Mosaic

In London in the late eighties there was a fashion for the distressed and old. The city was gripped by a frenzy of house buying. Everyone — except me – was feeling rich. The Conservatives were greasing the palms of protest with oil wealth, and half the city seemed to be on the move, trading up, peeling off the wallpaper, discovering with braying delight patchy pink plaster, and rag-rolling remaining walls to make them respectably patchy too.

I was feeling tired. I had three jobs, three children, and an open house for burglars. On the first occasion, my son and I came home with the shopping  ‘Who’s that, Mummy?’ he said.  ‘I don’t know — who are you?’ I growled furiously, grabbing a large man by the collar and pushing him against the wall. A skinny accomplice ran down the stairs with our possessions in some plastic bags, and my captive fought me off. Once they’d gone, I felt they’d been almost gentlemanly not to stab me.

Jobs one and three were similar – I looked after two delightful children, one French and one Colombian, starting at 6.30am and ending at 6.30pm, but job two – while all the children, both mine and my charges, were at school — was Mosaic Workshop.

I’m sure no one will ever have asked you this before’ an unknown voice said quite regularly ‘but could you make a mosaic that looks like ancient Roman remains?’ ‘What an interesting idea!’  Tessa or I would say brightly, not wanting to put off a potential client with an implication of unoriginality.

We made faux-Roman pavements everywhere – from Tunbridge Wells to Maida Vale, from Somerset to Chelsea Harbour. (I’m not making this up. I wish for poetic purposes the places would alliterate, Somerset to Sittingbourne for example, but I am sticking to the facts). Some were Roman figures, some were geometric floors, some were abstract/classical fusion (a style of the eighties much beloved by designers) and one – shown below – was Celtic-classical.

In one London mansion, a beautiful woman pushed an old-fashioned perambulator.  Her husband drove up in a vintage car. They commissioned a Roman bathhouse floor. At the front of the house workmen were constructing a marble bath in the centre of the room ‘In’ ‘arf gonna be cold in that barf’ said one of the workmen. ‘Marble dun’arf take the ‘eat out the war’er.’ At the back of the house the Renaissance garden was going in.

‘Mummy who’s that by the coats?’ said my daughter. ‘Not again!’ and we ran down the hall.

The Phillipino maids paid attention. ‘I care about beauty’ said the beauty. ‘In this house you are only to sweep with a besom’.

By the sixth break-in the lights in the sitting room were kaput and we couldn’t afford to mend them, so for illumination the burglars made a fire with some bills I’d left on the table. They stole my clock, and left the fire smouldering as we slept. Perhaps for us, like the rest of London, the time had now come to move house.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: burglars can be less violent than you think > Emma Biggs > London in the eighties > modern day Marie Antoinette > Mosaic Workshop > the life of the poor > the life of the rich > the sad effects of burglary