a shard, which, by leave, he sometime broke
This isn’t a bad place to make a living. William is doing well enough that he can repay Silvanus, and finally put Cookworthy and Co. above the side gate.
And though this is a carefully run and prudential family, there is the odd dropped plate, a handle swiped from a cup in the scullery sink, and one day a Chinese plate – one of the precious set that his midshipman brother Philip brought back from his time at sea – is severely chipped. And William, for whom the world of things is an Adventure, keeps on going and breaks the plate into shards.
The glaze hugs the porcelain clay tightly, a Cornish shoreline of white. It is a different hue from their crockery. ‘I have, now by me, the bottom of a Chinese punch bowl, which was plainly glazed, when it was raw or a soft biscuit; for the ware wants a great deal of being burnt; it being the colour of coarse whited brown paper’, he writes. And it has broken in a different manner too, sounded in a different way in its demise.
All porcelain sounds differently at the moment it hits the floor.
Sometime before, Quakers had been urged to ‘refrain from having fine tea-tables set with fine china, being it is more for sight than service … It’s advised that Friends should not have so much china or earthenware on their mantelpieces or on their chests of drawers, but rather set them in their closets until they have occasion to use them.’ He has a use for them now.
He starts to break pots.
He becomes known for it. In a memoir written twenty years after he died, a pious Quaker writer says that William always asked permission before he broke your pots, ‘a shard, which, by leave, he sometime broke’, but this is so firmly stated you know that it cannot be true, that here must be a secret history of casually snapped saucers, cut finger- tips as he traces the line of the break, silently below a table, before ‘shewing the owner the excellence of the texture’.
There is now a shelf of shards in Notte Street. Fossils, minerals, books. And shards. There is now a shelf of shards in my studio too. Broken tea bowls from a hillside in China and a crescent from the floor of Albrechtsburg Castle, surreptitiously gathered.
‘To acquire a competent knowledge in Mines, &c., a long residency in their vicinity is certainly necessary’, writes Dr Pryce, the expert on the geology of Cornwall. ‘Much study is weariness of the flesh’, says Ecclesiastes. You need to stay still. You need to know what study means. These sentences sit next to each other.
William is now forty, energetic and long-time resident in the West Country, much studied and quick-witted and curious to take bits of Cornish rock home. He has seen a rock melting to make a viscous white puddle, then harden until it is as strong as metal.