by Alex Monroe
I don’t have time to draw any other necklaces. We are led off, through more darkened passageways and heavy doors, and this time down lots of steps too. Eventually we arrive at our rendezvous, which must be well below street level.
As-Salamu Alaykum.
Wa `alaykumu as-salāmu wa rahmatullāhi wa barakātuh.
We politely remove our shoes before shaking hands and sitting down with the bearded young men on the floor, grateful for the 7-Up we are offered. While Mr Ali talks, we wait and drink and the men look at us, nodding and smiling. Their faces are kind but you can see these are hard men. Displaced by the American invasion, they are now surviving by smuggling gemstones over the Khyber Pass. They keep their guns by their side, and more are stacked against the wall.
Soon Claudia begins to ask questions about the quality of the gemstones, and how they are mined and cut. One of the men produces a soft leather pouch and tips some emeralds into the palm of her hand. They are the brightest thing in the room. I can see Claudia’s eyes light up, and I’m sure mine do too. The colour is so brilliant, so strong, and they have an unusual clarity. I am used to seeing emeralds with more inclusions – marks of other minerals, liquids or gases trapped in the gemstone, which can detract from, or sometimes add, to its value.
I’m interested in buying some, I tell Mr Ali. Could he ask the price?
The dollar-per-carat weight rate he quotes means nothing to me, so I consult Claudia. She takes out her loupe – a little handle-less magnifying glass the size and shape of a dice shaker – and inspects the stones more closely. As she glances at me, she nods, almost imperceptibly. They are good stones, and so is their price.
That means it is time to haggle. I ask Mr Ali to offer less.
The atmosphere shifts. We are getting down to business now. All at once we are arguing. That is more like it. This is the best adventure I’ve had since arriving in Pakistan. Nothing like finding yourself cross-legged on the floor in a cellar in Peshawar with a bunch of armed Afghans, disputing the price of emeralds, to take away the taste of homesickness.
A few nights later, when it is too hot to sleep, I creep down after midnight to watch the football. England are playing in the World Cup, and a small crowd of Pakistani men are gathered around a large television next to a stage in the white marble hotel lobby. The place is depressingly nondescript, all white marble and fake statues and brash gold trimmings. Mindful of my warning to avoid groups like this, which are prime targets for bombings, Westerners offering an added attraction, I carefully refrain from cheering when England scores. But I can’t pretend I blend in.
The feeling of not being sure if you’ll be blown up is much more uncomfortable than I remember it. I find it’s always better if you have no idea what’s coming.
I had already devised an elaborate system of tripwires along the approaches to the orchards and the main gardens of the house, honing my technique carefully over the years. About 2 inches above ground level, a line of tarred twine was strung across the path. This was fed around a cotton-reel pulley, and then attached to the trigger: a tapered plug, forced into a short retainer-stake already driven into the ground. A crossbow was fixed to the ground too, its string pulled back onto the retainer-stake, and the trigger-plug gently pushed home to retain the taut crossbow string. The whole affair was then camouflaged with grass and leaves. If you tripped the wire, out came the plug, ping went the string, and the arrow shot out. You were done for. Or so we hoped.
The choice of bolt, or arrow, depended on the target. Fights with the boys we knew from our village primary school were prearranged, and rules applied. We tended to ambush them with coppiced hazel arrows, stripped of bark and sharpened to a point. Considerable effort was invested in making these. Trimmed pigeon feathers were bound in place with twine for flights, and we often used to cut away the bark in elaborate banded patterns. We had a reasonable chance of getting some of these arrows back.
Other adversaries we had to take more seriously. For as long as I could remember, we had been defending ourselves from the boys of Woolverstone Hall. Known to us simply as The Enemy, they used to sneak into our gardens to scrump apples, or take a peek at the girls as they blossomed: both Debbie and Nikki were very pretty teenagers, and ever-more tempting. If the intruders encountered Roddy or me, they showed no mercy. During the worst of his many beatings, as he lay pinned to the ground while a Hall boy repeatedly jumped on his head, Roddy thought he would probably die. So when it came to The Enemy, it was open war.
The Hall, a magnificent Palladian mansion standing less than a mile from The Old Parsonage, was a London County Council experiment – a state-run residential grammar, at least until 1977. Closer to a boarding school than an Approved School, many of Woolverstone Hall’s pupils were there because their parents were away in the forces, but the place also had its fair share of tearaways and magistrate referrals, bright inner city boys who had learned to be tough from an early age. There was much talk of ‘broken homes’ in those days. One of the boarding houses, Corner’s – a beautiful Lutyens building with Gertrude Jekyll gardens, heartlessly converted – lay in precisely the opposite direction from us, the cinder path between school and boarding house running right past our back gate. This gave The Enemy ample opportunities for attack, and us to retaliate.
Clearly, the Hall inmates required something more lethal than hazel. For the real Enemy, we reserved our bamboo bolts. A metre long, these were weighted at the front with 6-inch nails. We simply removed the nail heads and pushed the shafts, pointed end out, into the hollow of the bamboo. Choose the right feather flights, and these arrows flew fast and true.
The real skill lay in their positioning. There was an art in judging where to aim, and this was both the joy and the frustration of our booby traps. The Enemy would be coming from the direction of the river, of course. But they came in all sizes. Best to aim somewhere around hip-height. At what speed would they approach? We calculated for a fast walk. By a mixture of trial and error, and systematic testing with dummy bolts and volunteers on the path, we became pretty accurate, though we often found that bows had been tripped with no sign of a direct hit. Occasionally we would hear a cry in the night, or we’d peek round the kitchen door to see a strange boy in blood-soaked flares at the big table, Debbie or Nikki gently bathing a wound. Once a rather nice older boy limped in with a whole arrow embedded in his leg. He’d been visiting one of my sisters, by arrangement, and had made the mistake of coming through the back gardens at night. He may have been a boyfriend, but he was still a Hall boy and that made him a legitimate target.
I’m afraid I recently ran into one of the few we actually befriended ourselves, now a middle-aged father of three. He pulled up his shirt to show me two scars, entry and exit wounds from a long-forgotten battle. I squirmed with horror, and apologised profusely. He bore no grudge.
The jewellery workshops in downtown Peshawar are stiflingly hot. They are hidden away in the oldest part of the city, down alleys and passages as dark and winding as tunnels. We are taken to one tiny high-ceilinged room after another, where men and young boys are hard at work in conditions that seem quite impossible to me. High narrow windows mean there is little in the way of natural light, with only a dusty light bulb hanging unshaded from a long frayed flex to compensate. Craftsmen dress in light cotton shalwar kameez and work on the floor, sitting on stained, buff-coloured scraps of carpets at low tables. No women, ever. Dirty walls painted apple green or tiled up to about a metre high, off-white above that, and everywhere we go the plaster is chipped and cracking and dotted with rows of crooked electrical sockets, over-laden with plugs and extensions.
Familiar tools hang from lengths of wire suspended between two nails like rusty washing lines: pliers, tweezers and fretsaws. In one workshop, an iron safe has a plywood cutting-V bolted to it while a little low-level steel-framed table holds broken pieces of fire-stained asbestos and a torch for soldering. Hand tools litter the floor. Curiously, no one wears glasses. I’m not sure whether t
his is because of the jewellers’ relative youth, excellent eyesight or simply that they can’t afford them.
Of course I’m learning as much from them as they do from me. I’m particularly fascinated to see jewellers working with flattened lumps of purple plasticine into which they press tiny shapes of gold. I watch and ask questions, and discover that the plasticine is a way of composing a complex design, so it can be all soldered together easily. Little golden beads, settings, scrolls or flowers can be laid out, adjusted or altered if necessary, and held firmly in place throughout the process. Opposites for pairs of earrings can be assembled side by side. When the design is complete, the jeweller pours plaster of Paris over it, and once this is set, the plasticine is peeled off to reveal the back of the golden composition, all held in place now by the plaster. Blast the piece with a soldering torch, and the plaster stays intact, allowing the jeweller to solder the whole thing up in one fell swoop. I watch as another jeweller breaks off the plaster to reveal a delicate, ornate, complex piece of filigree jewellery. It could never have been constructed any other way.
Picking up a finished brooch, I raise my eyebrows when I feel the weight of it. Mr Ali explains. This technique isn’t just about the aesthetics of the piece or ease of execution. Jewellery forms an essential part of a woman’s dowry in Pakistan. The heavier it is the better, and weight is gained by adding more and more decoration. Although the results often aren’t quite to my taste, there is a quality to this jewellery that very much intrigues me.
By the time I return home from Pakistan, I am dying to get back into my workshop and experiment with plasticine. But it is high summer and that means flying straight off to Calabria in southern Italy for a holiday with my family. Just where you would tie the lace on the boot of Italy, there’s a little coastal village called Acquappesa, an hour or so north of Cosenza. The old village, Acquappesa Paese, is scattered up the steep rocky hillside and has been half abandoned. The new village is strung along a narrow strip between the railway track and the sea. It’s not the prettiest place in Italy but it has a decayed, old-fashioned charm, and I’ve never met another English person there in all the years we’ve known it. The water and electricity are turned off at regular intervals, and villagers meet around a standpipe to fill buckets so they can cook supper. From time to time, everyone brings chairs down to the square by the church and they project a movie onto its crumbling stone walls. We stay in one of Donna Vittoria’s appartamenti, wedged between the railway line (with heavy freight trains thundering by every few hours) and the promenade (where young men and women walk and chat into the small hours). But it’s the heat, not the noise, that keeps you awake at night.
Get up early enough, while it’s still cool, and you can take a path up to the old town through a gap in the buildings opposite the church. It’s the most direct route, and extremely steep, but it’s been officially closed for years because of the instability of the giant stone steps and the poisonous snakes that lie out basking on them. The alternative, a new path which winds its way up the hillside in a more leisurely fashion, leads off to the right by an old mulberry tree whose irresistible fruit leaves your fingers stained with thick crimson juice. It’s a good place to draw. Instead of the bright showy bougainvillea, hibiscus and amaryllis planted down in the coastal village, up here you can find all sorts of interesting wildflowers and leaves to sketch, and treasures like seed heads or dead insects. I have no idea of the names of most of them, but I sketch away in the shade of the mulberry tree until the sun gets too hot. And then I head down for a dip in the treacherous sea.
As soon as we are back in London, I start planning the new collections for Spring/Summer 2007. Inspired by what I’d seen in Pakistan, I decide to skip the drawing stage of design for once. I wonder what will happen if I design as I make, experimenting with the techniques I’d witnessed.
I buy a new packet of plasticine from the art shop. Thick-ribbed ribbons of colour, looking exactly like the plasticine of my childhood. I choose blue, which looks best against the silver, moulding a shallow dome of it straight onto my bench. Rummaging through my bits-and-bobs box, I find a little flying swallow, all sorts of tiny flowers, some minute leaves, and a filigree butterfly no bigger than a sequin, all cast-offs from previous experiments. I lay the swallow on the plasticine, pushing it down firmly, and add a few flowers. It looks OK. But I’m after the kind of swirls and tiny bobbles I saw in Peshawar. So I cut some 1cm lengths of silver wire and bend them into little swirls like sixes, using a pair of fine-pointed round-nosed pliers. Then I cut about twenty or so fragments off another piece of silver wire, chuck them on the forge and melt them into tiny shining beads. They move around as they heat up, becoming molten and excitable, one or two jumping together to form slightly larger balls. But I don’t mind. I want a selection of sizes. A minute in the pickle, a hot acid solution, and they’re all clean again – pearly white and shiny and ready to use. I place the twirls between the swallow and the flowers and start to work up some sort of composition, filling the little gaps with beads and leaves. The piece takes on a sort of teardrop shape, about 3cm long. I quite like it and I’m very keen to try out the soldering technique, so I decide it’ll do. I use some bright yellow plasticine now to build up little retaining walls before mixing a little plaster of Paris to pour over my composition. I wait for it to set. But after a minute or two I know I’m far too impatient to take this one step at a time, so I start another piece. This one is based around the butterfly, built up on red plasticine this time, with green walls. The shape, and the swirls and bobbles it contains, combine to create the impression of paisley. I fill it up with plaster too.
Again I have to wait. This is the bit I hate most. I check the plaster, which has set, but I guess it has to be bone dry before I can solder on it. The sensible thing will be to leave both pieces overnight. I wander back to my design desk and open up my sketchbook. On a great big new blank page, I have written: New Collections Spring/Summer 2007.
And nothing else.
One miserable rainy afternoon in the autumn of 1972, my family decided to make a rare trip to the cinema. The Aristocats was playing at the Ipswich Gaumont. As usual, too many people were involved. There was another family, and lots of children, and dividing ourselves between two cars was proving problematic.
I’m not sitting next to him . . .
I want to go in the other car!
My mother drove a rusty white Mini, from which I was promptly removed because Debbie wanted her friend in the car with her. My other sister Nikki was fed up with all this and refused to come, staying at home with my father. A soft-spoken, gentle man, he never much liked the cacophony of family life and would usually find a quiet spot to avoid any disruption. Quite often, he’d take to his bed, though it was years before I found out exactly why. An expedition to the cinema was not his idea of fun. Our manly trip to see Live and Let Die the following year was a treat so unusual that Roddy and I have never forgotten it.
Eventually we were all squeezed into two cars and off we went, just as it was getting dark, the Mini leading the way. About halfway there, we reached a short stretch of dual carriageway, over which flickering orange street lamps cast a peculiar sodium glow. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of my mother’s Mini just ahead. Like a slow-motion ballet dancer, the car flipped and began to spin through the air. With a terrifying crunch of metal and glass, it hit an electricity pole. Roddy and I pressed our faces to the window while we glided past the carnage in decelerating silence.
A period of chaos. We emerged from our car. A grown-up, a stranger, took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. His heavy hands pressed down on me as hard as they could, as if he wanted to stick me to the spot.
Don’t, whatever you do, don’t go over there. Don’t look . . .
Then we were left alone. My brother and I stood staring across four empty lanes of road at a crumple of metal. The fallen electricity pole hung over it like a broken daffodil. In the wreckage were my mother, my sist
er Debbie, her friend Louise and my younger brother Tom. We could see bodies hanging out of windows from where we stood. And quite a lot of blood. They couldn’t really expect us to stay where we were. We dashed across the road and up to the car, unnoticed.
What a mess, I thought, crunching through the powdered glass. It felt just like walking on sugar.
The front of the car was completely crushed in and unrecognisable. Blood and bits of flesh were mixed with metal and glass. My mother was half out through the windscreen, her door was open, and the engine seemed to be in her lap. I thought her legs had been completely chopped off. She had bitten her own tongue off. Debbie was in the front passenger seat with a spade stuck through her. It was one of those old-fashioned army shovels with a heart-shaped blade that folded up, and was kept in the car boot for digging snow. All this was far too much for a child to take in. Somehow all I could think about was how strange it was to see a car ripped open, all its workings exposed. I couldn’t believe how fragile it all was. Rather like its occupants, I suppose.
As we looked, two or three large silver ball bearings plopped out from the wheel, dropping onto the oil-slicked tarmac. They made a curious muffled sound as they fell, and rolled slowly through the thick lubricant. They looked exactly like silver gobstoppers. I really wanted one.
Sirens approached, and flashing lights, and suddenly we were whisked away. Here my memory fades. Perhaps there was a blanket and a cup of sweet tea. By this time I think it was quite dark – almost pitch black, as the crash had cut off the supply of electricity to the entire area. Just headlights to see by, and the emergency vehicles’ insistent flash.
When the police finally knocked on the door to tell my father about the crash, they assured him, apologetically, that nobody was likely to survive, except for my sister’s friend Louise, who had relatively minor injuries. Then they offered to take him to Ipswich Hospital to see his wife and daughter. He arrived, and gazed at their motionless bodies surrounded by medics fighting to keep them alive. He must have been afraid of the answer, but he finally plucked up courage to ask about Tom.