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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 ofthe 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 thewoods 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