Enigma

 

AH commented: "I have just watched the video of Enigma. As you know anonymity is always my most comfortable position and was unhappy to see my photograph accessible to one and all." AH, the subject of my watercolours titled Enigma, decries use of photographic imagery in which he is portrayed because anonymity is protested as being his default position. Yet his own fifteen minutes of fame came about vicariously at the end of the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s, when a certain David Farrant (also known as Allan Farrow, the surname proffered by him on the charge sheet in August 1970 following his arrest in Highgate Cemetery) occupied AH's personal coal bunker in a communal cellar. For a brief period, a matter of weeks, AH was the puppeteer to puppet Farrant, ending with the latter's arrest and imprisonment exactly one year after taking up residence in the aforementioned coal bunker. From thereon Farrant became a loose cannon, issuing contradictory claims about himself and others, hurtling to his inevitable doom (a four years' eight months' prison sentence). His former puppet-master remained ever in the shadows, treating his tenant from August 1969 to August 1970 with untrammelled contempt. Yet, curiously, Farrant, whom he cuckolded and made a figure of fun, never evinced any real resentment or open hostility toward AH who would later claim the dubious honour of being the architect of Farrant's downfall. I, on the other hand, would receive Farrant's full wrath for no more than disbelieving him, and warning against his meddling in the Highgate Vampire case.