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By Root 2185 0

of coal-shed, pointed out by Fludd, who at first stood in the doorway, poised and watchful, to see what Philip would do. Philip wiped the wheels, and found cloths to cover the slurry. Fludd said “Well, we might take a look at the kiln. We need to take care with the mortar. The last was too coarse. It exploded here and there, and marked the pots.” Philip nodded. He knew about explosions. He even offered advice as they rebuilt the firing-holes and the spy-holes for the pyrometric cones. He went up on the roof—Fludd held the ladder—and repaired the chimney, where it came through the slates. From up there across the yard, he saw the fat-necked shape of what he did not know was an oast-house. He came down again and asked Fludd what it was. It was too fat to be a kiln, he said, though at first, when he saw them in the countryside, he had thought they were bottle kilns. Fludd explained about the hop-growing, hop-picking and brewing in Kent. He fired his kiln, he said, with spent hop-poles, which were plentiful and easy to get. Philip said he thought you could make a whacking big kiln in one of those. Fludd said “We might. You’d have to make some pots yourself.” Philip grinned with pleasure, and Fludd grinned back.

Over the next weeks, cautiously, the two of them made pots. At first Philip simply did apprentice-work. He wedged the clay, a process akin to kneading bread, which battered every air bubble and water drop out of the solid mass. Otherwise, as Philip knew very well, a duck-egg bubble could expand, and burst, in the firing, causing large or small explosions, which could lose the whole kiln-full. The clay was mostly local. There was clay dug from Rye Hill, which was a strong red, and clay dug in the marshes, which was sandier. Fludd pointed out one sackful—reddish—and remarked drily that that was the clay to which we all returned, and had been excavated from the graveyard, which had a particularly rich layer of it. He looked at Philip to see what he thought, and Philip grinned again. It was, as Fludd said, good strong clay.

Fludd did import, by train, a pale, creamy clay from Dorset, which he used to make pouring slip, or engobe, and mixed with the red clay to lighten it. Philip learned to pound and sieve this clay, and mix it in water. He learned to revolve clays in the bladed pug-mill which stood where the butter-churn had been. He learned to mix clay bodies and later to mix glazes. Like most potters, Fludd was secretive about the recipes for both these things. He had leather-backed ledgers, locked in a drawer, written in a code, based on Anglo-Saxon runes and Greek lettering, which Philip could not read. He did not use conventional weights, but had his own spheres of dried clay, numbered from one to eight. Philip mixed tin glazes and lead glazes, and was given mugs of milk to counteract the poison in the lead. He mixed antimony and manganese and cobalt. There was a substance called pin-dust, made of the copper powder left over from the manufacture of pins, which made green glazes.

There came a day when Fludd invited him to sit at the wheel and throw a pot. Fludd centred the ball of clay for him, and Philip put his wet square hands on it, and depressed the centre. Brown clay ran over his fingers as though they were becoming clay, smooth and homogeneous, or as though they were clay becoming flesh, with living knuckles and pads. The clay under his hands rose and grew into a thin cylindrical wall, higher and higher, as though it had its own will. It whirled evenly round, lined with the movement of the fingers—up, up, and then suddenly it flapped and staggered, and form slumped into formlessness. Philip was breathless and laughing. Fludd laughed too, and showed him how to finish the rim, how to recognise the form to which the clay aspired. He said that many master craftsmen never threw a pot, but confined themselves to the decoration. Philip said, how can they not want to know the feel of the clay. Fludd said, Philip had potter’s hands. He took Philip’s place, and threw a tall crane-necked jar, a wide deep dish, a useful