The colour of Roger Red-hat’s hat is not a trick question but with no mention of his face, I coloured that red too – thinking outside the box, you see, means sometimes colouring outside the lines. On the next page, my teacher used my pencil to write in large letters that Roger lives in a white house then watched as I traced over each letter with my red felt-tip pen. Pleased, she moved on to another child in the class and left me to draw Roger’s house. Once satisfied, I put down my pencil and picked up my red crayon. As Pollock described it, ‘When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.’ There is no hesitation in those crayon strokes, just the determination of a willful boy with none of the doubt that would come to define him as a man. While I am incredibly fortunate to have this piece as a testament to an innocence once truly free, there does remain, however, one nagging concern with regard to the difficulty Red headed Roger Red-hat’s wife would have faced whenever looking for him in that red house. In retrospect, my mother clearly wasn’t hitting me hard or often enough.
CHRIS PARLETT 