Oh well. There were other chemists, and I tried them.
Cool lot, Bristol chemists.
They can take a request for frankincense and snap back a “Sorry sir, we don’t stock it” without batting an eyelid. Actually one did say, “Good God!”
I was advised to try the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.
“What? Oh. Really? We’d better telephone you back,” they said.
They came back to say:
“You’ve had us all searching. Apparently myrrh used to be used in a mouthwash. If you find the old type of chemist you might possibly still get it.”
Mouthwash didn’t sound right, but I pressed on. I found Mr. Pughe-Jones, a chemist in West Street, Bedminster.
“There isn’t the call for that type of thing now,” he said. “We used to sell myrrh before the war. There might be a bit left somewhere, but I doubt if I could find it.”
Then I began thinking: Perhaps it’s you. What you want is a bit of style. Perhaps people aren’t getting the message.
So off to Bristol Arts Centre to be kitted up at short notice as an oriental prince.
The robe was last worn by Herod. I said I wasn’t snobbish.
“It’s not too bad,” said the wardrobe mistress, surveying me critically, “after all, they’d been on a long journey.”
Cool lot, Bristol shoppers. No one took a blind bit of notice of an oriental prince hopping along trying to keep his cloak out of puddles.
This is what happens to a Wise Man who wants to buy gold in Bristol …
If he goes to the Bank of England he gets handed a form by a sympathetic young man. He soon learns that it’s no good asking for gold just because you want some.
He is told: “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but that’s just about the worst possible reason you can give.”
If he’s a real wise guy he gives up then. That form is awfully ominous. A third of it is in capital letters, and full of phrases like FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH CONDITIONS.
If he’s just persistent he visits a few jewellers. I did. I was shown a solid gold napkin ring which I very nearly bought till I snapped out of it.
It’s no good. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh don’t get a look in.
Next year I’ll just buy a hamper.
Three kings in Bristol would just find their camels towed away for parking offences.
But of course they didn’t pass through Bristol—wise men.
HONEY, THESE BEES HAD A HEART OF GOLD
Bath and West Evening Chronicle, 24 April 1976
I was a subeditor at this paper, some years into my career as a journalist. They still had lead type, like the old days, and I was fascinated by that. When it’s hot metal printing, it’s real journalism.
Every newspaper needs to have someone who can write—not simply journalese, but other things, too. So I wormed my way into that and I had a little shed on the roof with birds I could feed. And I got paid for those pieces—countryside pieces, mostly.
It was a brief shopping list I took to London: gold. I got it. But that’s hardly a beginning, is it?
Michael Ayrton, sculptor, novelist, artist, and wide-ranging genius, died not long ago. I met him twice. I can think of no other person whose death has affected me so much, even so.
He wrote a book called The Maze Maker, based on the life of the half-mythical craftsman Daedalus. He was the father of Icarus, and built the wings—in the book, the primitive hang glider—on which his son failed so spectacularly to defy the sun.
I don’t think it was ever a bestseller, but for many people it is still a book to return to again and again.
Well, anyway. One achievement Daedalus is credited with is the casting, in gold, of a honeycomb, and in the book Ayrton suggested how it might have been done.
To cast in metal you can make a wax model, envelop it in a sort of plaster cast, melt out the wax, and fill the impression. And a honeycomb is its own wax mould. Was it really possible? So compelling was the description, I decided to have a go.
Daedalus decorated his honeycomb with bees cast in gold. You can treat the dead insect like wax, and burn out the ash of its creation in its mould.
It was November. I enrolled at a local silversmithing evening class, which enabled me to buy gold. Gold! They sell it in high-countered little shops in London, festooned with the stuff like a metal delicatessen. I bought enough—well, enough to see, if you looked closely—and rather more silver. Silver’s okay, you can buy silver like sweets, it’s gold that has the mystery.
It was winter, but the Bee Research Association came to my aid with a matchbox full of dead ones, a piece of wild honeycomb, and their most interested best wishes.
I made a pyramid of wax, and on it placed a bee—poised in flight. I ran tiny wax threads to antennae and wings, so that the molten metal would flow into every crevice, working with tweezers and a heated needle.
And in the workshop I mantled it in an okay cocoon, baked it to red heat, melted a fragment of 22-carat gold in a crucible, spun the whole lot in a centrifugal caster, and dropped the mould into a bucket of cold water. It exploded. And from the steaming water we took a gold bee, eye-faceted, wing-perfect, pollen bags still full—but full of gold. It took two days to free from its golden web and remove the last trace of clay.
Then I melted it down. Well, why not? I needed the gold. Some fast talking got me some five locusts from London Zoo—a dozen flew out when I went into the little locust breeding rooms under the insect house, where they’re bred for the zoo’s insectivores. It’s Quatermass and the Pit in there, I can tell you. But the ones that escaped didn’t defoliate the country—they can’t breed in Britain.
I cast locusts in silver. And the Natural History Museum donated four dead grasshoppers surplus to requirements. In gold you could have used their back legs as saws—and in fact they were once used, in bronze, for that purpose. I cast a honeycomb in silver, a few inches square. It took days to prepare and dripped with silver honey. And finally the gold was used in another bee, which stayed out of the crucible this time.
It worked, and I had become a minor expert in the ways of transforming insects into gold. Trouble is, anything else would have been repetitive, so I stopped. But at least I knew it could be done.
Michael Ayrton did it, too. When I met him later, I saw the golden honeycomb he had cast after a challenge by a rich reader of the book. On it were seven golden bees, the best of forty attempts. The whole thing was worth, I suppose, ￡1,000 at the time. When the new owner set it in the grass by his beehives, the bees visited it. I’ve always wondered whether they filled it with honey, and if the honey was unusually sweet.
THAT SOUNDS FUNGI, IT MUST BE THE DAWN CHORUS
Bath and West Evening Chronicle, 2 October 1976