Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013) CBE, RA, Hon RSA — to 20th- century Scottish art what his hero and acquaintance Hugh MacDiarmid was to Scottish poetry — but its inspiring message is that love conquers all. Helen Bellany is not a ‘quitter’, and her story triumphantly confirms it. It is a long book but does not drag. The past is so alive to her it seems only natural when she lapses into the present tense.
She is a highlander from Golspie in ‘timeless and silent’ Sutherland, and the poetry of her descriptions encourages a visit to that far-off county. Golspie is on the coast, and fishing employed the distaff side of her family; a complement to Bellany, the son of generations of Port Seton fishermen on the Firth of Forth. Both had ‘secure and happy’ childhoods. Sutherland is beautiful, but Helen longed to experience the wider world. Earning a place at Edinburgh College of Art in 1961 was the crucial first step. ‘Don’t you be coming back with a fellow with long hair and a beard, mind!’, warned her father, and of course she did.
Freshers’ Week proved an anarchic introduction. One character, ‘thundering out jazz’ on a piano, caught her eye. He wore a flamboyant black hat and from his waist ‘swung a great bone’ fresh from the butcher’s. This was John Bellany, who supplemented his grant by playing at weekends in a band otherwise formed of coal miners. He was in the year ahead, a ‘slightly scary’ star talent.
Art education was changing — ‘the wave of the new was largely turning away from the scholarship of the past’.
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