A diary made in collaboration with RGAP (Research Group for Artists Publications).

1962 Derby College of Art

Figure Composition Class
A minimum of three full-length figures (with visible feet) within a perspective setting of buildings of brick or stone (including a clock tower) and at least two trees. Predominant colours to be burnt umber and yellow ochre. Title: Autumn Evening.

I'm painting quickly after coming back late from an extended lunch hour in the Regent Snooker Hall at the back of the college. The best of three frames I'd played against Dave had been delayed while we argued about whose turn it was to play the role of Minnesota Fats, the king of the Pittsburgh pool shooters, who was eventually dethroned by the upstart Fast Eddie Felson in the film The Hustler, which had recently come to our local cinema and held us in its thrall.

Neither of us wanted to be brash, good-looking Paul Newman (Fast Eddie). We both yearned to be honey-talking, wise old Fats (Jackie Gleason) who enters Ames's Pool Hall every evening at 8pm on the nose through double doors deferentially opened by a limping flunkey. Fats is immaculately dressed in a Homburg hat and six-buttoned overcoat with a double-folded silk handkerchief in the breast pocket and a duplicate in the same pocket of his three-piece suit, in the button-hole of which is a carnation. With a silver lighter he lights a cigarette taken from a silver case, twirling it in his jewelled fingers like a conjurer, then proprietorially surveys the poolroom like a priest in his church. The Church of the Good Hustler.

So today it was my turn to be the Fat Man. Now Fats was big, heavy, like an elegant bear. Whereas I was so thin that the seven stone weakling who got sand kicked in his face by the hunk in the Charles Atlas body-building advertisement actually looked physically better than me. Within two years, hollow-cheeked, scrawny youths with northern accents would become pin-ups as the beat groups swept the charts. But not yet, so for me to impersonate Fats required a vivid imagination, and that at least I had.

A second difficulty was that in 1960s England, pool was an unknown, foreign game. The balls were bafflingly numbered, the cue bridged under the index finger, and shots were played without fully lowering the head. Yet pool was recognisably related to the game we knew: snooker, which still awaited its discovery by television and was considered a disreputable pastime of mis-spent youth, played by pale-faced wasters in dimly lit saloons above Burtons Tailors shops. In the Regent Snooker Hall the sustenance was Spam rolls and stewed tea, the clientèle ex-footballers, spivs and layabouts, but the ambience was not too far from Ames's Pittsburgh Pool Hall: the shaded lamps over the baize tables, the dark wooden cue racks, the signs saying "Don't sit on the tables. Use the rest". We could easily imagine that Ames's had the same miasma of unventilated cigarette smoke, chalk dust and fetid toilets as the Regent. Thirdly, in a lunch break we couldn't hope to duplicate the film's epic, 36-hour game, which we knew, literally, frame by frame, shot by shot.

Fats gets off to a flyer, watched by an admiring Eddie. "Woooo, he is great! See that old Fat Man, look at the way he moves, like a dancer. And those fingers, those chubby fingers, that stroke, like he's playing a violin or somethin'."

Then the game ebbs and flows, first Fats then Eddie holding sway, against a jazz-scored montage of cigar-chomping faces and hypnotic incantation: "Seven ball in the corner." Kerchunk. "Six in the middle." Kerchunk. "One twenty five. Game. Thirteen. Five. Ten. Game. Two in the corner. Thirteen. Ace in the side. Three ball. One twenty five. Game. Rack 'em."

Now Fats is $18,000 down and sits impassively like a buddha, as the inspired Eddie lines up another plant before lifting his eyes and saying to Trevor, who is watching our game in the role of George C. Scott: "Hey mister."
"The name's Gordon. Bert Gordon."
"Mister. You've been sitting in that spot for hours, now would you mind moving, it bothers me."

Trevor takes off his wraparound shades, sips his glass of milk, moves his chair one inch to the left and drawls to me out of the side of his mouth: "Fats, stay with this kid, he's a loser." Then with mimed hand gestures and no props, I enact the film's most magical scene, where Fats, after 25 hours of the match, takes time out to wash and brush up, dusts his hands with talc, sets a fresh carnation in his button-hole, then pink and powdered like a big, dimpled baby, ambles back to the table, fixes Newman with his piggy little eyes and smiling benignly says: "OK Fast Eddie, let's play some pool."

And you just know he's going to take back every last dollar with interest, except that Fats is a gent and, 12 hours later, having reduced Eddie to a beaten, drunken wreck, he refuses to take his last $200, declares the game over and exits in Homburg and overcoat through the same doors which he had entered a night and a day earlier; the epitome of savvy, cool artistry and style. Everything we aspired to.

Meanwhile, so help me, this Composition Class is chronic, and only 15 minutes left to get this third figure right. Maybe if I give him a Homburg, yes, that's better, and an overcoat with six buttons, yeah, easy, and just in time, it's 5 o'clock, time to go home.

At the bus station I climb on to the Long Eaton bus and Dave on to the one for Belper. We wave from the steps and Dave shouts: "Fat Man, you shoot a great game of pool." "So do you, Fast Eddie." I respond, raising an imaginary whisky glass.

There's a free seat next to a woman with a blue-rinsed perm who shifts up and says: "Plenty of room for a whippet like you."

I grin: "Ah, but you know what they say, in every thin person there's a fat one trying to get out."

She gives me a funny look and stares hard out of the window.