Random reminder

Press, 21 October 1980, Page 33

Random reminder

GREEN LEAVES

Four Ham students wheedled some paint out of their landlady, who had to agree that the flat needed doing up. While some of them were re-painting large rooms with a spraygun and a bucket, it fell to one girl, a young lady of some artistic talent, to re-do the 100.

Not that the 100 was the "littlest” room. Bigger by itself than the average modem flat, it was tall to match, with one of those stratospheric cisterns operated by a chain three metres long.

There were pipes and plumbing everywhere. Everything was covered with many many layers of paint, the most recent of which — approximately 1945 — had once been purple.

She turned the Joo into a landscape. It was a new Garden of Eden. Leaves, Fruit. Birds flittering through the

greenwood. Animals cavorting in the undergrowth. Pipes and plumbing became tree-trunks, clematis, forsythia, grape vines. Butterflies fluttered by. Richard Attenborough sat on a branch. Then something went wrong with the cistern, and the landlady sent a plumber. He entered the 100. He came out, most impressed. "Beautiful.” he raved. “Fantastic. You don’t see that sort of thing very often these days.” "You thought it was all right, did, you?” smiled the young lady. "Yeah,” said the plumber. “Cost a fortune to replace it now. Everything in ’ there is solid copper or; brass. There’s not a bit of galvanised rubbish the whole set-up. If you got stuck in and scraped it al! down with a bit of paint stripper gnd a wire brush, it would polish up a treat,”