by Alex Monroe
In the drawing room downstairs, the party swung on until one or two guests remarked on the flickering lights. One by one they stopped talking and the room fell silent. Deprived of current, the record player ran unevenly, slowing down and speeding up, grotesquely distorting the music, until it sounded like the soundtrack to a scene from a horror movie.
Darling, perhaps you should see what’s going on . . . Peggy-Ann sent Stuart to investigate, and a couple of other sturdy chaps came too.
I must have just about hung onto consciousness until they found me, or maybe they revived me, for I remember being rather annoyed as they started to hit me with a broom. I gather the plan was to hit the light out of my hand with the broom handle. Luckily someone had the sense to pull the flex out of the wall. I fell in a crumpled heap on the floor, smoke still rising from my hand and arm, giving off an unpleasant smell of cooking flesh.
But I wasn’t dead, simply knocked out for a while. I was carried to my bed and, as usual, my sisters were fetched. They cleaned up my hand and wrapped it in bandages made from torn-up old sheets. With the power supply fully restored, the party swung on. I woke to a familiar smell of Dettol and zinc and castor-oil cream.
For the Gardener display at London Fashion Week, I had photographed and printed out a muted panorama of my allotment in Dulwich to dress the back panels of the stand. The rest of the display was to be taken directly from the exhibition, which I had taken down two months previously. The same quirky potting shed set-up with crates and seed trays. The gardening magazines. The stacked flowerpots in red clay. The old garden chairs. There was a slight problem of fitting everything in this time.
The grand white plasterwork and wooden floors of Somerset House would have made the perfect backdrop for our elegant English garden in muted pastel colours. It was looking distinctly out of place in this industrial setting but Emma and Suzy remained optimistic, and my hopes rose too. Until I stepped back to survey our work and tripped on that odd bit of stand-frame which was still sticking out. We had asked repeatedly to get it removed so I thought I might as well do the job myself. It surely wouldn’t take a minute. I was unscrewing the crucial nut when someone booted me gently in the backside and said: What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
A workman was staring down at me in indignant disbelief. A brief period of chaos followed, and workmates and health and safety supervisors were summoned. However I explained myself, I managed to rub them all up the wrong way. The workman got more and more heated. The others kept shouting Health and Safety at me and I tried to explain that was exactly why I wanted it moved. But there was no way out for me. The men were getting really angry. I stopped what I was doing and apologised. Soon the small crowd dispersed.
But I had a plan. I asked Emma and Suzy to hold up a tablecloth as you would if you wanted to change into your trunks on a beach. Only I wasn’t going to change into my trunks: I was going to unbolt that bloody strut at last. They were unhappy with my plan but I soon persuaded them. Two minutes later the job was done. Easy. Or it would have been if I hadn’t noticed another stray strut sticking out at just over 6 foot. Now that I had spotted it, I really wanted it gone too. The problem was that I needed a stepladder. The place was still teeming with workmen and there were lots of stepladders dotted around. It would only take two seconds. Nearby I found an unattended ladder and whisked it away.
If I do this quickly nobody will notice.
Emma and Suzy weren’t so sure. I nipped up, whisked out my Allen key and started unscrewing the strut when suddenly the stepladder shook beneath me and I nearly toppled off. I grabbed the top of my stand and I looked down, half-hanging, to see the same furious workman pulling the ladder out from underneath me. He was shouting. Emma and Suzy were shouting. Soon a considerably larger crowd gathered. It seemed to egg me on.
Why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone? I said.
The workman’s fists were already clenched and he pounced first and tried to throw a punch. Emma and Suzy and several bystanders jumped in to stop him and I was bundled off down the narrow spiral staircase. Outside I sat and fumed. Then I stood up and paced angrily. And when Emma reappeared, I snapped.
Enough is enough, I said. We’re leaving. Break down the show and see how they like that.
Emma looked me hard in the eyes as you might stare down a small child. More firmly than ever, she told me to bugger off. And don’t come back. So I did. And I didn’t. That was the last time I was allowed anywhere near London Fashion Week.
Daisy Bell
Today I’m meeting Roddy for lunch. We meet every week in the same place, the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo. Locked to a tree outside is a 1980s tangerine Bianchi, my weekday commuting bicycle. One of an ever-increasing collection, it’s a beautiful bike, with sweeping Nitto handlebars in the shape of Conan Doyle-style whiskers. I bought them in Tokyo to fit to a frame imported from San Francisco. Roddy is chatting away when I look up from my potted shrimps to see three or four people standing round it. One man squats down and examines more closely. I don’t even say anything to Roddy. I just glance over at them quickly, feel like a million bucks and smile a secret smile to myself.
There is something special about the freedom a bicycle gives you. When I was nine or ten it was a step-through Raleigh Jeep. Freewheeling down the road to the marina with the wind in my face, I was half-intoxicated, half-terrified. Now my most treasured possession is a hand-built Roberts, made for me like a bespoke suit by Chas Roberts, the finest frame builder in the south. I did the aesthetics; Chas did the technical stuff. It’s that perfect marriage of form and function again, the work of a real craftsman. I’ve cycled the thousand miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats on my Roberts, on the greatest adventure in British cycling. Just you and your bike and the open road.
You never forget your first bike, though. Not long ago I found a Raleigh Jeep on eBay and bought it for my daughter. It wasn’t in too bad a shape, arriving flat-packed in a ropey old cardboard box. The handlebars were at ninety degrees, the pedals had been removed, and everything rattled like crazy. It needed new brakes and cables, of course, and I could only find those unusual size tyres online. But a tin of oil and a couple of hours in my workshop later, it was as good as new. Orange-red frame, metallic blue mudguards and a slip-stream chain guard. Three Sturmey Archer gears. Whitewalled wheels to match the saddle and handlebar grips. A bike to be proud of and beautiful to ride, it has an old-fashioned long wheel-base with forks that stretch lazily forwards so it almost steers itself. Connie loves it as much as I loved mine.
In Suffolk she glides along the back lanes and freewheels down towards Iken Church, with me keeping a safe distance behind. I want to give her the independence I enjoyed in my youth and I don’t want to break in on the fun, but still I can’t bear to miss out on seeing her enjoy it. Connie is twelve and she can feel the wind in her face. I remember that feeling all too well and I want to capture it somehow in my next collection. Freedom. Being on the brink of something exciting, something you can sense, although you don’t yet know quite what it is. Freewheeling down through the dappled shade.
That Raleigh Jeep is my starting point. I trace its outline in fine pencil in my sketchbook, and I’m reminded of a song. So under the sketch I write:
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do,
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
There is something about that song that I can’t get out of my head.
There is a flower within my heart . . .
Planted one day by a glancing dart.
He’s begging her to marry him.
You’ll be the bell which I’ll ring, you know
Sweet little Daisy Bell
You’ll take the lead on each trip we’ll take
Then if I don’t do well
I’ll permit you to use the brake . . .
My daydream has quickly turned into a cliché from a romantic film but I don’t care. A well-used image can often make a good starting point. It offers the kernel of an idea that you know will be both familiar and appealing, with instant resonance, but there’s always scope for development: a good dollop of reality and a twist of your own. I make a few notes in my sketchbook, hastily pencilling a wicker picnic basket with the mouse inside and a bottle of wine and an overturned glass.
For me it wasn’t Daisy. It was Sally Beaumont and she wasn’t a cliché. She was real and she was the flower within my heart.
As far as I was concerned, there was simply no argument. Sally Beaumont was the most gorgeous girl in the whole of East Anglia. She was a little bit punky, in a schoolgirl sort of a way, with a blonde bob, soft pale downy skin and a full figure, pink-and-orange punkette make-up, big eyes and a wide mouth. Her plump pale-pink lips parted when she smiled, revealing the whitest teeth I ever saw. In the summer of 1979 she was probably about sixteen. I couldn’t believe that anyone so beautiful could exist in the world.
I knew her through my friend Jaki, who was all you could ever want in a best mate. We laughed, we argued, we messed about and it was fantastically uncomplicated, despite the fact that Roddy had recently fallen for her romantically, successfully wooing her away from another boyfriend. Sally was her best friend, so the four of us became a bit of a gang: Jaki, Sally and I all about the same age and Roddy just a couple of years older.
One morning, late in the long summer holidays, the two girls and I were hanging around in the walled garden, soaking up the sun, finishing our tea and toast. Roddy had already disappeared, setting off early to get to work on a boat he’d just bought with another friend. Victoria was a small cutter, built at the end of the nineteenth century to patrol the valuable oyster beds on the river Colne. She was berthed at Bourne Bridge on the Wherstead road, where the Orwell meets the outskirts of Ipswich.
Sally wanted to see the boat but Jaki had to get back to town so I offered to take Sally down to the moorings myself. We could walk along the river. It was only five or six miles to the bridge.
We packed a small picnic, grabbed a couple of bikes from the barn and pushed them up through the garden. Along by the old garages, round the kitchen gardens and greenhouse, we followed the high red-brick wall with its soft, rounded coping stones, from which we used to launch ourselves onto the Tarzan rope. Past Top Field and through the Japanese knotweed jungle. Down the long, shady path, once thick with mantraps. And then we burst out through the old wooden gate into bright open parkland and the smell of sun on grass. As we walked through the shade of a huge sweet chestnut tree, the air grew cool and I noticed goosebumps on Sally’s arms.
Back in the open, swallows swooped down with incredible speed and agility, nearly brushing the grass with their wingtips before darting back up again. What could possibly be better than that? Except this: I had Sally Beaumont to myself and I could feel the sun on the back of my neck.
On the white concrete of the marina road, we hopped onto our bikes and freewheeled down the long straight hill. Stacks of huge polystyrene blocks, each the size of a car, stood around, waiting to be made into pontoons for the new marina. A few days earlier I’d watched the Airfix glue I’d poured into one block burn right through the polystyrene like acid. Now I was watching Sally’s face, lit up and thrilled by the speed of our downhill coast. She grinned her widest smile, and so did I and we whooped.
Just before the sharp bend by the Cat House we turned off, pedalling hard to make it up the last few yards of the steep slope towards the tuck shop. We propped our bikes against the shop’s larch-lap cladding. Sally was intrigued as I led her down a set of giant concrete steps, moulded like so many bars of chocolate, and plummeting down into the darkness of a steep wooded slope. We used to skid down the muddy slide here on dustbin lids. I was beyond that now. I took Sally’s hand in mine and helped her down the first massive step.
Oh my God! Where are you taking me?
At the bottom we found the path through the trees that ran parallel to the river. Here the air was cool and damp, the feral rhododendrons well past flowering. Spots of sunlight dappled their dark shiny leaves, and the soft spiking mares’ tails gave the place a prehistoric feel. Greens and browns and a soft mossy carpet. The steep earthen slope rising above us on our left was thick with tall trees, ferns and fallen logs. On our right, bright sunshine caught the river. There was an occasional sharp birdcall. Pigeons clapped their wings in flight. We didn’t talk much.
After a few hundred yards the path became difficult, so I found a good place to climb down to the water’s edge. There was a fallen tree trunk, like a bridge from the bank. Holding on to a branch, I scrambled down and held out my hand again for Sally. She jumped down to me. I was standing on a soft mass of twigs and seaweed at the top of the tide-line. She flicked her hair off her face and smiled again.
We walked along the soft sand. The tide was going out and there was no danger of getting cut off. Up ahead, I could see where the shore widened further. It was sunnier there, with tree branches dipping onto the muddy sand, reedy, weedy flotsam caught up in their twigs. I noticed the skeleton of a dead seabird, washed up by the river and bleached white, but for once, I didn’t pick it up.
Away from the bewitching shadows of the undergrowth, we both seemed to open up. We began to chat freely and we laughed. Sally took off her shoes and tucked her skirt up into her knickers so she could splash in the water. Birds sang in the trees on our left and somewhere out on the river, I could hear the distant drone of an outboard motor. Every so often we came to a tree which had fallen out into the river, stretching out seaweed-clad branches. We clambered over the trunks, pausing sometimes to sit on top, chatting or simply taking in the beauty of it all, admiring the intensity of the sunlight on the other side of the river. And then we would jump off with a crunch on the sandy shingle and run off chasing one another.
Past alder and willow oak and a vast ash, just clinging on to the bank. From time to time the gargled screech of a black-headed gull tried to interrupt our now unstoppable conversation. We had to leap over a little stream gushing out from the bank. The water ran through the woods from Freston village, smelling of freshly crushed leaves. After Si Blackwell’s house, the shore grew cleaner. The bank on our left levelled out, while the river opened up and curved off to our right. Then we reached a tall pine tree and a thicket of silver birches.
The road used to run along the shore here. A long time ago, of course. One terrible stormy night a coach crashed, killing all inside. And to this day on a dark night you can hear horses galloping, a terrifying crash and the screams of a dying woman.
Have you heard it?
I had to shake my head.
But I can show you the gravestone if you like.
Her lips parted and she nodded, so up we climbed, Sally still barefoot. Just as I remembered, a large granite stone was hidden in the undergrowth. I pushed aside the long wet grass and read the inscription
aloud, in a doom-laden voice.
This stone marks the spot on which a four-wheel carriage was accidentally overturned on 31 July 1893. All the four occupants were mercifully saved.
My voice tailed off.
What? Mercifully saved? What’s the bloody point of that?
Sally shrieked with laughter and took the piss. Ooo . . . look out, the ghosts are coming to get you . . .
She turned and ran back down to the river and I chased her. Back on the shore Sally raced ahead. Tripping as I went, I pulled off my canvas deck shoes and ran barefoot after her. We were right on the apex of the river’s curve. We ran out into the shallow water and Sally turned and kicked splashes at me. The scene is fixed in my mind for ever, Sally giggling in white cheesecloth, the sun sparkling on water droplets, caught in a warm wind. Life in slow motion. I splashed her in turn and we then ran back though water and silky-warm mud which squidged between our toes, then soft brown sand, a strip of sharp shingle and finally onto the bank where the grass rolls gently up towards Freston Tower. There was the odd spiky thistle and dandelion but the ground was soft and warm. Sally flopped down to lie on her back. The grass was lush, heated by the sun, deeper than an eiderdown. I lay beside her and we both looked up at the sky. A huge Constable sky with puffy white clouds. The wind swished in the trees behind us and in the distance sounded the plaintive cry of a sandpiper.