Josef had spent a large part of the first semester stripping the students back: he called it their year of ‘forgetting’. He began his first workshop with a box of drinking straws: ‘Take what you need,’ he would say. ‘Make something that could only be made of drinking straws: not knitting needles, wire, or spaghetti.’ And, after the students’ initial confusion – lessons from the lemon continued – they would start to make things: straws were split, flattened, glued, even used as spatulas and paintbrushes.

Most of them came around to it. Some dragged their heels, wondering, I think, what it was they had come to the Bauhaus to do. It all looked too much like child’s play, and not enough like fine art. I always had my eye on the man or woman who was most resistant; someone like me who clung to the imitative impulse. I tried my hardest with them.

Today I would continue Josef’s themes of spatial creation. The babies gathered at their work tables. Most of them looked like they could do with a good meal, and I wondered that they didn’t stock up at the cafeteria, as we Journeymen did. Most of the students were blond, but there was also Michiko, a student visiting from Japan, and a tall dark man: Howard, an American. Before I began I felt self-possessed and powerful; how good it felt, to be their teacher; to have the students in my hands.

Beside me were stacks of colourless cardboard. ‘I want you to find new ways of dividing and joining the cardboard. Obviously, cutting and gluing are uninteresting. Can we make this cardboard do something it has never done before? Something it is particularly suited for?’

It was always best to leave them unobserved, because even the suggestion of authority could impede their ex perimentation. And so I left them to get on with the task, and in my room I worked on a painting that was turning out better than expected: a simple grid of berry-bright colour. Now I was living, as well as teaching, Master Itten’s methodology, which was not to care too much about what was produced.

When I returned to the classroom an hour later the results were ingenious. One of the students had wetted the cardboard into spirals which retained their shapes when dried. Another – this was Michiko, who was particularly talented – had made a design on the board by stippling its layers of laminated fibre. No other material would have achieved such textural difference; she had discovered its unique properties. ‘Was it accidental?’ I asked her. ‘This discovery?’

She nodded.

‘What knife did you use?’

‘No knife.’ Michiko brought out something from her handbag. ‘My eyebrow tweezers.’