The Walking-Stick Maker
• In he walked one evening with a stride that shook our glasses, carrying under his sinewy arm a bundle of what looked like triune hybrids of walking stick, mitre and shepherd's crook. He began telling- me about his tame fox that cried like a kelpie when the food-hour was due, burrowed into his waistcoat when it was frightened and was good as gold when he took it for a walk on the lead.
But I was still more curious about those sticks of his, the like of which I had only once seen before, carved by a Welshman of slaty Festiniog and with a handle ending in an ogee curve, yet less fantastical than these. They were his recreation, his way of spending his leisure. In the autumn when the sap was down, he would go prowling among the hazel bushes that stud the Pilgrim's Way above the farmlands. The tertiary beds overlying the chalk are highly variable in composition of soils, and the hazels differ in growth and structure accordingly. Some are smooth-stemmed and others rough ; some are knotless and some quite baroque in style with their knots, swirls and rugosities. Consequently, to pick out the appropriate wand needed experience and the disciplined eye. He liked the knottier specimens, not only to sharpen his wits on them but as least likely to break, and he was pernickety about the right colour. Some he kept for three years to season steeped in water and straightened by weights, but others his fingers so itched to be fashioning that he could not wait beyond the next summer or winter, and these he painted with boiled linseed oil for an air-tight covering.
By axe, billhook, brace and bit, a wood-chisel, a small penknife and sandpaper, the hazel-lengths were converted to what I saw. The heads only were peeled until they were smooth as ivory or yew-wood and shaped into rounded or angular forms of a most fancy-free and prolific invention. Their extremities would be a delicate thistle-head or some other device, matching the exquisite whorls and other patterning in the veinings of the wood. For security or further decoration he attached to some a ferrule of box, walnut or chestnut, and, as he expounded his mystery, he spoke not of but to his sticks as, part of the listening com- pany. And what a bevy of Hogarthian characters they were!-,
Previous page
