Cumming - You gotta get bigger dreams: my life in stories and pictures

WHEN I WAS about ten I was cutting the grass outside our house when a car drew up and a strange man got out and asked me if I knew an Alan Cumming.

I um, I, well , I stuttered, worried I had done something wrong and this man was from the local gulag and I was about to be abducted and whisked off to some child labor camp. Then I realized that would actually be preferable to my life as it was under my fathers draconian regime so I said boldly, Yes, I am he.

Except I said it too quickly and it came out as Yamahee, like the name on the side of the plastic electric organ with the wobbly leg my auntie had recently bequeathed to me.

What did you say, son? said the man, a slight note of pity in his voice, as though I was impaired in some way.

I am Alan Cumming, I said.

Years later I saw the movie Spartacus and so wished there had been a horde of other little boys amid the freshly mown lawn to echo my childhood pronouncement.

Then congratulations! said the man, a smile breaking across his wrinkly face like an accordian opening for air. Youve won a camera!

He proferred a gleaming plastic box with a plastic Kodak camera inside it along with a packet of Kodak film wrapped in plastic! I was overwhelmed. Id never won anything before. I thought it must be a joke of some kind. Nice things like this didnt happen to me. I panicked that it was some sort of test my father had engineered to see how I would react.

But how? I spluttered, looking at the magical package in my grass-stained hands.

You went to the Monikie church jamboree, did you not? said the man, enjoying my puzzlement.

Yes.

And you bought a ticket for the tombola, did you not?

Uh-huh, I countered, my mind whirring.

Suddenly he was a prosecution attorney circling in on the accused, about to look up at the judge and murmur, No further questions. But instead, in real life, he said

There you go then! You won this camera! Happy snapping!

And with that he stepped back into his car and was gone.

I stood there, just staring at the magical offering, absolutely dumbstruck. Suddenly I heard the sound of the front door open behind me and my father was striding down the drive, the tacks on the bottom of his boots beating a militaristic and ever-loudening cacophony that rung in my ears and overwhelmed my present wonder.

Who was that? My fathers voice snapped me back to reality.

I won a camera, I said, realizing how ridiculous that sentence would sound to him. Even in something as simple as cutting the acres of grass around our house, his ditzy, flighty son had failedand not only failed, but conjured a camera and some ridiculous story to validate his failure.

My father eyed me suspiciously and pulled the camera from my clutches.

A man from the church jamboree brought it. I won! I added faintly.

If you fell out of a window, youd fall up, my dad scoffed, pushing my prize back into my hands, turning on his heels, and marching back inside. Get on with that grass, he threw over his shoulder as he went.

I looked down at the box again. The whole thing seemed magically unreal. This wasnt just a raffle prize, it was something untouchably mine, something my dad couldnt control or beat me at. In an instant I realized what it was to be an artist. I had the means to express myself and now I merely had to work out what I wanted to say.

The first picture I took was of my granny when she came to visit the next week. She was as excited as I was about my stroke of luck and gamely became my first model, posing in front of the rose trellis in our garden.

I didnt mean Granny to be so on the left of frame. I thought I was centering her, but my novice skills forbade such a predictable action. However, I am glad she is at the side, beaming away encouragingly, giving the roses a chance to bloom beside her.

My parents were standing by as I took the picture and I felt it rude not to ask them to be my next muses. In the ensuing portrait my framing issues were less able to be explained away, although perhaps cutting my father out of the picture was a rather symbolic premonition.

The last picture I am going to show you from that first, and sadly, only roll of Kodak film, is of a sheep and her lambs that were residing in the field in front of our house. Much as I want to advocate the rustic beauty of dry stone walls, I did not intend to show such an expanse at the expense of my ovine models.

Do you see a theme emerging?!

When that first roll had been developed and picked up from the local towns chemist, and my family huddled around me as I opened the packet and viewed my attempts at capturing my contemporary existence, this photo of the sheep was the final straw for my father. That I had bothered to take a photo of them at all incensed him but it was my repeated left-side framing of my subjects that his militaristic mind just couldnt handle. That, along with the expense of the film processing, made him issue an edict that forbade me from ever taking another picture with my new camera. I placed it in the chest of drawers in my bedroom, and once in a while Id look at it waiting for me, still sparkling and new, both of us knowing that one day I would be free to tell stories and take pictures of whatever I chose.