A Forger’s Tale

AFTER THE UNEXPECTED success of that Degas sale, and the new-found money it brought, I had to be a bit careful of spending more than I could easily explain away. My parents were unaware of what I’d done, but they did know that I could make money out of my arty stuff. I’d been all right for money since the age of 13 or so, from when I had first started selling those pot lids. To ‘camouﬂage’ my spending, I started to put in long hours at work and in what spare time I did have kept busy doing legitimate projects, most of which were carving furniture details in oak for Mr Monks.

I still found time to enjoy the fruits of my ill-gotten gains. Every Sunday morning at the crack of dawn, even though it was the only day of the week I could have a lie-in, I’d be out and about on my new motorcycle. It was also the only day I didn’t have to be at work, so for quite a while my bed took second place to my bike and I’d spend the day riding the trails up on the East Lancs Moors. But after a few weeks of this, the gilding seemed to wear off. Chugging away in the mud and muck of the moorland trails was fine, but on my way home I had to suffer the indignity of being burned off the road by every bike I encountered. A Montesa, despite being just about the best off-road bike you could get at the time, was no match for the Japanese road bikes that quite a few of my friends rode. They’d come whizzing by in a rerun of the tortoise and the hare parable, only in our version the tortoise never won. The ‘slug’ had to go. It was time to revisit that Aladdin’s cave: Sports Motorcycles in Manchester.

Unfortunately, they didn’t sell new Japanese bikes and, although I could now afford anything they had on show, several times over, my brother reminded me that my limit was a 250cc as I hadn’t passed my test yet. In any case, he gleefully added, ‘Everything here would be too much bike for you, kid,’ referring to the Ducatis, Laverdas and Moto Guzzis that had caught my eye. Eventually, I got fixed up at a dealers much closer to home, a Japanese bike dealer in Bolton, where I bought one of the fastest 250s I could get – a storming race replica Kawasaki in lime green. It sounded like a giant wasp and was worth every penny it cost.

After buying that bike, I didn’t get ‘burned off ’ much. But I always treated it with a healthy respect. I was well aware that these things could be lethal in a moment of madness. Several of the lads I knew in my teens were to die in motorcycle accidents and I’ve had a few spills myself, including a ‘big one’ on my brother’s monster bike, a Dunstall Norton. He’d bought it from a chap who raced in the Isle of Man TT. It was the fastest thing I’d ever been on. It ended its days embedded in the front of a Datsun pickup truck. That experience brought a pause to the speed need and the lifelong, until then, motorbike fixation. If only it could have cured my other obsession – art – then the whole painful episode might have been worth putting up with. Unfortunately, my art bug survived the impact to grow ever larger. The only lasting cure for it would have been to squash me under the tracks of a battle tank.

Because of the six-day weeks I’d been putting in at the Co-op, and the carving away like a nutter I was doing in my dad’s garage at all other times, no one batted an eyelid as to how I was funding my ﬂash bikes. As the hedgerows and weeks sped by, the memory of the Degas drawing began to fade and my thoughts turned back to getting on with my artwork – though the temptation to do more fakery was definitely out. So I decided my art and craft equipment gathering dust and cobwebs in the garage needed an update. Some of it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval workshop.

The first thing to replace was the furnace I used for casting metal – a temporary affair modelled on the one I’d seen on that ‘wheelbarrow foundry’ in the back streets of Rome. It was soon superseded by a larger home-made thing that would have looked good in the backyard of the Beverly Hillbillies. Coke-fired and force-draughted, courtesy of a hairdryer I’d ‘borrowed’, it was finished off with an old iron downspout acting as a chimney. It looked awful, but worked amazingly well, melting a 20-pound weight of bronze in its crucible with ease and with enough draught to suck your socks off.

I had to choose my casting days with care. My mum and dad’s house was in a smokeless zone so whenever they were going out for the day that would be my cue to fire up the ‘Vulcan’. Getting it going usually filled the street with a huge cloud of smoke, but other people had barbecues that spewed out similar amounts of pollution so my attitude was ‘bollocks to the neighbours’, and I got on with casting. My parents never actually saw my ‘Vulcan’s barbecue’ in action, but, thanks to my little sister, they heard rumours of it. Such was its bulk that when it was dismantled it filled three wheelbarrows with junk.

I really went to town on that refit, eventually buying a larger pottery kiln, a lapidary saw with some very expensive diamond blades, and some grinding wheels and burrs for the gem and hardstone work. The other side of the garage, meanwhile, was fitted out with new woodworking machinery for my latest venture. By then I was doing quite a few pieces for Monks – mostly carving details, Gothic tracery and finials, the more complicated the better as far as I was concerned. I didn’t mind doing these little jobs. The carving was quite sculptural and it wasn’t as if they were mass-produced. I particularly liked the fact that there were no deadlines or delivery dates to work to. Monks left me to get on with things at my own pace and whenever I finished a few pieces, I’d take them in, and always got prompt payment and good prices.

One particular day, I took in my latest batch of finished pieces to his premises in the old mill where I used to work and Monks and his rather splendid-looking wife were overseeing the packing of loads of furniture into a big removal van. They said they were taking it down to their business partners’ premises in a small market town in the Cotswolds and asked if I wanted to go. Monks had told me before of his trade with the London antiques dealers and also that his partners were involved in restoring pictures and suchlike. Needless to say, I jumped at their offer to have a look at the place.

I didn’t know what I was expecting but at first glance the fine art restorers were something of a disappointment. It was a small set-up, a hive of activity, employing several ‘restorers’ working on all sorts of furniture. Some of them were fine-looking pieces, but others were being remade entirely from high quality wood recycled from what was described to me as ‘undesirable nineteenth-century monstrosities’ – High Victorian sideboards and tallboys, chopped up and combined to emerge as small sticks of eighteenth-century furniture. Since seeing those Cotswolds cabinetmakers at work, I’ve always been of the opinion that old Chippendale must have lived a thousand years to have made all the stuff that’s been ascribed to him. Similarly with the vast number of paintings ascribed by ‘experts’ to the Impressionists. I once heard that there are several thousand ‘authenticated’ Renoirs in the USA alone. Obviously Renoir was as robust and long-lived as Chippendale, and just as prolific!

The furniture set-up was run by an elderly widow. She was assisted by her daughter and son-in-law. They, I was told, were picture restorers. I already knew Monks dabbled in picture ‘restoration and alteration’. He mostly concerned himself with doing up potboilers and other people’s treasured family portraits of great grandfather’s ugly mug. Usually nineteenth or early twentieth century, and crap. Old Monks would praise the picture to excess in front of its soon-to-be ﬂeeced owner, just so he could charge a suitably excessive fee for doing the thing up and, into the bargain, rob it of its frame. He’d persuade the gullible to have the painting reframed in a contemporary style, ‘to improve its appearance’, adding that he would dispose of the old frame free of charge. ‘There isn’t a market for fussy gilt frames anymore,’ he’d sob, especially if it was a finely cut one and worth more than the daub that it surrounded.

The Cotswolds clients were of a different calibre. Many of them were involved in the top-end art trade in London, so they had good pictures and knew their stuff. Over the next few years, I visited this establishment many times and learnt a great deal about the art and craft of restoration and the technique of many fine artists of the past. The owner’s daughter had learnt her trade at one of the premier London institutions. She was a top professional and always very kind to me. I think it’s fair to say that I learnt most of what I know of the painterly methods used by proper artists from looking and listening to her expertise.

Another upshot of my new contacts was that it gave me another string to my bow in the form of a range of ceramics that sold as fast as I could make them. Like Mr Monks, the Cotswolds people did a lot of export business to the US. At the time there was a big demand for nineteenth-century English majolica pottery, so beloved of the Victorian middle classes, the type of stuff pumped out by the thousands in Stoke-on-Trent by such great potters as Minton’s and the smaller concern of George Jones, along with a myriad of lesser-known firms. The widow who owned the place had a Minton garden seat in the form of a monkey holding a cushion on its head whilst fondling its nuts – monkey nuts, not its actual tatties. She reckoned it was going up in price so fast that it wouldn’t be a wise thing to sell at the moment and Monks chipped in that he could get rid of anything in that style for good money. I decided there and then that I was now a producer of majolica-style pottery and that everything else would have to take a back seat until I’d mastered the craft.

Modelling the forms in clay and firing them wasn’t a problem, but getting the right look to the glaze was a big challenge, especially the trademark turquoise-ground found on most Minton majolica. After some trial and error, I managed to get a passable effect. Before painting the colours onto the base glaze I mixed them with a low-temperature frit. When this was applied to the heavily leaded glaze, it brought up a rich sheen and colour, not a long way short of the Minton look. I didn’t make these pots as fakes and never applied a repro factory mark. They were merely in the Minton tradition. But still went very well.

My best sellers were ‘game pie’ dishes and tureens modelled as wicker baskets with bits of animals and birds stuck onto them. Pheasants, partridge, pigeons, hares, even stags’ heads. All pretty ghoulish to a modern eye, but the Victorians of the late nineteenth century apparently loved them and, going on the demand I had for them, so did the Americans of the late twentieth. I couldn’t make enough. But, as usual for me, when I’d cracked the method of copying something it was time to move on to other things.

I also made some of those monkey garden seats. The large wares were only made possible because of the big kiln I’d recently bought. The original one that Mum and Dad had given me years before was now relegated to the garden shed. I used it for my experiments, firing small tiles covered in various mixtures and concoctions in pursuit of the finishes I would see on all kinds of pottery that interested me. The endless permutations in ceramics is something that has always fascinated me. I’d read of the trials and tribulations of the French potter Bernard Palissy, although I’m not sure how much truth there is to some of the tales of his efforts. I drew the line, for sure, at burning all the household furniture in pursuit of the perfect pot, as he apparently did when running short of fuel for his kiln. My mum would have skinned me alive for burning ‘grandma’s sideboard’.

Another off-putting aspect of those large Minton-style garden seats was the sheer physical effort of making them. They were damned hard work, similar in bollock-straining weight to the concrete work of earlier times. Tipping up the huge plaster piece moulds after I’d filled them with clay was just about at the limit of my strength. To ease the effort, and save straining my valuables, I constructed a Heath Robinson contraption that held the mould and tipped it with the lightest of touches during the manufacture of the big pieces of pottery. It was ‘inspired’ by something I’d seen on a day trip to a south Manchester slaughterhouse whilst on my day job at the Co-op butchery.

This particular day, we went off to the abattoir to see the whole process for ourselves, from the live beasts to the carcasses that would be delivered daily to our warehouse for dismemberment and packing. My mould-tipping device was based on the contraption in which the slaughtermen held the beasts when despatching them – a galvanised steel frame that would be clamped around the animal by pulling a lever and then, using a counterbalance, would roll it over onto its back for the dastardly deed to be performed. A quick slash across the throat with a big knife down to the spine and, hey presto, Sunday lunch.

While some of the party I’d come with were otherwise engaged in parting with their breakfasts, I went through to the section where they did the ritual slaughter for kosher. The rabbi who oversaw things showed us the knives they used and explained the ancient methods of ritual slaughter employed in the Jewish tradition, which I found very interesting. The sights and sounds weren’t too pleasant, but I’m not at all squeamish. Blood and guts don’t bother me. In fact, the structure of the body, animal or human, is something to learn from for anyone interested in art. It helps to know what goes where, if you hope to represent your subject accurately. Though cutting up cadavers by candlelight, as Leonardo used to do, might not be the most pleasant way to spend an evening alone.

When we got back to the Co-op, the old fellas in the party went into action cooking up an artery-clogging meal for all those who could stomach it. There weren’t many takers. I always made a point of dodging these culinary delights with their archaic-sounding names: ‘cowheel pie’, sticky enough to paste paper; pigs’ trotters or snouts; sweetbreads in soup, known to us as ‘ram’s bollock stew’; along with their signature dish, as the celebrity cooks put it these days, pig’s dick and lettuce sandwiches. Yuck!

Most days, that job at the Co-op gave me a chance for an early finish and I used these extra hours to keep up with my own art. On days when I could get off early, I would usually zoom off on my bike to one of the Manchester libraries. They had the books that I couldn’t buy in the shops, volumes that always seemed more interesting than my own. I’d mostly go to the art library at the Central and, more and more often as I got older, to the John Rylands Library at the university.

The original building on Deansgate in the city centre is a magnificent neo-Gothic effort built by Rylands’s wife in her husband’s memory and quite a monument, not only to him, but also to the talent of those who designed and made it. I’d been going there since school days. It wasn’t actually open to school kids, but I was a big lad at 15. In the pre-internet days in which I grew up this was the best place to find out what I needed to know. There would always be long queues of gormless students making requests for books or other things, wasting more of my time than the reading up. Fortunately, one library assistant always let me jump the queue on one pretext or another. She was a humanities student and surely the prettiest thing I had ever seen, the wonders of Rome included.

Her name was Janey, and as I occasionally managed to squeeze out a few words of conversation – all the time hoping I wasn’t turning my usual shade of shyness-induced scarlet – I discovered that she was at the university and hoped one day to become a teacher. On the days I went, I always wished she’d be there. Eventually, I picked up the courage to ask her out, only to receive an immediate knock-back. I felt my heart sink. However, her next words were, ‘I’m meeting some of my friends in the pub later. You can come along if you wish.’ It was all I could do to stop my big gob from shouting out an idiotic ‘Oh yes please!’ Instead, I just shrugged my shoulders and squeaked, ‘Maybe, if I’ve time’, and turned to leave. My nerve failed a few steps from the exit and I ran back to where she was standing to ask where and when. I was hooked.

Janey’s friends seemed a weird bunch; male, female and a few batting for the other side. None of them were at all similar to the people I knew. Although fairly equal in age to me and my mates, they all seemed much older and more serious in nature, cleverer too. I suppose they’d had a better education or been better able to absorb a standard one, thus giving them a different outlook on life than me and my mates, most of whom, me included, were pretty thick by academic standards. All that evening, I felt like a fish out of water and but for Janey I’d most probably have ended the night by punching one of those self-important snobs right on the beak.

They were discussing an upcoming music thing they all intended going to, combined with a trip to Stonehenge, and as I know nothing of music I switched off my ears and just took in the sights. Suddenly, I was awoken from my non-musical interlude by a sharp jab in the ribs from my heart’s desire. ‘Are you listening or what?’ I explained that I’d been put off music for life by all the crap issuing forth from my big brother’s sacred record player. The noise kept interrupting my train of thought when I was a kid and led to lifelong musicophobia, or whatever it’s called. So I made it clear that I wouldn’t be going along on any musical adventures. It never occurred to me that I hadn’t been invited.

This was music to the ears of a certain drip who was getting on my wick because of his obvious infatuation with Janey. I had already decided he was unsuitable for her. Besides setting his sights on my target and wearing his hair like a girl, his major sin was owning a Vespa scooter and a fishtail parka. As the evening wore drearily on and the students became more and more pissed, some of them seemed amused at the fact that I worked for a living, and in a manual job to boot. When I mentioned some of the things I made and sold in my spare time, they fell about laughing. I was in two minds about giving them a good kicking, but the piss-taking turned out to be a godsend. Janey came to my defence, fell out with the lot of them and stormed out with me following in her wake. She was only a slip of a thing, but had a temper to rival the gods of thunder.

As we walked through the streets back to her digs, I suggested she get rid of the drip and she laughed at my suggestion. To my great relief, he was nothing to her. In fact, at that time, no one was. I didn’t know how to take that comment. Did she mean me too, or something else? As we walked, I found myself unable to shut my gob and went gabbling on about all sorts of things. Most unusual for me back then. I wasn’t normally as relaxed as this around girls. I’ve always been a quiet and shy type of person, though it’s something I’ve tried not to be, to no avail. I suppose you can’t be anything but yourself, can you?

By the time I’d finished my marathon rant we were at hers and, being the gentleman I have always been, I wished her good night and set off to find the place I’d parked my bike in the hope it hadn’t been nicked. Our evening hadn’t actually been a date as such, so what the bloody hell could I do next? Turning round, I rang the doorbell and was confronted by a buzzing girl wearing a green facepack and almost nothing else. ‘Well, what is it?’ I mumbled something beginning with J and she shouted out in an Amazonian voice, ‘Jay, it’s for you’, and promptly waggled off down the hall showing quite a lot of cheek. Janey came to the door beaming a big smile, bright as a lightning bolt, and it made me forget what I wanted to say. My mind did a blank. Eventually, gathering my thoughts, I asked if she would like to come out with me on Sunday for a bike ride? It was all I could think of at the time. Then I started to gabble again, telling her of my motorbike and probably boring her rotten. I think she only agreed to go that Sunday to shut me up. I didn’t mind what the reason was. I’d succeeded. She was now my bird. Oﬃcially.

When I picked her up on my bike that morning, her first words were to say that she wasn’t going on the music thing with her former friends. That word ‘former’ was the best thing I’d ever heard. I fired up my bike and we whizzed off for a tour of the places I would go most weekends, the high moorland road and a place called Rivington Barn where hundreds of bike fans hung out. Once the home of the soap king and chemical baron Lord Leverhulme, it was where we would go to race our bikes.

Janey was a bit downcast at the thought of missing out on her now-cancelled trip. She’d wanted to visit Stonehenge, but didn’t want to go alone. I jumped at the chance to be the white knight and offered to go with her, even pretending I’d wanted to see Stonehenge for ages, though I hadn’t. We arranged to go that following week, but something unforeseen interrupted our plans and it was some time before I was walking amongst the stones of the henge with my favourite person.

By the time I’d taken Janey back to Manchester and got home that evening, I was knackered. But I then had to spend a couple of hours helping my brother with his temperamental monster Norton. That bike was more trouble than it was worth. The engine was oiling up and the timing kept slipping, so I suggested we leave it for the night and sort it out the next evening after work. With that, my long but happy Sunday came to an end.

The next day started badly and ended worse. It was a cold mid-February day, with snow on the ground first thing, so not really biking weather. I set off at 6 to walk the mile or so to work and promptly tripped over a bollard hidden in a snowdrift, creating a fine intaglio of me in the soft snow. I’d been half-asleep and hit the ground without even taking my hands out of my pockets, so the impression was perfect in every detail. You could even make out that my eyes were shut as I landed.

At work, the bad omens continued. First I trapped my hand in the freezer door. Then I almost impaled my foot with a razor-sharp boning knife. So I was glad to set off for home. My brother had taken the day off work and was already red-faced and angry when I took off my coat to lend a hand. We struggled with the bike for an hour or so, with the usual audience looking on – the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, better known as my dad and little sister. They would always turn up on such mechanical occasions to dispense wisdom. This got on our tits even more than the uncooperative junk from Birmingham.

I suggested we take the Norton for a test run, more to get away from the founders and to cool down my overwrought brother than any hope of getting it to run well. During the day, the snow had turned to rain and by evening had dried up altogether, though it was still bitterly cold. We managed to get the Norton into half-life, I jumped on and off we roared. About a mile from home it started to splutter. Only by putting it in a low gear with high revs could we keep it going. This thing did 65 in first, so you can imagine the diﬃculty we had staying within the speed limit, but, somehow, we did. On the way home, a Datsun pickup truck turned across our path as its driver did a right turn. He saw neither us nor the 10-inch halogen lamp set into the front of our fairing. I remember little of what happened next. But the result was a stay in hospital nursing a couple of broken bones and a punctured lung that seemed to be manufacturing fizzy red cola. Apparently, I’d also tried to knock down a concrete lamppost with my head and now had a skull fracture and ﬂuid on the brain for my efforts, which kept me in and out of consciousness for two weeks.

There were no body scanners then, not in Bolton anyway. My examinations mostly consisted of a doctor moving a biro across the field of view of my heavy-as-lead eyes. Eventually, everything healed, though the jury’s still out, probably, on the issue of water on the brain. One curious side effect I’ve had ever since, on and off, is that although I can generally hear perfectly well, the speech of others is sometimes completely garbled. In conversation, I’m sure people must think I’m nutty or something as I’m probably saying ‘yes’ when ‘no’ is called for. So if we ever meet you’ll know why I’m nodding my head when I should be shaking it.

The smash allowed me several months off work and was the first time in my life, as far as I could remember, that I hadn’t drawn a single picture in a whole week. Not even a scribble. I’d last seen Janey the night before booking the bed at the hospital and wasn’t aware if she even knew of my accident. She did, of course, and although I couldn’t remember, had been to visit me whilst I was still in dreamland nursing a swelled head. I also learnt the reason she hadn’t wanted me to meet her parents. I had presumed they didn’t approve of me, but it seems they had an aversion to motorcycles due to a family tragedy of years past. I could now see their point.

For some time after we only spoke on the telephone. Janey’s finals were on the horizon and with all that entails, and my immobility, things just seemed to prevent it. Getting back to work in the summer even my thoughts about art began to fade. I still had most of that money from my fake drawing and wanted to move on from my job at the Co-op and become someone. Not that my job at the Co-op butchery was anything but respectable and honest work. My time there, and the people I worked with – nice people without exception – are a happy memory. It was just that I knew Janey and her parents were fairly well-to-do and someone who worked in a meat factory might not impress them. I could hardly tell them that I made a good living as a part-time manufacturer of crap, and that since my London sale I was now a wealthy crook. So for some unexplainable reason I had the idea of going into landscape gardening. It was probably that bump on the head.

For several months, I’d been putting in the odd weekend’s work with my brother. He worked for Bolton Council maintaining the grounds of old folks’ homes, and on his travels various requests had come his way to sort out gardens, trees and such things. So he had quite a few projects on the go that required extra hands. The trouble was, both my brother and myself were now creaking around like two old crocks because of that bloody motorbike. Always quick to act and long to lament, I rang the dealer who’d sold me the Kawasaki and ﬂogged it back to him that afternoon taking a whopping loss into the bargain. Never mind. I was glad to be rid of the thing. I wasn’t the only one. Mum, especially, gave me a tearful thanks. Unfortunately, that bike wasn’t the last thing coming from my direction to give her grief.

My battleaxe sister, Samy, was at Mum’s when the dealer came to collect the bike and sent him packing with a ﬂea in his ear from her. Something to the tune of him being a dealer in destruction and selling death traps for a living. It didn’t seem to occur to her that in all the time I had the Kawasaki, neither it nor I had a scratch to show. For now, though, bikes were out.

My next silly plan was to become the proprietor of a garden centre. If I couldn’t go to my customers, I reasoned, they could come to me. In the late 1970s, garden centres were still thin on the ground. Unable to afford the outright purchase of a going concern, though a small one might have been within my budget at the time, I was determined, in the old Bernini tradition, to do everything myself from scratch, as I always did with my art and craft stuff. Most of it at least. True, I didn’t build the kiln, grind the paint or – at that time at least – dig the metal ores and refine them for casting. But I could have done.

Surveying for a suitable site, preferably a bit rural, I settled on some disused railway sidings about a mile from my home. This was in the days of British Rail and, due to my dad’s time in the scrap metal trade in the fifties, he knew that the BR land agent was based at Hunts Bank in Manchester. I was far more outgoing then than I am now, so I went to see this land agent to enquire about my chosen site and managed to get a preliminary lease agreement from him, conditional on my getting planning permission from Blackburn Council for a change of use. Dad suggested I needed professional assistance in submitting these plans, but, as usual, I ploughed on regardless. Having no intention of paying for a white elephant, I surveyed the site on my own.

For this, I plotted it in the traditional Egyptian manner, using a knotted rope arranged in the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle, pegged with my old tent pegs substituting for helping hands. All this wasn’t really necessary, but it’s a simple and really accurate way of getting a plan. The stumbling block was that the overgrown siding overlooking the Jumbles Country Park had become something of a wildlife haven. This was cited as the reason for the planning refusal that came through the post some weeks later.

Other plans that came unstuck in this busy year of disaster and enterprise included a first go at making paper – handmade rag paper for watercolours, at a few quid a sheet. That failed when the supplier of the cotton linters used in making rag paper, under pressure from his established customers, refused me any more supplies. Then there was a falconry centre, which failed because of my cold feet.

I’d been to see the estate manager of a stately home in Cheshire owned by the University of Manchester, a nice chap, ex-army, oﬃcer class, with two very old farting Labradors which he obviously adored. Those old mutts took an instant shine to me as I entered his oﬃce with my falconry plans and immediately came over to sit with me. This seemed to impress Colonel Blimp and, having heard my ideas, he offered me an old walled garden at a peppercorn rent for the site of the ‘falconry centre’, with the only proviso that I would do hawk ﬂying demonstrations, once a day, out in the park. The rest was my own. As I said, I got cold feet and never took up his kind offer. I may be a passable art maker, but I’m surely no businessman.

By now the crash was starting to fade in both mind and body, and I swapped my two-wheel lifestyle for four in the shape of a Ford Fiesta in vomit green. It was cheap and cheerful and as I was becoming more of a miser I turned a blind eye to the colour. Come the summer, things were pretty much back to normal and, with Janey’s exams out of the way and me still on sick leave, we finally got to go down to Wiltshire to see the pile of old stones. Before that I was invited over to her parents’ house for a first visit. Janey was an only child, so her mum and dad were very protective. I spent the first meeting being stuffed with food and getting an education in the care of tropical fish, learning what a very safe hobby it was. I believe I made a good first impression and was soon calling round ‘whenever I wanted’. They have always been kind to me, but God knows what they saw in me back then.

Janey and I spent that summer driving around. It was my happiest year. During her studies, she had done some fieldwork, ‘proper archaeology’ as she put it, at a section of Offa’s Dyke in Shropshire where they had managed to find bugger all. I knew a little of this place. It was a defence ditch built across the English–Welsh border on the orders of the eighth-century Mercian king, Offa, stretching from the Severn Estuary to its terminal near a place in North Wales called Basingwerk Abbey. I once planned to do something in gold relating to King Offa. The idea was to cobble together an old provenance of its discovery in the eighteenth century in the vicinity of Basingwerk Abbey, and then let the experts make up the rest with their fertile imaginings. But I never got around to designing the thing. Standing now at Offa’s unimpressive dyke, I mentioned to Janey that in my opinion his efforts were puny compared to the Roman earthworks further north. The comment earned me a swipe from her bulging rucksack. That rucksack was always three times heavier than anything I carried, despite the fact she was so waif-like. ‘Strong in head, strong in arm’ was her motto. When I pointed out that the saying was actually ‘strong in arm, weak in head’ it earned me another whack, along with a few sharp barbs about my total lack of formal qualifications. Academics are very touchy you know!

All day I nodded with feigned interest. But as far as I’m concerned, holes in the ground are for pissing in. So I suggested we spend a couple of days in London to visit the British Museum and the first-class galleries of the capital, then go on to Stonehenge, adding that I knew those museums and galleries like the back of my hand, which wasn’t strictly true. We stayed with my aunt on the Edgware Road. Janey was well impressed with the British Museum, but when we went to look at the Elgin Marbles she, like me, wasn’t too taken by them. I don’t know what it is about them. They just don’t live up to the hype. When I’d first seen them as a lad, they had looked immense. But compared to all I had since seen in Rome, even Belzoni’s plundered granite colossus in the Egyptian gallery had somehow withered. Nevertheless, a wander though the galleries of the BM is always a red-letter day.

The next morning we said goodbye to my aunt and set off to see the pile of old rocks. It was the first time either of us had visited Stonehenge. It looked bigger than I had envisaged and older than its 5,000 years. The stones themselves look much more ancient than anything you might see in the Egyptian monuments that are contemporary with it, though that’s probably down to the freeze-thaw winters we have in Britain. Still, for me at least, Stonehenge has an aura of very great age and is surely one of the greatest monuments that has come down to us from ancient times.

Our base was a pretty rough B&B in the village of Bulford about five miles away, so pretty handy. These were happy times for me. At last I felt free of my obsession with painting and all that rubbish. All year I hadn’t done anything remotely arty and felt the better for it. Even our trips to the British Museum didn’t fire me with enthusiasm. I was just a looker now, and not a doer.

When I got home, my dad told me he could help me find a new job if I wanted. He’d been showing some of my woodwork to one of his mates in the pub. This mate ran a large building company that held contracts to paint many of British Rail’s stations and was now whizzing about in a Rolls-Royce. His ‘speciality’ was buying big Victorian houses, many of them former care homes decommissioned by the local authorities, all with equally big gardens. He’d bulldoze the lot and put up a small hamlet of ‘select executive homes for the discerning’, usually at equally select prices. I went to see him and was offered a job working for his master carpenter, a man from whom I learnt a lot.

I was already a fair hand with a chisel and lump of wood. It wasn’t something I had ever been trained to do, but I can carve anything pretty well – wood, stone, whatever. My new boss, Mr Haslam, was obsessed with ‘minstrel galleries’. They featured in all his constructions and he reckoned that this feature alone helped to shift the house in no time. My job was to carve the details. I’d been given it on the strength of an oak table I’d done. It was supposed to have been my last job for Monks. He’d supply the things cut and planed, then I’d carve the fancy bits and return it to him for assembly and finish. This one I’d kept and given to my brother for his new home. Monk could whistle for it. I could be quite bolshy when the mood took me.

The other aspect of my new job was doing illustrations of the developments as they would look in their new surroundings when they were finished. Usually in very large watercolour. These fanciful views were intended for the boss’s oﬃce and I used a lot of imagination in doing them. Today, the trading standards commissariat might have a lot to say about them. But back then, the better I made them look, the better Mr H liked them. And he was my paymaster, so I danced to his tune.

The boss’s oﬃce was also his home, a magnificent and wholly original neoclassical building that had once belonged to the Dukes of Bridgewater. It had been one of His Grace’s lesser country retreats, but obviously built without regard to cost, as one does, I suppose, when one’s a duke. It really was a beautiful place. Neoclassical art and architecture is one of my favourite periods in art history. But those illustrations I’d do for display on the grand walls of Mr H’s HQ became a case of the tail wagging the dog when the landscape designs I made up, purely for artistic effect, started to be followed in the layouts of the real developments. It got to the point where the houses sat in landscapes that were more my vision than anyone else’s.

As I wasn’t doing any arty stuff at home, my evenings and weekends were my own and, for the first time, I seemed to have loads of spare time on my hands. Most nights, after work, I’d go over to Janey’s at her digs in the city centre where several ‘punks’ had now appeared on the scene. Punks were some kind of musical type and quite something to behold. I’d got the rebel bug out of my own system early on, so this lot looked like right wallies to me. But I suppose I was similarly wallyish to them, only I wasn’t held together with safety pins and snot.

My new job went down very well with Janey’s parents, especially when I mentioned that my boss lived in the Duke of Bridgewater’s house – as I did at every opportunity. Adding that I also intended to get myself a ducal pile one day. They laughed at that, rightly so, of course, as things turned out. But Janey never laughed. She believed in me.

About now, I did a quick swerve back into the field of painting. Not for money, but as a labour of love. Also to use as a prop in a small plan I had hatched. With Janey’s recent graduation, I decided to paint her portrait in her graduation gown – minus the silly hat, which distracted from her fine features. For the painting, a half-length in oils, I pulled out all the stops. The stretcher I made myself from elm, cut with Janey’s initials and hung with the best quality fine-woven canvas, tacked with tinned copper pins. I sized and primed it in the traditional manner and bought the colours, at some expense, from a supplier I’d found from my early dealings with the Cotswolds people. I intended that picture to last a good 500 years. The only iffy part was to come up with a style in which to paint it. This gave me the most trouble.

I did umpteen pastel scribbles of my intended masterpiece, something I always do on any big picture to work out the colour and tonal balance – what goes where and in what order. That way I get the scene clear in my mind. Then I can blaze away to capture an immediacy in the paint that is essential and gives the picture ‘life’. After giving up on an original style, I decided to paint her in the deep chiaroscuro of my favourite painter, Caravaggio. It turned out better than I hoped. My best effort to date. Most importantly, Janey liked it – with certain reservations. Nose too big. Face too fat. Eyes not right. Other than that, it was ‘very good’. That was enough for me. Eventually, my ‘bird’, as she hated to be called, withdrew her criticism for fear of hurting my feelings. But I don’t mind criticism of my work. I never have. If something’s crap, why not say so? My brothers and sisters always did, and over the years I took quite a verbal battering with regards to my artwork. I used it to spur me on and improve. Criticism works wonders.

When I took it over to Janey’s home for her mum and dad to see, for some strange reason it made her mum cry. I had intended them to have that painting and said so, then moved the conversation on to how I’d based it on the style of Caravaggio, slipping in the opinion that ‘the best place to see Caravaggio’s work is in Florence’. I quickly added that it holds some of the finest works of art ever made and that we intended going to see it. A few weeks later, we were there.

Our hotel in Florence wasn’t in the old city as my stay in Rome had been. It was a few minutes’ walk from the railway station, but nice enough. It was run by a couple from Cardiff who were always pissed. They’d tell us how they had run businesses all over the place and finally settled in Florence. Their tales of entrepreneurial ineptitude reminded me of me.

First stop on our tour of the sights was Janey’s choice. And she chose, of all things, in the number one city of the Renaissance, a Gothic pile! In the shape of Santa Maria Novella! Janey had a wicked sense of humour and always knew which buttons to press to wind me up. She knew full well that I wanted to go to the Duomo to look at the great bronze reliefs on the Baptistery by one of the Renaissance’s best sculptors, Ghiberti. I’d been mesmerised by these things since the age of seven – if only in books. And although Santa Maria Novella is a fine edifice, I grabbed her by the hand and legged it over to the cathedral.

Still the tallest building in the city, the Duomo, or, more properly, Santa Maria del Fiore, with its glowing orange dome, was built by one of Ghiberti’s contemporaries, the artist and architect Brunelleschi. When I first heard his name, I thought he was old Isambard’s Polish granddad! Standing before the east doors of the Baptistery, looking at those gilt bronze reliefs – they are actually copies, but exact in every detail – I could see what the great Buonarroti meant when he described them as ‘the gates of paradise’. And remember they were done in the first half of the fifteenth century. To my mind they are the first great achievement of the Renaissance.

During our stay, Janey and I visited most of the sights but, as in Rome, the crowds of sightseers got on my tits. The best thing was that I wasn’t on my own this time and didn’t have to talk to myself quite as much. Next stop was the Bargello, the sculpture museum of Florence, probably the best gallery I’ve ever been in, though all the galleries of Florence are first-class and need months to see properly.

I’ve always had this habit of saying things aloud and not realising it. Private thoughts usually best kept to myself. On this occasion, standing before the bronze of Donatello’s ‘David with the Head of Goliath’, the first nude done in western art since antiquity, I blurted out, ‘If that tackle wasn’t out, you’d mistake it for a 13-year-old girl.’ It came out without my lips consulting my brain and resulted in a few raised eyebrows from the gathered gawpers and the sharp dig of fingernails into my soft underarm. ‘Shhh, you twit.’

For a long time, the Bargello was a prison and the HQ of the chief of police in whose name it is dubbed. Maybe these days I’d be uncomfortable walking its galleries. But although I’m now familiar with the insides of various prisons, the ones I’ve been in probably don’t compare with the Bargello in its day. I should think that place was less than comfortable, wouldn’t you?

We went on to see the Medici Chapels in San Lorenzo, with the sculptures by Buonarroti in their original positions. The thoughtful pose of Lorenzo’s marble-cut figure reminded me of the Delphic Sibyl on the Sistine ceiling and is first-class in every way. But I was a bit surprised at the state of the unfinished facade of that church. I’m no scholar on those moneylenders, the Medici, who had it built, but I can only think that their money must have run out. When I got home, one of the things I did, just for my own interest, was to draw up a design for it. I don’t know where that plan went. But it’s still lodged in my mind in every detail.

We also went to see the frescoes of the very early and groundbreaking Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar whose work spans the end of Gothic and the beginning of Renaissance. These are at the Convent of San Marco, another Medici project, and very beautiful. Then on to the Uﬃzi, where there was just too much to see, and where I showed Janey what proper painting looked like. My portrait of her was more Beano than Bargello in quality. But I did the best I could.

One of the things I simply had to see was the great bronze of Perseus with the slain Medusa, by Cellini, which stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi, a kind of open-air sculpture gallery in front of the town hall. Cellini’s bronze was one of the first things that fired my love of sculpture and I seemed to be aware of it since before I could remember anything else. I’d read the account of its making, something I’d recited to the man from Turin at the foundry on Trafford Park, to which he’d offered the expert opinion – ‘boolshit’.

Our last art stop was the Basilica of Santa Croce, where our trip ended as it had begun with a Gothic pile, though it does have some redeeming features – a superb chapel by Brunelleschi and the tomb of Michelangelo by Vasari. The church is spoiled by a nineteenth-century facade which I would like to pull down and redo in honour of our greatest artist. Buonarroti’s tomb is just inside to the right and across from him is Galileo. All around are frescoes by Giotto and sculpture by Donatello. Not a bad place to be, even dead. But this time I made sure to keep that thought to myself. Janey was holding my arm and her claws were as sharp as ever.

We managed to squeeze a couple of excursions into our trip. One to Carrara, taking in the house where it’s said that Michelangelo stayed when choosing his stone. And then on to the marble quarries where I would have been happy to camp out for a year. They say Buonarroti would choose his blocks and could already see the figure in the stone. All pretty fanciful stuff. But it makes a good story.

For my own efforts in marble, I prefer Carrara as well. Parian and the other Greek marbles of further east seem too granular to me. But I suppose it’s just a matter of what you get used to working first. I haven’t done anything of note. Mostly fragments from larger works – heads, torsos and the like. Mainly purporting to be Roman, but also Greek – both classical and archaic – and some Persian. I’ve worked in other stones, too, from alabaster at the softer end, to granite for Egypt, and then on to some of the hardest stones to carve – cornelian and amethyst, garnet, jaspers, jades and all. The largest was a life-size fragmentary torso of a first- to second-century Roman general in a cuirass. The smallest were jasper and onyx intaglios from signet rings. With a wide range of ages, sizes and styles in between.

Stone is my favourite sculpture material and really the only material of proper sculpture. Bronze and terracotta is modelling rather than sculpture, though still a nice thing to do that takes great skill to do well. It’s often said by painters that sculpture is easier than their efforts with the brush. To this I would say: you’ve obviously never stood before a stone block with chisel and mallet in hand. I’ve had a go at most things in art and for me, painting is only better than sculpture if it’s a quiet life you’re seeking!

For our final two days, on the recommendation of our hosts, we took a trip by coach to Pisa and then down the coast about 100 miles to Piombino, where we crossed by ferry to the island of Elba. It’s only five miles or so and doesn’t take long, but even on a dead calm day Janey was sour green to the gills and I spent most of the day feeling like an associate member of the Red Cross. I don’t get seasick. I’d been to the Isle of Man in conditions that would have today’s ferry from Fleetwood cancelled. Almost everyone on that boat was sick, but I was singled out for my iron gut by an old sea dog. Dad called him a ‘golden rivet’ – but not to his face. He was 7 foot 14 inches with arms like legs. I didn’t know what a ‘golden rivet’ was until I joined the Royal Marines.

We were looking forward to Elba. But come the day, we couldn’t really have cared less. An extra bottle of wine the night before – or was it two? – had a lot to answer for. It buggered up the trip. The only thing I knew of the island was that it was where Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile to meet his Waterloo, courtesy of Wellington. I’ve seen both Napoleon’s Imperial Porphyry sarcophagus in Les Invalides at Paris and Wellington’s Cornish porphyry one in St Paul’s at London. And this last ‘battle of the sarcophagi’ surely goes to Boney.

Imperial Porphyry is something I’ve done a little of myself and it’s damn hard work. Even with the help of modern diamond-cutting blades and burrs. It was the hardest rock in antiquity and the best lump of it you can see is a sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum that’s said to have been the last resting place of Helena, mother of Constantine. Personally, I think it would have been made for the emperor himself and cut in Egypt where such hardstone cutting had a long and glorious tradition. The sheer effort in the stonework of Egyptian masons and sculptors has always been a wonder to me. Things such as the colossal porphyry columns in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – or Istanbul as it’s presently known – are a testament to the iron will of Egypt’s stone men. Not to mention the efforts of their forebears who worked in the service of the pharaohs. All great stuff.

Our holiday finally over, we landed back in Manchester to leaden skies and a feeling that we’d left most of our internals ﬂoating in the Med, courtesy of our boat trip and the projectile vomiting caused by the extra wine. By late September, Janey was back at university working towards a teaching qualification and I was back to my woodworking at Haslam’s builders. Janey had a burning desire to be a teacher and I thought her eminently suited to that noble profession. Patient, kind, clever, with a sunny disposition and great sense of humour, she also carried a certain air of authority. Some might even call her very bossy. But not me. When I was a kid I would definitely have liked her as my teacher. If only all teachers could act and look like her. My own teachers, when I was at school, probably had to work with what sculptors call a ﬂawed block. Flawed stones, no matter how carefully worked, never produce a good sculpture.

My job was trotting along well enough and no two days were the same. Oswald, the carpenter, did most of the fitting and we had two lads in the yard who cut most of the timber from the drawn plans. I did all of the detailed carving when it was called for. One strange and very theatrical project that sticks in the mind was the carving of a big post at the bottom of a sweeping staircase we’d built for a particularly eccentric client. What we had to carve was a life-size couple of entwined female nudes in mock art nouveau style, topped off with a unicorn’s head. Very bizarre. Someone quipped the client must have been ‘smoking his socks’.

The whole thing looked lethal when set up and I just hoped no one tripped on those stairs. They’d have been skewered for sure. The unicorn was just a nag’s head with a broom handle sticking out of its forehead. But the two nudes were diﬃcult to do. I was well paid, though, and money seemed of no concern to the chap who ordered it. For a moment, I wondered if he was in the market for rare works of art. But only for a moment. I didn’t do such things any more, did I?

After carving that monstrosity I was kept busy doing all sorts and became a bit handy with the wood chisel. It wasn’t art, but I couldn’t have cared less. It paid well and my sights were set in another direction. During our trip to Florence, Janey and I had talked about getting a place together. Now that I was on better money in my new job and she was balancing two part-time jobs along with her continuing studies, we could afford it. The money from my fake drawing was still mostly intact and would have come in handy. But seeing as how I was now determined to get away from all that, it felt like dirty money and I didn’t want Janey to be any part of it. We rented a small ﬂat in Manchester, not far from the university, handy for both of us as far as work was concerned, although I couldn’t have cared less if that ﬂat had been on the moon. I was with my favourite person, just the two of us. And we’d finally shaken off those nutty housemates of hers, along with the out-of-date ‘punk’ boyfriends held together with safety pins and too-tight trousers.

I was doing well in my work and was being given more responsibility for setting out the landscapes for new projects. We usually got to the site before the old house had been pulled down and would walk the unkempt gardens marking out the features Mr Haslam wanted to keep. He was especially keen on retaining any specimen trees. Haslam knew his market. He always insisted on building his houses in a mature landscape. It seemed to work, because pretty much every one of them was sold off-plan. He kindly said that my painterly impressions helped in that regard. So I hoped he might cough up a little more cash. But he didn’t. Some 18 months later, when I walked away from that job, he did make me a great offer and even promised me an opportunity to ‘follow in his footsteps’. But I wasn’t interested.

This came about not because of any disillusion with my job – it was the best work I’d ever had – but on account of my own life going wrong in the worst way I could have imagined. It isn’t very easy to put down in words. Not even after more than 30 years. Janey and I were settled in our life together and I was as happy as I’d ever been. Until she started to become unwell. The first thing was regular headaches, which the doctor put down to working long hours and studying too much. Later, she started to have problems with dizzy spells and balance. So our doc arranged for a hospital appointment. I could tell she was scared and tried to lighten her heart with reminiscences of our earlier times. The unforgettable ‘Olympian’ projectile vomiting from that ferry on our away day into exile on Elba, 18 or so months earlier. My run-ins with the ‘snot and safety pin brigade’ at her old digs, some of whom tried to lure my treasure away. How they always failed and sometimes got a fat lip for trying.

It wasn’t of any real help. I just rambled on to keep my thoughts away from the present. We came away from that first visit to the hospital no wiser. This went on for several crushing weeks. Janey’s mum and dad would sometimes take her to the hospital appointments and I junked my job at Haslam’s so as to do more, but to no avail. Things gradually became more diﬃcult and after Janey had a seizure it was decided she would go to stay with her parents. The ﬂat, with its ﬂights of stairs, wasn’t at all suitable.

When she had that first seizure, I thought it was an epileptic fit. I was well used to dealing with those. One of my brothers suffers from the condition. Whenever he’d go into one, most of the family would go into a panic, but, for some reason, I’d always end up as the one to help out. Our old dog-loving doctor had shown us what to do and I would carry out his commands to the letter whenever it was needed. Clear the airway, check for breathing and, as the seizure subsided, place the person into the recovery position. I could hear the doc’s squeaky tones ringing in my ear as I ran through the drill. It all sounded so matter of fact. When it’s someone who means a great deal to you, though, as my brother certainly does, or who means everything, as Janey meant to me, seeing them in that hopeless state is quite something.

In a strange way, the seizure gave me some reassurance that things would be all right in the end. My brother lives with his epilepsy, held at bay with a cocktail of barbiturates, and I reasoned that Janey could do the same. I hoped that her illness was just that – the onset of epileptic fits. We could easily live with that, I thought.

She was eventually diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, deep-seated and aggressive. Within a very few months she was desperately ill and reached the surrendering point of going into a hospice. For a few days, she picked up. Looking back it was possibly an increase in pain relief, courtesy of those magnificent beings who cared for her in that place. She died several days later, in the early hours of the morning, when I wasn’t there. What more can I say of her – she was the best thing.

The next couple of years were my unhappiest time. I left my job without explanation and stayed on at our ﬂat for a while. I couldn’t settle to anything and went on a number of trips to look at the things me and Janey had talked of – Egypt, Greece, Spain. Seven trips back to Rome, each one of them on my own. I spent what was left of my money on those trips and by 1983 I was somehow back at my dad’s home. He and Mum had retired, and with all my brothers and sisters being busy with their own lives, and Mum not doing too well with her angina, I started to do more and more for them until I gradually became indispensable.

I believe most ‘carers’, as I became, fall into that way of life without realising and can’t or won’t go back on the commitment out of a sense of loyalty. Looking back, I think it suited my purpose. It gave me an excuse not to join in with things.

During my all-too-short time with Janey, I hadn’t felt the need for art. I had kept to my work and the only arty things I’d done were her portrait and those illustrations for Haslam’s. Art didn’t seem important, or relevant. Janey knew about my ‘Degas’, and I’d told her of all the things I’d done before, but she would not have wanted me to do the dishonest things I have done since. If things had gone differently, I would never have gone back to my art and through it, into crime. But they didn’t go differently.