by Alex Monroe
The shed had a small overgrown window, too dirty to see through, but all the family knew what lay inside. A workbench ran down one side, covered with a jumble of pots and tools, while more trowels and scissors and secateurs hung on the wall behind, alongside coils of string and carefully saved oddments of wire. Another wall was almost entirely papered with certificates, faded rosettes, and photographs of Charles at the height of his success, accepting his prizes. Wooden trays and buckets of soil stood on the floor. (A herring box is a capital thing for cuttings, reads a guide to The Culture of the Chrysanthemum, published in 1920.) A large bundle of blooms past their best were piled down one end of the bench, their petals browning but their colour still vibrant. At the far end, an old bookcase was crammed with bottles, tins and jam jars, labels beginning to curl.
In the competitive world of the flower show, every grower was naturally armed with an array of potions and powders, fertilisers, fungicides and insecticides. You had to be alert at all times to stem rot or leaf spot, verticillium wilt, rust, powdery mildew, thrips, capsids and red spider mite. Of course this was long before anyone worried about being organic or eco-friendly. Ammonia and copper sulphate were hardly unusual in a suburban potting shed, while one of the most common treatments for leaf nematodes was a double-strength spray of nicotine sulphate and Bordeaux Mixture.
Beside the shelves of chemicals was a chair. A Lloyd Loom that had become too tatty for the house, perhaps, or a wood-and-canvas folding contraption, with arms? I’m not sure. But I’m told that on this particular September evening, when the sun was still out but no longer on the lawn, in this chair sat Charles. He was slumped as if asleep, his head on one side. The kind of neck-cricking slump from which you wake up stiff and aching. There was a small stool beside him, on which stood an empty whisky bottle and a glass. But Charles wasn’t snoozing. Charles would never wake up. From inside the house Lohengrin churned on.
Death by poisoning reads the death certificate. Accident or suicide? I can’t help wondering if it could even have been something more sinister. It sounds so like a scenario from a Miss Marple mystery. But I shy away from these thoughts. My mother remembers that he kept his nicotine solution in an old whisky bottle. It was something gardeners often made themselves, a treacherous infusion of tobacco acting on the nerves of insects and humans alike, potentially more powerful than either arsenic or strychnine. Hardly a pleasant way to die. Confusion is one of the first symptoms. If he realised his mistake, he may have been in no condition to call for help. Seizures and coma are quickly followed by respiratory arrest.
However the poison may have found its way into the glass, the family suddenly found itself destitute and homeless, with little in the way of life insurance to compensate. I’m not sure that they were overly bereft though. Two years after his death, war broke out in Europe. There were other things to worry about.
The nuns had actually done their job rather well after all. Unlike her husband, Madeleine was both accomplished and extremely resourceful. After a stint teaching French and piano at Wellington College, she moved her family to Scotland, where she had secured the post of governess to the Molteno family in Fortingall in Perthshire. She had six Molteno children in her charge, and two of her own, and they all lived in a sprawling seventeenth-century mansion remodelled in the Arts and Crafts style and repainted in cream. It opened onto the moor, and looked down towards Loch Tay and its array of boats.
At night, when she had finished educating the Molteno offspring, Madeleine would read to my mother. Their favourite books were full of maps and boats and adventure. They had enticing dust jackets plastered with line drawings like labels on a traveller’s trunk. Arthur Ransome’s tales of children and sailing and expeditions all took place far away from the confines imposed by grown-ups. The first, Swallows and Amazons, had been published in 1930. This was the book in which the Walker family’s distant father gave them permission to sail and camp on Wild Cat Island with the immortal telegram: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN. By 1939, there were seven books more in the Ransome series, and four still to come. Peggy-Ann devoured them. Just before she went to sleep, in that end-of-the-day quiet time between mother and daughter, perhaps an idea was born.
My mother as a child, looking very pleased with herself.
Designing the Chrysanthemum collection is a bit of a gamble. I have a few pages of drawings in my sketchbook but, as usual, no idea whether they will actually work, and neither time in hand nor a backup plan to come to the rescue in case they don’t. All my eggs are in the one basket. Can I make a chrysanthemum flower to express the thoughts and emotions coming together inside me?
Physically, the three-dimensionality of this flower particularly intrigues me. I hope to capture the movement I’ve noticed, that twisting and turning of the outside petals. It’s something I’ve observed in other picked flowers. Tulips often go a little wild after they’ve been cut, their petals bursting open and contorting out in all directions, in a kind of tarantella of the plant world.
At this point I remember a wonderful exhibition I’d seen at the National Gallery about fifteen years earlier, Spanish Still Life (from Velázquez to Goya). By the time I reached Goya, dead creatures and lumps of meat were beginning to pile up like the corpses in his ‘Disasters of War’ series. Not what I was looking for. I still have the catalogue. On the cover is the show’s poster painting: Cotán’s severe arrangement of a hanging quince, a cabbage and a cut melon; simple, domestic and sharply lit against a black background. Inside I find the painting that struck me so much when I first saw it, a far lusher and more generous display of fruit and vegetables and cut flowers by a painter from Madrid called Antonio Ponce. He was later than Cotán, earlier than Goya, and less highly rated than either, but his work has an appealing extravagance about it.
In the Still Life with Artichokes and a Talavera Vase of Flowers you can hardly see the stone ledge on which the overflowing jug is balanced. Like my grandfather’s potting-shed shelves, it’s covered in stuff: untrimmed artichokes and apples and twigs and buds and foliage all jumbled up together. And just as I’d thought, the flowers themselves are just going over, doing that thing I was after. Rendered in brushwork that is strange and intriguingly super-real, the petals twist in chaotic beauty and lushness. Typically the background is dark and sombre, and the flowers, picked out in light, are positively luminous. Some look rather tired and old, still beautiful but heads drooping. Others are fresh and young and raring to go. There’s a shining terracotta-coloured tulip in the centre that’s as fresh as can be and just unfurling its petals. Far off to the right, a pretty white butterfly is fluttering out of view. It always catches me unawares and makes me wonder what is going on outside of the frame. There are no chrysanthemums in the vase but that doesn’t matter. It’s the spirit of the thing I’m after. I’ll keep this page open as I do my designing to remind me.
Other paintings in another exhibition also come back to me. The riot of colour and movement produced by the ‘phoenix of all flower painters’, Jan van Huysum. Surely there were chrysanthemums in among those wildly outstretched tulips and bursting peonies? It doesn’t matter; I don’t need to check. The effect is what’s so important. I’m going for that that off-centre craziness, whirling petals contorting in a dance, a sculptural, three-dimensional helter-skelter. And once I’ve made these little objects, I plan to put them together in a way that shouts glamour. I’m thinking Grace Kelly in the mid-fifties, driving along the coast road at Monaco in To Catch a Thief, wind in her hair, lusting after diamonds and diamond-thieves. I’m also thinking of her last film, High Society. Perhaps I’ll even add a string of pearls.
I have a photograph of Grace Kelly, rather a polished Hollywood- studio type of an image. She’s reclining in a strapless dress with a big blossom-branch of a corsage across her breast and up to her collarbone. It’s an image I also intend to keep in mind while I design the collection. It’s big and it’s blousy but it’s also quite dazzling and desirable
. Just as unforgettable is that haunting photograph of her ‘rising from the sea’ by Howell Conant. Her wet hair is swept back, the water just below her bare neck and shoulders like a mirror of soft swirling golds and grey-greens. A tiny drip of water hangs from her earlobe. Her natural beauty looks straight through me. It’s intimidating. But what a jewel of a picture.
Whether I can get all this into a single flower is a technical problem as much as anything else.
My next stop is my local florist, where I buy a few chrysanthemums which I promptly destroy. I’m pulling them apart to find out how they work. What does a flattened petal look like? I draw and I make notes, and after a day or so I have a plan. I’m going to cut out layers of leaves, from big to small, which I’ll bend into shape, soldering the layers together and building up the form as I go. But I’m not sure how it will work out, so the only thing to do is to experiment.
I draw several versions of the layers of petals. Some look like a child’s drawing of a daisy; some have only three or four petals. I scan these into the computer, zooming in and out until I have a whole variety of sizes, ranging from the dimensions of a 10p piece to a tiny sequin. My sheet of A4 paper is completely covered in little petalled star-shapes. I take a guess, choose a few I particularly like, cut them out and stick double-sided tape on them. I’m ready for the workshop.
I have a cine film of my parents’ honeymoon in Devon. They’re pootling about in a little clinker dinghy, my father looking very handsome at the helm, and my mother beautiful and rather coquettish, her arm draped over a picnic basket in the bow. She raises a camera, a Zeiss by the looks of it. Snap! and a cheeky laugh. I love the fifties glamour of it all. And I love the boats, all wooden of course, beautifully handmade and proudly painted in blues and reds. The colours on old cine films are great too, subtle but also much simpler: faded turquoise water, blue-grey sky and a varnished hull glowing gold. My mother is dressed in rust-coloured canvas slacks and a blue smock, her jet-black hair shortish and slightly tousled. My father wears high-waisted black trousers, a white shirt and a blue canvas sailing smock, open at the front, and always has a cigarette in hand. Carefree, young and beautiful: the world was just waiting for them.
Boats brought my parents together. My father, Stuart, had learned to sail in Salcombe, crewing for Peggy-Ann’s brother Bill during his college days. The three of them would pop over to France in a hapless old lifeboat that had been converted to sail. Long weekends in Cherbourg in cable-knit sweaters and cropped jeans. Stuart spent far too much time mucking about on the water or playing pool with his friends, so he kept getting sent down. By the time he graduated, Peggy-Ann was already heading up an architectural practice in Cardiff, where she promptly employed him.
They married in the summer of 1956. They look carefree enough in the film, but perhaps they’re giddy with relief. The day before the wedding, Peggy-Ann was struck down with polio, most likely picked up at her hen-night party at the Turkish Baths in Tiger Bay – her very first visit to the steam rooms. The ceremony was postponed while Peggy-Ann was held down in a hoop in the Isolation Hospital, where she endured lumbar punctures performed by an Amazonian matron. She still recalls the screams of a boy with meningitis. She got married in a wheelchair, only standing for the photographs. The harbour at Salcombe was a substitute for their original honeymoon plan, sailing round the Isle of Wight.
A year later though, they revived the idea of that south-coast cruise and chartered a vessel called Blue Moon of Skye. At night, by lamplight, they read. Just as Madeleine had read Arthur Ransome aloud to Peggy-Ann in the castle in Scotland, my mother in her turn introduced Stuart to the stories. Lying on his bunk, with waves gently rocking the boat, a lantern swinging in its gimbals, it was the perfect setting. One book, the seventh in the series, particularly captured Stuart’s imagination. We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea takes the Walker family to a new spot, Pin Mill, upstream from Felixstowe. In an unexpected fog, the children find themselves accidentally sailing to Holland after losing their anchor on a falling tide. For the first time, Ransome’s charmingly naive line drawings are accompanied by real rather than fictionalised maps. Stuart read the stories and traced the lines of the east-coast estuaries with a finger. On one map, titled Voyage of the Goblin, showing how she came and went back, he found the rivers Orwell and Stour and the North Sea. Here was a good place to explore.
When a couple of jobs came up in an architectural practice in Ipswich, home to Arthur Ransome’s boat the Nancy Blackett, the decision was made. A series of trains and buses later, Stuart and Peggy-Ann arrived in Ipswich and walked the seven miles along the southern shore of the river Orwell through Wherstead, along the Strand, past Woolverstone and then to Pin Mill. A pint of Tolly Cobbold in the Butt and Oyster and they fell in love all over again. This time with the Suffolk coast.
They got those jobs and moved. Boarding houses to begin with, then they rented a tiny house in Waldringfield where my oldest sister Debbie was born. Shopping trips were made in Titmouse, a 15-foot dinghy with a crude ruddy lugsail, named after Tom Dudgeon’s boat in Coot Club and The Big Six. Debbie would be wedged into the bow, first mate and shopping took the centre thwart and the skipper was at the helm. Three children on, they had moved to Groom House in Woodbridge. Once the Horse and Groom, a long white stripe on the façade disguised its name, but the smell of beer never left the place. It still wasn’t quite right. They needed more space.
It’s like putting on a favourite pair of slippers for me, coming into my workshop. Tucked away upstairs in a Victorian mews that has always been a working yard for South London artisans. Cobbles and blackened London Stock, with huge peeling rust-coloured doors, which would slide right open if they actually worked. Inside, the workshop is as big as a good-sized sitting room. Plenty of light, dusty whitewashed brick walls, not a square inch unused and everywhere stacked up with extremely useful bits and bobs. The main workbench runs down the wall opposite you when you enter, with places for three jewellers. I sit on the far left, nearest the window. The workshop also has a forge, a polisher, a sink, various tables and hundreds of drawers. It smells familiar, like home. The acoustics make you feel at home too, somewhere you’ve been for ever and spent a lifetime carefully filling up. Soft and comfortable and just right.
A jeweller’s bench is typically set about a metre high and made from thick planks of a hard wood, perhaps 5cm thick. My old bench is MDF. I couldn’t afford the real thing when I made it. At each workstation a semi-circle of about 60cm diameter is cut out, a block of wood that traditionally became the seat of a low three-legged stool for the jeweller to sit on. We prefer squishy modern adjustable office chairs these days. Under the cut-out is the skin: a piece of leather slung on hooks to collect the lemel, offcuts and filings of precious metal which can be recycled or sold back to the bullion dealer. At the apex of the cut-out is the jeweller’s pin, a wedge-shaped piece of wood about the size of a pack of cards against which metal can be held and filed or cut or emeried or whatever. Each pin gets worn down into a different shape depending on how the jeweller works. It’s a bit like a fountain pen, perhaps. I get rather protective if anyone borrows my bench.
To the left of the pin is my cutting-V. A rectangle of plywood with a V cut out of it, pivoted at one end so it can rotate out over the skin and I can hold sheet metal on it and cut into it. (I say cut, but the jewellers’ term is to pierce.) In between each workstation is a hefty vice and, although the area around each cut-out is clear, the rest of the bench is piled up with all sorts of tools and machines. My chair is quite low, so the bench comes up to the height of my chest. As I sit at my bench with my arms by my side, if I bend my right forearm 90 degrees it is about 10cm below my cutting-V. The perfect position for piercing out.
It’s time to tackle the chrysanthemum in earnest. I decide to cut out from a sheet of 0.6mm-thick silver. Rummaging in my scrap box, I find an offcut the size of a standard Post-it note. I use double-sided Sellotape to stick my printed petal shapes onto the silver, as cl
ose as possible to each other, so as not to waste too much metal.
I have four or five piercing saws, but my favourite isn’t the best. It’s still the very first one I bought before starting college, and I’ve been cutting with this saw for almost thirty years. Burnished brown steel and wood, it has its peculiarities but I hardly notice them any more. For very fine thin sheet work I’ll use a really thin blade, as thin as a hair: a 6.0, toothed along one side. You want the teeth to face downwards so the saw cuts on the pull, so I draw the saw blade across the sleeve of my T-shirt to feel for the direction of its teeth before fastening it into the C-shaped saw frame. Top first, a wing nut secures one end. Then, handle to chest, braced against the bench, I press into my ribs to tension the frame, and fasten the other end of the saw blade. With the release of pressure it draws tight like a bow. Ping . . . a sweet high note and it’s perfect. My left hand firmly clamps the silver sheet onto the cutting pin and I start to cut.
My eyes hurt. It always takes a while to home in. It takes time to focus on details so tiny and necessarily so close. The job is 6 inches from my eyes and I hold the saw frame precisely upright. I saw using the full length of the blade, long strokes, the saw doing all the work, while my eyes stay directly above the cut. Each time I raise the saw it just brushes my cheek. My back is as rigid and upright as the saw blade. The rhythm of the taut moving blade is only interrupted when I pause to brush away the silver dust, which accumulates and conceals my drawing.
I cut out each layer of petals. Each layer has about twelve petals, and there are seven layers, the outside being the largest, going right down to tiny petals which will form the tight ball in the centre of the flower. Then I work on the texture of each petal. The effect needs to be linear and organic. It’s slow and laborious work. There are technical words for this. Chasing and repoussé make the most of the malleability of metal, stretching and manipulating it from either side. Laying the petals on a leather pad and holding a punch in my left hand, I hammer with my right.