Then came the instruction:
"Thou shalt spend most of Christmas, and after, painting a thirty-six foot Big Ben made entirely out of doors (not outofdoors, but with doors) in a collapsing barn."
It was too late to do anything: The Bad Fairy waved his wand, and my fate was sealed.
I couldn't work fulltime on it right away, because I had paintings to finish and frames to make in time for Christmas, but I made a vague plan on the top section with a carpenter's pencil, sketched in the main clock face and started one flank of the tower to see how I was going to do it.
The barn is beautiful. Its condition makes it impossible for John Burgess to use it for anything (much of the front wall has disappeared and the footings are unsafe). But the main timbers are probably eighteenth-century or earlier, and it's like being inside the hull of a ship. The original thatch has been replaced with corrugated iron, so it doesn't look much from outside. But it's a wonderful place to work: when the sun is low it strikes through all the gaps to form a cat's-cradle of lightbeams.
The Bad Fairy appeared and disappeared with various harassed-looking elves in tow. At one point Mike Liggins materialised, and I thought he looked just like he does on telly: a sort of badly made up inflatable dummy. Once Christmas had got a grip there was just me and the cats, and I could start work in earnest.
My mate Dave Gent had scanned and printed out a poster-sized image of BB for me from the Internet, and I pinned it to one of Noah's spare doors. It called to mind that when I was fifteen I had another BB on my wall... the weekly newspaper "Reveille" (or "Reveal" as we used to call it) printed two double-page spreads that made a lifesize black and white Brigitte Bardot. Everyone I knew had one. It was very effective, and I wish I still had it. My mum thought that it was the beginning of the end, and she was probably right.
When you get up close to Big Ben, the Victorian Gothic decorations are very intricate, but nobody notices that and I had to make an abstraction that would work from a distance like the real thing. The key to this, for me, was to manipulate the shape of the rectangular box of the tower so that you couldn't see where the actual corner was, and make nonexistent columns of stone thrust out beyond their real position to look like heavy bulwarks. I eventually worked out a formula to simplify the structure, but did this faintly in pencil so you couldn't see much.
Noah had provided me with a scaffold tower, a gas heater and a floodlight that lit up the inside of the barn like the surface of the moon... shadows cast by the two sections of the clock were like dark pools, and things disappeared in them.
The Bad Fairy materialised one night. I thought his nails were looking shorter. "Do you think you'll get it finished?" he blurted casually at one point.
Only two of our three cats were involved in all this. Corky, who is old, specialises in the house and for him life continued as normal. Tess, our soppy black cat, grieved in the doorway of the barn at intervals. She always wants to go to sleep on top of anything we are doing... writing pads and computer keyboards are included. But Big Ben defeated her, although she likes hard surfaces: she can't do vertical.
Ted, our big macho white cat, was the most concerned, because the barn is His. He patrols it at night, and regularly pays his rent by catching mice which he leaves for us carefully arranged, paws crossed on their chests, on the kitchen floor. He has big shoulders like a panther, and he stalked around the barn in a huff, doing his strange broken miaow. He was outraged from the beginning.
-What's this?
-It's a big clock.
-Why? What's it for?
-It's for Market Street on New Year's Eve.
-Well, it's taking up far too much room in here. I'm supposed to do stuff in here.
-Sorry.
-And look at that light... there's not a mouse to be seen anywhere. I can't be doing with it.
I was puzzling over lighting: to suggest three dimensions in the stonework, I had to light it in paint. I chose to have an imaginary light-source from the right on all sides. I looked forward to seeing what happened if the actual lighting came from a different direction.
Two things I wasn't prepared for: one was that the project wasn't boring for a split second, though conditions made it frequently uncomfortable. It was completely absorbing even when high wind was blowing things like pencils and waterpots off the scaffold tower. Pam fished me out of there twice because she thought the barn was going to blow down (bits of it did). The other thing was the astonishing beauty of one image: the barn from outside at night under a horned moon, floodlit inside with pale Gothic stonework thrusting up inside the shattered walls... a Gormenghast vision, and a workpoint for the near future.
I didn't go near the barn on Christmas Day, and we had a great time with all our visitors, but I was conscious of a large pointed shape in the back of my head, and I could feel Big Ben out there in the dark, doing things behind my back.
Back to work on Boxing Day, and Ted was disgusted: he stamped round the barn all day doing his miaow. Aware of the sheer physical ground to be covered, I decided to call in my friend and frequent co-exhibitor Walt Turton.
Walt came out for a few days, but when he arrived he had the flu that's been going round. His first comment when he saw the object of our attentions was: "You're mad, you."
The barn was very cold, so he drank a lot of wine to fortify himself. H couldn't get his head round Big Ben, and couldn't decide whether he was more drunk than ill, or more ill than drunk. He concluded he was both, and went to bed for ages. I thought, Well, that's it, and carried on painting. The clock had become something separate from its purpose: it was going somewhere on its own.
When Walt got up he'd somehow absorbed the whole of my formula: he joined in, and from then on it was like two people painting from the same mind. It was also more than a little like climbing some surreal North Face together, and the end of it (about 2-30a.m. on the 29th) was exhilarating.
The birthing of Big Ben from the barn when daylight came was an epic sight. Later, Ted stalked round the littered floor, flexing his white pecs in a muscular sort of way.
-This is more like it. You've got rid of that light as well. Make sure you keep
it this way.I looked at the big empty space. My Ben had gone. I felt like one of my legs had dropped off. I recognised the sensation: it was like finishing a painting. What could I do now?
Something stirred in the depths of the old barn, and it wasn't Ted. The Bad Fairy was still there in the shadows...
