The mother and father of clay

Heat rose up through his body, fire and flesh joined as he felt his blood burn. He writhed at the unison, as if his soul were being sacrificed, boiled and baked for a higher being to feast upon. He endured for what felt like an eternity, until a single droplet from his temple cooled the burn and brought him back to life.

He woke without worry, for this was a familiar place his mind took him ever since he was a young man. The smallpox he suffered luckily didn’t kill but it left its heated mark on Josiah, dragging him down to the feverish depths of hell more regularly than he’d like. His leg ached as if it were still down there with the demons, the ailment a consistent reminder he was lucky to still be of this earth.

Even in the outskirts of Burslem the fires of industry raged; early and relenting like a young child ready to take on the new industrial world. Muffled shouts of foremen and delivery carriages rapped against the side of the house, finding Josiah even under the heavy velvet sheets. The original family factory nestled awkwardly between the small manor and village church, where since 1679 and for close to 100 years after, the noise of the pot chimneys competed against the church bells for village supremacy.

Lifting the stiff leg awkwardly out of bed, he rose for the day, dressing not as master but as the apprentice he’d used to be at the Churchyard Works. His home, his heart.

‘Good morning, dear Josiah! Wasn’t last night fun! I do love having you here, please do come stay more often won’t you dear brother?’

Jane’s voice carried joyfully through the breakfast parlour and over the work yard noise outside. He knew his brother Thomas would abhor the invite after they’d quarreled, though he would make no move to apologise since it was he who so wrongly refused his birth right to join as partner in the family business. Thomas didn’t have the touch though; he’d eventually burn their name to the ground.

‘You know I appreciate your generous hospitality my gracious sister, but I must be going back to my own factory to check on work at hand, so much to do so little time,’ he called through, loud enough to frustrate Thomas in his office close by. Waring brothers were never a good sign for business, but Josiah had more pressing problems.

The walk from the Churchyard Works to Ivy House Works was a pleasant one but made slow and painful with his blackened knee giving particular grief post a feverish nights sleep. It needed to go, the doctor had said it may need amputating and Josiah feared the time may soon be nearing. Pushing the thought out of his mind he took in the air of the morning, the entire village holding on with bated breath for signs of spring that were so close to arriving. Farmers moved their cattle for the day, men began their day of labour, the few boys of age and means from the town raced to the nearby schoolhouse.

As he shuffled slowly comprehending the day, he recognised a man sprinting towards him around the church yard.

‘Sir, I thought you’d want to know as soon as I knew.’ The man expelled breathlessly.

‘Go on Jenkins, I assume it’s last night’s batch?’ Josiah said calmly.

The man nodded as he caught his breath, apron laden with ash and soot already in this early hour.

‘Every piece is destroyed… another explosion… it must be the glaze, it’s just not working… we tried to separate out all the test pieces so they wouldn’t destroy the rest of the pot but the entire patch is gone sir, except for this one piece I thought you’d want to see.’

The Ivy House foreman dipped his head in shame, dropping his hand into his pocket to pull out a small brown clay tile, except for a corner section which gleamed white as bone.

Josiah looked at it carefully. Since his fateful days confined with Smallpox, he’d thrown himself into academia, wanting to take the art out of pottery, bring a science to ceramics that he knew would change the industry forever. He’d committed everything to these experiments. Testing new clays from Dorset, experimenting with when to fire, how much flint to use, each decision a step closer to creating something altogether new. Something delicate, something pure, something a queen would want.

This however was the eighth firing in a row that had been destroyed. Hundreds of samples, hundreds of hours, so much heart ache. The men stared at the small tile, a hint of something to come showing through, though in painful recognition at what it had taken to get even here.

‘A few more of the men have left sir.’

Josiah looked up. He couldn’t be the Wedgwood that failed. He was the one with the ideas, the one to make change, why were they deserting him?

‘They think it’s cursed, the kilns sir’.

‘Explain yourself Jenkins?’

‘She’s angry at what we’re doing, you know the chimney herself, she needs to be pleased like any lady and we’re abusing her, they think she’s Athena, raging her fires to destroy the work, if you please, sir’

‘You think so?’

‘Maybe sir,’ the man replied coyly, ‘they are fickle like any lady folk sir, they need pleasing, they’re artists doing the work we request in earnest, creating art in the hot dark underbelly that we mere mortals can never see or understand.’

‘You really think that?’ He asked.

‘Like any fine lady Mr Wedgwood, you can harness them and ensure they do your bidding, but it takes a special kind of man to tame one.’

***

Josiah sat glassy eyed in his small office at Ivy House. In the days and months he couldn’t sit at a potters wheel, the bread and butter of all the wedgwood boys, he sat and studied, observed, filled the office with experiments and hypothesis’ ready to be solved.

He knew he could perfect the humble process, but something wasn’t happening, the science wasn’t following what the articles and academics said. He had a feel for clay, an intrinsic understanding of it’s form and boundaries but since his smallpox the feeling had been seeping away. With every hot nightmare it got further and further from his grasp.

A voice from outside cut through the thick silence.

‘Do you need anything more from me tonight sir?’

‘Other than a small miracle no Jenkins, you’re dismissed’.

The weathered man stood in the office doorframe, age hanging from him in every wrinkle making him appear older than the reality. He’d been with the Wedgwoods his whole life, a faithful servant to the chimneys.

‘If you don’t mind me remarking Mr Wedgewood sir, I think you should go and speak to her. Go and get reconnected with the master chimney. Go and speak to Athena.’

‘Don’t be daft Jenkins, don’t let the men pull you into their silly tales, it’s a kiln it’s science, we’ve just not cracked it yet.’

‘That maybe so sir, but we don’t call her a she for nothing, she has a mind of her own. Think on it, and I’ll bid you goodnight.’

Josiah let the words hang in the office, dark crawling in from the fields outside, soft sounds moving through the house from the cows coming in from their days on the village pasture.

Its stupid, the men need to be educated, I need to put a stop to this foolishness, Josiah thought to himself. No sooner had the words formed in his head a crash sounded from behind the desk, a small jug smashing on the floor behind, a favoured one he made as an apprentice at Churchyard. He got up with difficulty to check the shelf it had been sitting on, assuming the poor thing must have been placed at a strange angle when one of the girls was last cleaning.

As if to prove their point, one by one, pieces from every wall in the office started to quake, moving of their own accord like rats coming out of the walls. His children, the pieces of his creation were somehow one by one coming alive, trying to tell him something he couldn’t comprehend. He didn’t believe in witchcraft but the room felt spellbound, unnatural, untamed.

This isn’t happening, this isn’t real, I'm dreaming! Josiah shouted in his mind. One by one each piece began to prove their status and committed their own form of defiant suicide, crashing to the floor in some kind of strange defence. A peasants revolt for their mother who’d brought them from her fiery belly into this world and she had been scorned.

Josiah fell out of the office door, wide eyed and in shock, crashes still reverberating from the house as he hobbled with his blackened leg out into the pottery courtyard for help. As darkness fell the wind began to pick up and the noises from his office only grew louder, as if each piece was remaking itself only to smash again into a thousand pieces, his beloved pottery children siding with their mother, his waring wife.

The wind tugged at his clothes forcing him to take shelter, finding himself in the mouth of the mother herself, in the doorway of the largest pot chimney he had, the matriarch of the three sisters he had at his disposal.

He held is hand cautiously up to the brickwork. Even though the kiln had been out of use since the early hours the bricks were still hot, sharp even to the touch. He pulled his hand back in shock. Were the men right, had she pulled away from him, was she angry?

Another crash echoed from the house.

‘I hate that I am doing this, I don't think I believe in this or what is happening, but I can’t do this without you.’ He said to the chimney, laying another tentative hand on the brick. ‘We’re a team, a partnership, I am you and you are me, we are one in mind and body, and I’m sorry if I have somehow neglected you, dearest one.’

The wind picked up and another bellow from the office came, an assumed affirmative response in the argument.

‘I need us to be friends, to be partners. You’re the blood and bones of the pot works, the soul of what we do. My soul. What can I do to make this better? Please my lady, please, I need you to hear me, I need to find a way. I will do anything for you.’

A rumble came from the chimney, sound reverberating around the inside of the black hole with a deafening boom. He was sure it was just the wind but on some strange level he felt she might have been speaking to him, though he could not understand.

The wind slowed and somehow silence fell over the house. He held his breath, placing his forehead to the brick in a final silent payer, hoping against hope his words had done something. From the now setting dark a small boy appeared from the back of the kiln, his eyes only just visible inside a completely black face and torso from cleaning one of the neighbouring chimneys.

‘Sounds like she’s out for blood Mr Wedgwood, sir, hope she doesn’t catch me one day.’

As quickly as he’d appeared the boy slunk into the growing darkness, leaving Josiah alone with his scornful lady.

***

Time passed and Josiah, spurred on by both fear and competitiveness, spent every moment he could trying to embrace the art in his craft. Every day he’d speak to the kilns, their giant bottle shapes engulfing the Ivy House in both size and influence. He’d even named them formally. The largest remained Athena after the superstitious foremen, with her partners being christened Hera and Persephone, keeping in theme and hoping for some kind of luck through their namesakes.

He got to know every brick in each bottle chimney by touch, knowing where the cold pockets of air were, knowing where mistakes could be made, remaking every shelf to not maximise space but create proper air flow around pieces. He became intimate with the art, embracing the chaos but still, the results weren’t what he needed to satisfy his vision.

Whilst Josiah got closer to his kilns, his leg worsened with infection until he could barely move let alone ever operate a wheel again. He knew the time had come for it to go, else risk an even worse fate and so one wild and wicked evening in June the limb came off, in one neat wood shattering blow. He didn’t resist the procedure as most of the day would, but instead followed the surgery with a strange request as the surgeon at St Thomas’ stitched the bloodied skin over his knee back together.

‘I’ll need that leg to come back with me if you’ll allow it doctor, pray don’t ask me what for, though I will pay you for your discretion sir.’

The doctor merely nodded and asked for the limb to be salted, as if it were in the end a fairly routine request, like preserving a ham ready for Christmas.

***

A week later, Josiah called Jenkins to his office, though the main desk had been moved to allow a small day bed to be installed, keeping him as close as possible to the yard.

‘Jenkins, I have a special request, one that can only be carried out by you, dearest man, my most humble and closest confidant.’ The foreman nodded, eagerly awaiting instruction.

‘I have made up a new glaze formular, based on a new lead and flint test I’ve been constructing. Go into the workshop and take out twelve of the large urns we fired last week and submerge them fully in the new glaze. Don’t put anything else in the kiln, just the twelve. Spread them out all within one middle shelf, away from those air pockets on shelf three we found, let them all look at each other, engage with each other.’ Jenkins nodded profusely.

‘Once you’ve set them up, go into the kitchen pantry and retrieve my leg. It’s in a wooden box submerged in salt from the surgeon. Take it to Athena and place it in her heart, in the very center. Then at midnight, set the kiln alight. Let it run until dawn and then we’ll open her up when the sun hits it’s highest point. Do you have all of that?’

Jenkins nodded again, asking only one question in return.

‘Why twelve sir?’

‘That’s all you have to ask, nothing about why we’re setting my amputated limb alight?’

‘No sir, she’s a woman, she is after blood, a sacrifice, your body and your soul, all the boys were hoping it was why you asked for the leg to be returned to us.’

Josiah smiled. ‘The twelve is for the Greek gods Jenkins, we pray to them now for our breakthrough.’

As the sun set and Josiah waited in his office he listened to the movement of Jenkins outside, carrying out his wishes to the most precise degree. At midnight he smelt the kiln beginning its cycle as he fell in and out of another fevered nights sleep. This time however it felt different, he wasn’t being tortured, his skin wasn’t prickling and blistering it was instead warm as if it were melting, being heated by the everlasting English sun on a summers day out in the barley fields over by Churchyard Works. He felt home.

Josiah woke late the next day, a deep recovering sleep had taken hold of his body. He took up a crutch and heaved himself onto his makeshift desk, willing his body to co-operate through the pain. As he looked out into the yard he saw Jenkins at the mouth of the large bottle chimney, his mouth agape. Josiah dragged himself over the cobbles one painful single step at a time, leaning up against the doorway next to the dutiful foreman.

Inside the kiln stood twelve pristine urns, gleaming in the thick darkness, all a perfect shade of bone white. A holy set of chalices, fit for a Queen. The men looked at each other, tears forming in their eyes. They’d found the art in the science, the balance of chaos and precision, allowing their faith in some higher being to take them the rest of the way there.

The men stayed standing in silence as a small crowd began to gather around them, potters from all around rushed forward for a glimpse at the new creamware, the first ever of its kind. Finally, in amongst the fire, the original mother and father of clay had found their balance.

***

Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, entrepreneur and abolitionist. Founding the Wedgwood company in 1759, he was the leader in the industrialisation of the manufacture of European pottery. His invention of Creamware later became known as Queen’s ware, after being popularised by queens across Europe and beyond.