#nhoke

Arthur [Ballad] was so overtaken by Stuart's abilities that he said he forgot he was a student and regarded him as a fellow artist. Arthur would go and watch Stuart paint and then they would go to the Cracke and analyse the work. But Stuart's thoughts were clearly not far away from John, for he attempted to write a novel - I still have some pages of it - in which the central character, John, who also appears as Nhoke, is an artist living in horrid rooms in Puke Street. It is, in its way, stuttering satire. It is also heartbreaking, for Stuart writes of the terrible change in John/Nhoke nine months after they met, in time and incident that mirror the death of John's mother Julia. He also conjures up an early portrait of John and, of course, himself, writing of his hero: 'He was capricious, incalcuable and self-centred, yet at the same time he was always a loyal friend. A frustrated and misunderstood child not given its due need of affection, ends as a man without roots, in rebellion or bewilderment, almost embittered, this was John. Painting had reached the point of obsessesion with him. He lived it, ate, slept and drank it.'

Pauline Sutcliffe described a novel Stuart began in this period, where a character named Nhoke is the thinly veiled composite of Lennon and Sutcliffe, "an artist living in horrid rooms in Puke street." She remembered how Stuart wrote of the "terrible change in John" in the months after they met, mirroring the loss of his mother. "He was capricious, in-calculable and self-centered, yet at the same time he was always a loyal friend. A frustrated and misunderstood child not given its due need of affection ends as a man without roots, in rebellion or bewilderment, almost embittered."