by Alex Monroe
Peacock and Crow is another stage in a long journey to bring together skin and feather, something that’s always fascinated me. My quest is to pin down the flow and filigree lightness of feathers in raw, cold metal. I wonder how best to recreate that soft sensuousness. A bird’s wing has something about it that reminds me of the gentle curves and movement of a woman’s neck and shoulders. I think about the lower jaw, the sternocleidomastoid muscle, the clavicle, the suprasternal notch and the supraclavicular fossa, and how they come together and move under skin. This is what I want to evoke: the mesmerising conjunction of hard and strong and soft and smooth.
Later I realise this collection might reveal more than I’d anticipated.
Did I feel envy as we drove away from the old house for the last time? The new owners were Lord and Lady something-or-other and they’d already been round with builders and tape measures and a brace of well-brought-up children ready to pick out their new bedrooms. No, it wasn’t envy. Just an overwhelming sadness, mixed with a little anger. Betrayal, perhaps. All at once the life we had always known had been exposed as a show. A fraud, even, perpetuated almost by accident. Nothing would be the same again, and we all knew it.
I’m not sure if I’d ever really realised until then quite how different we were from the other families who lived in big sprawling Suffolk houses. They had investments, portfolios and land. We had existed by the skin of our teeth (and borrowing from the bank, I assume). The change suddenly made sense of the peculiar existence I’d always taken for granted. No central heating; not much food, either. I spent half the time starving hungry. We had eggs if the hens laid but sometimes for supper the seven of us would share a cauliflower with a thin parsley sauce. We hardly ever ate meat. It explained why I was always dressed uncomfortably in my sisters’ hand-me-downs. But why, when I longed for a comic like all my friends – the Beano or the Dandy – why did my mother subscribe me to Paris Match instead? Was that part of the masquerade?
Our new house was called Cherrytrees. The cottage used to be the post office in Freston, a small village only a mile or two from The Old Parsonage. If I saw it now it wouldn’t strike me as a small house – and somehow we soon managed to make it bigger, extending and spreading over the years, with endless lean-tos in all directions propping up the old building at its centre. But when we moved in, it felt like being squeezed into a tiny box. I just wanted to escape.
By then I was seventeen. Even Suffolk didn’t feel big enough for me any more. The first step to stretching my wings was a foundation course at Ipswich Art School. Here we had our very own cultural revolution. On Day One, our teachers, who dressed in frayed paint-stained jeans and sneakers without laces, told us that they had just one objective: to de-educate us. They were determined that we should un-learn everything we had been taught so far, about life and art alike. Then we could start again, looking at the world afresh, without prejudice. It was an approach that certainly suited me at the time.
We all sat on the floor blindfolded, with sheets of paper and pots of paint, while freaky American west-coast hippy music blasted out of the speakers. Paint the music man . . . Just paint the beautiful music. So we did. I felt as if I’d spent my educational life so far in a straitjacket. I splashed and splurged colour in a horrible mess all over the paper and all over myself, but it didn’t matter a jot. I was liberated.
It was around then that I started getting interested in clothes, not simply in a practical sense but as a way to express ideas. Roddy and I used to wear mohair jumpers knitted by Nikki in florescent stripes, so massively too big for us that they hung off our shoulders. Roddy was more ambitious than me with his hair. Occasionally we both wore a bit of make-up, eyeliner we scrounged from our sisters or girlfriends.
We had always made our own clothes at The Old Parsonage. Clothkits were the simplest: bright easy patterns printed directly onto the fabric, with little scissor markings so you couldn’t go wrong. Cut them out and stitch them up. Cheap and cheerful but cool too, in a 1970s sort of a way. But now I learned how to design clothes from scratch. My sister Nikki was the inspiration. She was studying fashion at Harrow and would occasionally return home bringing with her a waft of something exotic: a black line outlining her lipstick, perhaps, wild back-combed hair or a baggy T-shirt pulled in tight with a heavy belt over cut-off jeans. She talked of parties where Adam Ant or Duran Duran might turn up, and the out-of-reach suddenly seemed within my grasp.
Nikki taught me how to cut a pattern and about the fabric itself, how it has a grain, about the nap and the bias, and how to lay out a pattern so a garment hangs well. I began to experiment with cut, colour and materials.
Me, sitting on the steps, chatting with Roddy after an eventful all-night party in Oxford.
First things first. I need to find some feathers. One of my daughters has a vase of peacock feathers in her room so I borrow them for a couple of hours and make a few sketches, take a few notes, play about with them. I photograph them against a white background so that I can reduce the images and mess around with them on the computer.
I need a crow feather too. There are plenty of crows in the local park. On early morning dog walks you see them huddled and plotting, scavenging on the grass of the football pitches; later in the day they take to the trees. I pop down to look for their leavings. Of course, the moment you start searching for something, you never find it. It takes a few trips to every park in south-east London to find a good selection of feathers, and still I end up with more pigeons’ than crows’, not to mention several distracting bagfuls of interesting leaves.
But when I examine each feather, something’s not quite right. I have an image in my mind and I can’t let it go. The crow feathers I’ve gathered are as lustrous as petrol, but they are too lustrous. The grander the feather, the more perfect its shape. I need to find one with a slightly dishevelled look to its filigree, a particular humdrum curve and a twist I remember from my huge childhood collection. It’s the kind we’d throw away after plucking. Tufty and disorganised and a little more wild. Where the quill becomes the shaft, right at the base, soft downy barbs appear like fluff. The barbs that follow look scruffy; they’re not stuck together. And though the parallel barbs which come next are fixed together more neatly, running out evenly from the shaft, every so often they become unattached from one another and curve off in anarchic arcs. Rather like the contortions of my chrysanthemum petals.
I’m not having much luck finding a scruffy commonplace feather. Not until I shake out the duvet and plump up the pillows one morning and a little downy feather hangs in the air right in front of me and I catch it. It isn’t quite right, but nearly. So I cut open a little bit of seam in the pillow and pull out a handful of feathers. Sifting through them on the bedroom floor, I soon find the perfect shape. A slightly tatty little feather with downy barbs and an anticlastic curve, it bends off in two directions at once, fighting itself. I make a few sketches and then I scan the feather itself into my computer so I can play with proportions.
Late one night at Cherrytrees in Suffolk, up against a deadline, I was hard at work bringing a concept to life in my bedroom: a fantastically layered see-through dress that would make the wearer shimmer and rustle like a bird. Bright confetti swirled with static inside pockets I’d created by quilting together layers of clear polypropylene film with netting. The bodice was fitted and strapless, the skirt full and flowing. Imagine a whispering cascade of stitched cellophane, alive with trapped, dancing colour.
Jaki was my living mannequin. We were alone in the house, and the dress was nearly finished. Jaki stood on a low table as I tinkered away, my mouth full of pins. I just had to make a few final adjustments. I stood back. In the dark, with the light behind it, the dress looked stunning.
Then the phone rang. The caller was on a payphone: I heard a series of beeps and the clunk of a coin being pushed into the slot. Then came the sound of heavy breathing. In the background the recognisable hubbub of a busy Saturday-night pub.
Hello? I
said. Silence. Near silence, at least. I waited, listening to the sinister breathing for a minute, wondering if I recognised it. Hello? Anybody there? I didn’t really want to know. I put down the receiver.
That was weird. Some bloody weirdo. Come on, then, let’s get on with this dress . . .
But the phone rang again. I looked at Jaki before I answered. I knew it was the same man right away. His breathing was again heavy and laboured, but his time he spoke very quietly, in an uneven whisper, hard to hear. It was obvious he was drunk.
Roddy? I know it’s you. I’m going to kill you, you fucking bastard. I’m coming over there now and I’m going to kill you. Do you hear me? You’re dead.
Hello? I don’t understand . . . I’m not Roddy. Roddy isn’t here. Who is this anyway?
I know it’s you, Roddy. I’m coming over and I’m going to kill you, . . .
The voice was chilling and full of menace. He sounded like a psycho. A pissed psycho at that. So I put down the phone. Jaki saw the look on my face, and when the phone rang for the third time, she picked it up.
I’ll be there in five minutes and then you’re dead. Do you understand? Dead.
Fuck off, wanker! Jaki shouted, slamming the phone down. She didn’t look as confident as she’d sounded. By then she knew exactly who it was, and I did too.
Oh shit, Alex. I think he means it. I think he’s going to come over. What are we going to do?
Suddenly the dress looked ridiculous. Shimmering plastic peacock colours.
OK. Leave this to me. I said. And we both got to work.
I could only find four air rifles in the house, all .22s, but we had plenty of steel dart bullets, much more dangerous than flat-headed lead ones. Tom had sawn the barrel off his gun so he could carry it around with him. He’d had a quarrel with some lads from Holbrook village. When one of them was in a play at the village hall, he smuggled it in and hid in the loft behind the stage. As the boy stepped on stage Tom shot him in the back with a lightweight pellet, home-made, of course. He’d fell to the floor shouting I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot! It took several minutes before the audience realised that it wasn’t part of the play and the police were called. They never found the gun. It wouldn’t be much use to us now, unless it got to close range. We bolted all the doors, drew all the curtains and turned out all the lights. We had more windows than guns, but upstairs we opened four of them and propped a loaded gun by each. In the pitch-black darkness we waited, sitting by the window overlooking the road. Every so often I’d hear a rustle behind me as Jaki moved in the cellophane dress. We didn’t speak. Jaki’s rustling seemed to get louder and my mouth dryer as the minutes went by.
Perhaps fifteen had passed before we heard an engine. I recognised it as a Mini, driving slowly down the lane towards the house. The driver killed the lights before he reached us. The car pulled up quietly, with a rasp of handbrake and then a flash as the door opened and someone stumbled out, thoughtfully closing the door behind him very quietly. I couldn’t hear anything at first after that, except the humming in my head, but then I heard a new kind of rustling, from further off. Someone was pushing through the bushes to get into the garden. I saw a faint shadow on the lawn. The man stood stock still for an age, for so long that I wondered if he was really still there.
Jaki and I concentrated hard to make ourselves breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
We saw some movement down on the grass below, and a little later heard the noise of something hard. He had walked over to a downstairs window at the side of the house and he was trying to open it. I could half make out a shadowy figure pulling something from his pocket to work on the window. No luck. He stood back. I imagined him looking up at us. When he began to cross the lawn, as if making for the back of the house, I picked up a gun.
Jaki, you’re going to have to reload as quickly as you can. I had never whispered so quietly. She nodded.
The lawn wasn’t big and there were open fields behind it. As he moved away from the side of the house I could just make out his silhouette. It didn’t make me feel any better.
I’d guessed right. This was a friend of Roddy’s – or he had been. There had been three of them for years, best friends: Roddy, Andy and Malcolm. Until Andy was killed in a motorbike crash and sweet, kind, intelligent Malcolm had snapped and gone off the rails. In the aftermath, he couldn’t cope. He started drinking far too much and in his drunken rage he focused all his anger on the living, mostly blaming himself and Roddy. It was Malcolm downstairs, and he was here to make trouble.
Staring into darkness, I searched for shapes through my sights. Black crosshairs were useless against a black moonless night. The stock felt cold against my cheek. I didn’t know where Roddy was, but I hoped it wasn’t anywhere close.
At last I caught an outline. I had him. I traced the shape of his body in my sights then up to his head. Dead centre. And I pulled the trigger. There was a muffled cry and the silhouette fell to ground. Invisible against the black, of course. But Jaki handed me another gun and I shot into the darkness where he had fallen. A yelp. I shot again and again. As fast as Jaki loaded, I shot. It was mostly guesswork but sometimes I caught a glimpse of movement and reset my sights. Soon the figure was crawling back towards the bushes. But I didn’t stop firing until we’d lost him in the undergrowth.
A car door clicked open and a dim light came on inside the car. Through the foliage I could just make out a figure trying to pull himself in through the passenger door. We leaped into action again with a final rapid fire straight into the light. The sound changed to metal on metal, before the door slammed shut and the smudge of light was extinguished. The car started up and it zoomed off, back in the direction it had come from. I reloaded again, and followed its path with more shots until it was well out of range.
Standing in the silent darkness of the house, chilled by the open windows, I turned to Jaki.
I’ve had enough of this dump. I’m moving to London.
In the studio, surrounded by sketches and scans, photographs and feathers, I start to design the shapes of the peacock and the crow feathers. I want to make a good range of sizes for each, varying from about 10mm to 50mm in length. I’ll be able to experiment when I come to construct the actual pieces of jewellery. I have seen far too many clumsy representations of feathers not to realise how wrong it can go. I know the pitfalls of this kind of work. These feathers must have that gentle, contradictory twist, and the finest of hairline gaps between their barbs. They’ll be light and soft, hard and heavy. A little lawless if they want to be, with a certain freedom. But they also have to convey the essence of my original Peacock and Crow story: the opulence, the decadence and the darkness.
The peacock feathers I have drawn are quite open. Their long wistful barbs are barely attached to each other, except when it comes to the solid eye right in the centre at the top. The crow feather is much more dense, with scruffy downy barbs and broken parallel barbs. I print out my drawings, stick them onto a very thin sheet of silver and start cutting.
Two or three back-aching days follow. Each filigree gap needs a hole drilled first. Then it’s just me and my fretsaw. Every cut has to be smooth and neat, for there will be no getting into these tiny spaces later with a needle file, no cleaning up after the main event.
Finished peacock earrings.
Look at a feather, and you’ll see thin lines inscribed between each barb, where hooklets and barbules join and intersect. To etch these in, I start by using an engraving tool called a graver, which has a length of sharp high-carbon steel driven into a button-mushroom-shaped handle. At least, that’s my favourite shape. I like a heavy cherrywood, with a brass collar if possible, so that it feels substantial as you cup it in the ball of your hand, sharp cutting tip in your fingers. Then it’s just a case of digging the point into the metal and pushing. And remembering not to let your other hand get in the way. It’s easy to slip and stab yourself. The best thing about the button-mushroom handle is the flat slice it has out of it, which means it does
n’t roll away and damage the tool tip when you lay it down on the bench and go off to find a plaster.
I am a very bad engraver. It may sound contrary, but when I see that the line I’ve cut looks terrible, I feel something like relief. So the graver isn’t the best tool for the job this time. Its mark is too smooth. It doesn’t have the right texture. I want something softer.
Back in the design studio I have a closer look at a feather under a loupe. I need to get the measure of these barbs, and exactly how they connect. It’s clever. Perfectly engineered trelliswork. Fernlike, each barbule emerges perpendicular to the shaft, to be gripped by tiny catches where the hooklet runs up and across. That’s why you get that zip effect when you run your finger along a feather’s vane.
This sends me back to my micro-motor, the little hand-held high-speed drill. I select a cutter (or burr) called a bearing cutter, the shape of a tiny Chinese hat on a shaft. I carefully follow my engraving and the smooth line becomes rough and juddered. It’s just right. Now I simply need the patience to cut each and every line between the barbs, soft arcs which follow the flow of the feathers, sometimes parallel, sometimes crossing paths.
Paris again, and a little after-show party at the bar. It was early days in the business of showing for me, a time when I still shared a stand with Sian, an old friend from university. Nothing was yet routine, we had lots of energy and we weren’t about to miss out on free bubbly and the sparkle of glamour. Those fashiony booze-ups were peculiar dos, everyone there as frantic as the next. We were feverishly trying to relax and release the tensions of the show. We wanted to forget about the huge overdrafts we’d gambled with to be there. We didn’t want to think about the possibility that it might all come crashing down at any moment. Fatigue and empty stomachs sent the alcohol straight to our heads.