by Alex Monroe
For Denise, Very, Con and the Lobster
When a thing’s done, it’s done, and if it’s not done right,
do it differently next time.
Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale, 1931
Contents
Woolverstone and the River Orwell
Chrysanthemum
The Bee
The River Alde
Two Turtle Doves
Calabria
The Gardener
Daisy Bell
Peacock
East Coast Rivers
Lovebirds
Butterfly
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Chrysanthemum
I’m squinting as I emerge from the Metro station. It’s March so the sun is bright and low, glancing off the sandstone walls of the Tuileries’ austere gardens. Bare trees and classical sculptures throw long shadows across pale gravelled paths. The traffic in the Rue de Rivoli behind me is as noisy as ever and the Musée d’Orsay tempts from the opposite bank of the Seine. A waft of cigarette smoke mingles with the fresh air and scent of sun on stone.
Parallel with road and river, long white marquees run the entire length of this vast space. Already I’m noticing a ridiculous number of skinny women dressed in black. They stand posturing in groups, sunglasses huge, cigarettes in one hand, phone in the other, their hair expensively dyed in streaks and pulled up tight. Their faces are pulled tight too, giving a harshness that’s hard to put your finger on at first. It’s a kind of blankness, which makes me think, as I look closer, that they’ve had some work done. They all sport big black shoulder bags, bright lipstick and shiny hoop earrings – just a little glint of bling is allowed. This is the uniform of The Fashion Buyer.
We’re in Paris for Fashion Week. Twice a year, March and September, designers come to show, the press comes to write and buyers come to buy. It’s a mad rush from season to season, show to show, collection to collection. Time slips away unnoticed while the months are measured out in marquees. This must be my twentieth year in Paris. I exhibit each year in London and Tokyo as well, New York if I’ve got the energy, and from time to time Berlin and Melbourne too, unveiling a new collection of forty or so themed pieces: necklaces on lavish and modest scales, a selection of earrings, some rings and a few bracelets. The pressure is to second-guess – or better still, inspire – the following season’s ‘new look’.
Down the steps, a doorman in a bright yellow puffer jacket lets me in and after a flash of my security pass, I’m swallowed up by the first tent: Paris Sur Môde.
The white space inside is divided into booths, monochrome settings for rack after rack of new clothes. The air is warm and sugary with the smell of sweet coffee mixed with a hundred different perfumes. Subdued and sophisticated muzak loops under the chatter, its hint of Europop echoing the medley of languages and accents I catch as I pass – there’s Russian, French, Italian, American and Japanese too, of course. These visitors are also all in black. Footsteps are muffled but not silenced by the carpet covering the wooden flooring. Some people stomp purposefully down the aisle, while others totter along in shoes as unfeasibly high as they’re fashionable. My own uniform of jeans and trainers comes from years of experience and a longing for comfort.
As a rule, buyers move in packs. The Japanese tend to trawl the shows in groups of five or six. There’s a gang of them coming along now: three men (the bosses, no doubt – the money men) and two exhausted-looking women who’ll be making the decisions. Italians move in threes, British buyers seem to operate mostly in twos, while big American stores roam in threes or fours. They pull things off racks and wreck elegant displays with nonchalance. Their silhouettes widen as they progress, great shiny bags multiplying on arms and shoulders.
I’ve made it through Paris Sur Môde and I’m into Première Classe now. The difference is striking. It’s more cramped and busy here, and smells much sweatier too. It’s horribly hot. In the old days you couldn’t see from one end to the other for the cigarette smoke. Paris Sur Môde is clothes; Première Classe is accessories. One of several such shows in Paris, it’s both the biggest and the toughest to get into. The organisers have a strict selection process and it shows.
There’s more variety here in people as well as products. There goes a guy in skinny purple jeans and yellow shoes, tossing his orange ponytail. He looks as though he’s got a monkey strapped to his back but it’s just the fur lining of his jacket. A tall and beautiful black man with short-cropped peroxided hair and a seventies pornstar moustache is wearing an ankle-length dress of floating purple under his leather jacket and stiletto boots with fur pompoms. I think of the streets around my studio in Elephant and Castle and wonder how long he’d last there.
There’s a real mix of things on show too: shoes, bags, scarves, belts and, of course, jewellery, which itself varies from huge dinner-plate-sized necklaces to pieces precious in their detail, set with minute gems or intricately filigreed. We’re at the nuts-and-bolts end of the international fashion industry here, all business and hard work. It’s an absolute meritocracy that’s upfront and honest, but it comes with hard knocks, too. If your stuff sells, you survive. If it doesn’t, you won’t last two minutes. That’s why I like it here. And why it makes me nervous.
Weaving towards my own stand, my eye is briefly caught by a display of gigantic necklaces of pearls and beads hung on coat hangers. American. They’re good at this, these three pretty young women with big hair and big smiles. I’ve caught their eye now . . . Hi, how are you? One approaches with a clipboard. I’m an exhibitor, I say. Her smile drops and she’s off in a millisecond. Good for her. No point in making small talk with me. I move on past an Italian company with loud plastic necklaces selling to a group of older women, beautiful long white hair hanging down their black dresses. Opposite, a Japanese designer has a wonderful display made entirely of paper, tiny gold pieces glistening with micro-set diamonds. But no buyers, so the two young Japanese women sit and chat at the table, holding their mobile phones. Next there’s a collection of vast mirrored pieces that catch the lights and dazzle me as I pass.
And then it’s me.
My stand looks scruffy in contrast, and it smells of burning wood. I’ve made lamps for the occasion out of Suffolk twigs, but the hazel wands are overheating, and the hot bulbs seem to scorch the bark. I worry a little about the fragile twists of smoke that rise from time to time (you’d never get away with this in London) but I love the reminder of autumn. Bonfires and incense. If I get it right today, that’s when this jewellery should be in the shops. Chrysanthemum season.
Chrysanthemum is the name of this collection. I haven’t put the whole lot out on the front plinth. Instead I’ve made a simple arrangement of key pieces, each necklace or pair of earrings lying on its own Perspex block, which is lit from within. They’re designed as tempting tasters to lead buyers to the display tray at the back of the stand, where the rest of the collection waits for judgement. Gold stands out best on the blocks’ translucent white tops, so these are the pieces I’ve chosen for the front, and unusually, this particular collection is looking just a bit sparkly.
There’s an asymmetric necklace here with pea-sized white pearls strung on one side, and a large blooming chrysanthemum flower in the middle. An organic bud-like setting holds it in place with leaves and a single pearl. The cocktail ring is as big as I’ve ever made: three flowers burst into life, almost blousy as they jostle for space. Of the three different pairs of earrings, the most glamorous are the smallest: pearl and faceted white topaz. Tiny flower buds have tinier diamonds set at their centre, and another pair borrows the pattern of chrysanthemum leaves, their stems forming elegant ear-hooks, their surface softened by flick-brushing to imitate the sheen of t
heir pearls. I’ve used black pearls too, at the heart of a couple of iridescent raven-black blooms, an effect achieved by ruthenium electroplated over gold over silver. The black pieces won’t sell as well as the gold and silver, but they’re fun and attention-grabbing and that’s just as important here.
There’s no time to eat. Just as you’re about to tidy away the debris of coffee cups, someone else is inspecting the stand, asking what it’s all about this time. You always need a line on the latest collection: a snappy PR quote that will feed the buzz. This time it’s easy, because I knew right from the start what I was after. It’s pure Grace Kelly, a new take on classic 1950s glamour. Form and texture; gold and pearls. An antidote to the looming financial crisis, I hope.
That’s the quick answer. But of course there’s more to every collection than a headline, and never time in a rushed fashion-show exchange to go back to the beginning and get a sense of where it all started. Sometimes I haven’t quite worked it out for myself. Like the forgotten source of an estuary – widening as it reaches the sea, repeatedly returning on itself with the tides, carrying silt and gathering debris, washing over the same territory but always changing – the origins of a piece of jewellery can be obscured even to its maker. I’ve made things for as long as I can remember (go-carts and necklaces, ammunition and earrings, bicycles and bracelets) but it’s taken me till now to start to map the tributaries of ideas and memories, and the flow of people and emotions running between these different creations.
Few of my collections have more distant headwaters than the little pieces that now lie glittering under the smoking lights at Première Classe. Chrysanthemums were significant in my family history well before I was born. In my childhood though, it was their absence that made them distinctive.
My mother, Peggy-Ann, was a wonderfully keen gardener but chrysanthemums were one of the few flowers she couldn’t bear. Great big blousy fellows, she would say. Very non-U. Some of the villagers grew them in their pretty bright cottage gardens, vibrant splashes of vivid colour among the veg and the red-hot pokers. I thought they looked splendid, and so they did, but I quickly learned they wouldn’t ‘do’ for us. They would have looked out of place beside our apricot and almond trees, and subtle swathes of ferns and grasses set against elegantly curving walls and lawns.
What I didn’t realise then was that my mother had a history with chrysanthemums.
Her father had absolutely adored them. They were his life’s great passion. In fact, I wonder if he mightn’t have loved the flowers more than he loved anything else. But at that age I never actually thought to wonder if my mother even had a father. He wasn’t ever talked about, and it didn’t occur to me to poke around. It’s only as I piece together the family history now, following trails of words and paper and images into the past, hints of stories trailing through time, that I begin to see how the past plays out in the work I do today.
My mother turned six in the summer of 1937, and her family lived in Lytham St Annes, the posh side of Preston, in a respectably large Victorian end-of-terrace. She remembers a red-brick façade with a shiny black front door, stone pillars on the bay window and white-painted sash windows.
When I quiz her, she tells me that her father Charles was one of twelve children, all Devon-born, and she uses the word ‘uneasy’ to describe him. As soon as he could, Charles ran away to Canada, where he married and had a son called John. Canada was not a success. His first wife promptly died and work was certainly not worth staying for. Charles came back to London with his son and he seems to have met and begun courting my grandmother, Madeleine, almost immediately.
Madeleine was everything that Charles was not: young, beautiful, intelligent and posh. She might also have been more than a little naive. I can’t help assuming this from her convent education. In the early 1900s she happily shared a dorm at St Ursula’s Convent School in Greenwich with a delightful mix of French, German and Norwegian girls. The school had been founded in 1877 by German nuns expelled from the Empire when Bismarck’s grip on state education tightened. By the time Madeleine became a boarder, most of the German sisters had returned home, and teaching had been largely taken over by French nuns escaping their own government’s increasingly anti-Catholic stance. It’s hard to imagine that these sheltered sisters and their motto of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience were the best preparation for a young woman in matters of love.
When Charles was presented to Madeleine’s parents, they took an immediate dislike to him. He had overdressed in an effort to impress: plus fours and, reportedly, a rather silly moustache, which was lacquered down and shiny, like his hair. He came across as a bad imitation of a country squire, sweating uncomfortably in an inappropriately stiff collar. Much older than Madeleine, brash and slightly spivvy, Charles was painfully aware that her parents saw straight through him. I suppose they were trained to do just that. Maddy’s mother was French and a grande dame of the old order. They lived a grand life in a grand house in Berkshire, where everything they consumed was ordered down from Harrods and delivered in the shop’s conspicuous green van. Peggy-Ann particularly remembers the weekly arrival of the Harrods’ library van. Even the family’s reading matter had to come from the right place.
Against her parents’ wishes, Madeleine and Charles were married. Charles got a job in manufacturing (imagine!) and they moved to Preston. Awkward and out of his depth, Charles quickly ran into difficulties at the firm. Work went no better when he left to start his own business. It had something to do with cereals, connected to his time in Canada, perhaps. By this point Madeleine seems to have lost her naivety, and stepped into the breach left by her husband’s inadequacies.
At least there was one place where Charles could escape, and one thing he could do well. At the back of the house was a long thin garden full of roses and flower beds. There was also a large greenhouse and a potting shed. The greenhouse was a blaze of colour. A jumble of crimson and salmon, yellow and orange, chestnut, gold and terracotta. It was full of chrysanthemums. I imagine him opening the glass door and inhaling a scent of earth and concentrated florist – green, grassy, fresh but not floral. Did his breathing become slower as he inspected plants for crown buds, and did his muscles relax as he pinched off the ‘first break’ of a promising-looking pompom?
For several years running Charles had won gold at the Lytham St Annes’ horticultural show and a number of his blooms had shone in regional competitions too. Here was a place where gaudy was good. In fact, the bigger and brighter, the better. There was no need for pretence or subtlety or feigned sophistication in the world of competitive chrysanthemum-growing.
And the 1930s were exciting times for a cultivator of exhibition-standard flowers. Whole new varieties of chrysanthemum were springing to life each year – Japanese and large anemone, reflexed and incurved, double garden and pot singles. Strings of married women, like Mrs W. Jinks, Mrs Barkley, or Mrs F. Coster, gave their names to new blooms in lavender and blush, purple and amaranth, tangerine and mauve. Breeders developed flowers with eye-catching multi-coloured petals, showy and superior, with grandiose names to match. The Marquis of Northampton was buff, suffused with rose. The Duchess of Fife stood tall in white with lilac streaks and pink. Lady Conyers boasted a silvery reverse. The gaudier types had brasher names. Tuxedo was bronze, Money Maker and Market Gold simply white and yellow. There was even a variety called Freedom.
Out of the way in his outhouses, Charles could lose himself in a sea of colour. Colour and sound. For Charles also loved Wagner. He spent all his free time pampering his beloved blooms and playing Wagner, far too loud.
It wasn’t often that he had much to do with any of his children. When my uncle Bill was born in 1935, his half-brother John was already eighteen and working in London. Occasionally though, on a Saturday evening, Peggy-Ann remembers Charles finishing early in his potting shed. Coming into the house, he’d feign a great intrigue with his daughter, and she happily played along with it. In this mood he called her Topsy.
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sp; I have a surprise for you, Topsy, he would announce. I think, Topsy, we will cook supper tonight. Just the two of us! What do you think about that?
As if this were the most extraordinary surprise. As if it had never happened before.
Then he would head over to the gramophone, pull out a heavy disc from its brown-paper sleeve, and turn the volume up a little more until Wagner was resounding through every room in the house. Together they would fry the week’s leftover bacon rind (cooks’ perks) until it was nice and crispy. And into the melted-down bacony fat, he’d throw in a couple of floured and seasoned herrings. The surprise was always a herring supper, served with neat slices of buttered bread, and a cup of tea. It was eaten in the cold, dark and dusty dining room to music played at such a volume that there was no chance at all of conversation. Charles sat at the head of the table dressed like a country squire, lost in his Wagner, while his small daughter quietly ate. There was never any mention of the fact that the family’s finances were slowly slipping away.
One particular evening though there would be no bacon and no herring surprise for Topsy. It was early September now. The day had been hot and close, and the early exhibition chrysanthemums were just coming into bloom. The back door of the house stood open and Lohengrin came booming from inside, even more loudly than usual, so the music could be heard clearly right through the garden. The roses were still flowering and beds of the hardier chrysanthemums overflowed, spilling out onto the lawn. Their great petalled heads dipped and drooped over the grass, too heavy for their stalks to bear.
The roof and one side of the greenhouse had been whitewashed to protect the plants from an excess of sun, but the colour inside was intense enough to blaze through the opaque glass. The greenhouse vents and door were wide open. Nothing unusual about that after a warm and sultry day. But the door to the potting shed was closed.