Bogarde’s biographer John Coldstream identified him as a tentative presence at Chelsea (he found just one former student who remembered Bogarde there), 'vanishing every evening'. It seems he did not want to 'connect'. 'He had already experienced a period of blackness', said Coldstream, 'what he called the "anthracite years" in Glasgow - and he'd established a sort of "shell" around himself.' Adam Low, director of the ‘Arena’ documentary, said that after being exiled to Scotland Bogarde ‘understood the nature of rejection'. (There had also been an incident in which Bogarde had been taken home from the cinema by an older man, who had wrapped him up in clothes like a mummy, and abused him. It is telling, as Low remarked, that this scene - almost fantasised in Bogarde's memoirs - is connected with the cinema; one of the earliest known examples of Bogarde's art is an adolescent sketch on a page from a school exercise-book, depicting Laurel and Hardy, Greta Garbo and Mickey Rooney.)

During his time at Chelsea, Bogarde had become artistically obsessed with the First World War, reading All Quiet on the Western Front and Seven Pillars of Wisdom and idolising William Orpen and Paul Nash. 'I was quite convinced that I was painting in this fury because I was the reincarnation of a young soldier who had been killed in 1917,' he wrote. His output was prodigious, 'leading Sutherland to say it was probably better to "get it out of my system" and exercise my imagination . . . [he] knew full well that no reincarnation was taking place, simply a release from too much emotionalism.'

Yet it was a fantasy which would stay with him.