Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 18

We stuck at it and got better and kept on getting better until we were actually quite good at it and Heather ended up being able to throw sixty mugs an hour. We imported a couple from Glasgow with a mobile home who came and worked for us and no matter how many pots we made, people wanted more and we sold them all over Scotland and the top bit of England.

It was very hard work, but wonderful.

One night at 2 a.m. at the end of 18 hours’ work, I saw big black beetles crawling all over the white bricks inside the kiln. There were dozens of them and they were real, except they weren’t there. I was amazed that you could be so tired and not fall over. My brain knew they were a hallucination, but the beetles didn’t and when I finally closed the kiln and set the controller and crawled up to bed, they were still there sitting in the dark wondering why it was getting so warm.

Even though there were quite a few more 18-hour days, I never saw the beetles again, which was a bit disappointing.

Then eventually the remoteness got too remote so we moved everything, except the couple from Glasgow who had gone native and stayed behind, to Denton Fell in the top bit of England near Hadrian’s wall and a fantastic, solitary three-hundred-year-old derelict farmhouse

shaped like a seven with only one visible neighbour across the moors. The Isle of Lewis Pottery became Cumbria Pottery. We chopped down the ivy and put glass in the windows and stayed there for over twenty years.

I thought I had found paradise and would never leave it until I died.

(But then in 1995 I went to the other side of the world for a week – and stayed there.)