the thing that’s going to be built around it? Can’t you do a picture of that as well?’
‘That is the building, Alan.’
He’d snorted through his grizzled beard. ‘I don’t want something that’s going to have Swedish architecture critics buzzing round it. I want a place for living in. Take that piece of paper away and build it in Helsinki or somewhere far away like that and I’m sure a publicly funded committee will give you a prize. If we’ve got to have some bloody building in this garden – of which I’m far from being entirely convinced – then what we’re going to have is an English country house, with bricks or dry-stone walls or some decent local material.’
‘This doesn’t sound like the angry young Alan Martello,’ I’d said sweetly. ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart, isn’t that the sort of thing you’ve always been keen on?’
‘I like old styles of architecture. I’m not young. And I’m not angry any more, except with you. Replace that structuralist horror with something I’ll recognise as a house.’
It was Alan at his most gruff, charming, flirtatious and I was grateful that he’d felt able to yell at me in the old affectionate way while I’d been in the process of divorcing his son. So of course I’d gone away and put together a plan of impeccably rural appearance, complete with a rather amusing gambrel roof. It was designed in the sense that you design the contents of your shopping trolley as you walk around Sainsbury’s. The prefabricated frame construction house was Norwegian, though manufactured in Malaysia. Alan would at least have been grateful to know that the extraction of the raw materials probably involved the destruction of a small patch of rain forest.
‘What’s this up here, Mrs Martello?’ Jim Weston had asked, jabbing at the plan with his pipe.
‘Please call me Jane, Jim. They’re the ridge tiles, set in mortar.’
‘Hmm.’ He’d replaced his pipe firmly in his mouth.
‘What do you want to go messing about with mortar for?’
‘Jim, we can’t argue about this now. It’s all arranged. It’s bought and paid for. We’ve just got to put it together.’
‘Hmm,’ he’d grunted.
‘We excavate here, just a few feet down…’
‘Just,’ Jim had muttered.
‘Then the footings, here and here, and then the hard core, then the damp-course and the damp proof membrane, then concrete and then the tiled ground floor on top of that. The rest is a matter of just joining it together.’
‘Damp-course?’ Jim had said dubiously.
‘Yes, unfortunately there was a Public Health Act passed back in 1875, so I’m afraid we’re stuck with that.’
Now, at the beginning of the first day of work, Jim looked more like something that was growing in the garden than a man who had come to supervise, or pretend to supervise, work in it. His face had been left outside in all weathers and had attained a complexion like the rear end of a toad. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears like moss on an ancient rock. He really was old now and his job consisted of telling his son and his nephew what to do. Their job consisted of ignoring what he said. I shook hands with them as well.
‘What’s this about you digging?’ Jim asked suspiciously.
‘Only a spadeful. I just said I’d like to dig the first spadeful, if that’s all right. It’s important to me.’
I’ve been an architect for nearly fifteen years now, and whenever I work on a building, I have a rule, which amounts almost to a superstition, that I must be there to see the first spade being dug into the ground. It’s a moment of pure sensual pleasure, really, and I sometimes wish that I could do it myself with my own bare hands. After months, sometimes even years, of drawing up the plans and the specifications and obtaining tenders and calming the nerves of the client and bargaining with some functionary in the planning department, after all the compromises and the paper arguments, it’s good to go outside and remind myself that it’s all about dirt and brick and fitting the pipes together so they don’t crack in the winter.
Best of all are the ten- or fifteen-metre excavations which precede the really big buildings. You stand on the edge of a site somewhere in the City of London and peer down at a couple of thousand years of fragments of other people’s lives. You’ll see the suspicion of an ancient building, sometimes, and I’ve heard all the rumours