Unzip and Other Compact Stories

2

  The old town of Stilbury had been surrounded by a necklace of ring roads and roundabouts, like a tarmac- grey string of pearls. Whether the intention of the urban planners had been to adorn or strangle the city was a matter of debate. Along these bleak dual carriageways a host of functional warehouses and services stations had sprung up like trees along a river bank. Trees sought water and trace elements; discount stores and leisure centres came in search of access routes and parking space. It was their natural habitat.

  Stilbury was dwindling, its population trickling away to larger cities. Despite the industrial estates, despite the Congress Centre, despite the demolition of every building over fifty years old. Once famous, at least locally, for its ceramic trade, the town had fallen prey to World Economics. Somewhere a handful of people were playing real Monopoly, gobbling up properties and amenities and laughing all the way past Go, whilst others went bankrupt. Rules of the game. Not so long ago there had been over a hundred working kilns in Stilbury, producing some of the finest pottery in the area. Today all but one had been bulldozed for redevelopment.

  The new Stilbury was a drab affair. Only a few streets remained of the historical centre, marred with office blocks and plate glass shop fronts which had somehow managed to squeeze themselves between the traditional buildings despite the uproar. Anonymous architecture, cloned from a thousand other towns worldwide, offered a dull backdrop to the listless townsfolk. It was ironic that Stilbury, in the past a town renowned for its things of beauty, should now be reduced to this insipid, uninspiring present, as if the aesthetic and the functional were mutually exclusive.

  But the terrible truth was that nobody bought ceramics anymore. They were expensive and impractical. Plastic substitutes could be found for a fraction of the cost. Or cheap imported versions. Why pay more? Bailey’s had at last gone under, the largest manufacturer the town had ever known, and one of the oldest too. Sold out to a DIY franchise.

  Coming into town off the M17, exit 43, the foundations of the long heralded Pottery Museum could be seen like archaeological remains, abandoned to the approach of weeds and vermin. It would never be finished now, arts funding being a thing of the past. The treasures intended to find their eternal rest in Stilbury Pottery Museum could now be seen in a modest exhibition at the back of My Old China Shop, just off the town square.

  Ted Turnbull, the proprietor and master craftsman of the shop, and of the last working kiln in Stilbury, was under as much pressure as the town itself. One by one he had seen how his fellow potters had been forced to close, unable to weather the storm, unable to survive without protection in the Free Trade Zone. Market forces the media said. Law of the jungle it used to be called. But Ted Turnbull struggled on, against the odds, against his family’s advice, against financial logic, like Canute fighting back the waves of change; stubborn, resolute, and doomed to eventual failure.

  The other kilns had moved on; he would stay. The local council had refused to fund the Pottery Museum; he would house it. Other shops had given in to the persuasive tactics and ready cash of the import trade; he would hang on. He would not sell trash, he would not abandon the skills he had perfected over a lifetime, he would not sell out to the highest bidder. Ted Turnbull would continue to create things of beauty, even if no-one wanted them, even if he never sold another one in his life, even if all they would do was gather dust in his makeshift exhibition room.

  Because he had to admit business was slack. Even his less artistic work was of the highest quality, but with a price tag that reflected the hours spent in its manufacture. His earthenware urns, his decorative figures, even his lowly plant pots, were considered luxury items by most of the townsfolk and sold slowly. So when he arrived on Monday morning to find that almost every single piece stored in the backyard had been destroyed, deliberately vandalised by persons unknown, though heavily suspected, he realised that final defeat was not far away. Luckily they had not ventured into the exhibition area, and his most prized items remained intact. For now.