Bee up the shorts

When I was designing for the theater and landscape painting in 1950, I was beginning to think that a wartime gap in my education needed to be fixed. A Grand Tour around Europe was what was wanted. I would feast on paintings and the theater, let alone the food and wine from foreign parts.

Painting scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and designing and painting sets for repertory theatre was artistically and creatively rewarding but poorly paid. 

But when I worked on background scenery for an ice show (I still had my RAF flying boots to keep my feet warm on the ice), I had enough money to buy an old, flat-back, Ford, builder's van on which to construct a sort of mobile living space.

I made my vehicle to fit my body shape, with a most comfortable, deep, rubber seat, canted up in the front for me to lean back and, in so doing, raising my knees. On the flat part of the truck was enough space for a blow-up bed, cooking kit, stores, water, paints and other stuff.

As it would be hot in Europe, on the roof above the front seat I installed two large air scoops - the kind seen on old-fashioned steam ships. These would scoop and duct down fresh air and, should it rain, they could be turned to face the rear. And as an anti-mosquito measure, combined with a net, they could stoppered off with two large diameter corks. 

Then I added a horn that would waken the dead. My personalised Grand Tour vehicle made an unusual sight with its added streamlined bodywork, made of moulded ply and canvas. I gave it new Michelin tyres, brush-painted it British racing green, and set off. 

It was when travelling along a main road somewhere near Genoa in Italy, and amid a throng of workmen returning home on bicycles, that a bee was scooped in and down through the vent above my head, directly entering my shorts. 

I glanced at the consternation in my more view mirrors but was otherwise more concerned about that bee. 

Back in England, my live-in car was eventually sold to a Scottish Laird and may have been used to round up deer or other animals. Armed with a mosquito net and corks he may well have got the better of the midges in the course of travels around his estate.

As for that Genoese bee....? I can't recall. 

Gardeners' World

 In 1984 I was living in the country north of Andover in Hampshire. A car accident had ended my life as a sculptor of large lumps of elm trees and I had started to write on wine.

A not-too-distant neighbour, called John Cherrington, and I became friends. He was a famous farmer who had a weekly column in the Financial Times. Through his recommending me as a writer, the Editor of the FT published my pieces on any subject not covered by his regular journalists.

Also, through John Cherrington's auspices, I was introduced to the producer of Gardeners' World programme for BBC2, who liked the garden and my ideas so much that a date was fixed for a programme to be made on it.

Other than the overall design of its wedge-shaped Leylandii hedges in serpentine form, and a focal point of an old and broken stone fields roller on end, there were, I seem to remember some nine designs of weathervanes around the garden, mostly made from copper sheet and tube. One, the most common, least elegant, but most successful, had a plain vane at one end and a four-bladed propeller at the other. This told not only the direction of the incoming wind but by the speed of propeller rotation, its force.

Another took a tube shape with a vane at one end and an inserted kitchen funnel at the other. This supposedly would scoop in the wind to a sub-sonic whistle, which would tell the birds in the district that this was a nice garden to visit. Unfortunately, a spider liked to take up residence in the funnel and block it with its web. If the cleared weathervane ever worked in attracting wildlife, I will never know. But it might have done. 

Another piece of interest to me and possibly others, was an experiment with wood preservation. At the end of a small wooden stable block was an exterior wall made of vertical planks. As these faced the wind and weather I thought I might treat each one with a wood-preserving substance, leaving an untreated control panel every so often. I recall that I used oil from a fish and chip shop, creosote, paraffine, bought wood-preservers, petrol, linseed oil, engine oil, caustic soda, urine, paint stripper, roofing solution, drain cleaner  and other substances. After four years the outright winner was used sump oil from a diesel tractor. And when powdered burnt sienna powder was added, the result was excellent, warm-coloured wood-preservation.

The television crew arrived in three great wagons and parked them in a field next door. Their operators numbered some 13 men. Cables were dragged around the garden and my sculpture of a large elmwood horse placed on trestles in the middle of the lawn.

It was raining when we started to made the programme, only noticeable in the end result by water running down the side of the horse.

The presenter of the programme, Geoff Hamilton, would isolate himself from everyone to practice his lines. When we came to discuss the wood-preserved woodwork he might suddenly utter a vile oath, this, he explained to me was when he was not pleased with his words so that those in the wagons would be unable to use them in the programme. So he would carry on without swearing until word perfect.

At the end of filming, the entire programme had been completed in the wagons and ready to be broadcasted the next day.

A few days later I received a letter via the BBC from a fellow wartime pilot. He and others had visited my last address in London, to be told by the landlady that "I had gone". From this they presumed that I was dead (as I had been invalided out of the RAF with TB). Now, here I was, after some 40 years, alive on television. So I joined these fellow pilots, with whom I had trained in the USA, for their annual get-together.

It is somewhat ironic that now I am still very much alive and they, sadly, may all be dead.