Derek Jarman: A Biography

2. Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them

2 Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them ‘Roses. There is a charm about a beautiful Rose garden which appeals irresistibly to every lover of flowers. It is not necessary to win a prize at a Rose show to enjoy Roses when they are used in free, informal, natural ways. There is a wide gulf between exhibiting and gardening .’1 Published in 1926, Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them is a substantial work. A mere thirty-two colour plates illustrate 400 pages of dense text. Even so, the Jarmans deemed it an appropriate gift for their four-year-old son, to whom it was given on 25 April 1946, shortly after the family’s reunion in Italy. At Manor Cottage, little Derek, or ‘Dekky’ as his doting grandmother called him, had wandered into the garden which, owing to the neglect of war, had become hopelessly overgrown. He picked nearly every flower in sight, studying each one with intense pleasure as he did so. ‘These spring flowers,’ he would later write, ‘are my first memory, startling discoveries; they shimmered briefly before dying, dividing the enchantment into days and months, like the gong that summoned us to lunch, breaking up my solitude . . . In that precious time I would stand and watch the garden grow, something imperceptible to my friends.’2 After Northwood, Italy was a fabulous floral crescendo. The gardens of the villa where the family spent their first summer were, in Jarman’s words, ‘a cornucopia of cascading blossom, abandoned avenues of mighty camellias, old roses trailing into the lake, huge golden pumpkins, stone gods overturned and covered with scurrying green lizards, dark cypresses, and woods full of hazel and sweet chestnut ’.3 Very much a product of England, and a war-torn England at that – his first reaction on seeing the Coliseum was to comment on how badly it had been bombed – little Dekky was ravished, in imagination if not in reality, by the vividness of the colours, textures, sounds and scents which Italy presented him. The dawn would bring Cecilia the housekeeper bustling into my bedroom – with a long feather duster to shoo out the swallows that flitted through the windows to build their nests in the corners of the room . . . After breakfast Davide, her handsome eighteen year old nephew, would place me on the handlebars of his bike, and we’d be off down country lanes – or out on the lake in an old rowing boat, where I would watch him strip in the heat as he rowed round the headland to a secret cove, laughing all the way. He was my first love.4 The image is splendidly romantic, splendidly romanticised, and was of such importance to its somewhat precocious author that, love-struck, he would return to it a number of times in his writings and films. Lance was based in Rome, a city which, for all its splendours, is simply too hot in high summer. With Lance flying up for weekends, Betts, Joany, Derek and Gaye found themselves billeted with a number of other air force families in the villa with the magnificent gardens, the swallows, Cecilia and Davide. Situated on the shore of Lake Maggiore, the Villa Zuassa had been requisitioned by the Allied Commission from a Fascist whose wife, ‘a sinister figure with a string of alsatians’,5 was still in residence. Her baleful, witch-like presence in the other half of the villa could cast a shadow across this Italian Eden as dark and alarming as the stormclouds that occasionally gathered across the lake. 16 Derek Jarman There were other shadows. In most respects little Dekky was a model child, impeccably turned out, well-mannered and cheerful. In matters prandial, however, he was proving something of a rebel. Usually it fell to Joany to feed the recalcitrant child. ‘Eat this for little Joany,’ she would croon – until Betts’ sister, Moyra, who happened to be staying, could stand it no longer. ‘For God’s sake,’ she snapped, ‘eat that for bloody little Joany.’ Thus did ‘Bloody Little Joany’ acquire a nickname and Jarman a reputation for being difficult at table. It was a reputation that would soon bring him into fierce conflict with his father, who up to now had seen very little of his son. That winter, after a brief stint in Venice, the family took up residence in Rome, a city then remarkable for its emptiness: ‘There were...