Ken was a gentle-natured Polish wartime refugee who stoked the boiler at the laundry behind our big house in Chippenham. Well, it was referred to as the big posh house by other kids at Ivy Lane junior school just a short distance beyond the laundry. Ken let me use his workshop at the laundry and I have vivid memories of drilling through scraps of metal with a large bench mounted hand drill and he would show me how to bend and twist metal by heating it up with a blow torch until it was bright orange, or was it green? I wasn't sure because at around this age of nine or ten it was revealed to the world that I was colourblind (well they made such a big fuss about it at school).
School was hell because normal working class kids - who all had mums, regularly picked fights with me just because I had a posh accent and when I got home I got a beating with garden canes from father for speaking with a Wiltshire accent. At Ken's laundry workshop I would escape the domestic brutality of my father who banned me from entering his scruffy home workshop for fear of my messing up his tools. Ken was always kind and encouraging and just let me play with the tools and scraps of metal while he stoked the boilers - and helping when I needed it.
Who would ever guess that twenty or so years on I would be considered amongst 'the top rank of innovative (British) craftsmen' exhibiting my furniture designs alongside the cream of the Royal College of Art, winning awards, travel scholarships and prominent teaching jobs.
Perhaps it was a deep rage that drove me from the abyss of utter failure. Ken would never know but he had introduced me to a wonderful world of making things and that time and time again in my troubled adult life using my hands would relieve the anguish and eventually rescue me from the depths of paralysing cyclic depression. A foreigner who spoke little English and uttered few words, torn from his family roots by war, and with an unusual kindness and generosity of spirit.
An extract from 'Missing Jean' by Jeremy Broun
The Woodworker magazine 1984
The Caterpillar Rocker 'as original as Saarinen's four into one chair legs'
(from The Encyclopedia of Chairs)
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