by Alex Monroe
I haven’t heard this for a while.
I look at my birds and I’m disappointed by a niggling doubt at the back of my mind. It’s getting late. Tomorrow I’ll pay a visit to my old friends and see if they can help. It might set my mind at ease.
Saturday morning finds me springing up the steps in through the great arch of the Victoria and Albert Museum, hand in hand with my kids. I’m looking for the tiny exhibit in my sketchbook, which has haunted me ever since I first fell in love with it as a student. It’s in the Japanese department – a little carved toggle. Seeing it in the flesh again should make all the difference. And it’s time I introduced it to my daughters.
Returning with the girls, I see the museum through their eyes, exciting and unfamiliar, just as I once encountered it myself. I enjoy the wonderful feeling of anticipation aroused by the grand entrance. The strident noise of traffic on the Cromwell Road cross-fades into a hushed chatter of hundreds of voices and shuffling feet.
Come on, let’s go straight to the Japanese room!
I know the way. Straight across the entrance hall with its beautiful mosaic floor and incredible ceilings, writhing green and blue glass Chihuly chandelier suspended in the dome. Eyes everywhere. Up, down, side to side, we peer through to a tempting corridor of classical Indian sculptures and down towards the medieval ironwork. No! Not the shop! We turn a sharp right, speed through China and here we are in Japan. Away from the brightness and into a dark and subdued room, with not a soul to disturb us.
The new-found silence reduces us to whispers. Whole suits of armour are here, brought to life by long white whiskers which descend from iron masks. Lacquered boxes, kimonos, and so many pots. Golden chrysanthemums gleam from the patinated bronze of an indigo-coloured vase. But there, right down at the end of the room, a little to the right, we spot a terraced set of shelves laden with exquisite little figures, made of walrus tusk, boxwood, agate and walnut.
The kids love them. I knew they would. There’s something endlessly compelling about these miniature carvings, originally so practical. They were made to be toggles – two hundred, three hundred years ago – to hang a pouch from a kimono sash by a silken cord. Traditional Japanese gowns had no pockets. Some of these toggles were fashioned from ivory, some from black ebony or warm brown wood: two funny men wrestling, a sleepy rabbit, a white skull without a jaw, a perfect tiny pumpkin. But where are my birds? Not here. We look harder.
Round the back of the cabinet we find more carvings. And here are my friends, between an eagle and an owl, carved in ivory with blackened detailing, standing about an inch tall. ‘Quails and Millet’. Signed: Okatori.
The carving looks exactly as I remembered it, just like the little sketch I made in my notebook twenty-five years earlier. But I need more detail now. Two little quails are perched on . . . what? A ribbon? The ground? That must be the millet under their feet – long curving leaves with a central stripe, looping round bursting seed heads. The birds are chubby and full of character and beautifully carved, but what has always fascinated me is the way they stand. They face each other, barely touching, and nearly, but not quite, side by side. The head of the slightly smaller bird is lowered, while the larger of the two looks up and over her wings. Just keeping an eye out.
The kids are soon distracted by all the other carvings. So we play a game and try to spot more by the same maker. We only find one, a tiger, one of the twelve East Asian zodiac animals. I admire its snarl but it’s still the birds that I feel most drawn to. They haven’t lost their charm for me. While the girls compare their finds, I do a few new sketches.
I can’t help wondering about Okatori-san and how he had made them. And what he was thinking about while he carved. I sense a connection to this craftsman from Kyoto. (His older brother was a carver too, one of the greatest.) The story he’d told some two centuries before I was born still feels familiar. It’s about a particular relationship, a suggestive angle, a protective gaze. It’s a tale in miniature that can be told in ivory or in gold. It’s the residue of a distant memory unaltered by time.
Ethel Sunderland-Taylor was a game old bird. She had a huge telescope in one of her many upstairs rooms, commanding a terrific view of the river from Iken Marshes to Westrow Point. The house also had a lift, the first we boys had ever seen.
Luckily, Ethel took a shine to me, which was reciprocated, and in the end I spent many summers living with her in that large house overlooking the Alde. It was half a mile away from Cob House, where Letty lived – the lady from the train. An eccentric elderly couple, Ethel and Letty were as fit as fiddles. They kept ornamental ducks and chickens and they shot their own dinner.
That first summer my family drove off leaving me standing by the back door, perfectly happy, still in shorts and scratchy pullover, wet shoes replaced by wellies. Just as scruffy as I was, Letty and Ethel lived in cord slacks, faded smocks and quilted Barbours, Ethel with long white hair up in a messy bun. Letty had a husband somewhere. I never actually saw him but understood that he was terribly rich. I pictured him in a darkened room, watching the cricket. Ethel was a widow who had spent a good deal of her life in India. Our evenings were spent cooking elaborate curries, carefully grinding each exotic spice by hand. I had never heard their names before. Turmeric, dhaniya, kala jeera. Beautiful rich yellows, oranges, reds and intense browns.
Occasionally a friend from Aldeburgh would visit. Letty and Ethel knew Imogen Holst and Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. My mother remembers me playing tennis with Britten, though I have no memory of the match. As far as I was concerned, the most exciting of Letty’s visitors by far was Queeny, a retired pirate who lived on a boat. Sporting canvas slacks and a sailing smock, she smoked cigars and wore a monocle. Lorks-a-lummy, they all cried as they chatted in the kitchen, hoots of laughter rising and cigar smoke filling the room to mingle with curry scents and the smell of wet dogs straight from the river. They reminisced about the Empire and about being torpedoed by U-boats on the North Atlantic route in the war. They discussed the problem of the fox who had taken some chickens a few nights before, and how best to shoot it. And they talked ducks. I just listened as I ground the colourful spices and breathed in their mysterious odours.
I’ve got a treat for you, Ethel told me on my first day there.
Upstairs – I took the lift, of course – Ethel pulled out a brace of shotguns. The smaller of the two was an ancient single bore.
Right-ho Alex, this one is yours. Ever used a shotgun before? This one is a four-ten, perfect for a skinny boy like you. There are rules, you know. Come on, you’ll soon get the hang of it.
Ethel explained that she hung on to the guns in case of unwelcome intruders, animal or human. Just last week someone had been poking about in the dead of night. She shot him fair and square with rock salt and by the sound of his screams neither he nor anyone else would be back for a while. But she’d keep the twelve bore beside her bed just in case. I immediately planned to sleep with my gun too and hoped I’d soon get the chance to shoot an intruder.
The first practice shot knocked me over backwards. But there was indeed a technique and I soon mastered it. At ten years old, you can’t imagine anything better than your own shotgun. Up at the crack of dawn before Ethel woke, I would make my way through the woods to my favourite spot, a grassy clearing with undergrowth behind. Here I would lie for hours, as quiet as could be, not moving a muscle until the wood itself forgot I was there. The sun slowly rose, sending long, low shafts of light through the dewy mist. Birds and insects wandered by, or flew through the wet grass, and sometimes deer appeared, and none of them saw me. Spiders spun webs, and rabbits came to feed.
I bided my time.
The animal wandered closer.
Nibbling. Listening. Nibbling.
So close now I couldn’t even breathe. Squeeze, don’t pull, gently, gently . . . and suddenly everything would change. Nature disappeared in the explosion. All that was left behind was the dead rabbit. There was pride and there was horror in this. Too late I always
remembered how much I preferred the moments before the kill to the reality of its aftermath. But the rabbit curry would be delicious.
Just upstream from Ethel’s house, and accessible only by boat, there was another magical spot called Little Japan. A small sandy beach faced south, a maze of creeks running off it into the reeds. Once it was used for loading barges with produce, but all that remained now was a broken-down old cottage tucked away in the woods. Trees grew out through its windows and it reminded me of the Hansel and Gretel story. It made a perfect hideout. I used to take my sketchbook and my shotgun, and I spent hours there, drawing avocet and dunlin (up-curved scimitar beaks and black-patched bellies), and snoozing on the warm sand. I explored the creeks, and returned with our supper when I could.
Time was marked by the rising and falling of tides as the days passed by. At Little Japan I lay on my back in the dappled shade, looking up into the branches of an ancient oak, searching for the pair of doves I could hear.
Back at my bench on Monday morning, I’m clearer about what I’m doing. I know exactly how to recreate the tenderness I remembered in that pair of quails. I have two flat cut-outs of my doves on my bench and I need to file them into shape. As usual, I solder an extra piece on to the tail of each bird, something to hold on to, a little rod for a handle, 2 inches long.
I start to file, and then to grind the silver with a small flexible micro-motor. The job gets hot and burns my fingers as I whittle away. Soft lad has been doing too much desk work recently.
To start with, I cannot find the forms in the metal. I file away at the silver in the hope that my dove is in there somewhere and will appear soon. But this bird is shy and reluctant and doesn’t want to be seen. I decide to pull out my bird books again and prop dove pictures all around my bench. That’s better.
Once again I cut and I file and I cut some more and at last it starts to take shape. I’m ready to use a different tool, a tiny ball fraizer, which always makes me think of a dentist’s drill. This cuts away at the details and brings forth wings and eyes and feathers. By late afternoon a small fat bird is looking up at me. I’ll leave her there for now and make a start on the larger one.
I am much bolder with my second bird and I rip into him with confidence and a coarse file. Then I have to tell myself to slow down. I’m in danger of slipping and messing up everything if I keep going at this pace. So I take a breath and put the brakes on. It’s hard because I know I need to keep the momentum going.
Cocky himself, he responds to my cockiness.
I stop for a cup of tea and I ache all over but I feel I’m getting somewhere.
The next step is the branch. Then it’s on to the forge to solder them into position. It doesn’t go entirely to plan but I think it’ll work. I fix the smaller bird first and I file away the branch to fit her really low and snug. Then the larger bird goes on. By seven o’clock they’re finished and I feel fairly exhausted.
It’s wintery, there’s definitely something going on between the two. Perhaps it’s a kind of tension but it’s very endearing, and there’s a lot of love in it too. I’m pleased with the angle of the twig, and the bends work very well. I need to fit the chain, and perhaps think about setting a little diamond in the piece, but I’m out of steam now so I’ll finish it off tomorrow.
Looking at them for the last time before I lock up, thinking about where and how the jump rings should connect to make the necklace hang just right, I realise there is something rather lonely about my pair of turtle doves. I’m glad. If I had framed them in a circle as I’ve done before, they would have felt too safe, protected. This way, they seem slightly raw and exposed. And that is exactly what I wanted.
A few months after Christmas a letter arrives from the woman who’d bought those doves in our virtual trunk show. She had given the necklace to her daughter Lydia, and she wanted to tell me why. There’s a scene in Lydia’s favourite childhood film in which a little boy gives his meagre savings to a toyshop owner who is raising money for a children’s hospice. In gratitude, the shopkeeper gives the child a pair of white turtle dove Christmas decorations, and explains their symbolism: love and unbroken friendship. The significance of that scene was sealed for Lydia by her mother’s gift of my necklace.
That was when I knew that my little doves had taken off on a new life of their own. Now they were at the heart of a different story, woven around them by a different person. And that too was exactly what I wanted.
Calabria
I lie on my bed in a hotel room in Peshawar watching Carry On Up the Khyber on my laptop. Shot in Snowdon – from time to time you can see the steam of the actors’ breath – the landscape of the film bears little resemblance to what I’d glimpsed of the Pass a few days earlier. Not that we had got very far, of course. The famous route through the mountains to Afghanistan was far too dangerous, and we had to content ourselves with photographing the fort guarding its entrance, before beating a rapid retreat from the heat. It’s the very height of summer.
On my screen, Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James) continues to dine under descending clouds of plaster dust. He winces at the pop of a champagne cork, oblivious to the explosions going on all around him. I sweat, sprawling on my beige sheets, trying to ignore the peeling green wallpaper and overpowering smell of stale cigarette smoke, badly disguised by cheap air freshener. Perhaps a ‘no smoking’ room was too much to ask for at a place which had so recently been bombed itself.
Westerners are still very much a target in Pakistan, and as far as I could see, my colleague Claudia Martin and I are the only ones around. We are here on an EU mission to support the jewellery sector in Pakistan, touring the country, advising local jewellers, delivering lectures and teaching as we go along. Our guide and translator is Mr Wali, a gentle, softly spoken Ismaili from Hunza. We arrived to find a thriving industry that needed nothing from us but funds to buy equipment. The only thing we can’t offer.
Karachi has grown used to the huge amounts of aid being sloshed round by the Americans. This made for a somewhat hostile reception for a couple of penniless jewellery designers with good intentions from London. But here, up-country in Peshawar, we find our audiences far more receptive. Their expectations are lower and appreciation is warm, particularly for Claudia’s expertise as a gemologist.
There’s always a plentiful supply of uncut gemstones coming over the borders here, most of them from Afghanistan. Pakistan itself is a mineral-rich country with a good supply of tourmaline, peridot, topaz and aquamarine and Peshawar has developed a busy stone-cutting industry. But without investment, tools and conditions are still rudimentary. Stones can be cut more cheaply and accurately in India.
I love this city at the crossroads of the world, and I’m excited, if occasionally alarmed, by its frontier feel. Later that hot night we lie out on the roof of the hotel on rope-strung wooden beds called charpois, while sweet cardamom tea is brewed for us in a chipped enamel teapot over the grate of an open fire. A Pashto musician plucks his rebab while another drums out a hypnotic rhythm on a small dhol drum. Then Mr Wali arrives with news. A party of Afghan smugglers have recently arrived in town with a good selection of gemstones, including some spectacular emeralds. Were we interested? Claudia has a professional curiosity and I think it might be a good opportunity to buy some stones for a commission waiting for me back in London. We arrange to meet them the following morning.
After a breakfast of bread and fresh mango juice, we find Mr Wali waiting for us in the lobby, with Mr Ali, our local advisor. Mr Ali, an extremely dignified young man who has grown up in the Peshwari lapidary business, is both knowledgeable and highly skilled as a cutter himself. He also teaches, which gives him a special status in the community, and has connections with the Gems and Gemological Institute of Pakistan.
Our taxi cannot penetrate far into the Afghan quarter of the city before the driver is defeated by the lively labyrinth of narrow streets. We happily get out and walk. Women dressed like coloured shuttlecocks look away through narrow g
auze eye-slits. Ancient, high, crumbling walls are festooned with hanging cloths, scarves and dresses drying in the sun. Exposed cables and electrical wires run anarchically over our heads. We encounter more than one mournful-looking donkey, patiently waiting among piles of sand as street-workers dustily shovel rubble into sacks slung across its back. Protected from the sun by a cloth, a great basket of vegetables passes by, balanced on the head of a bearded man in a baby-blue shalwar kameez. He also carries a huge bunch of bananas in each hand.
The further we go, the more fantastic the architecture becomes, the buildings reaching such a state of disintegration it’s a wonder they still stand. From intricately carved balconies, the palatial remains of a colonial era, pale sheets of material are strung across from side to side, bannerlike, for shade. Turning left through a high archway, we find ourselves a large, light, open space. It is a covered bazaar, tiled in the most amazing patterns, radiating blue floral designs on a white background with red and gold detailing. Here and there the pretty tiles have been brutally smashed through to admit yet another tangle of wiring.
All kinds of Afghan wares are being sold from the glass-fronted stalls around the edge of the market. Delicate glass phials which are probably less ancient than they look, old tiles, collections of antique brass and copper, brilliantly coloured cloths with beads and mirrors sewn into their designs. Afghan jewellery too, which has a rather different style from its gaudy Pakistani cousin. I quickly get out my notebook to scribble a few sketches. Lapis lazuli is the favourite stone, intensely blue in a setting of tarnished silver, though I also see a black stone which I guess is agate, and tiny wooden beads strung in combination with minute silver balls. My eye and my pencil are caught by a silver cylinder hanging horizontally from one string of these beads. It is almost bullet-shaped, cone-ended, and about the size of a lipstick. One end, secured by a safety chain, comes off to reveal a secret chamber, and I suddenly realise it is an amulet, designed to store a written prayer or blessing to keep its owner safe.