I know now that it was a blueprint, but at the time I had no idea it was other than a picture, one I was not as yet equipped to understand, other then to have a sharp and instant conviction of its tremendous significance. Chicken was sitting on one of his orange boxes in rapt contemplation of this masterpiece. ‘What you think of that, then, gal?’ he demanded, not taking his eyes off it. ‘It’s beautiful.’ The blueprint was full of lines, some straight, some curving. The way these lines were drawn in, with strength and at the same time the greatest delicacy, reminded me, more than anything else, of my father’s exercises in Chinese calligraphy. I no more expected to make sense of them than I did of those ideograms, put on to paper with the lovely tapered brushes which came out of the little jar patterned with butterflies. That being so, Chicken’s next words confused me. ‘What you think she’ll look like, then, on the water?’ ‘The water?’ The man twisted round on the box and stared at me.
