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 books you can see his chisel marks on the faces of Christ and Mary and the saints.
I opened my eyes and I was back in Dimes Place and the whisper of the rain with my hand still on the wood. If I used lime I was connecting myself to that man who was, you might say, the Johann Sebastian Bach of woodcarving. Probably in his whole life he never got the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds for a single commission.
Stuart Duncan, one of the company directors of these ghostly forests, was in the office. I was half afraid that he’d ask me if I was qualified to use lime but when I told him what I wanted he said, ‘You can probably find what you need right out here.’ We went to the little room outside the office where there were remnants of various lengths and thicknesses. I found eight pieces that would give me more than I needed, all neat and smooth and blond.
On the way home on the Piccadilly Line I could see my chisels and gouges and hear the slithery rasp as I sharpened them on the oilstone. I felt wide-awake and excited. Odd, I thought, that I had never done any woodcarving. Why hadn’t I? The hand, the eye, and the mind respond differently to different tools and materials. Once home, I put the wood on my work-bench and there it waited, whispering to itself.
Before I began the actual carving I needed to know how the figures were going to be made to work so I browsed the small ads in Model World and found Dieter Scharf, I CAN MAKE IT WORK — SPECIAL APPLICATIONS TO ORDER. He was local, too. I got some sketches and notes down on paper then I rang him up and went to see him the next day.
Scharf lived off the North End Road in Eustace Road, which today seemed somewhat sullen and withdrawn; the houses were looking at me the way the regulars look at you when you wander into the wrong pub. The sky was overcast, as it often is when I’m trying to find something. When I rang the bell the door was answered by a stern middle-aged woman in a flowered apron. She looked like a housekeeper in a horror film. ‘He’s in the basement,’ she said. The house was dark and cool, the furniture was dark and brown; the curtains were drawn, the kitchen was silent.
Dieter Scharf’s workshop was dark and cosy; it smelled of electrical wiring, oiled metal, and cheap cigars. A light bulb in a green metal shade looked down on various little engines and skeletal articulations that littered his work-bench; some looked as if they were arrested in mid-crawl or mid-hop, others were not that far advanced. Tools hung in their painted outlines on the wall. From this moment on, I thought: What? You never know.
Scharf didn’t look like an indoor type; he was a short sturdy man with a brown weathered face, sudden blue eyes, and big strong hands. He might have been a charcoal-burner in a haunted forest, and although his basement was in SW6 it felt far away and elsewhere. He watched me as I took in his workshop. There was a sampler on the wall in a carved rustic frame; the stitches were in faded orange, pink, and mauve:
EGAL WIE MAN SICH DREHT,
DER ARSCH BLEIBT IMMER HINTEN.
‘What does that say?’ I asked him.
‘“Whichever way you turn, your arse stays always behind.” My grandmother gave me that.’
‘Words to live by,’ I said.
On a little box on the wall there was a small wooden figure of a horseman in medieval dress. About a foot to the right of the horseman was another little box with nothing on top of it. Between the two boxes and connected to them by wires was a pushbutton. ‘This is Eustace Road,’ said Scharf.
‘St Eustace?’ I said, pointing to the wooden horseman.
‘Right.’
‘But where’s the stag?’
‘Push the button.’
When I did that, St Eustace sprang from his horse and fell to his knees; the lid of the other box slid aside as a stag reared up, a tiny Jesus popped out of its head with his arms outspread between the antlers, and Bing Crosby sang ‘White Christmas’.
‘The music’s a nice touch,’ I said.
‘Goes pretty good, I think,’ said Scharf. ‘There never was a St Eustace.’
‘Just as well for him and his family; in the story they ended up being roasted alive in a brazen bull.’
‘This will teach us not to talk to strange stags. Have you an interesting problem for me?’
‘I think so.’ I showed him my sketches and explained my requirements.
Scharf laid the sketches on his work-bench and perused them, humming ‘Der Lindenbaum the while.
‘How come you’re humming that?’ I said.
‘It’s one of those songs that’s often in my head, it’s a goodbye song — he’s saying goodbye to his youth, his dreams, his hopes. The rustling of the branches speaks to him, offering rest; but for him there is no rest as off he goes on his winter journey. No rest for any of us, not?’
‘I guess not.’
He drummed on the sketches with his charcoal-burner’s fingers. ‘Someone has commissioned you to make this?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll do anything for money, yes?’
‘I’ll do a lot of things for money.’
‘I also. Have you met this person who commissions you to do this?’
‘No.’
‘What, a letter comes out of nowhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then a cheque?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wonderful.’ He spread out the sketches and lit one of his foul cigars. ‘You want both figures to be active, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘In any position and independent of a base?’
‘Yes.’
‘So for this we need radio control. There must be an aerial on each one and I think you don’t want the sort that sticks up as on a model car.’
‘No.’
‘We can do internal ones if the distances are short. Probably these are for indoor use, not?’
‘I doubt very much he’d be taking them outdoors.’
‘So internal is OK then. You want the whole articulated torso to be motorised or only the pelvis?’
‘Pelvis only — the articulation will allow the rest of the torso to move with it.’
‘Arms? Legs?’
‘They’ll stay in the position they’re put in except as the pelvis moves them.’
‘Your sketch indicates that his pimmel elevates and extends — a commanding member, this one.’
‘Well, you know, this whole thing is what it is.’
‘I can make it work. You want the batteries in the thighs?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping. Will that be a problem?’
‘No, we can do this. Let me make my calculations, and if you phone me tomorrow I can tell you how much this will cost.’
We said our goodbyes; I made my way through the cigar smoke and walked home thinking about Adelbert Delarue. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! What kind of man would pay that kind of money for such a thing? Obviously someone who had money to throw around, and he’d turned up at a time when I needed money. This whole thing began to feel like something fated. Not for the first time I tried to visualise M. Delarue: sometimes I saw him alone and scholarly in a booklined study; sometimes in action with a partner while watching my crash-test dummies. Occasionally St Eustace and company got into the picture; Eustace leapt off his horse, the stag reared up; Jesus popped out of its head and watched while the dummies did their thing and M. Delarue and partner (frequently a stern housekeeper) did theirs.