Yesterday was a late posting, today it's an early one. There's a frost on the garden, and we're going out this evening. Plus, as I woke up I thought what I wanted to write about. Such is the variable nature of a hand-crafted product, made up on the fly.
When I switched on the car radio yesterday afternoon, on my way back from work, I found I was midway through a programme I couldn't immediately identify. A woman with a deep, strong voice was talking about the East Anglian coast, and I had a strange feeling that it must be Dame Maggi Hambling. It was. I don't know how I knew that, unless I'd read the Radio 4 schedule and subconsciously remembered it. The programme turned out to be about her scallop sculpture on the beach at Aldeburgh. I adore the scallop, so I started to listen properly.
The scallop has engendered a degree of local public outrage which I find incomprehensible. One objection is that it occupies a previously empty section of beach, and destroys the wild, deserted feeling. I don't accept that. If you stand with your back to the scallop and look out to sea, it can be as wild and deserted as you like. I have seen the southern North Sea from the middle, quite a lot of times, and it is a pretty wild and deserted sort of place even on a nice day. Go up there when there's an onshore easterly six or seven blowing, and I think you'll find enough wildness and desertion for anyone. If you look along the beach to Thorpeness, the view culminates in the great dome of the nuclear power station, and if you look back the other way you see the town of Aldeburgh, with the large and entirely hideous red brick block of flats where my cousin lives taking centre stage in the foreground. They were both there well before the scallop.
The other reason given by locals for disliking the scallop was that it brought in visitors. Outsiders. Urgh, how horrid. Tourists, gross. And that the scallop had been imposed on them without due consultation. They probably wouldn't have been any happier if Michelangelo's David had been plonked down on their beach without their consent.
Anyway, back to the scallop. What really grabbed my imagination was the way it was made. Dame Maggi made a tiny little maquette out of scallop shells. That is actual shells picked up on a beach somewhere, or gleaned from a fishmonger, not models of scallop shells fashioned out of plaster of Paris. She took it to J T Pegg and Sons, fourth generation precision engineers and ironworkers based in Aldeburgh, and asked them to make her one of those, only thirty-seven times bigger. They did.
The question I was left asking is, who was the artist? The scallop is probably Dame Maggi's most famous work, certainly the most contentious one and probably the only one to have been vandalised twelve times. But all she made was a small model, using mostly shells which she didn't make or even imagine either, but found somewhere. It was her idea to assemble them in that order, and to inscribe that line of verse (which she didn't write) round the edge, but all the work and skill of scaling up the maquette, bending and cutting and welding the one centimetre steel, and knowing how the material would behave structurally, exposed to the ferocity of the North Sea gales and the vandals, was done by the Peggs. And until yesterday at about twenty past four I had never heard of the Peggs. Even to find out that they were J T and Sons, I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Why does Dame Maggi get all the credit as an artist, and the Peggs none? It seems more like a joint enterprise for which they should get equal billing.
I got quite excited, for a while, that if I were to invest in a whole crab (I'd have to eat it all myself, the Systems Administrator being allergic to seafish), and mount the claws on a disc of cardboard, and track down the Peggs in Aldeburgh, and explain that I wanted it in steel, not thirty-seven times bigger but perhaps ten, and ask them to cut Eliot's lines about being a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas round the edge of the disc, I too could have a joint Pegg artwork. I'd like that, though it would not carry the cache of a Maggi Hambling one. Alas, I don't think I could afford to have it fabricated. It is seven years to go to the one hundredth anniversary of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. I'd better start saving up.
*In the spirit of this post, the title is lifted from a book by David Pye I still haven't read.
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