Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

The day was grey but not yet showing its hand with any precipitation. I thought it might be a favourable greyness, it felt as if it was with me and not against me. Fulham Broadway station, excited by the attentions of workmen and machines, hummed in anticipation of the new self that would emerge from its chrysalis of scaffolding, hoardings, fluorescent tubing, and noise. Mid-morning, this was, and the platform not too crowded. The rails winced, a headlight appeared far back in the tunnel, gathered a Tower Hill train to itself in its onward rush, became large and loud, stopped, and slid its doors open. I boarded it, went to Embankment, and changed to the Northern Line.

When I came out at Warren Street there were red Jurassic earthmovers nodding and feeding behind the hoardings on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, their heads rising into view and dropping out of it again as two motionless cranes watched from a distance. I looked down Warren Street into a foursquare perspective of nothing in particular. ‘What?’ I said. Warren Street shrugged, and it began to rain, gently but perhaps with intent.

Undistracted by pubs, shops, cafés, and a health-food centre with free-standing sandwich boards that offered to restore the world’s love life with Viagra, I proceeded to the modest blue shopfront of Est. 1895 ALEC TIRANTI LIMITED, TOOLS, MATERIALS & EQUIPMENT FOR MODELLING, CARVING, SCULPTURE. BOOKSELLERS Inside, exotic labels whispered siren music of haematite, jade oil and iron paste along with gilt cream, antiquing fluid, cupra, black patinating wax, gold leaf and rust remover. Elementary and advanced glues urged me to stick my world together; coloured waxes evoked the ghost of Benvenuto Cellini; unrolled canvas rolls of sharp and slender shapers hinted at undreamt-of subtleties of form; short and tall modelling stands in wood and metal beckoned tripodally; calipers in many sizes promised to transfer any measurement faithfully; and rows of carving mallets in beech and hardwood silently insisted on the verb, ‘to thump’.

Ignoring everything but my immediate needs, I quickly acquired twenty-five kilos of terracotta clay, a nylon clay cutter, a tabletop modelling stand, two sliding armature supports, some armature wire, and a set of modelling tools. For the next stage, the woodcarving, I bought a book on how to do it, a variety of chisels, gouges, rifflers, fluters and veiners, beechwood handles as necessary, an oilstone, slipstones, honing oil, a buff hide leather strop, strop dressing, a small beechwood mallet, and a Scopas Chops, which was not a machine for decapitating sculptors but a kind of bench vice. Finally, with my Visa card breathing hard and myself in a state of wild surmise, I stepped out into the rain, found a taxi after a while, loaded my gear aboard, and went home.

I put the woodcarving equipment aside for the present and prepared for clay-modelling. New tools and materials have exciting smells; they smell as if good things are going to happen. ‘Here goes,’ I said. ‘This is the first moment of the rest of my life.’ I poured myself a large Jack Daniel’s, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ to whatever might be looking back, drank most of it, put the modelling stand on the work-bench, made the armature, cut off some clay, and started work on the female figure.

Although the traditional design of crash-dummies offers little scope for individuality I felt that liberties might be taken here and there; with the clay I could decide how far off straight I wanted to go, work out the articulation, and estimate my wood requirements. Both male and female faces would be blank and eyeless but the bodies could certainly help the body language along. The clay felt primeval under my hands; it smelled earthy and made me think of God and Adam. I watched my hands and was impressed by their confidence and skill. When I’d done both figures I must admit that I was pleased; the female was somewhat more voluptuous than the usual crash-dummy and the male was similarly robust; I was looking forward to seeing them in action.

I went to Moss & Co in Hammersmith for the wood. It was raining again that day; the greyness and the wet made the whole thing more private and I liked that. Moss & Co itself is rather private; it’s in Dimes Place, a tiny alley you could easily miss, off King Street. Most of the north side of King Street between the Broadway and Dimes Place is taken up by Kings Mall Shopping Centre. Everything is nothing, it said brightly as I passed. Everybody is nobody. I averted my eyes and hurried on to Dimes Place.

I love specialist suppliers of all kinds — places that have exactly what you need and know all there is to know about it. Moss & Co have been around for a hundred and fifteen years, and not only are all the people somebody but all the woods are somebody as well. When you turn into Dimes Place you’re in a long narrowness lined with sheds where long baulks of timber lean, each in their proper place with a sign on the shed saying what they are: iroko or jelutong or ebony, whatever. All the woods have their smells, sometimes very faint, like the ghost-breath of the trees they came from. When you look at all those straight and squared-off timbers you might not think of trees at first but in the sheds the forests gather round you, tall and shadowy, whispering wood. In the long narrow alley the paving stones glistened in the rain; the sounds of King Street were small and distant.

In the shed where the limewood was I put my hand on one of the timbers and closed my eyes. For a moment it seemed to me that I stood in an avenue of linden trees roofed in by dark leaves and branches that met over a dim perspective of shadowy trunks. There came to me the Schubert song, ‘ Der Lindenbaum’ , and with my hand on that wood I thought of Tilman Riemenschneider, the great fifteenth-century sculptor who worked mostly in lime. In the photographs in my books you can see his chisel marks on the faces of Christ and Mary and the saints.

I opened my eyes and I was back in Dimes Place and the whisper of the rain with my hand still on the wood. If I used lime I was connecting myself to that man who was, you might say, the Johann Sebastian Bach of woodcarving. Probably in his whole life he never got the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds for a single commission.

Stuart Duncan, one of the company directors of these ghostly forests, was in the office. I was half afraid that he’d ask me if I was qualified to use lime but when I told him what I wanted he said, ‘You can probably find what you need right out here.’ We went to the little room outside the office where there were remnants of various lengths and thicknesses. I found eight pieces that would give me more than I needed, all neat and smooth and blond.

On the way home on the Piccadilly Line I could see my chisels and gouges and hear the slithery rasp as I sharpened them on the oilstone. I felt wide-awake and excited. Odd, I thought, that I had never done any woodcarving. Why hadn’t I? The hand, the eye, and the mind respond differently to different tools and materials. Once home, I put the wood on my work-bench and there it waited, whispering to itself.

Before I began the actual carving I needed to know how the figures were going to be made to work so I browsed the small ads in Model World and found Dieter Scharf, I CAN MAKE IT WORK — SPECIAL APPLICATIONS TO ORDER. He was local, too. I got some sketches and notes down on paper then I rang him up and went to see him the next day.

Scharf lived off the North End Road in Eustace Road, which today seemed somewhat sullen and withdrawn; the houses were looking at me the way the regulars look at you when you wander into the wrong pub. The sky was overcast, as it often is when I’m trying to find something. When I rang the bell the door was answered by a stern middle-aged woman in a flowered apron. She looked like a housekeeper in a horror film. ‘He’s in the basement,’ she said. The house was dark and cool, the furniture was dark and brown; the curtains were drawn, the kitchen was silent.