaying a ‘Babycham’ bambi and a tin of ‘Quality Street’ so large as to prove incontrovertibly that confectioners have been shrinking the size of their products shamelessly ever since, hangs ‘Tina’. And this was the catalyst for a return down the rabbit hole in which I last got lost when Collins’s hit single was released in the 1990s.
This time, I discover that ‘Tina’ and her artwork friends had made appearances in scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s even more iconic – and surely far more controversial – A Clockwork Orange (1971), and that Stella McCartney had used Tina’s image in her A/W18 collection, showcased in Paris in 2018. The reviewer in the fashion and culture magazine, ‘AnOther’ noted that McCartney’s use of the art work, ‘glimpsed out from beneath blousy layers of tulle and lace…their latent sense of eroticism [seeming] to hint of the private desires that a woman might harbour’ and that the prints ‘spoke of the alluring appeal of kitsch – of bad taste made good’, McCartney herself acknowledging ‘the charm of “something a little bit wrong”’.
So there it was. My father would have felt vindicated. ‘Tina’ is, perhaps, ‘a little bit wrong’ but, over the course of time, and seen through the lens of retrospective and nostalgia, definitely ‘bad taste made good’. However, had Father Martin been aware at the time of his sermon that not only was ‘Tina’ on permanent exhibition in our living room, but on the wall of the set of a notorious film banned from screening in the UK for a quarter of a century, the padre’s outrage might have blown his piggy eyes right out of his biretta-ed bonce.
Postscript (spoiler alert to my brother)
I am thinking about spending a lot of money on Etsy: ‘Lovely Vintage J.H. Lynch ‘TINA’ 1960s Print in Original Frame. Excellent Condition. Rare Find.’
A 50th birthday gift for a sentimental relative, perhaps, doubling up as a house-warming present for his new flat? Or to keep for myself? I’m not sure. But God knows what we are going to do with the Pope.