Graduating from Durham with a First Class in Greek, Graeme was Head of Classics for one year at school in Lancashire, and a teacher for nine years in Norfolk. A Lecturer in Greek and Roman literature, University of Reading, he has also worked as a translator of French, Latin and Classical Greek texts.
This Biography holds the details of when he spent his holidays making furniture in Rob Corbett's workshop, Corpusty, Norfolk. In 1978, intending to make furniture, Graeme sidetracked into
building, singing with a Rock Band and having his daughter, lucy.
You can browse through Graeme's Work including a diverse portfolio of Books, Articles, Radio
and Plays.
Don't miss the News section for releases of new work and if you need to Contact him, he'll be
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Corbetts Workshop
First day of the Christmas holidays, 1974. The cedar wood I'd bought at a woodyard outside Norwich is cut into rough sections ready for the construction of a bed, designed by me. I vow not to change my clothes until I had finished making the bed. Where this potty, monastic notion came from, I do not know, but Rob rarely bothered to change his own work-clothes and the overarching pungency of the workshop aromas were varieties of sawdust, glue, the metallic acids of hot electrical motors and the fumes of the coke in the potbellied iron stove. BO didn't get a look in.
I began on Saturday, cutting, shaping, planing, sawing and chiselling joints, drilling holes for the fastening coach bolts, polishing, all the hours I could cram into a waking day and, by Friday evening, I was ready for the glueing up. In preparation for this - one of the most tense, alarming stages of the process - the tailboard and headboard, panelled with thin sheets of the fragrant cedar and standing five feet high, had to be put together dry, to make sure the joints were snug. (I'd fashioned the bed so tall because the bedroom in Middle House, where I lived, would barely hold a double bed: a large area underneath the bed offered extra storage space.)
Each set of legs was joined by two cross members, into narrow grooves along their length slotted thin panels which were also housed in the upright of both legs. Laying out these leg sections with panels was fiddly, time-consuming, painstaking. So, too, setting the big sash cramps to the right dimension, gathering thinnish blocks of wood to act as washers between both teeth in the steel jaw of the cramp and the soft cedar, tightening the whole assembly, checking the joints, cleaning out the mortises, retightening, and, when the joints were sound and ready, checking the whole thing was square and true with long laths to each end of which were fitted marking points; then pulling the whole gubbins apart and repeating the laborious process with the other section. The noises the wood makes as the joints close are intimidating, like cries of pain, easily interpreted – by me in my jumpy state, at least - as prelude to break point.
By 10pm, I was ready for the gluing up. Rob was in the workshop with me, finishing an order. He looked across. 'Fancy a pint?'
We walked down into the village, had our pint, then, outside his house, halfway between the Duke's Head and the workshop, we stopped in the pool of light from a street lamp by the stretch of grass beyond which runs the river Bure in its early stream. 'D'you want a hand?' he asked. I wanted nothing better: his steadiness, his expertise, his support, an extra pair of hands, master guiding the apprentice. We'd have had a laugh, too, got the job done in no time, easy, no pressure. But, I knew this was something I simply had to do on my own, from tentative start to agonising finish. Stolidly, I said, in a dull tone as if it weren't me responding at all but some mersmerising other presence: 'No thanks, I'll be okay', thinking, with a pang of dread and frittered nerves, that I might very well be far from okay, that the job would be beyond me, that it would go wrong – any number of ways it could go wrong, that the joints would ping and split, the panels refuse to settle and flip malevolently out of their grooves and scatter like so many wet plates in my fumbling clumsy hands. Why was I putting myself through this when my friend, a professional, was willing to help me, to share his own loss of sleep with me and see me right? I don't know, but I smiled, said: 'See you in the morning' and, with a brooding fear in my gut and consternation in my head, tramped off up the road and along the gravel path lined with alder leading to the workshop.
I turned the big key in the lock, pushed open the door, switched on the lights and set to. Mixed the glue, assembled the headboard, lower and upper rails with the thin laminae of the panelling in place (flimsy and tricky to manoeuvre when not sunk home and braced between the rails), squeezed the joints together, positioned the cramps and the washer blocks, tightened the screws slowly, slowly, and listened to the menacing creaks and squeals of the tenons as they were forced reluctantly home to the shoulders of the mortise, then wiping away any excess glue lest it stain the wood. The glue sets quickly enough to make you move fast and sure without hurry but with a deliberate confidence you may be a long way from feeling. Check for square. It was okay when you put it together dry but now, now, it won't go square, it's on the huh, as they say in Norfolk, on the sosh, and the cramps have to be shifted marginally to make the geometry accurate, minor adjustments taking time, precious glue-drying time.
By half past midnight, I had finished: the polished headboard and tailboard glued and gleaming in their holding frames. Exhilarated, tired out and very, very grubby, I switched off the lights, left the warm timber- and beeswax-scented fug of the workshop, and strolled contentedly back to Rob and Mary's house where I clambered into the sleeping bag on the settee. Next morning, the fatigue and eagerness to take my new bed home woke me early. Rob came down for a cup of tea. 'You did it, then?' he said. I took the bed home, bolted each endboard into the lengthwise rails, heaved the mattress up and ran a bath. When I had washed off all the grime that turned the water grey as a stagnant ditch, I ran a second bath and soaked. I finally emerged, glossy and fragrant once more, and, for weeks afterwards, the whole house was sweet with the smell of cedarwood.
On my first day at the workshop, Rob had had me pushing large balks of elm through the electrical cross-cut saw: heavy to manhandle, the unplaned edges of the timber, frilled with sharp splinters, rough on my hands, the whirring blade of the machine positively demonic and, as the saw-teeth bit, gouts of stinking sawdust spurted into my face. 'I''ll soon cure you of this bugger' he said, laughing, 'this bugger' being the yen to cut wood, fashion furniture, learn from scratch a new mystery. But, I refused to be cured. I had come to make furniture and I would make furniture. Nearly thirty years on, I still sleep in the high cedar bed. And, I learnt more about what I do for a living now in Rob's workshop than I ever gleaned from books and study, though books and study are central to my life. I learned about making things, about risk, about finishing the job. -
Building
Bought a house - sight unseen - near the workshop in Corpusty. Rob rang to say it was for sale, needed work done on it; I went to the estate agent and put in an offer, went to the bank to arrange a loan, then drove down to have a look at what I had bought. I did most of the renovation and enlarging work on what became End House myself. (A builder I employed turned out to be not only incompetent but a criminal. I sacked him.) Having dug the foundations of a two storey extension, I finished the brickwork abandoned by the cowboy, put on the roof, timbers, insulation, pantiles and ridge; added floor joists and a wooden floor, windows, plumbing, sinks, WC,bath, electricity; rendered the new walls ready for plastering - which I handed over to the plasterer for whom I had once worked and learnt the basics of the trade. Laid a tile floor downstairs, painted, decorated, furnished inside and laid out the garden. From the front door of End House, I one day saw my future wife, Jane Wheeler, riding past down the village street on her hunter, Herbert (by name and disposition). -
Rock Band
Mandrake Root metamorphosed into The Toffs and finally disintegrated in the grind of moneylessness and the shocking and inexplicable absence of a recording deal with a major label, indeed with any label. So, we established our own: Treaclehead, in reference to the morning when Jeremy, the drummer, poured a jug of porridge syrup over his House Captain’s head at breakfast and was promptly expelled. However, we had bags of fun and plenty of mind-numbing bouts of creative angst, played gigs all over the place, gathered a small following and got nowhere, really. I wrote a lot of songs, words and music, mostly at the piano, many of which we recorded in various studios - that was always a blast. John Peel played one - Bebop Junkie - on Radio 1 and the 45rpm vinyl has, of course, become a collector’s item. Listen to Freedom Train -
Lucy
Jane Wheeler and I were married in January 1980. In the December of that year, Lucy was born, nearly two months premature. In the scramble to readjust - Lucy spent the first three weeks of her life in hospital, most of it in an incubator, attended by Jane - I continued with a building job, made a crib from sycamore in the workshop and started to manage Jane's knitwear business which continues to thrive: she makes very beautiful things.Check them out.
To Lucy, two days old
Lucy knows why
There's blue in the sky
And green in the sea
But she
Isn't saying.
Between you and me,
It's not that she's shy
Of how? When? Or why?
She's simply
Not saying.
In 1982, the first piece I had ever submitted to BBC Radio was commissioned: a monologue about the true inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe. Speak to anyone at the Singer Corporation, as I did in the course of my research, and they will, with the chilling certainty of a Mormon, allowing for no possibility of either dissent, error or infinite regress, deny the very existence of Elias Howe, but he it was to whom the breakthrough idea of putting the eye in the point of the needle not the other end, as in hand sewing, came in a dream.
Six stories I wrote next, about composers, first in what became a long series, were duly accepted - Stravinsky, Balanchine, Barnum and the Polka for Circus elephants - Rossini and his recipe for tournedos - the death of Gluck - and so on - and I thought I had arrived: a writer for radio. The next eleven submissions were turned down, one after the other. But, as Mark Twain put it, a man has no business getting disappointed at a setback, he should be making up his mind to get even. I eventually wised up, partially, and got even, of sorts.