i
William returns to porcelain.
He goes back to the hills and he digs here and then a little bit to the right. He stoops and brushes the soil away, breaks a piece of this crumbling stone into a cloth bag, moves on. He tests his idea through the turf, pushing aside the bracken, hawthorn, dog rose, scrambling across stream beds, slipping on these wet declivities, scanning rockfalls on cliffs, noting unexpected shadows emerging as dusk falls that show where the earth gives way.
He starts to experiment with the materials he discovers ‘in the parish of Germo, in a hill called Tregonnin hill’, nine miles along the coast from Penzance.
There are two kinds of rock here. They are closely allied. One is a kind of granite that the locals call growan or moorstone. This is what he has seen being used by the bell-founders. It is, he writes in a beautiful memorandum of eight pages written long afterwards:
compounded of small pellucid gravel, and a whitish matter, which indeed is Caulin petrified. And as the Caulin of Tregonnin hill hath abundance of Mica in it, this stone hath them also. If the stone is taken a fathom or two from the surface, where the rock is quite solid, it is stained with abundance of greenish spots, which are very apparent, when it is wetted.
‘This is a circumstance noted by the Jesuits’, he adds, like the good scholar he is, joining the stone from the hills of Jingdezhen noted by Père d’Entrecolles to his own damp Cornish slopes. This growan is the first ingredient of porcelain, the petunse that ‘gives the ware transparency and mellowness, and is used for glazing’, looked for across Europe, theorised over by mineralogists and doubted by alchemists, found only in the back country of the Cherokees in Carolina. And it is present here, ‘in immense quantities, in the county of Cornwall’.
Amazingly, he adds, ‘the whole country in depth is of this stone’.
The other rock is kaolin itself, the white clay that he saw the men mending their pumping engines with.
This material, in the Chinese way of speaking, constitutes the bones, as the Petunse does the flesh, of Chinaware. It is white talcy earth, found in our granite country in both the counties of Devon and Cornwall. It lies in different depths beneath the surface … It is found in the sides of the hills, and in the valleys; in the sides, where following the course of the hills, the surface sinks, or is concave, and seldom, I believe, or never, where it swells or is convex … I have a piece, by me, of this kind, very fine.
William continues, ‘This earth is very frequently very white.’
And he knows it is caulin, kaolin, because he has started to experiment. Every scrap of surmise has to be tested. In depth.
ii
I must follow William. So I go to Tregonning Hill.
When I was a child, an elderly archdeacon gave me his collection of minerals and fossils, collected in the late nineteenth century by him and his brothers. Many were annotated in pen or with small labels, locating afternoons from ninety years before:Diss April 17th 1880. Ammonites and trilobites, ferns and the hipbone of an iguanodon, were passed over with a geologist’s hammer and chisel in its leather case.
And he gave me a packet of Victorian Geological Survey of England and Wales maps. I had sheets 351– 8. Penzance, up on my wall as a child near my cabinet of things found, things given, things dug up.
It is still a beautiful map, a field of washed nectarine pink for granite, sweeping up from the snub nose of Land’s End, scalloped by the two great bays of St Ives to the north and Mount’s Bay to the south, polka dot for Blown Sand, before meeting a pale green tide of Mylor Series Fine-grained Slate. A spattering of magenta Greenstone falls from west to east. And my hill – William’s hill – sits in a protective ring of pink dashes. Pleasingly, England doesn’t fit into the carefully calibrated square and the map ends in a drift of contours.
This is Cornwall, so there is a key for mineral lodes containing silver, arsenic, copper, iron, manganese, lead, antimony, tin, uranium and tungsten. And an hour after unfolding the linen-backed map, I am still tracing and prospecting my way through this landscape, from mine and seam and lode. Habitation seems so uncertainly placed against intractable geology. But then the mines come into focus and then the railways, and then the slew of shaft and mine.
I park near the Methodist chapel, a dozen miles from Penzance. It is seven in the evening in July and almost cloudless. A lane leads up past some cottages and becomes a stony track, steep, banked with deep bracken, foxgloves, scabious, red campion. There are gatekeepers, small brindled flashes of butterfly, tumbling everywhere. A few calves are asleep, heavy in the shade. It is very quiet. A dog sets up on a distant farm.
As pilgrimage routes go this feels pretty good. In my mind Tregonning Hill was an effortful climb but this is an easy track up to the top, a few twists around declivities where a clay working has given way. At the top there is a granite war memorial and a trig point and you can look around you, down the cliffs to St Michael’s Mount, across to Penzance and on to the end of England. I can just pick out the odd chimney for a tin works amongst the patchwork of farms and fields and woods. But mines disappear.
I’ve brought a piece of porcelain with me.
It’s a sweetmeat dish, a low moulded scallop shape with some very limited blue decoration around the outside, a few half-hearted sprays of flowers. And it is chipped, of course, which is how I could afford it from the quiet Kensington gallery where I bought it before this journey. The base is beautiful, a few iron spots, a piece of something gritty stuck fast and left on by some Devon boy at the Plymouth works who, in 1770, late on in the abbreviated life of William’s porcelain, should have ground it down to an alabaster smoothness, but didn’t. And it’s grey. It looks like badly washed linens.
This is my Third White Hill. And what I have in my hands is Cornish white.
iii
William experiments. He is fifty. Fifty is very close for me too.
He is mixing, grinding, calcining. He has no apprentice on his books, but his brother. Do the girls help him, watching the clouds of milky clay settle in a trough in the yard, running from the pump to the still with a bucket, from the still to the trough to pour again? Do they scrape up the wet clay on to boards to dry it, pick at it behind their fingernails, watching as it reveals the estuary lines on their hands as it dries?
He puts the two pure materials together, ‘equal parts of the washed Caulin and Petunse for the composition of the body; which, when burnt, is very white and sufficiently transparent’.
William has done it. He has managed what only Tschirnhaus and Böttger have done before and created a new porcelain body. No emperors or kings are involved, no imprisonments and no theatrics. He has worked it out entirely on his own.
And now he wants to turn this clay body into something, transform his academic quizzing, into a pot. He needs to work out how to glaze and then fire a vessel. So, remembering the good Jesuit father, William uses the same materials that went into the clay as the base for the glaze: ‘These, barely ground fine, make a good glaze. If ’tis wanted softer, vitrescent materials must be added. The best, I have tried, are those said to be used by the Chinese, viz. lime and fern ashes, prepared as follows.’ And he is off.
William starts to involve other people. Someone needs to be sent to Tregonning Hill, to heave a basket of growan down the track. Someone is off collecting a lot of ferns, I realise, as I know from weary experience how many sackfuls you need to burn for a cupful of grey ash.
He is not so removed. This private journey becomes a conversation, the private world is reaching others, ‘many ingenious men’, neighbours, men of learning and capacity.
I realise that William’s way of moving through ideas is like the air and flame in the kiln, with lots of free ascent and play, motion and discussion. Tschirnhaus would have understood.
It is becoming his obsession, a vision to make porcelain whiter than the Chinese. To make something so white and true and perfect, that the world around it is thrown into shadows as the blackthorn does when flowering in the hedgerows in early spring.
And William’s obsession is also a sort of exhaustion of white. It is a way of keeping himself turned to the world, keeping himself away from all the absences in his life. Obsession can be useful.