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Two Turtle Doves

Page 18

by Alex Monroe


  It was gruellingly hard to make enough money to pay both the rent for my crappy little bedsit in Clapham and the studio too. I worried continually about my overdraft, which kept creeping up. I always needed a little more to pay for a show or to buy materials. I worked too hard for too long, burning the candle at both ends, existing on a diet of beer and roll-ups, with the occasional curry sauce and chips from the Chinese takeaway on a Friday night. I was exhausted and aching all the time. Eventually I dragged myself to the rheumatologist’s consulting room at St Thomas’ Hospital.

  Ankylosing spondylitis and seronegative arthritis. Seronegative spondarthritides. You’re HLA B27 positive. Is there a history in the family?

  The words sounded fantastic. Almost fantastical. Even now I love the way they look when you write them down. But that didn’t make it any easier to absorb what the consultant was telling me.

  I remembered being told that as a young man my father had a bad back and needed hospital treatment. It was only then that I thought about his habit of taking himself off when things got a bit hectic, usually slipping away unnoticed to a quiet corner with a book and a glass of beer. I hadn’t really paid much attention to the increasing number of whole days he spent in bed. But now his back was curved and his neck didn’t turn.

  Throughout my teens and into my twenties I often found myself gripped by the most terrible pains in my joints, and increasingly had to take to bed a lot of the time too. My health had deteriorated progressively and by this time I’d been living off painkillers for years, just so I could get myself moving again and back in the studio. From what I could understand, this rheumatologist was now telling me that I was fucked. There was nothing we could do about it. No cures, no hope, and no way of preventing my decline. No fixing it this time. Best just to accept it.

  But I couldn’t. I had never not been able to fix anything before. I’d spent my whole life fixing things. Making things and fixing things. That’s what I did. So I left the hospital and limped home, where I doubled the dosage of painkillers and went straight back to work.

  Not everything can be fixed as easily as a broken wheel on a go-cart.

  Whenever I least needed it to happen, my body would attack itself from within. My joints swelled up and my eyes milked over. Sometimes I could get through by taking lots of painkillers; occasionally I was hospitalised. My overdraft steadily grew. A new treatment was talked about. The consultant wanted to bring me into hospital and try pulsing massive amounts of a steroid called methylprednisolone straight into my bloodstream. Rather like rebooting a computer, it was meant to knock out my immune system completely so we could start again. It wouldn’t fix me but it might help suppress a particularly nasty episode. I wasn’t keen, but after a succession of progressively bad flare-ups I gradually became bed-bound. Stuck in my grim bedsit in Clapham, I lay with misted eyes and a pain in my joints that was quite extraordinary. Through the fug of sightlessness, pain and medication, a ghastly depression took hold of me. For a couple of months I hadn’t been able to work at all. The money had completely dried up. When the cartilage and tendons in my ribcage became inflamed, and breathing became increasingly difficult, I realised things were taking a turn for the worse. Eventually I gave in.

  I was whisked away into hospital where I remained for months. Great hanging bags of steroids were plumbed periodically into my arms and injected into my eyes. I was a mass of tubes and needles. It all sent me slightly mad. When Roddy first came to visit me with a couple of clandestine cans of Special Brew, he was shocked at what he saw. A cannula in my arm had sprung a leak and blood had sprayed over me and up the walls. My vision was so milky I didn’t recognise him, my body writhed and my mind jumped around incoherently. Roddy kept up his visits, though. Occasionally I would surface and see him sitting there, sipping a beer and reading the papers. He would look up and smile.

  By the time I was discharged from the hospital I had no money, no home, and no girlfriend. In my absence my landlady had broken into my flat and cleared me out. And I suppose I shouldn’t have expected Siobhan to put up with it all either. I knew she loved me, but for her, the passion had seeped away. She spoke softly and cried as she explained. She was young and had a life to get on with, and I was stuck in a wheelchair. She had already been through so many ups and downs with me. It really was over. It felt impossible to contemplate. Of course she had done exactly the right thing, but it took years for me to understand this.

  Roddy took me to an airport and I flew to Jersey, where my sister Nikki lived. It was the obvious solution, for my parents were still living in a caravan in the garden and Nikki’s husband was a doctor who could monitor my progress. Nikki had always looked after me, and I’d never made it more difficult. I sat in that bloody wheelchair and stared morosely into space. I had loved Siobhan more than I had ever loved anyone before and now I was alone, with absolutely nothing to look forward to. An impenetrable all-engulfing inky-black cloud of depression billowed up around me and swallowed me up. My very life-blood had been knocked out by the steroids, cleansed of its history. All trace of who I was had gone, it seemed. I felt stripped bare.

  In Jersey, I was just another child again in a bustling family. Good food, perpetual company, a sister’s eternal patience and mild sea breezes worked wonders. Despite myself, I was up and walking again in a few weeks, although it was several more months before I could think of returning to London. My potter friend Pam kept in touch, and when I was finally ready, in the autumn of 1992, I moved into a small room in her house in Clapham. Pam had known better than I had what I needed. She realised that when I eventually surfaced from the pain and self-pity it would be my tools that would save me. Everything else I owned had been thrown in a skip by the landlady, but Pam guarded my workshop and my equipment. She smoothed things over with the owner of the workshops, kept the studio ticking over, and waited, patiently. My cold forge gathered dust and a thin bloom of rust powdered my pliers and hammers. But when I finally returned, everything I needed was there.

  Making would mend me. Drawing, cutting, soldering, bending and polishing. Making.

  I probably spent a good year growing stronger and learning to look after myself better, cutting down on smoking and drinking, swimming every day and beginning to make ends meet. I was still having the occasional attack of arthritis, and getting around could be difficult, but my parents had given me £200 to buy a clapped-out Citroën 2CV. With a disabled sticker I could park anywhere. My freedom was returning, and my horizons broadening.

  Then Tom and I found Swallow, under a frayed tarpaulin tucked away right at the back of Webb’s boatyard in Pin Mill.

  We had been looking for a boat for months, something big enough to cross the Channel. We hoped eventually to work our way down through the canals of France into the Mediterranean and perhaps over to Cyprus. On holiday in Paphos once with Siobhan, in less dark days, I’d watched a stately old Dutch vessel sail into the harbour and the image had stuck.

  Of course we didn’t have any money to speak of. What we needed was a fixer-upper and Swallow fitted the bill all right. There she lay, propped up by cut-off telegraph poles on a couple of railway sleepers, in a sorry state indeed. We peeled back the tarp and clambered aboard to find a hull that had been partly stripped and bare wooden posts sticking up from her decks. She must have been abandoned halfway through an overhaul – a good few years ago, too.

  Tom crawled through the fore cabin and popped up through the glazed fore hatch. The cabin would sleep four easily, he reported, and there was a fold-out table over the keel-box. Not much of a cockpit, but the counter-stern stretched out aft for about 8 feet with a great expanse of deck perfect for sunbathing on a sunny day, or sleeping space for a couple more crew-members at night. The more we explored, the more excited we became. Swallow had been built as a shrimping smack in Leigh-on-Sea, her cabin added some time later. With her stubby bowsprit, puff-breasted hull and long, slender counter-stern, she even looked a bit like a swallow. By the time the yard owner offere
d her to us for the price of her unpaid yard fees, we’d fallen for Swallow.

  For the rest of that summer we spent every spare moment working on her, meeting at the boatyard whenever we could. We had a huge amount of work ahead of us if we were to get her ready to sail for the following season. Old wooden boats don’t like to be out of the water for too long. Their timbers prefer to pickle in salt water, swelling up nice and tight. If a boat dries out, the wood shrinks, seams open and things start to rot. We stripped her down to bare wood and repainted. We reriveted the hull and filled between planks. We fitted new beams and built strong chain-plates. We carved cleats from oak and constructed wooden blocks for the rigging. We learned on the job as the work went on, and saved whatever we could to spend on wood and paint and screws. No chance of an engine, but that was fine by us.

  On Christmas Day, we lay on our backs in half-melted snow and slopped black tar and pitch on her bottom. Numb fingers and stinging, sticky streams of pitch dripping down our frozen arms. Christmas lunch was a couple of pints of Tolly and pickled eggs in a bag of crisps.

  Throughout the following spring the boatyard slowly emptied out. Swallow was gradually getting ready to spread her wings too. Passers-by would stop and admire her as we polished her brightwork and varnished her spars. Expectation hung in the air.

  Remembering what had worked so well at that little boutique in Hampstead, I decided to try my luck in other areas of London: the King’s Road, Fitzrovia and Knightsbridge. I became a little cannier, keeping hold of the samples and taking orders, usually asking for cash on delivery. One stockist became two, then three or four, until suddenly I was busier than I’d ever been. Soon people started asking for new designs, so I made a whole new set of samples.

  Stories began to creep into my work as I put together my very first collection: Fish and Bottles. (Not the most exciting name.) Inspired by those sketchbook drawings from the British Museum, and others I had made on a seaside holiday, I imagined a fisherman hanging his catch from a railing on a quay: forlorn-looking fish dangled in rows. My cartoony sketches had a slightly comical air, the starfish and seahorses looking absurdly depressed. But the shops loved them. Stylists began to ask for them for fashion shoots.

  London Fashion Week used to be a huge and daunting affair held at the exhibition space at Olympia. Teaming up with an old friend from college called Sian Evans, we approached the British Fashion Council to see if we could take part. For the first few years we shared a tiny stand, exhibiting the jewellery on a home-made display built of canvas and plaster-of-Paris picture frames. From time to time, it would collapse onto our unfortunate buyers. At this point my slightly quirky, nature-based designs turned out to be far more popular in Japan and America than in Britain. As long as I had the orders, I certainly didn’t mind. Within a few years I had an impressive list of overseas stockists, including Barneys in New York and several prestigious retailers in Tokyo.

  And then one season Sian and I found ourselves dismantling the London show at breakneck speed, loading up my ancient Fiat Mirafiori and driving over to Paris to take part for the first time in what promised to be a very exciting new international show: Première Classe. My jewellery flew off to increasing numbers of far-flung boutiques, and before long I realised I needed a larger workshop space. A studio was available in one of the old Victorian workyards, the Pullen’s Estate in Elephant and Castle, and Jason was happy to share it with me. Tom came to help us fit it out. Demand abroad and even at home was increasing all the time. I asked a couple of friends to come and help me keep up with the orders.

  My work continued to be better known outside Britain until I encountered a very special buyer. For a fashion jeweller, a great buyer can make all the difference to success or failure, and I had a good feeling about Sara Dappiano as soon as we met. By fate or by irony, she worked at Liberty. Its jewellery department had changed utterly since I’d wandered in looking for answers in 1982, and when my own work first went on sale there, it was an instant hit. Sara kept beating the drum for me, and when we held our first major press event at the store, the fashion editors turned out in force. Their response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

  I keep hammering away, trying to bend the British jewellery world to my shape, and probably don’t change anything. But something certainly changes for me early in 2008 when the Victoria and Albert Museum asks me to make a special piece to commemorate the launch of their redesigned jewellery galleries. Another new door seems to be opening.

  Born out of the enormous international success of the 1851 Great Exhibition, so enthusiastically promoted by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, the V&A has always been a huge influence on me. From its earliest days, it has worked to bridge the very gaps I hate – between high art and low commerce, gallery and high street, exclusivity and fashion. It was conceived as an educational institution, with egalitarian principles at its heart – ‘a schoolroom for all’, according to its first director – where anyone could go to learn about art and manufacture. This was the way to boost both productivity and creativity in design and industry.

  Now they are asking me to design anything I want, with no restrictions at all. Anything. Flattery and free rein: what could be more exciting? Even better is the thought that the old divisions against which I’d railed for quarter of a century might finally be dissolving, this commission the proof of it.

  I visit the museum and wander around, neck craned at the marvellous high-Victorian architecture of the building itself, admiring leaf-patterned plaster mouldings, stained-glass windows, decorative wood panelling. As usual I make a few sketches and take a number of photos, glowing with pride in the fact that I’m not here as an art student or a visiting parent. This is official duty. I belong. I find no shortage of inspiration in the fabric of the building, and plenty of visual material to play with in its collections, but it takes longer to settle on a narrative. Once again, I am looking for a story to tell with this piece, and the one I keep coming back to is the simplest kind of all, a love story. The touching and elusive tale of the museum’s namesakes, Victoria and Albert themselves.

  So often it’s serendipity that makes ideas crystallise. This time a phone call from Simon, my wife’s brother-in-law, sets things off. Colonel Simon J. Banton was changing the guards at Buckingham Palace and wondered if we’d like to come and watch. On a bright Saturday morning in January, Denise, the kids and I hop on a train to Victoria, very excited, and I sing some very poor versions of A. A. Milne’s poem. Tumti tum, Buckingham Palace. Dum di dum di, something with Alice.

  We meet Simon in Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk and I immediately feel very scruffy. He escorts us in all his finery through the crowds. As we approach the palace’s ornate black-and-gold iron gates, they are thrown open by several highly polished subordinates who salute at every turn. (I enthusiastically salute back and am asked not to.) We watch the proceedings from inside. Swords drawn and backs straight, the soldiers march up and down on a great expanse of brick-red gravel and shout at each other. White gloves, brass buttons and shiny boots, a marching band and plenty more saluting and standing to attention. It is a marvellous spectacle.

  Simon takes us for lunch afterwards, through security gates at the back of St James’s Palace and into a mysterious village within a city, with its own streets and houses, gardens and front doors. It’s a whole world I knew nothing about: the officers’ mess. I look up from the mahogany dining table, dripping with ornate silver and glittering with cut glass, and catch the eye of the first of the severe-looking military men of the past who surround us. As well turned out as our living companions, on all four walls these old soldiers stare out from gilt-framed portraits or perform glorious acts of gallantry in long-ago battles.

  There is just one exception in this array of paintings. From above a pale marble mantelpiece at the end of the room, the sparkling eyes of a young woman in a dove-grey ballgown are also taking in the scene. Her soft brown hair is parted in the centre, plaits looping like spaniel ears on either s
ide of a face that is pink, round and radiant, its slightly parted lips moist and fresh. It is a few moments before I pick up the clues to her identity: the royal-blue sash across her white lace, off-the-shoulder bodice, the glimpse of Windsor Castle behind the trees in the background, beneath a darkening evening sky.

  The young Queen Victoria has just got engaged, to judge by the diamond ring glinting on her right hand. Her left hand raised to her chest, she clutches a blue pendant hanging around her neck on a cord. This is a very different image of the Queen from the one I know. Instead of saggy-jowled despair, I see a blossoming creature in love. She isn’t exactly smiling, but she looks full of confidence, and happy – beautiful, even. Close to bursting with the joy of her still-unannounced engagement to Albert. No wonder those rosy cheeks. I am struck by the transformation of this lovely young girl into the figure she later became, horribly altered by loss and mourning.

  The Mess Colour Sergeant, noticing my interest, is keen to tell me more. He shows me a small glass-fronted box on the mantelpiece below. It contains a circular blue-enamelled brooch, about 10cm across, three diamond-studded crests in the centre and a hoop at the top to take a cord – the very piece of jewellery she is wearing in the painting above. A little relic from a moment of happiness.

  I am already fascinated by the symbolism and technical challenge of the locket form. The connection between a beautiful cage and Victoria’s self-imposed seclusion after Albert’s death is too tempting to ignore. Her story also brings to mind my favourite parrot, the lovebird. In French, the lovebird is called l’inseparable, a name I prefer because it describes their behaviour so movingly. The birds are not only monogamous, but they actually spend most of their lives side by side. When a bird dies, its partner becomes inconsolable. Often the mourner simply gives up the will to live, and dies soon afterwards. I’m particularly fond of the Fischer’s lovebird. Male and female are indistinguishable: pillar-box-red beak and face bleeds into orange which cascades through yellow into a vivid green chest and tail, with a bright splash of blue just below its wing feathers. A rainbow of a bird.

 

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