Laura Freeman

Who’s afraid of the dark? Who now fears shadows and bumps in the night? Where do you even find any dark to be afraid of when your phone is only a pocket away? One swipe and the screen lights up blue-white like the old explorer’s match in a cave. If I wake in the night I don’t bother with the bedside lamp. A bar of light comes under the blinds. Lights from the flats opposite. Fire-escape lights from the hotel next door. The jaundice glow of London light pollution. Even staying with my parents, on the edge of a village, there’s no real darkness. There are lights from the lane, lights from the next farm, lights from the main road on the hill. Intruder lights come on each time a muntjac makes for Mum’s vegetable garden in the small hours. Click. Click. Click.

What advice would you give to this modern moral question posed by my friend’s younger sister? A boy at school had asked her to send him a selfie. Nude, naturally. She was dithering. She liked the boy, a sixth-form crush, and was keen to endear herself. But she knew that if she sent a naked picture he’d pass it on to his friends. She had thought of compromises: just her breasts, or her bottom coyly reflected in a mirror. It hadn’t crossed her mind to say ‘get lost’. Then, she explained, he’d tell his friends she was a prude. That, to her, was far worse than the First XI seeing her in the nuddy.

The girl who posed for Auguste Rodin’s figure of Eve on the ‘Gates of Hell’ was, the sculptor said, a ‘panther’. She was a young Italian, pregnant, but barely showing. Not a professional artist’s model. He found the girls who modelled for the Academy painters too affected. He liked stretchers, yawners, fidgeters, jitterbug girls who couldn’t sit still. His figures in plaster, bronze and marble have a pretzel suppleness. They do the splits, lie curled and foetal, fold at the waist, and crouch doubled like Atlas. His sibyls hold yoga poses. His prodigal son has a six-pack. A sketch might take only three, four, five charcoal or gouache strokes. Then: new pose, new page.

Have you, on hearing the story of the princess who felt a pea through 40 feather mattresses, ever thought that she was, well, a bit of a wet blanket? One measly dried pea through all that padding and she wakes up black and blue with bruises? ‘I can’t tell you what I’ve suffered!’ she quivers in an 1846 English translation from the Hans Christian Andersen original. Ah, but you don’t know the whole story. Go back to Andersen and you discover it was three peas. Poor princess. Now I understand. Imagine fidgeting in the night, feeling a lump under the mattress, and rolling over to the cool side of the bed and finding another pea — dastardly pea — and curling up miserably at the foot of the bed only to discover a third pea-hummock.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning it was to the news that Donald Trump was the next President of the United States, and, at the top of my Instagram feed, to a photograph of a pair of shiny silver ballet pumps. ‘Wearing sparkly shoes to make today just a teeny bit better,’ was the caption. I scrolled down through other photographs in my usual mindless morning way. A greyhound, already the most doleful looking of dogs, in her basket and the caption: ‘Thank God she neither knows nor understands. I envy her peace’. A toddler, still in his pyjamas, tousled, sleepy, fawn-in-the-headlights eyes: ‘What kind of world will he grow up in?’. A single candle, a mug of tea, a slice of buttered toast: ‘I need the calm in this picture today’.

Can I tell you about one of the best weekends of my life? It involved no foreign travel, no booze, no party, no love affair, no sun, sea, shopping or beach. It was the second weekend of my A-level year and I had been set the first History of Art essay of term: on early Florentine sculpture. My teacher had lent a book from his shelves, I’d borrowed another from the library and half-a-dozen more from my mother. I sat all weekend, rapt at the kitchen table with Andrea Pisano, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi spread around me. I wrote a seven-page essay in my tiny monk’s handwriting and could have gone on for pages more. In a way I have. I went on to study History of Art at university and now write about art – among other things – for a living.

Thomas Hardy, while still married to his first wife Emma, but arranging assignations in London with Florence, his second-wife-to-be, used to ask her to meet him at the Victoria and Albert Museum by the great, towering plaster cast of Trajan’s column. Really, Thomas? Trajan’s column? How obvious can a man be? Knowing what I know about Hardy’s column, and with the added burlesque of the modesty fig leaf that was cast for Michelangelo’s plaster David, I cannot now keep a straight face in the Cast Courts at the V&A and have to take myself off upstairs to look at silver salt-shakers the minute I get the sniggers. What a lot of things the Victorians had.

The new consumer obsession of my generation isn’t white goods, trainers or designer labels. It is — whisper it — quiet. We, the under-30s, are almost allergic to noise, so much so that many of us would happily pay extra to sit in a quiet carriage, or in the café seat furthest from the speakers, or drink in an upholstered alcove in a bar. Two of the three things — privacy, space, quiet — that our parents wanted when they bought houses with gardens in leafy streets and town suburbs are lost to us.

The curious thing about an art room is that you never remember the look of the place. Each summer, a school art room sloughs its skin: life drawings are unpinned from the walls, maquettes carried home for the holidays, canvases taken off easels, portfolios collected by school leavers, the whole place stripped of colour and finery. The room is white and empty again, a canvas primed for September. What stays from year to year and what lingers in the senses of former pupils is the smell. Chalk and charcoal, oils and turpentine, wet clay and slip mix, Swarfega jelly and Pritt Stick, sugar paper (a smell like damp hymn-books) and the heady, headachy vapour of hot glue guns.