The Children's Book

Philip interested in the potter? Oh yes, said Philip, who was interested in pots.

Fludd began to tell Philip the heroic life history of Bernard Palissy. He told it in vivid, intense instalments, to the rhythm of the wheel, or the slap and thud of the wedging, or the scratch and slush of the sieving. It felt almost like an initiation rite—this was the exemplary tale of what it was to be a true worker with clay, a complete artist. Fludd’s voice was deep, and he left gaps between his sentences, as he meditated on what he was saying. Philip meditated too. He was learning.

He learned that Palissy had been, like Benedict Fludd, an inhabitant of salt marshes, a workingman who painted portraits and had also learned to paint on glass. He was poor and ambitious, and one day someone showed him “an earthen cup, made in Italy, turned and enamelled with so much beauty” that he had been driven to learn how to do such work—“regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for the enamels, as a man gropes in the dark.”

Fludd stopped, and said “Something like that happened to me. It’s not reasonable, how a choice is made, of this or that craft, this or that life. In my case it was an Italian majolica plate, gold and indigo, covered with arabesques, and a kind of shadow in light—”

Philip said “I saw your watery pot at Todefright. I was looking already of course, I grew up, with the clay, but I saw that pot.”

It was the most personal thing he had ever said. Fludd, who was painting a jar with a stripped goose-plume dipped in manganese, looked up and smiled straight at Philip, seeing the serious square face.

“It’s a form of madness,” he said. “Palissy was a madman, and in my book supremely sane, and you’ll come to see—if you stay here—that I too am a madman. When the wind’s in the wrong quarter, I’m driven the wrong way. So to speak. You’ll see, I’m telling you in advance. A good gale in the right direction—and some solid earth—and I’m driven to be a perfectionist.”

He told how from seeing the one cup, Palissy had narrowed and intensified his search for perfection to the discovery of a pure white enamel to put on earthenware. He had a wife, and many children, and lived in poverty, for years upon years, experimenting with mixtures of metals and tinctures he’d learned from glass on hundreds and hundreds of shards of pot, which he took to local potters, or glaziers, to be fired. And he failed, and failed. Fludd gave a bark of laughter, and observed that failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements, he said. Any one of the old four—earth, air, fire, water—can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter—months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. “It’s purifying fire and demonic fire,” he said to Philip, who took in every word and nodded gravely. “Very dangerous, very simple, very elemental—”

Palissy had given up his search, for a time, and turned his attention to other things—the nature of salt, or salts, the way plants used salts, the way plants used manure, and the way it was connected to salts—and the construction of artificial salt marshes—“on earths which are tenacious, clammy, or viscid, like those of which are made pots, bricks and tiles.”

He loved the earth, said Benedict Fludd. He worked with the earth and he loved it. He got his hands dirty, and improved his mind.

Another day, he told the heroic story of the initial discovery of the white glaze. He enacted Palissy’s four-hour wait at a glass furnace for the three hundred broken pieces of clay, each numbered and covered with a different chemical mixture. The furnace is opened. One of the shards has a melted compound on it, and is taken out, dark and glowing. Palissy watched it cool. His thoughts were black. But as the black shard cooled it whitened—“white and polished”—a white enamel—“singularly beautiful.” Palissy is a new creature, reborn. The glaze contained tin, lead, iron, antimony, manganese and copper.

Palissy ground a quantity of it—he tells no one the proportions, of course—coats a kiln-full of vessels, relights his own kiln and tries to raise it to the heat of the glassmaker’s kilns. He works for six days and nights, heaping in faggots, and the enamel will not melt or fuse. “He lost the first firing,” said Fludd. “He went out and bought new pots, and reground his glaze, and relit his furnace, and laboured another six days and nights. In the end, he had to feed his furnace with his own floorboards, and smash up his kitchen table. And still the firing failed, and he was thought of as a mad alchemist or forger, and reduced to extreme poverty. He worked for another eight years, built a new kiln, and lost a whole firing of delicately glazed pieces because the mortar had been full of flints which splintered, and spattered his pots.”

“But in the end,” said Philip. “In the end, he found the enamel, and made the pots.”

“He worked for kings and queens, he designed a Paradise Garden, and an impregnable fortress. He hated alchemists—he knew they were looking for something simply mythical. He liked to watch plants grow, and speculate about how hot springs, and fresh-water springs, rise in the bowels of the earth. He had a theory of earthquakes, which wasn’t unreasonable—he was thinking cleverly about earth, air, fire and water moving mountains—”

“What happened to him?”

“He was a Protestant. He didn’t accept the doctrines of the Church, and he wouldn’t compromise his beliefs. They put him in prison, and condemned him to death for heresy. He should have been burned to death for refusing —in his own words—to bow down to images of clay. He died in the Bastille, tough as ever. He was seventy-nine. I will lend you Professor Morley’s book, you can read it in there.”

Philip said he was afraid that would be no use. His reading was not up to it. He added, reddening, “It’s not up to much, to tell the truth. I can make out simple words, that’s all.”

“That won’t do,” said Fludd. “That’s no good. Imogen shall teach you to read.”

“Oh no—”

“Oh yes. She hasn’t enough to do. You won’t get far if you can’t read. And you’d like to read about Palissy.”

•  •  •

Docile Imogen agreed to give Philip daily lessons in reading. She said she had never taught, and did not know how to teach, but would do her best. She sat with him at a garden table in the orchard, or in the kitchen if the wind was blowing in from the Channel. She wore the same two or three lumpy linen dresses, with uneven necklines and embroidered lilies and irises, on whose petals Philip could feel the tiny spheres of blood from pricked fingers. He noticed—he was young and male—that she had a strong and well-proportioned body under the sacklike folds. He thought with the tips of his potter’s fingers about the contours of her breasts, which were round and full. He did not notice any female atmosphere around her—no scent in the hair, no hint of the smell of her skin, no hidden damp, breathing—and he was too young to know how odd this absence was. He did think, as she