by Alex Monroe
Where’s my son? Did he not survive?
The policemen looked confused. Then they seemed embarrassed. They went into a huddle and whispered to each other. Could my father hold on for a few minutes?
He was beginning to panic. The policemen probably were too.
No boy had been found at the crash. In fact, this was the first they’d heard about him. A police car was dispatched. Three-year-old Tom was only found the following morning. He had a habit of standing in front of the back seats of the car, between the two front ones. When the car had crashed he must have been flung a considerable distance through the windscreen, and right into somebody’s garden. Perhaps the owners were out when the crash happened, and didn’t find him till the road had been cleared. Could their phone have been out of order? Whatever the reason for the delay, they were a nice couple, and decided to keep him overnight, only calling the police the next day. He was alive and relatively well, arriving in hospital with a broken hip and a few cuts and bruises.
My mother’s progress was reported each day in the local newspaper. At first they announced her condition had worsened. Things looked very bad. But then, against all expectations, both she and Debbie rallied. A few days later, their condition was reported as ‘satisfactory’. They’d be in hospital for months, to be sure, but most miraculously, they were now expected to live.
At this point my father – never much in evidence before – disappeared from our lives almost completely. It must have been very hard for him. He divided his time between his architectural practice, which he ran from the cellars at The Old Parsonage (strictly out of bounds to children) and the hospital. I don’t remember ever visiting the hospital myself. Perhaps they wanted to protect me; perhaps my mother was in a state too alarming to witness; perhaps the hospital had ruled that children would be too disturbing for her. But my father was there often. He must have felt even more awful because he maintained the cars himself, a perpetual process of fixing and tinkering. It was some time afterwards that we discovered that nobody could have predicted this accident: it was all down to a faulty bearing, a tiny bit of metal shattering at precisely the wrong moment.
A change came over The Old Parsonage, and it was very much for the worse. Sympathetic well-meaning ladies visited our house bringing shepherd’s pies. They talked in hushed voices and looked at me in a way I found hard to interpret, but didn’t much like. Some of them even tried to hug me, which I liked a good deal less. The adult world must have decided that we needed looking after. For the first time in our lives, grown-ups imposed themselves on us. It became much harder to sneak off unnoticed. Our experiments with crossbows and explosives came to an abrupt end. I began to resent my mother’s absence purely because of the presence of all these other well-meaning adults.
The following spring, some time after Tom and Debbie had been discharged, my mother came home from hospital in a wheelchair, her legs a mass of metal plates and pins. At this point, thankfully, the unwanted attention waned. I was free again to escape back into my own world and I began to develop pit traps to back up the tripwires. The pits we dug were substantial, about 3 feet deep, and in highly strategic positions. We stuck sharpened stakes in the bottom, and then covered the pits with a lattice of twigs, disguised with a sprinkling of grass or leaves. I became the master of camouflage. I checked them every morning and sometimes one had been disturbed. The combination of pits and crossbows was proving effective. The Hall boys started to stay away. We were winning.
I have no idea what led me to build a pit trap for my mother the first time she walked again. She had just started getting about in the house, and then began to hobble to the orchard where we hung out the washing to dry. As there was only one path, positioning the trap was easy. I did a beautiful job. It was as good as invisible, just by the swing, which hung from an old Bramley tree. There was even a perfectly positioned bay tree, huge and capacious, where we could hide while we observed operations.
On cue, the wrought-iron gate creaked on its hinges and my mother appeared, moving gingerly. She had a walking stick in one hand and a basket in the other. She shuffled along slowly, taking two or three tiny steps at a time before repositioning her stick with caution. We held our breath as she approached the pit. Then she stopped. For what seemed like an age she looked down at the ground. Her head went up, and she scanned the orchard as if looking for us, and we shrank back in fear. But without a word, she sidestepped a few paces, then continued on her way to the line with her basket to gather in the washing.
You can’t out-fox a fox.
Later that afternoon we were tracked down by Nikki and summoned into the house.
It really was too bad. What were we thinking? Our mother had been very ill. This could have been the final straw. This time we had really gone too far. And of course she was right, though why I couldn’t see this at the time is beyond me. I don’t think we meant to be callous. We were simply curious. Perhaps somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, I suppose I must have felt she was well enough by then to be punished for all the disruption her absence had caused, but even now I sidestep that explanation.
Anyway, things were going to have to change. Our parents intended to keep a closer eye on us. For the time being, at least, all weapons manufacturing had to be suspended.
This photograph was taken in the drawing room at The Old Parsonage and I’m wearing my best cowboy outfit. From left to right: Roddy, me, Nikki, Peggy-Ann, Stuart, Tom and Debbie.
I get going again on the plasticine first thing in the morning. First things first: off come the yellow walls, and then I carefully peel back the blue plasticine to reveal the back of the silver, each piece securely embedded in the plaster. I’m ready to solder.
My forge is over by the sink. A jumble of firebricks is stacked on a bench against the wall and a brazing-hearth turntable is loaded with pieces of heatproof board, honeycomb soldering boards and bits of charcoal blocks. The blowtorch hangs on a hook to the right, fed by a propane cylinder under the bench. Soldering is a jeweller’s technique for attaching two pieces of metal. It’s different from welding, which melts and fuses the joint itself: if you add a filler metal into the join, it will be the same kind. When you solder, you’re melting an alloy of metals with a slightly lower melting point into the joint, and the trick is only to melt the solder, and not the pieces you’re joining.
Solder, like everything else, has its likes and dislikes. It loves heat. It loves cleanliness. And it can’t resist a capillary pull. But it absolutely hates grubbiness and people trying to tell it what to do. I love soldering because I have been doing it for so long we’ve become old friends. It is a fluid and organic process. Almost instinctive. If you know how to treat it, you can persuade the solder to do almost anything for you: get it sticky and thick to rebuild a missing petal on a flower; send it shooting along a long join, sucking its way towards the heat and defying gravity; coax it by stroking it with the flame; tempt it with a steel needle heated to white hot.
Solder comes in various guises, in different alloy mixes, each with their own specific melting point and speciality. Typically, a jeweller cuts tiny squares called pallions from a sheet, each the size of a piece of glitter, placing each one exactly where it’s needed.
But for this job I’m going to cheat. No cleaning in advance, or messing about with pallions, or finding just the right pair of tweezers or forceps or pointers, which all lie jumbled in a tray beside the forge, like the tools of an unhygienic surgeon. I’m going to use syringe solder. This is a paste of ground solder in ready-made flux. (Usually you have to mix that up yourself, making a milky paste of ground borax and water, which has to be painted onto the joint before soldering to prevent oxidisation.) This special easy-flow stuff comes in a syringe so you can just squeeze it out exactly where you want it, like a tube of writing icing, and it cleans as it melts so the whole job gets stripped clean as you warm it with the torch. With about fifty joins to make, it’s going to be a whole lot easier than trying to position lots
of tiny pallions of solder.
When all the joins are covered in paste, I turn on my torch. This is quite a big soldering job so I need a lot of heat, and that’s why I need the forge’s big torch rather than the delicate needle flame I often use. The blowtorch sparks into life with a click, blue paintbrush-shaped flame and a gentle roar. There’s no skill or grace here. I just blast the plaster block from above and wait for it all to heat up. It’s hot and there’s an acrid smell as some of the organic material that’s in the plaster burns out. I hold my face closer to get a good look. Slowly it gets hotter and the silver begins to glow red. The flux is melting now, like warm honey. Solder pings from powder to shining liquid as it runs into every join. It’s done.
With a pair of tweezers I drop the whole thing into a bowl of water. The plaster fizzes and hisses like soluble aspirin and breaks up. There are still a few bits stuck to the silver so I carefully brush them away with an old toothbrush. And there it is, my teardrop composition with the swallow and flowers. I pop it into the hot pickle to clean up the metal and remove any remaining flux. Then into the barrel polisher for five minutes to shine it up some more. Finally I repeat the whole process with my other lump of plasticine.
Back at my design desk I put the two pieces on my empty sketchbook page. The swallow swoops through the teardrop, among an array of leaves and flowers, and the butterfly looks great, surrounded by swirls and bobbles in a mango-shaped flourish. The technique has worked a treat. But I quickly realise what I’ve known all along: it’s not perfect, because I’ve missed a step. In my enthusiasm for the technical challenge, I’ve jumped straight to the making. Though I’d always intended to do part of the design on the bench, experimenting with the components on the plasticine, I’ve still rushed ahead too fast. I’ll have to go back a step or two and start again.
I turn back a page in my sketchbook and pressed leaves and petals spill out onto my desk. I’m back in Calabria, under the mulberry tree and wandering past the vivid blooms down on the promenade.
Always start from your original research.
Two years later, despite the best of intentions, the parental ban on weapon-making had been forgotten. And with just the occasional hit, and no end of misses, the Hall boys kept coming. More firepower was required, we decided in the summer of 1974, so I began to design ever-more-powerful crossbows. I tried using thick rubber instead of string, and multiple arrows in a single bow. Although my crossbows could inflict some impressive injuries, they were no longer a real deterrent. We needed to up the ante.
At this point our main weapons factory was in a small shed off the walled garden, next to where the coal was kept. It smelled of boiled cabbage and steam-soaked bricks because it also happened to be where I prepared the food for my ducks, boiling up leftovers in great pressure cookers each morning before school, and mixing the hot sludge with meal. It was a great place for making things, but it was no good for creative work. Research and Development took place in the Boys’ Room.
A long corridor with various doors opening off it led from the flagstoned kitchen to the main hall. One of these doors took you to the back stairs, once used by the servants of the house. That was the way to the Boys’ Room, tucked away by itself off a landing with a bathroom, in a part of the house that was otherwise pleasantly neglected. We shared a large room with high ceilings and exposed oak beams; a single huge, rattling sash window overlooked the walled garden. There were three beds, all built by my father, one up high in the corner with a fixed ladder. A hammock hung from the main beam. You’d often come upon a bat or two sleeping in the room during daylight hours.
It was time to investigate the possibilities of explosives. Time to move beyond arrows and bolt bombs and Lego. I began by shaving the heads off black matches and igniting little piles of the resulting powder. Next, I tried bending over the end of a piece of copper pipe, drilling a small fuse hole and pouring in my home-made gunpowder. A wad of cloth then a handful of split-shot – little lead spheres used to weight a fishing float – followed by another piece of wadding, and it was ready. Down in the duck-food shed we clamped the pipe into a vice and tied a match to a bamboo pole. Roddy lit the match, fumbled with the pole, and we quickly stood as far away as we could, wincing in anticipation as we turned away just enough to protect ourselves, but not so far that we’d miss the action. We saw a tiny spark, and another – for an instant time seemed to stop altogether – and finally there was a bigger flare, and kaboom! A huge explosion deafened us. The room filled with smoke and we tumbled out coughing, in fits of laughter and relief. Success.
It took months to get the formula perfect. We developed much faster burning powder. Once I’d developed the simple tube prototype, the device began to look more like a shotgun, complete with a carved wooden stock. Even we were rather terrified of these guns, and we only ever shot them with a long stick at a safe distance. As we improved the quality and increased the load of gunpowder, it took an ever lighter touch to explode them and this added considerably to the excitement. I also built pistols, but I was too afraid to shoot them myself. Instead, I would bribe my younger brother Tom to dress up in protective clothing, complete with an ancient crash helmet and goggles. He’d fire the pistol in his hand, and all three of us would whoop with laughter as he staggered backwards with the recoil, disappearing in a vast cloud of smoke.
But of course these guns could only be fired once. Much more efficient, I realised, would be separate bullet-cartridge cases which could be loaded into the gun for repeat shots. (I also wanted a better trigger mechanism.) Tom had bags of used 0.303 cartridges collected on visits to a ghost village in Wiltshire that had been taken over by the army for training during the war, and never repopulated. I requisitioned the whole collection. Drilling a hole in the base of the first (full metal jacket) bullet case for the fuse, I filled it with our new, improved gunpowder mix, then added wadding and shot. I built a brand-new rifle for the new ammunition. We headed out to the old boiler-house to try it out.
Our first target was an old unwanted chemistry set, still in its box. Roddy and I clamped the gun to a table opposite, then fired the gun with our trusty stick-and-match method. Spark-fizz-kaboom! Hooting with delight, we peered through the smoke. Blown to bits. Just a few scraps of cardboard were left fluttering in the air. This was the way forward.
We were soon able to make refinements. The key to a successful shot was the speed of burn. Red matches worked much better than black, and the finer you ground the powder, the quicker it burned. A few weeks later, up in the Boys’ Room, I began work on a new super-gun. I had begun to suspect that the most successful bullets were the ones we had packed most tightly. After grinding the red powder as finely as I could, and filling the prepared bullet case, I began to cast around for a suitable tool that would fit precisely down the 0.303-inch neck of the bullet case and compress the gunpowder most efficiently. All I could find of exactly the right size was a drill bit from my father’s workshop. It was a bad use of a precision tool and I hated doing it. But needs must. Pushing the blunt end of the bit into the bullet case, I tapped the sharp end gently with a hammer. Tap. Tap. Tap. Then I tapped a little harder. And next . . . nothing.
I didn’t see that coming.
No sound, no feeling, no sensations at all. I found myself lying on my back as the ceiling swam into focus. The room was full of smoke, sweet and peppery, and a huge hole had opened up above me, plaster dust adding to the pall. I was aware of people in the room. My sisters, I realised. But still there was no noise. Very slowly, a brittle pain crept into my hands, up my arms and into my face. There was a lot of blood coming from somewhere. Detached confusion gave way to the here and now and soon things really began to hurt. I had a searing pain in my arms and a terrible ringing started up in my ears. The girls were fussing and coughing, and Nikki quickly pulled open the sash window. I tried to sit up but my body wouldn’t respond. More towels arrived for the blood.
I was horrified when I realised what must have happened: the shell ha
d exploded, firing the drill bit backwards into my head. I’d got away relatively lightly, with just a glancing blow and a nasty cut. But Roddy was down in the weapons factory, with ten or more other cartridges, following exactly the same procedure. Quick! Debbie ran down in a fury, her shouting echoing up the backstairs, and arrived just in time to put a stop to it.
For weeks afterwards, my face was peppered with explosive bright red freckles. The unburned powder had blasted into my face and embedded itself under my skin. Worried that I had become combustible, I decided to keep well away from naked flames and didn’t smoke a cigarette for a fortnight.
They made us swear solemnly to stop making guns and to stop making gunpowder. Which, for a while, we did.
I start by drawing up my sketches from Italy. Then I follow the usual pattern for the components of the design – scanning and reducing the drawings before sticking them onto sheets of silver, cutting them out, constructing the flowers and plants, and texturing the leaves. The flowers have a sunny Mediterranean feel to them: trumpet-like hibiscus with long stamens, the wildflowers more stylised, with tiny beads of silver forming pistil and stamen.
So now I have a good selection of little flowers and leaves in front of me, the largest no bigger than a small button. I sketch out a few ideas from these, but I think I’m ready to start playing with the construction on my plasticine base. Remembering the Peshawar craftsmen, I press an assortment of flora into the clay, and come up with some interesting compositions. I want to do a great celebratory crescent but something seems to be missing. Returning to my sketchbook, I flick through the pages and there, mixed up with all those pressed leaves and petals, are my original experiments in silver.