Chapter Four

It started with the children.

Not mine, thankfully, but the ones from the local primary school. Someone had told me parents were desperate for after-school activities, and I had enough experience corralling children from birthday parties and school workshops to believe this might be simple.

We would open the studio in the afternoons. I would put out clay. They would make pinch pots. Parents would collect them after an hour. The rent would become fractionally less terrifying.

On the first day, eight children arrived.

They were small, excitable and still carrying the heat of the playground with them. I had imagined order: I would demonstrate, they would follow. Instead, one child began chewing clay, another asked if he could make a sword, and a girl demanded to use the wheel before bursting into tears when I said she was too small.

I carried on, desperately cheerful, trying to shape lumps into bowls while fielding questions about Pokémon, slime and whether clay could be eaten if you cooked it first.

Parents arrived back forty-five minutes later and looked at the dust on their children’s uniforms with quiet alarm. I pressed damp, collapsing pots into their hands as if they were treasures.

By the second week, only three children came.

By the third, none.

It was my first lesson in the difference between being good with children and running a children’s pottery program in a half-built warehouse with one sink and limited patience.

William, of course, thought he could do better.

What people really needed, he said, was peace of mind. Meditation. Mindfulness. A quiet space in a noisy world. He found an old Tibetan bowl somewhere and began advertising drop-in meditation on pieces of cardboard he stuck around the neighbourhood.

On the first night, I expected four or five people.

Twenty arrived.

They came with yoga mats and cushions and the hopeful seriousness of people who had already told someone they were working on themselves. I had cleared a corner of the studio, lit candles and put blankets on the floor. It almost looked serene, if you ignored the dripping sink and the pile of clay bags behind the curtain.

William sat cross-legged at the front.

“We are here to let go,” he said.

Within ten minutes he had opened the roller door and invited in the neighbours, a passing dog and someone who appeared to be finishing a delivery shift. The meditation became a social evening. People chatted. Someone brought takeaway. A man tried to sell us homemade honey.

By the end, the original meditators left in silence, holding their mats tightly.

They did not return.

William declared it a triumph. He said it was community building. I said community building was not the same as paying rent. He sulked, then went back to prowling the streets with the dog, dragging home more chairs and crates to help.

And then there were the jumpers.

The jumper idea had seemed brilliant at the time. Late one night I found a small supplier in Cornwall selling handmade woollen jumpers at what looked like a bargain. I imagined pottery students slipping into them after class, warming their hands on mugs, looking rustic and financially useful.

I did not consider Melbourne weather.

I ordered a box.

When it arrived, I cut it open with unreasonable optimism. Out tumbled thick cable-knit garments that smelled faintly of sheep and damp coastlines. I held one up. It looked less like artisan chic and more like something a retired lighthouse keeper might wear while distrusting the sea.

Still, I pressed ahead.

I priced them confidently and draped them over a rack William had made from broom handles and rope. To launch the line, I wore one to class. Within minutes, sweat was running down my back. One child asked if I was hot.

I lied and said no.

William found the whole thing hysterical. He wore one around the studio calling himself Captain Knitwear and suggested we advertise them as heritage weight.

We sold two to neighbours who clearly felt sorry for us.

The rest of the box stayed in the corner, taking up space I didn’t have, quietly accusing me of confusing impulse with strategy.

Meanwhile William kept dragging in chairs with missing legs, shelves with no brackets and crates that might one day become useful if a person gave up enough hope. Between his rescues and my failed retail line, the studio began to look less like a ceramic workshop and more like a second-hand shop no one had agreed to manage.

That was the rhythm of those first months: bright ideas arriving quickly and collapsing just as fast. Children’s classes. Meditation. Knitwear. Furniture rescue. All of it slightly ridiculous, all of it somehow part of the studio learning what it was not.

I kept paying rent from the Run-Away Fund and telling myself each mistake was a step toward something more solid.

We were still alone in it then. The family didn’t visit. Friends assumed I was simply pottering in my spare time. But slowly the warehouse shifted from echoing box to workshop. The plumbing worked. The windows let in light. The floor, though uneven, held.

It wasn’t a business yet.

But it was starting to look like one.