Ten Stones Each, Then an Angel or a Crocodile

Angel or crocodile. No third option. No dragon on request, although the psalm specifically mentions dragons.

It began with the headmistress, Dame Kitty Anderson, who had seen Threlfall’s ceramic-and-stone mural at Loftus and wanted one for the school, made by the girls. So in the summer of 1964 all 850 members of the school were asked to collect at least ten stones each over the holidays. That is 8,500 stones, minimum, coming home in the luggage of one girls’ school. They came back by the sackful from Cornwall, Threlfall recalls, and singly, wrapped in tissue paper, from Iona and Mount Zion.

I know which kind of family we are. Our kitchen windowsill holds forty-one holiday stones from eleven summers, unlabelled, awaiting a purpose. One of them may be from Iona. It may also be from the car park at Iona.

The theme was Psalm 148, chosen because it would suit both Christian and Jewish girls: a big sun in the middle, with everything flying, swimming, crawling and walking towards it. Only the ten-year-olds worked on it in class. Everybody else did it in dinner breaks and their own time, because Threlfall wanted it done only by the girls who were really interested. Offering a crocodile in the lunch hour is a very efficient way to find out. In our house I have used the same method with a dishwasher and got no takers at all.

This was, after all, a school where Esther Rantzen had got in at seven, in 1947, on the strength of a drawing of “an elf doctor arriving on the back of a snail”, her appalling mental arithmetic notwithstanding. North London Collegiate knew what it was doing with odd creatures.

By the summer of 1965 the ceramics were finished, and the girls mixed the sand and cement themselves, built the shuttering round each block and sank the pottery and pebbles into it. The wall came out at 2.4 metres by 8.2. About thirty years later Sir David Attenborough opened another mural at the school, and a former junior, Sarita Vamadeva, remembered the day it opened: “I made a limpet.” Threlfall still hears from her old pupils from time to time. “Makers of crocodile, angel and fish are now grandmothers.”

On Sunday I cleared the windowsill and offered all three children an angel or a crocodile. Two chose the crocodile. One chose his phone. I am making the angel.