Shadow in the landscape
AS a boy growing up in war-ravaged Finsbury Park, Don McCullin would abscond from school and take the tube to Cockfosters at the end of the line, from where he’d roam into the countryside looking for birds’ eggs and snakes. Yet the seeds of his visual interest in the rural landscape were sown, he says, aboard the London Midland Scottish steam trains, where, aged 15, he had a job washing up dishes in the dining car for 30 shillings a week.
As he worked—‘they had no detergent in those days; there was a tin with a piece of fairy soap in it which you had to shake in the water to get a froth’—he’d look out through the slot of a window in his little pantry. ‘We’d go over these great Victorian viaducts as we tore through the landscape to those northern satanic cities and I’d toss out tea plates and the cows would look up. I was a bit of a rogue when I was a boy, you know.’
The story of how the defiant teenager escaped the ganglands of North London to become one of the world’s greatest war photographers is well known, his genius enshrined in countless
