by Alex Monroe
Roddy!
I ran as fast as I could, faster than any of the other boys on my tail. The crumpled body in the undergrowth didn’t stir. None of us had a clue what to do when we reached him. We just stood round in a circle, gawping, panting, waiting for something to happen. It might have been seconds or minutes before I heard a groan.
Roddy! Are you all right? I thought you were dead! I wiped back a tear. I didn’t want to look soft in this crowd.
And then he moved. Slowly at first. Pulling his face out of the dirt, earth caked into his hair and nose and mouth. He spat. And then the hugest grin.
Did you see that? Argh . . . that was fucking brilliant . . . ow . . . I want to go again. Where’s the bloody go-cart?
But he couldn’t even walk for quite a while. As for the go-cart . . . it was time for another note for the binmen.
And now there are more decisions to be made. I lie out several sheets of A4 paper on the central worktable and group the different castings into little piles. Then I collect together all the chains and hooks and fastenings and any stones we might want to use.
I start with the obvious. There are always some pieces I’ve planned to the last detail, that already exist as drawings in my sketchbook, complete in every way. So I place a bike on the paper, and drape a chain behind it. No, that one’s too thick. I change it for a thinner one. Then I lay a tiny ruby and a tiny diamond at either end, the rearlight and headlight. Those stones will need to be set.
After that it’s time to put together all the elements for the daring little mouse that has crept into the picnic basket. As I lay out the components for a few more pieces, a stone here, an earhook there, I scribble notes on the paper: big jump ring. Or should hang loosely. When I can’t find quite what I need, I simply draw it in: a chunkier chain, or a longer hook. Soon it becomes more collaborative. Like me, everyone in the workshop is art-school trained, and everyone has their own style, but we’ve been working together long enough for them all to know how I operate and what I’m after.
How about a ruby on the top of that cupcake, like a little cherry?
Someone else suggests a double-strand charm bracelet – always fun to put together – and then another has an idea for a huge long necklace, with a cup and saucer hanging from it. An ant here. A sapphire there. A cluster of oak leaves. A rabbit races for a gate. We all start to play.
Each creation is laid out and photographed, and then it quickly begins to get out of hand. We’ve got far too many ideas between us, and I have to start rejecting some, go back to the beginning, remind everybody of the feel and mood and emotion behind the collection. I have to keep it all on track, so that we don’t forget the story I’m trying to tell.
April is my production manager. She cooed over the new castings when they arrived but now she keeps looking over my shoulder and shaking her head.
How on earth are we going to make that? she mutters, while the arrangements we discuss become ever-more complicated. The mouse has proved particularly popular. We phone the casters in a panic. We need more. And after a day or two, I’ve got plans and photographs for perhaps twenty or thirty different pieces.
That means we can start to make the actual samples. When each one is finished we lay it carefully in a black sample tray. At the end of this process we sit down and have another long hard think about it all. It’s nearly always a matter of hard-nosed editing, and that’s where Emma comes in.
This one won’t sell, she declares confidently. And, nobody is going to wear this. Or, we already have six pairs of earrings so we’ll have to get rid of these . . .
Of course I fight my corner for some pieces. But Emma is very astute and I know it. It takes a good few hours of intense discussion and negotiation, and finally we’re down to two trays, with a good balance of necklaces, earrings and bracelets. Not quite as many rings as usual, but these ones are particularly lovely, so I’m not worried. The next stage is pricing, and then cataloguing, and then Daisy Bell will be ready to show to the buyers.
This collection is all about the wind in your hair and young love and escape, and behind all that carefree joy, something more elusive. An opportunity seized or lost for ever, the kind of chance that can pass before you even know you’ve had it. We’ve included a tandem of course, because of the song, and there are the hampers, and those inquisitive mice seem to have got in all over the place. But it’s the Raleigh Jeep which means the most to me. I bring one home and give it to Connie. It looks good on her.
The bike obsession came hard on the heels of the go-carts. Once again, we traded with the dustbin men and built our own from the parts they delivered. The village boys were off buying brand-new racers and choppers. Meanwhile I acquired that step-through Raleigh. It arrived one Thursday rusty and broken, and anything but fashionable, not least for a boy. That didn’t bother me. I removed every last part from the frame, stripped the paint with emery and a wire brush and repainted it pillar-box red using boat paint I found in my father’s workshop. I wouldn’t need mudguards or a chain guard. Or even a front brake. I’d only be using the brakes for doing skids. I oiled the chain and the wheel bearings. The crank was OK. Three Sturmey Archer gears were fine for the gentle hills of the Suffolk coast. I did need new handlebars, though. Cowhorns. And these I had to buy.
When the bike was finished it looked OK. And it was fast. I was fast. I had never been sporty but this was something even I could do well. I could beat most of the other kids in a race, I could skid longer and, budding Evel Knievel that I was, I could even jump over two or three lads lying side by side.
The best place for skidding practice was the cinder track leading from our back gate to the church. The track was long and flat and the black gravel perfect for locking up your back wheel on a turn and sliding your bike round in great arcs.
We had been working on Roddy’s racer for a few weeks. It was an agonising wait each week as we put in our requests for more parts. Each Thursday morning we rushed to the bins to see what they had left. Bit by bit, we flipped the drop handlebars so you could sit more upright, stripped down the frame and fixed the gears. Finally it was finished and Roddy took it out onto the cinder path to test it out. On his own.
When he returned a few hours later he was bleeding and bruised and carrying his bike in his arms, in pieces. His pockets rattled with ball bearings and nuts and bolts. Unfortunately for him a particularly nasty gang of boys from the Hall had been lying in wait. Their leaders went by the names of Scarface and English. They jumped Roddy not far from the gate, thumping him off his bike as he tried to escape. Then they beat him up and, to add insult to injury, they dismantled his bike completely, right down to the wheel bearings. It was a humiliating reminder that the war was never really quite over.
After bikes we naturally progressed to mopeds and motorbikes. Just the names still bring a smile to my face: Yamaha (shortened to Yammy), FS1-E (pronounced Fizzy), Honda SS50, Fantic (if you had rich parents), Mobylette (surprisingly fast), and my particular favourite, the Puch Maxi – probably the girliest of them all, a step-through moped with a little shopping basket on the front. But it was all I could afford. Forging coins and cleaning windows was never going to pay for a serious moped.
I stripped the engine and ground down the cylinder head to give it more compression. I built an air-scoop to force air into the gasping carburettor and I drilled out the jets. I stripped it right down to lose any excess weight. And I tinkered. Every day I tinkered for hours. Friends would bring their old machines and we all would work on them together. At any given time you might find half a dozen fourteen-year-old boys in a cloud of exhaust fumes, revving engines outside the old barn.
As a result my little Puch Maxi went like a rocket. Not as fast as some, though. There were Fizzies around which famously topped 50 miles an hour. We raced around the back roads of Suffolk creating havoc. You had to be sixteen to drive a moped legally but that didn’t stop us. Occasionally I would steal a bigger bike and hammer along the curves of the Strand, the lo
ng flat road that follows the river Orwell towards Ipswich. I would pull the throttle back gradually . . . 50, 60, 70 miles an hour . . . hedges flashed by in streaks. I was absolutely terrified but completely unable to stop. Faster and faster, as fast as I could go.
On the second day out of Land’s End we are already exhausted. There are three of us cycling: friends of mine called John and Lloyd, and me. A scientist, an actor and a jeweller. Devon and Cornwall are all hills and we are quite unprepared for their severity. We have chosen to cycle the picturesque route and we are carrying all our own kit. Progress is painfully slow. At about half past three we find ourselves at the foot of Dartmoor, looking up with horror at an angry sky above vast looming hills. There is nothing to say. We climb painfully slowly in the lowest gear, accompanied only by the sound of our gasping breaths. When we reach the plateau there is no feeling of triumph. We flop on the short-grazed grass beside patches of heather and stunted fronds of bracken, our bikes propped against an ancient stone cross. We are less than halfway to our next stop, with at least six hours of cycling still to go, and we have nothing more to give. By now it’s late afternoon. The clouds ahead darken.
The plateau is actually fairly flat and it isn’t raining yet, so we set off on the twenty or so miles across the moor. An hour or so later the horizon drops off and we can see the great hills ahead sloping down towards Exeter. Wild ponies wander across our paths and we take a short break so I can sketch them. At some point after Moretonhampstead, our little single-track road begins to plunge downhill, snaking its way off the high plains. We’re zooming at last. It is a much-needed spur. The road is rough with loose gravel and stones and it twists and turns awkwardly. A relaxed freewheel becomes slightly hairy. And then the slope increases again and so does my speed. From 25 to 30 miles an hour. Great granite boulders flash by me either side and I have trouble with the corners. 37 miles an hour. My back rack is heavily laden, so the rear end keeps skewing as the steel frame twists horribly under the tension. It makes steering increasingly difficult.
But still the road drops away from me and still I accelerate. From thirty-seven to forty-three. A long way off I can see a see a sharp blind bend to the left. I realise that if I hit any of the larger stones on the road my wheels will collapse. I wonder if I would die if I come off at this speed. And then there are the bloody ponies to worry about. I hope to God that one of them doesn’t step out. But this is my bike and it is a Roberts and it is built for speed and there is absolutely no bloody way I am going to pull the brakes. Up creeps the speedo. Forty-six. Now I am terrified. The corner hits me sooner than I expect and I fly round it. No oncoming cars, thankfully, no ponies, and by a miracle I still haven’t hit a stone. Leaning at a stupid angle I cling to the road with my back wheel juddering out from under me. A moment of terror when I think I’m not going to make it, then the bend eases off and I’m back in control. I freewheel gently on for another few miles and wait for the boys to catch up.
Don’t you ever fucking do that again. Lloyd’s fury arrives before he does. I’m not scraping you up and taking you home to Denise in a fucking bag, you twat.
He is right, of course. But when I look at my speedometer it shows a top speed of 48 miles an hour. Forty-eight! I grin a secret grin to myself. What a fantastic bike.
When I first moved into my Elephant and Castle workshop, I shared it with a wood-carver called Jason Cleverly. He had one half and I had the other. Jason sat and whittled driftwood while I filed metal. We made things and sold them to shops and galleries. And in the evenings, if we had enough money, we would stroll down to the Beehive and drink a few pints of Directors.
Jason’s girlfriend Kathy (who later illustrated The Gardener) had just returned from a long trip to China and we were off to the pub to hear all about it. While Kathy was in Beijing she met an English girl of the same age. They got chatting and became friends. Kathy talked about home and about Jason and she must have mentioned me because her new friend’s ears pricked up.
What a small world. What a coincidence. She also knew me. She was from Suffolk too and she knew me as a teenager. She told Kathy about long lazy summer days at The Old Parsonage. About Roddy’s boat. They both knew Jaki Prior too. And then she told Kathy a story which had stayed fresh in her mind since the day it had happened. She remembered walking beside the river twenty years ago. She remembered an odd memorial stone and splashing in the water. She remembered flopping back in the grass and waiting for me to kiss her. Hoping that I would kiss her. But I didn’t. Then it grew cold and that was that. We carried on with our walk and soon after, she left Suffolk and now she lives in Beijing. But she had wanted me to kiss her and she said she was sad that I hadn’t.
Whether she loves me or loves me not
Sometimes it’s hard to tell . . .
Not long after my riverside walk with Sally Beaumont, men in suits started arriving at The Old Parsonage. There were hushed meetings with my parents. Dodo, my grandmother, came to stay with us for ages, and it wasn’t even Christmas. One day they sat us all down for a chat. We had never sat down for a chat before. The strangeness of it made us nervous.
There is no more money. The bank is taking the house away.
My parents looked uncharacteristically worried so I felt I should reassure them.
Don’t worry. This could be an adventure!
My mother smiled but Dodo told me I was a horrible boy and it wasn’t going to be an adventure, it was going to be horrible.
We planned to hold a huge sale in the gardens and flog everything we owned to help towards our debts. One summer’s day, as if in a dream, I stood behind a trestle table in the walled gardens of The Old Parsonage, where I had recently drunk tea with Sally Beaumont, where we used to set up the ‘Bang a Nail’ stand at the fair, and eat bread and cheese. Laid out in front of me were old toys and crockery, instruments, pictures, and a weighty old black-and-white TV. I had saved my stuffed duck and hidden it in the house. The place filled up with visitors but the sombre mood was far removed from the jolly atmosphere of the village fêtes. We sold pretty much everything we had. And finally, in a strange reversal of our arrival seventeen years earlier, we loaded a few possessions into a rusty old red Ford Escort Mark I estate and left The Old Parsonage for ever.
Peacock
Once upon a time there was a Peacock and a Crow. Actually, more than once. There are lots of different versions of the tale that inspired this collection. From Laos to ancient Greece, every story plays with the same themes: vanity and envy.
The one I have in mind goes something like this:
In a world where all the birds and animals were still white, two friends were playing together one day in a field of beautiful flowers. Crow turned to Peacock and said: ‘Look at these gorgeous colours! Wouldn’t it be lovely to be as bright as these flowers?’
‘Oh yes,’ sighed Peacock. ‘These plain white feathers are so dull.’
Crow flapped his wings in excitement. ‘I’ve had an idea. Let’s paint each other.’
Peacock agreed at once. Off they went to find the paints. Crow was the first to take up the paintbrush. Taking enormous care and many hours, he painted his friend in the most exquisite colours he could find. Magnificent blues and greens shimmered on the bird’s neck, while a design of wonderful rainbow spots graced his sweeping tail.
Peacock was simply delighted. He spread out his splendid tail feathers and began to strut about proudly.
‘My turn now,’ said Crow, who was looking forward to an equally glorious transformation.
But the Peacock looked at him in disgust. It wasn’t enough for him to have all those eyes on his tail. He wanted every eye in the world on him. The last thing he needed now was competition.
Peacock picked up a pot of black ink and poured it all over Crow, who let out a loud squawk of horror. From that day on Crow’s feathers were black as night. But Peacock didn’t care. He was already on his way to show off his plumage to anyone who cared to look.
The show of b
eauty I’m trying to capture in the Peacock and Crow collection is on a grander scale than anything I’ve tried before. It’s a deliberate move away from the intimate, personal stories I’ve been exploring recently. And part of the excitement for me is the contrast in the tale. Juxtaposed with that flash of pride, I want a sense of inky-black malevolence – dark, decadent envy – a touch of gothic in Crow to cut across Peacock’s selfish opulence.
There will be other contrasts too. Although some of the individual pieces of jewellery will be the biggest I’ve ever made, the craftsmanship involved demands work of the finest and most detailed nature, using techniques of delicate piercing and smooth engraving.
I already have a long history with feathers. As a child I used to lie on my back in the parkland between The Old Parsonage and the church, stroking my lips with a pigeon’s feather and gazing up at the huge Suffolk sky. I collected birds’ wings too, a sybaritic pleasure. I loved the feel and the sight of them, that natural perfection of aesthetics and engineering. There were rich pickings to be had in the fields and woods and hedgerows all around: iridescent calling cards from passing starlings and slender curving pheasant plumes, tiger-striped. Asymmetric flight feathers – a mallard’s, blue and grey; a goldfinch, half-yellow, half-black. I used to save feathers from wild birds I’d shot for fun and others from partridges or ducks we’d plucked to eat. King of the collection was my jay wing, a flash of electric blue against black, white on pink – a hint of what Crow might have become had Peacock cooperated. The gorgeous jay is just the most glamorous of the corvids.