Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.
There isn’t room to walk into our shed without moving the stack of plastic trugs that stand in the doorway. On the left, hanging on the wall or leaning against it, are spades, forks and rakes, some of which belonged to my father and some to my father-in-law, Bill Ellis. I’m particularly glad to have a long-handled cultivator – a four-pronged cross between a fork and a rake – because I think that might have come from my grandad, Robert Bell, who had an allotment just across the road from his cottage in Sutton-cum-Lound near Retford.
The large black pond net, which I use to scoop up duckweed, would probably be safer stored in the garage as it’s had several holes nibbled in it by the mice that occasionally adopt the shed as their winter quarters.
The utilitarian stationery cupboard is consigned to the corner but, as it’s on castors – and therefore not a stationary cupboard – it occasionally gets wheeled out. Card and paper gets converted into booklets when it goes through the Xerox laser printer before I collate, fold and trim on the worktop at the lighter end of the studio, near the large Velux roof-light window.
In contrast to this sleek operation, an old Ikea office chair, which sits next to the printer, looks worn and rather threadbare.
Equally forlorn, a four-octave USB keyboard hasn’t been used since I attempted to add a minute’s atmospheric background music to a short film that I’d made of our back garden on a frosty morning. It proved far more difficult than I’d imagined to come up with anything more than an aimless plinkity-plonk.
A much more successful purchase was the exercise step that sits on the floor next to it: I use that briefly almost every day in a five- or ten-minute exercise routine.
Nicola Coughlan, who describes herself as a ‘Small Irish Acting Person’, was today’s subject on the Portrait Artist of the Year live session on Sky Arts. There’s an option of using a still as reference or of joining in the full four-hour session, but I went just for the final hour and drew her as I might draw someone at a party, in a cafe or in the pub. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can sit in a cafe again and sketch the world going by.
Today’s artist was Alastair Faulkner, who, when he’s not painting, works as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon. He pointed out there were similarities in the two strands of his career but he can never step away from an operation that’s presenting challenges as he can from a painting.
I took the opportunity to draw presenters Kathleen Soriano, Kate Bryan and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.
As always, struggled with Joan Bakewell (top left).
We left it too late to buy our Maris Peer second early potatoes last year, so we took no chances this year and got these on the back bedroom windowsill chitting two weeks ago.
I found the Telephone Pen nib that I used scratchy and blotty, but that’s fine as I wanted an inky effect. Controlling my usual urge to add cross-hatching, I used a Chinese writing set to add the ink wash. The brush is made of goat’s tail hair.
It’s been a bad day for the local goats: they’re serving goat curry at the takeaway at the end of the road. It smelt delicious, but we haven’t been brave enough to try it yet.
'They come as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl & the Waverley Pen'
I’ve been reading Joanna Carey’s survey of the work of Quentin Blake and when she mentioned that his favourite nib was the Waverley Pen, I remembered that I had a box squirrelled away in the attic.
Sure enough there was the Waverley Pen box, in grandad’s Victorian writing box but there were no nibs in it, just a couple of fossils and a few small spiral shells. We once recreated a Victorian naturalist’s study for a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society display at the Wakefield Flower Show, so I’d used the box as a period detail.
I guess that I removed the Waverley nibs at that time, so the only one that I can lay my hands on now is the one in the quill-like pen holder that we used in the exhibition.
Somewhere in an old film canister or matchbox, I guess that I still have a supply of Waverley’s. As you can see from my sketch, using a Waverley Pen doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to draw like Sir Quentin, but it’s a pleasant pen to use and it produces a varied line.
Gothic architectural features of Newmillerdam Boathouse, which dates from the 1820s. I’d planned this as a small black and white diagram, but it works better larger and in colour. I’m still struggling with joined-up handwriting, some of these were ‘best out of three’, but I think that it’s worth the effort, as it gives a bit more animation to the captions.
“I’ll bring my lumping hammer!” was a typical response from Barbara’s dad, Bill, when I was explaining some garden DIY job that I had in mind.
Lump in Middle English is a ‘shapeless piece’. In Swedish it could mean a ‘block’ or ‘log’. Lumping stuff about in Yorkshire dialect refers to carrying heavy loads from place to place.
The other hammer was my dad’s and I think this is the one referred to as the ‘coal hammer’. As he worked for the National Coal Board he was entitled to concessionary coal deliveries. Our Victorian house had two coal houses and, if I remember correctly, the far coal house was the one with the larger lumps of coal which occasionally needed breaking up with the hammer.
I’ve been working in brown ink for a month, so I was ready for some black inkiness again. My gardening gloves made a suitable subject. Drawn with my Lamy Al-Star with the F nib and a Pentel Brush Pen.
Eighty years ago this month, at about 7.30 pm on 12 December 1940, my mum, Gladys Swift as she was then, my Grandad Maurice and Grandma Ann, rushed for this air raid shelter in the back garden of their house at 77 Nether Edge Road, as the alarm sounded at the start of the Sheffield Blitz. They hadn’t finished their tea (the term for early evening meal at the time) and my mum grabbed the pan of stew from the stove, so that grandad wouldn’t miss out.
An incendiary landed within yards of the shelter, causing irreparable damage to my grandad’s house and to the joined-on semi-detached house of his mother, Sarah Ann Swift, next door. Another bomb that landed nearby wiped out a whole family with direct hit on their house, so I feel lucky to be here really (I would be born 10 years later).
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to listen to my mum’s stories about her experience and try to picture the interior of the shelter but I never dreamed that I’d get to see it, so my thanks to Andy and Neil who on the day of the 80th anniversary invited my brother, sister and I to a Zoom meeting live from the shelter (or rather from the coach house next to it as the wi-fi couldn’t penetrate those built-to-withstand-a-bomb concrete walls).
On the the guided-tour phone footage that they showed us, I was impressed by the original concrete door, still in place on rusty hinges on one of the entrances.
This door led to a flight of stairs (now blocked with rubble) which was intended as an entrance for my great grandma Sarah Ann, who, as I’ve said, lived next door. On that evening though, she took shelter in her cellar along with her pet bird and her Pomeranian, Queenie. The rescuers brought her out of the wrecked house through the coal chute, along with the bird and the dog.
I imagined there were rudimentary bunks in the shelter but there isn’t as much room in there as I expected. Probably they sat it out, as I remember my mum saying that she once fell asleep down there in a deckchair and had the most extreme form of pins and needles imaginable when she woke because the cross-bar had been digging in behind her knees.
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton: a painting belonging to my grandad, which survived the raid.
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com