IMAGES FOR HOLY WEEK 6 

Good Friday

Christ of Saint John of the Cross

1951 by Salvador Dali

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow 

A very personal account. This was painted when I was just one year old and I discovered it when I was 29. In those days it was much less well known than it is today. 

International Year of the Child 1979 had thrust me into the temporary limelight as I had unexpectedly become the UK face or coordinator of the campaign for after school and holiday provision, for what were then known as “Latchkey Children”. Today we think of such provision as standard - in those days it was highly controversial as children were seen as their ‘mother’s responsibility’ and it definitely was ‘mother’s’ not parents. 

I’d flown to Glasgow (that was something I’d never have done in normal times), visited some embryonic parent run play and care schemes, spoken at a conference and been interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland. They were heady days, the campaign was going well and I was terrified I’d put a foot wrong. I was extremely lonely, because in a few short weeks I’d moved into a fast moving world of media and politics, which didn’t fit well with my friends and family. I had a precious few hours to spare and visited Kelvingrove. 

This vibrant painting jumped out and spoke to me. It engulfed me with a feeling of safety and of love, reminding me of a crumpled note wrapped round a crucifix, given to by an elderly priest whom I’d turned to in troubled student days “This is how it was and is. To realise that everything is known and one is loved just the same, then anything is possible.”

These days a copy of the painting and the old crucifix hang together on my wall. An officious self opinionated visitor once suggested that these and a couple of nearby icons demonstrated ‘an obsession with death and dying’, nothing could have been further from the truth. The Leonardo crucifixion is all about new life. 

There were notes and drawings on display beside the painting in Kelvingrove, which I think were by Leonardo, but sadly I can’t find them online. These pointed to the shape created by Christ’s hands, arms and body on the cross. which are reminiscent of the ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. His feet in the birth canal ready to enter or re-enter our lives. His bowed head is the foetus in the womb - a human embryo or the origin of an idea, a neighbourhood support project, an artwork, an engineering discovery, a medical breakthrough, a campaign..... I’ve often wondered how I’d have managed if I’d not found this painting on my afternoon in Glasgow. 

The Latchkey campaign continued through the UK Association for International Year of the Child and the British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres; until the Saturday in April 1982 when Mrs Thatcher recalled Parliament to launch her Falklands Armada. Instead of the anticipated government minister she sent opposition MP Alf Dubs to our conference (financed by Woman’s Own, Marks & Spencer and the Baring Foundation) to announce the first ever Government monies for Out of School Play and Care. The rest as you say is history. I suffered burnout and withdrew in 1986, but that April day was the acorn from which today’s vast local authority, school and voluntary sector service for children and families outside school hours was born.

And as new life will come from death

Love will come at leisure

Love of love, love of life and giving without measure

Gives in return a wondrous yearn for promise almost seen

Live hand in hand and together we'll stand

On the threshold of a dream

Graeme Edge The Moody Blues “Dream”