Danger money

This was my initial proposal for a large fountain bowl in Portland stone for the garden of Sir Cameron Macintosh, set in the grounds of a beautiful converted priory, deep in Somerset. 

It ended up like this, which - to my mind - is quite a lot more boring than the one in my drawing would have been. The reason the shell-like edge has been flattened out on the underside is that he wanted the water to gently drip evenly all round, as you can see it is doing in the photo. Also, it was to mirror the texture of a suit of armour worn by a large stone figure at the end of that path (which I have cropped-out), so it was simplified even further. Client knows best, and Cameron Macintosh knows better than most.

I spent a long time making sure that the bowl was set as perfectly horizontal as possible so that the water dripped at the same rate around all 360 degrees, and we had just turned on the pump for the first time when that photo was taken. The dark lines are evidence that the water was, indeed, running evenly over the edge.

On my first visit I was greeted at the electronic gates by the groundsman, who showed me into his cottage near the house where his wife offered me tea. The groundsman let me settle and then gave me some stern instructions about how to behave in the coming few minutes.

"In a moment," he said, "Two Rhodesian Ridgebacks are going to come into the room. Do not stand up. Let them both sniff you for a while, then give them a little pat on the head. Stay seated."

He went to a room off the small corridor and opened a door, then two of the largest male Ridgebacks I had ever seen slowly padded into the room and stopped at my chair. Their enormous heads were actually on the same level as my much smaller one, and  - as instructed - I sat still while they warily sniffed around my neck area. I tried not to look them in the eye, and I tried not to panic. It took quite a lot of courage for me to give them affectionate pats on their tan-brown, bone-hard pates, but it seemed I had passed the test. They skulked silently out of the room and were locked back in their own. If I had any intention of intruding into the grounds late at night, it had vanished completely.

The job involved another brush with death, and  - so it seemed to me - the other was probably more likely to be fatal than the meeting with the dogs. There was a small fishpond up against one side of the house, and it had a lion mask fountain head mounted into the stonework overlooking the pool. There was no water spouting from the lion's mouth, because there was no hole in it to take the pipe.

Sir Cameron dragged a tiny, inflatable rubber dingy up to the fringe of the pool and chucked it in. Using his hands as paddles, he splashed his way the few feet to the blind wall with the mute lion, and began peering up and underneath, into its dry mouth. He is very good at peering. He has the right eyes and the right spectacles for it.

He explained that it just need a one-inch hole through the mouth at an upward angle, piercing the wall internally at just the right spot. I don't know why they didn't drill the hole before they mounted the mask, but a job is a job.

I explained that I could not drill a hole from a rubber dingy, so Cameron and his groundsman said that I should climb into the four-foot deep water, wade across and drill it. They would supply me with chest-waders. 

I protested that using a 240 volt drill whilst standing chest-deep in water is a very good way of killing yourself, either from foolhardiness or plain stupidity. There was a third motive though. Greed.

They offered me so much money for drilling one hole in a piece of stone that I got it done, with the groundsman gingerly handing me the switched-off drill at full stretch, making sure it was not dropped in the water before turning it on, then turning it off before I handed it back to him on dry land.