John Purser on friendship with sculptor and etcher Charles Wells

Wonderful white marble heads of women, their hair supporting them; a back with shoulder blades so real and yet so abstractly beautiful you would scarcely believe the hand of man could have produced them; lovers in a remarkable yellow stone, held, rather than locked in an embrace; and our own little children rushing around between the pieces.

Natty-suited Italians and well-dressed women everywhere but they were all Italian, so the children running about was fine with them.

Wells and Diana lived on a lightning-struck promontory at Castello, overlooking our rented house in Solaio in the shadowy hollow of the valley. Diana had her feet burnt by lightning once when it streaked across her kitchen floor. She kept a donkey, Wells kept a motorbike.

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The Italians appreciated art in a way scarcely understood in this country. Wells had need of a proper mattress for Diana’s troublesome back but all the mattresses were way out of financial reach. However, surveying the top-end possibilities in a swank furniture emporium, Wells noted that the walls were bare of pictures.

He collared the owner and proposed paying for the best mattress with etchings. A deal was done and the mattress duly installed.

My first wife and I were there through the winter, she studying composition with Luigi Dallapiccola on occasional trips to Florence, I supposedly composing an opera.

The house we were renting proved to be very cold and I spent much of my time sawing up firewood to keep us from perishing.

We were surrounded by marble quarries and sculptors and artisans and marble packers and vast marble lorries – and even an old bullock cart with solid wooden wheels drawing marble through the streets of Pietrasanta in defiance of the internal combustion engine, first invented by Pietrasanta’s own Eugenio Barsanti.

Duly inspired, I tried my hand at carving a marble mortaio – for a mortar and pestle. The butcher’s wife caught me at it one day as she took a shortcut past our front door, and snatched the tools out of my hands to demonstrate how it should be done and attempt to teach me about the verso and the contro which, if not respected, would lead to my shattering the stone.

Every child knew about the grain in the marble, the verso and the contro, and could identify it in the mountain and in any piece of marble they chanced upon. When ignorance is total, one should really give up but, armed with new-found knowledge, I managed two mortai, rather too heavy, but serviceable.

At the doorways of many houses in the district, the steps were flanked by mortai serving as flowerpots. These were the productions of young artisans – their first essay into stone-carving because it taught them the balance between internal and external forms.

These young lads, whose work far excelled mine, would proudly present the fruits of their early apprenticeship to their mothers who already had excellent mortai handed down through generations and seasoned by generations of grinding herbs and spices. But Italian mothers are soft on young lads and so these youthful efforts were never discarded and ended up as flowerpots.

Where we were, they sent their children to school with scacciata, a kind of dimpled flat bread drenched in salt and olive oil. The recipes online are for stuffed ones.

No such luxuries in those days and that part of the world but Italian mothers were also superb cooks and there was always home-bred chicken or home-bred rabbit; fresh vegetables on sale at the roadside; creamy-crumbly cacciotta cheese from sheep’s milk, and salamis from the weekly local market; and, of course, home-produced olive oil and tomato sauce, bottled for the winter. Simple ingredients cooked beautifully but without any pretensions. My son went to the local primary school – everything efficiently arranged by the communist regime of the district.

The chef for the school lunches worked in the sculptor Henry Moore’s favourite restaurant in Carrara in the summers. In the winters she cooked wonders for the kids. My son, Seán, being the only blond in the school, got the best of everything, including the bits of deep-fried garlic and rosemary always added to the chips.

Perhaps because of my persistence in folly, hacking away at marble, Wells invited me to join him in his sculpture yard. Or maybe it was because we both loved James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, from which he could quote at length. It was the most treasured of times.

He never taught students and worked very much on his own, so it was an honour and certainly an opportunity not to be missed.

Down the valley, I went to his studio/workshop in Pietrasanta to try my hand at a portrait head of my wife, Wilma.

You approached Wells’s workplace through ancient, tall, rusted wrought iron gates and walked down a broad cobbled lane between a high wall and a sort of shed-cum-open gallery.

The gallery, above head level, was all ruinous plaster casts – Venus de Milos who, already imitating the original mutilation, were further damaged; scattered limbs and heads; and a disjointed plastic baby doll encrusted with wormy barnacles, retrieved from the sea. The company was surreal.

Emerging into the open yard area, half peopled by rejected sculptures, one was immediately confronted by a vast triangle of stone, perfectly cut into a wedge of cheese shape, but several feet long and several feet high. Near the summit of this wedge, knees bunched up, sat Wells with his guitar and a mouth organ on a frame hovering in front of his lips, as he sang some folk-inspired diatribe against President Nixon who, though he had resigned by the autumn of 1974, still sucked.

I stood at the bottom of the cheese and waited for Wells to finish his song. It took several verses. Nixon was not to be disposed of casually. Meanwhile, as the afternoon ran out of energy, the sun began to sink behind the back wall that separated the yard from the main railway line.

There was something spooky about the sound of the Rome express racing by invisibly, the station of Pietrasanta being equally invisible at that speed to the express, which never stopped there. Spooky too were all those plaster casts of the long dead in their varied levels of decay and the abandoned monuments of yesteryear scattered about the yard.

But when it comes to addressing point and chisel to stone, present realities supervene. You have to select your hammer by type and weight, the length of your point, the width of your chisel. I soon learnt that the human head is wedge-shaped and the nose is well in advance of the rest, so you start working back from the corner, not the face of a block.

My block was a piece of marble I had picked up by the roadside. It was all eaten away by rusty-coloured earth on one side and was grey streaked everywhere else. No sensible sculptor would have picked it but it intrigued me and I happily chipped away with tools lent to me by Wells who would make a few sparse comments and then let me get on with it.

It was hot, hot work, a hot autumn. I got a chip in my eye and Wells took me to a trattoria where everybody knew how to get a chip out of your eye and where everybody’s left hand, at the flat area between thumb and forefinger, was mashed with accumulated bruisings from the occasions when the hammer skidded off the head of the point.

They also knew how to cool you down on a hot day: vinegar soup and brown bread. The soup was warm but refreshing and cooling at the same time. I thought about the offer of vinegar on a sponge to Christ on the cross and realised for the first time that it was an act of charity.

Over the years our friendship blossomed. One of the best times was on a privately-owned ranch at Vallecitos high up in northern New Mexico.

The place was spectacular. In front of the ranch house was a series of fish ponds. Upriver there were beaver dams and magnificent ponderosa pines.

Some miles to the east was the nearest working ranch from where we got milk and eggs. It was guarded by a small, one-eyed yellow dog who came up to the gate and glared at me with his one distinctly hostile eye. I waited for its owner.

As well I did. “How did he lose that eye?” I enquired. “Guarding the horses.” “From what?” “Mountain lion.” How the hell a little beast like that could see off a North American mountain lion – a cougar – was beyond me.

Apparently, the dog had heard the horses in distress in the middle of the night and had gone out in time to see a cougar stalking them. The dog made for the cougar, sank its teeth into a rear ankle and refused to let go.

The cougar kept swiping at it with its front paw until it eventually gouged out the dog’s eye. But that had no effect on the dog and finally the cougar gave it up as hopeless and the dog came home triumphant. I remarked on its unusual colour – yellow. “Oh, he’s half dingo.” Which explains a lot.

I was at Vallecitos at a pivotal period in my life and, at Wells’s suggestion, ended up erecting my own small henge on a rocky outcrop on a ridge on the property of the US government. Wells and Diana’s sons, Quinn and Brookie, helped me gather rocks. Wells himself was creating a masterpiece of the fallen Icarus on a neighbouring promontory, owned by a member of the Sierra Club.

Wells’s work was aligned cunningly and had his own characterful dry-stone work leading up to and flanking it. The place is now a mountain retreat centre and participants make pilgrimage to Wells’s sculpture and one or two have added a stone to my own folly.

Quinn is dead. Wells is dead.

I will never forget his first visit to Skye, reaching the summit plateau of Ben Meabost in thoroughly dispiriting weather. Not so to Wells. All was grey and damp, but under the low scudding clouds, he was louping and turning across the moss and heather, his arms outstretched and an ecstatic look on his face as he danced backwards calling out to me: “Gee, John, I just wanna disperse!”