I always responded to this in the same manner – by destroying everything I was making, locking up the workshop and doing something else for as long as it took for the ‘inspiration’ to return. This something else was usually several weeks spent out and about in the countryside, fishing, hawking or just walking the moors around Bolton. My boots, which I had just kicked through that painting, were put on and out I’d go.

For some time after giving up on Monks and his cronies, I spent my days training my new hawk. Falconry has always been one of my favourite interests. Ever since I got my first kestrel in my teens, followed quickly by a sparrow hawk, I’ve flown a few hawks and falcons. Sparrow hawks, incidentally, aren’t the best hawks to cut your teeth on, but as usual, having read that they are difficult birds to get to know and highly strung, it just had to be the ‘difficult pupil’ for me to start on.

Done properly, falconry is very demanding of your time. The hawks need to be flown most days, weather permitting, if they are to become fit enough to keep up with their wild and wily prey. The best falcon I had was something called a ‘tiercel’ – in hawk-speak, a male peregrine falcon. The female, about a third bigger than the male, is the one known as a ‘falcon’ to falconers. With all hawks and falcons, dominant females are more aggressive than the male birds, so in that way they’re a bit human, I suppose.

This tiercel was on the small side, even for his kind, but a brave little bugger in attack mode, regularly knocking over birds twice his size. I bought him in the mid-eighties as a captive bred from the Welsh Hawking Centre at Barry in South Wales for £500. He was a very intelligent chap, but most of them exhibit a remarkable understanding of things, and all from a brain not much bigger than a bean. If only the people charged with the running of our country could do as much with as little grey matter we’d all be in clover. After an unsuccessful flight he would alight on a nearby fence post or tree stump and look at me as if to say ‘that was your fault, you berk’. Then he’d whizz off for a few minutes, refusing to co-operate. Peregrines are at least as smart as a good dog and cleverer than a horse – or even a few members of the art establishment I have met.

I would usually fly them locally. A particular memory is of a place where I’ve had some spectacular flights and chases – a knot of old beech trees set high on the moors in an unusual enclosure that looked as if it had once been cared for. These old beeches had been battered by the prevailing westerlies racing in over the moors from the Irish Sea. On a clear day, you could see the water sparkling in the winter sun out past Liverpool and the mountains of Snowdonia. The windswept beeches were the usual hang-out for the local rook gang, and on this particular day, I was out with my hawk when the windbags in the trees began making a great din: something they always did when they spotted the peregrine approaching, sitting contentedly on the fist of the berk carrying him. Suddenly, the tiercel shot off my hand and raced for the trees. As the rooks squawked out to meet it, there was nothing for it but to stand and watch the fight. Peregrines don’t usually put the wind up rooks or carrion crows – they’re a big tough bird with beaks like pickaxes – but this one hadn’t read the script and went straight for them.

The usual objects of our attention were the game birds – partridge and the few grouse – that still live on the sparse unmanaged moors around the town. Until the 1940s, most of these moorlands were the preserve of the wealthy mill owners and closed to public access, but I’ll refrain here from a rant about the unworthy and over-mighty landowners who still populate our land, and get back to the chase. If I was lucky enough to spot a small covey of grouse before they saw me, I’d cast off the hawk into the wind and wait as he flew off upwind so as to gain height as quickly as possible. He would then turn downwind and use the backdraught to pick up speed before turning sharply into the wind again, ringing up higher with each circuit, until he was nothing more than a tiny speck on high. Then he would range slowly to and fro, letting me – his subordinate assistant – know it was time for action.

Not wanting to bugger things up, I’d wait until the hawk was high overhead and, for best effect, slightly upwind of the sitting game birds. At that moment, I’d run in on the sitting grouse who had no doubt been watching their age-old nemesis climb and take station high above. With a clatter of wings and grumbling calls, they’d break cover and scatter in all directions. The old birds usually turned downwind and would come by me at a rapid rate, just skimming to left and right, a couple of feet above the heather. They knew through experience this was the best defence from a stooping falcon. And their tactics always paid off. The younger birds, the birds of that season, only a few months old, would use their youthful power to fly away from me, into the wind, which had the effect of gaining height, making them a better target for the boss who by now had picked his prey from high above. At that moment, I would stop still to be an onlooker at one of nature’s best shows.

The falcon, rolling over to tip the air from under his wings, plummets to earth, only occasionally adjusting his trajectory with a half open tail or wing, and in what must be a split second of action – although, as in a motor crash, things seemed to happen much more slowly – whacks his target in a cloud of feathers. As the forlorn grouse or whatever falls to earth, the falcon zooms up for one last look at his handiwork, then drops upon it, and the grouse hits the heather with a bounce. I don’t have the required literary skill to describe it better.

But the battle with the rooks wasn’t such an elegant affair. Off on the wind they all went, climbing ever higher and out of sight. It was several days before I saw my hawk again. He was picked up near Huddersfield with several plucked-out feathers and two black eyes, courtesy of mixing it with a carrion crow. It didn’t stop him from chasing crows and rooks. I eventually lost that particular bird, but he was well able to look after himself and the shows he put on were worth the £500, so I hope he had a happy life. I know field sports aren’t to many people’s taste these days, but in defence of them I would say that most of those involved are good conservationists at heart and, as a rule, put more back in than they take out. Of course, as in all walks of life, there’s always the dickheads who give it all a bad name. But having seen the slaughter of domesticated stock and the despatch of wild birds and beasts in the field I know which I would prefer as an exit.

As the winter came in and the rain and blustery winds made it impossible to go hawking – still not fired up enough to resume my art work – I’d spend more and more of my time helping out my mum and dad. Slowly but surely becoming indispensable to them in their advancing years. I’d take time out for fishing or have days away in the lakes, walking, but my world was gradually shrinking around me. My earliest brush with the law happened a bit later. And it almost brought the wrath of Scotland Yard down on me 16 years earlier than was eventually the case.

During the late eighties and early nineties there was one of those cyclical booms you get in the art trade that ended, in typical fashion, a couple of years into the nineties with a big crash in prices. While it lasted, I’d noticed the gains made by the works of the Scottish Colourists. This fine group of painters was influenced chiefly by the French Impressionists. All of them were different in their style. My own favourite amongst them was Cadell whose work had a pleasing pastel quality to it. The other contenders were Peploe, Fergusson and Hunter. For my attempt, I decided on Peploe simply because his work was bringing the best prices.

Peploe’s technique is a nice thing and has a fluid and immediate quality to it that’s more difficult to do than first meets the eye. As I said before, producing believable oils on canvas is just about the most difficult thing in the faker’s repertoire. Most people have an image of the art faker as a bewhiskered old codger slaving away patiently at his easel. But I’ve never been bewhiskered and I wouldn’t know how to go about my work patiently. It’s always a bit frantic in my workshop with things getting made and destroyed all the time. The ‘Peploe’ came through this process in one piece and then received its cobbled-together provenance, such as it was. I knew that one of my mum’s relations had once been an art dealer with a shop in Edinburgh. So I used this story to explain how it had come into our possession.

The one abiding worry that many of the dealers I’ve known seem to have is of buying a stolen work of art. The law being what it is, I can sympathise with that, though I’ve sometimes wondered if that overriding concern is occasionally the reason for them taking their eye off the ball in matters of authenticity. Something must play on their minds for them to miss such glaringly obvious mistakes in many pieces sold as genuine by the trade. Not just my things. There are many others out there.

The ‘Peploe’ was my dad’s first ‘sale’ and almost his and my last. By this time, he had been retired for six or seven years and was bored to death with his lot. I asked if he wanted to go down to London to flog a picture and he jumped at the chance to get out and about for a change. I can’t recall when my dad became aware of my fakery, but he rarely asked what I was up to during the earlier years when I combined my copies, as they mostly were at the time, with my various jobs. So I never told him. He’d probably guessed before I realised he had. Dad had been a bit of a rogue himself in his earlier life, but never a bad person, despite what some arseholes have been allowed to say about him. All lesser men I’m sure. The inadequate always shout the loudest, don’t they ?

I’d already made a few enquiries as to who might be up for a ‘Peploe’ and we set off early to get into the capital by mid-morning, calling first on a dealer not too far from Harrods. Although keen to buy, he was a ditherer, and after lots of it, he upped his offer, but to nowhere near enough for a genuine Peploe. That said, I never expected to get a ‘full’ price for anything I did, especially not from dealers. After all, they have to make a living, too.

Having wasted a good part of the day on the ditherer, we set off into the West End and alighted on a shop near Duke Street. The only thing I knew of Duke Street was that it had been the London home of Brunel, so I half expected the whole street to be clad in plate iron and rivets. My dad was fired up to do his first sale, so off he toddled with the painting under his arm while I waited to see how things went. The whole experience was a new thing for me and a bit nerve-wracking. I prefer to do my own dirty work, if that is what selling those fakes is.

Listening later to the tape recording of my dad’s deal – I always recorded my dealings with the art dealers on a Sony pocket recorder and remembered to slip one into my dad’s pocket as he set off to flog his first fake – this dealer seemed taken with the picture from the start and expressed an interest in buying it. But before parting with his money, he wanted to subject it to an ‘authenticity test’. From my dad’s description of the process, I concluded it was nothing more than a raking UV lamp in a black box of tricks. This would show up any recent restoration and touch-ups. After pronouncing the picture genuine and a fine example of the artist’s oeuvre, he entered into typical dealer mode, disparaging it for not being of a suitable dimension for his discerning clientele, and all that. However, he would like to make an offer of £20,000. My dad almost bit his hand off and agreed instantly. At that time, £20,000 for such a picture was daylight robbery. But seeing as how it was my dad’s first deal, his enthusiasm was forgivable.

I’ve always kept a close eye on the prices of artwork and what’s at the top of its cycle. Timing is quite important in getting things to market, especially with the long lead times of getting a thing authenticated and into a sale. It’s something I’ve been aware of since making those first ‘pot lids’. Those were the most desirable and rare things to come out of the bottle tips, so they brought the best prices.

Dad took a cheque for the picture and emerged into the street after about an hour looking very pleased with himself. The whole experience seemed to bring him back to life, especially the £20,000. In the boom years, Peploes at the top of the market were going for £50,000 to £100,000. So I thought the dealer could have been more generous.

A few days after banking the cheque, we had a call from someone who identified himself as a detective from Scotland Yard’s Art & Antiques Squad. They had apparently received a complaint from a West End dealer in connection with a ‘Peploe’ he’d bought from us. In the end, the Yardies failed to follow up this contact and we heard no more about it. I heard later that they were massively overstretched at the time, which, this being the art world, I can well believe. What was curious was that in the course of the detective’s ramble on the telephone he described the work in question as being done in ‘acrylic paints’. Apparently, the purchaser had taken the picture to a restorer who told him it must be a fake as acrylics were unknown in Peploe’s time, as indeed they were. This story was brought up again by the Yardies during their investigation in 2006. They again mentioned that the picture was a deliberate fake, done in acrylics, that it was a poor effort and had started to peel from the canvas.

This was a bit of a puzzle to me. I don’t paint in acrylics and never have. What would be the point ? But I didn’t contradict them and went along with their description just for the peace of it. By that time, I’d had quite enough of their interrogations. All I can say now is that when I do a canvas, it ought to be good for at least a couple of centuries. So that little episode must remain a mystery. After the near miss with the Scottish picture, I turned away from modern art, as I call anything later than the mid-nineteenth century, and went back to doing sculpture and metalwork of an earlier and, for me, a more interesting time.

The only painterly exceptions to this were some fragmentary bits of fresco that I’d discovered were missing from an old collection. Years earlier, I’d done something similar for Monks – some fresco pieces ‘rescued’ from the burning of the Basilica of St Paul in Rome. These latest bits were supposedly taken from the demolition of old St Peter’s itself when it was being ‘remodelled’ on the orders of Pope Julius II at the beginning of the sixteenth century. I always think it incredible that no less a building than the Basilica of St Peter, the centre of the Christian world, erected on the orders of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, could have been demolished so brutally. I know what stands in its place is a worthy successor, but the ruination of old St Peter’s was a scandal in its time and caused great concern. I can’t imagine Westminster Abbey, which is now approaching its millennium too, being torn down and replaced by a contemporary design. But that is what happened in Rome in the sixteenth century. If they do ever knock down the Abbey, it would most likely be replaced by a smoked glass and polished steel dildo-type construction, with no mention of God anywhere within. After all, the apologists of the venerable Church of England wouldn’t want to offend anyone, would they ?

The fragments of fresco from the walls of old St Peter’s were done in a pre-Renaissance style. I’ve always been mesmerised by the great frescoes to be seen on the walls and ceilings of the fine churches of Florence and Rome. Buonarroti’s work on the Sistine Chapel is known to all and out in front of everything else. But my own favourites are the Masaccio frescoes on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine at Florence. They’ve been topped and tailed by other fine painters – Masolino and Lippi – but in technique and vision Masaccio’s work is outstanding and was recognised as such. Buonarroti and Raphael both went to look and learn from Masaccio’s work. And they certainly knew quality when they saw it.

Fresco and tempera, the preferred materials of pre-Renaissance Italian art, were both water-based. Fresco is painted at a rapid rate onto drying lime plaster, laid patch by patch as the picture progresses. The bigger the patch, the greater the ability needed to finish it before it dries. As the paint sets, it reacts with the lime and is drawn into the plaster to make a permanent image. If you get the chance to see an old fresco fragment in cross section, it’s similar to the effects of water being drawn into a dry sponge. The image is there in depth, so it lasts the ages. It also intensifies the colours to give fresco its unmistakable look.

Tempera was usually done on a smaller scale, the ground colours mixed with egg and water, but not exclusively so. Its effects are easier to fake than oil paints which superseded both techniques. A very fine example of Masaccio’s work in tempera can be seen at the National Gallery in London, part of an altarpiece originally in the Carmine Church at Pisa. It’s an outstanding example of painterly perspective of the early Renaissance and a beautiful work.

Oil painting came from the northern tradition of the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, but my favourite exponents of it are the Venetians, Bellini and his star pupil Titian. Titian took oil painting to a level that set the standard for all to follow. Even now, many of us can’t keep up. In the next age, it would have to be my ‘star’ painters, Caravaggio and Rubens, then on to Rembrandt. These are the great artists of a great era. And they certainly don’t make ’em like that any more.

I’ve always had a liking as well for views of ruined buildings – the watercolours of abbeys done by the English artists of the early nineteenth century and, especially, the even earlier views done by Piranesi of the ruins of ancient Rome. On my first trip there in the mid-seventies the ‘souvenir shops’ were full of modern reproductions of these things and I bought as many as I could afford. I would stare at their details for ages and imagine myself digging in the ruins and – hopefully – finding more than I ever found in those Victorian ‘bottle tips’ around Bolton. Knowing me, I’d most likely have ended up selling marbles ‘just excavated from the ground’ to the gullible of the Grand Tour. But I’m not the only pretender in the art world. Far from it.

Just for the record, I’ll mention something else that happened to me, so y...