Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  Two years after we had discovered the quilt in her attic, Charlie’s aunt came to visit. I showed her the quilt and asked about its memories. She was dismissive; she thought it might have once belonged to her mother’s neighbour, who had been a housekeeper in some grand house. Perhaps the housekeeper gave it to her mother, having no use for it herself, but she could not be certain. Whatever its story, she was adamant it had nothing to do with the family.

  The romance of hope: how easily we fashion a history for ourselves. I was disappointed, of course, but still in awe of the skill, time and patience that went into the quilt’s creation. I could still stroke the minute patterns of its sprigs and stripes, and feel, when we lay beneath it, the weighty warmth of other peoples’ lives.

  Many of us have textile keepsakes in our homes, rarely used but treasured for their sense of connection to a person, a place, a moment in time. They are sensory and emotional triggers, too precious to throw away. We keep hold of these tactile tokens, these tangible family links, passing them on to the next generation as material evidence of where and who we have come from. I have hoarded a small velvet cuff, braided in cream, which was sewn by my father’s mother as part of a costume she made for him when he was a boy. My parents had always told me that I had inherited her sewing skills. When my father died and we left the house I grew up in I salvaged it, and when I trace my fingers over the rise of its braid I feel connected to my grandmother and to my father. It is a memento of family. More than that, it is a touchstone of belonging.

  But are the textiles we keep just sentimental scraps of the past or does their tactility allow us to retrieve something more than anecdote? In her book A History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman says that touch is our very first sense, the first tool we use to register and remember difference, to record heritage. The textiles we keep demand to be lifted, stroked, handled. They literally keep us in touch with our past. Cloth softens with handling. It absorbs human touch and the drift of odours that surround it during its making: sweat, spices, perfume, wood smoke. Bury your face in a textile and you can nose up the scents of lives far away and long ago. If it is an heirloom, it can transport you to a forgotten blend of family fragrance.

  In 2016 I organised a project called Material Matters. The idea was simple. Ten women from different parts of Scotland were to make a small wall hanging that told the story of a textile that mattered to them. In Dundee, Ishrat replicated the tiny cotton dress her mother had made for her when she was born, then kept safe. She gave it to Ishrat when she left Pakistan to marry in Scotland. Even now, with four grown sons, Ishrat says that if she is upset she will go in search of that little frock and hug it close, to comfort her in the aroma of home, the lingering scent of her mother.

  When the exhibition of the wall hangings was launched in Glasgow and Edinburgh the public were invited to bring along a textile they cherished and tell its story. The stories people told were surprisingly emotive: a young girl held up dress pattern pieces, still pinned to fabric, cut out by a mother who never survived to sew them together, kept by her as proof of her mother’s care. There was a Christmas tablecloth signed each year by family members until, decades on, it had become a family diary of sorts, chronicling festive get-togethers and fallings out. An older woman produced an apron she had stitched as a little girl at school, which she had discovered among her mother’s effects after her death, treasured for years. The daughter of a Second World War refugee showed us the small lace mat her mother had carried with her from Poland to Scotland on the long and hazardous journey to safety in Scotland, brought as a tiny remnant of a lost land and community. These stories encapsulated the emotional and tactile agency of needlework. Each person, as they held in their hands their chosen textile, was holding a conduit to someone they loved. But much of the needlework people brought with them was newly discovered, pieces that had been folded away, only to be re-discovered after death. Why was it that these past lives, the attachment of mothers to daughters, had been so secreted away? The answer surely lies in the belief that needlework, pieces made at a particular time by a specific person in a place long ago, is a freeze frame of the time when it was made. It is part of a personal memoir.

  Cloth holds on to its material memory. Cotton will stubbornly retain the mark of its folds in the faintest of lines that no amount of ironing can fully erase. Velvet, pressed against its pile, will flatten to a sullen sheen and resist resuscitation. If you scrunch a piece of linen in your hand it will emerge peaked and dimpled like a small mountain range, waiting for the wind or a hot iron to restore it to plateau. In many cultures, the persistence of old cloth, stitched by others, endows it with greater value. Conserved within it is the passage of time, harbouring the spirit of those who created, wore and handled it.

  In the eighteenth century, the desperate mothers who left their infants in the care of London’s Foundling Hospital were encouraged to leave tokens, both as a memento and as proof of parentage should they be able at some future point to reclaim their child. Many chose to leave a small fragment of cloth, and these now represent the most extensive archive of eighteenth-century fabric in the world, safeguarded at the London Metropolitan Archive and the London Foundling Museum in what are called ‘billet books’. Intrigued to see them I visited the archives, filled out a request form and waited for a delivery of history.

  The billet books, when they arrived, were filed in grey cardboard boxes, each volume covered in dark green marbled paper. They seemed more like the ledgers of a bank clerk than the poignant scrapbooks of impoverished mothers and abandoned babies. I laid one down on the bookrest and opened it at its first page: 23 February 1760.

  The writing is beautiful, elegant in delicate copperplate, registering each child’s date of arrival, its gender and age, and allocating it a number. Below is a printed list of children’s clothes, such as cap, gown, petticoat, bib, waistcoat, shirt, shoes, familiar terms alongside others no longer in use, like biggin, clout, roller, pilch, long-stay, words ticked off to account for what each child was wearing when it was left, a scrupulous record of material possession. The relevant items are ticked off on the left, but on the right is an unexpected and illuminating hand-written description of the exact nature of some of the garments: ‘blue and white flowered lining’, ‘figured ribbon’, ‘purple and white sprigs, scalloped, round with pink and brown rosettes’, ‘red leather shoes’, ‘Irish rag’. Most babies arrived only with basic necessities, but a few were clad from head to toe in bonnets, robes and stockings, tucked into blankets and wrapped in coverlets.

  But the tokens themselves were the most telling, each one skewered with a hand-hammered pin to each child’s inventory. The tokens are tiny, just an inch or two of cloth, snipped from a shawl, a skirt, a blouse, a bonnet ribbon, cut off from the mother’s clothes at the point of separation. Many are grimed in dirt, some thinned with wear, most dulled by poverty. The majority are plain weaves such as checks and stripes, but there are occasional glimpses of prettiness: a floral print, a gather of pastel ribbon. One child was left a pale blue satin-soft rosette. In the company of the other, more austere tokens, it appeared as luxuriant as a full-blown rose.

  I thought about that moment of choosing, of mothers deciding what remnant of themselves to leave, how best to communicate love, regret, hope, a small explanation to the child they will never see again, while the registrar hovered with his scissors. Many tried to leave something of their hearts, choosing to snip off a motif that could be symbolic, like a heart, flower bud or butterfly. Some cut their piece of fabric purposefully in two and, hopeful of reunion, kept one half as evidence of parenthood. One woman, Sarah Bender, came back eight years later clutching her half of an embroidered heart and was reunited with her son.

  A few of the tokens are pinned to other papers, such as a confirmation of baptism signed by a curate, a scrawled record of a baby’s name, its date and place of birth, or a mother’s message to the hospital governors:

  While my father is abroad, fighting for his kin
g, receive into your Protection this helpless infant, who through your generous goodness may likewise be enabled hereafter to offer that life you now Preserve for the Service of his country in which he will so greatly owe it.

  and:

  The Mother of This child was willen to part from It For She was not Abel to ceap it. This child was crisend by Mr Huberd of Suren. And its name is Mary.

  As I turned each page I felt I was turning back time itself: the pages were so pristine, the handwriting still clear, the pins un-rusted, the fabric undimmed. The urge to offer a benediction was irresistible. I pressed a finger lightly on a rough inch of wool, turned a page and gently lifted back the fold of the next token. It revealed an acorn printed on coarse linen, still colour-sharp. I felt a slip to sadness. Here I was, 250 years later, a stranger able to revisit these shreds of care, these tokens of love, with a level of access denied to the women who left them, and their children. The tiny tatters of fabric spoke as regretfully as they were meant to do when a mother chose them. They moved me not just because I knew their stories, but because they had the palpable, inextinguishable, imprint of loss.

  There are a hundred pages in the billet book. I checked the date for the final entry: 29 February 1760. This large tome represented one week’s intake of children: 100 babies left in just seven days. I closed the book with no appetite for another. It felt intrusive enough to have glimpsed the desperation of 100 women’s lives, 100 women who had no means to raise their child. In an age when pregnancy, if unmarried, brought shame, censure, unemployment and sometimes exile from family and community, when women had little say over their bodies and few economic rights, destitution and abandonment were common fates. I was replete with the pity of it all. Between 1741 and 1760, 5,000 scraps of fabric were deposited. Of the 16,000 children left in the care of the foundling hospital during that time, only 152 were ever called for again.

  Rags have long been believed to hold special powers. The agents of mythical, magical and mischievous worlds – Harlequins, Mummers, the Lord and Lady of Tatters, shamans, dervishes – all wear costumes pieced from cloth patches. The Japanese sashiko cloth, layered and patchworked with pieces of fabric, was known as ‘the robe of rags’. Pilgrims to sacred wells and ancient trees often bring and leave pieces of cloth, some cut from the clothing of the sick, some from their own clothes. These are appeals imbued with a human essence. As their colour fades and the fabric disintegrates, so, it is thought, an illness will ebb, a dilemma will be resolved. Travellers to the Clootie Well in the north of Scotland still tie fabric strips to the surrounding hedgerows to make a blossoming of hope.

  Sewing pieces of fabric together was believed to endow the pieced cloth with spiritual power, the needle’s magical strength permeating every join, the more joins, the greater the potency. This is the traditional source of the allure of patchwork and of quilting: sewn acts of resurrection, reconstitution, re-connection. In many cultures it is believed that patchwork and pieced quilts made from peoples’ clothes transferred energy between generations, the dead and the living, mother and child, creating a collective human power, each salvaged piece transmitting its own force of identity.

  The belief in the collective strength of cloth continues today. In Syracuse, New York State, in 2008, the World Reclamation Arts Project covered an entire abandoned gas station, complete with pumps, offices, garages, with 3,400 cloth panels embroidered with messages about the environmental damage caused by our global dependence on oil. Its impact lay both in the unexpected splendour of the visual transformation of an industrial site into an exuberance of colour and texture, and in the scale of its collective action. Fabric panels had been donated from twenty-nine states in America and from fifteen countries. This project by WRAP, the first event of its International Fiber Collaborative, had physical and accumulative force.

  It is not only joined patches of cloth that can bind human spirits together to create a denser energy; layers of cloth stitched together are also thought to strengthen connection. Kanthas, the quilted and embroidered cloths of Bangladesh, are traditionally crafted from uncut cloth. Seamless, they prevent the entry of evil spirits, layered, they trap greater psychic force. From used materials such as the unpicked fabric and unravelled thread of old saris and dhotis (men’s garments), each reclaimed cloth was traditionally laid one on top of another, ensuring a combined connected force. The layers were sewn through with clusters of tiny running stitches to form talismanic symbols. This was an act of restorative restitution, of harnessing the energy of the dead to the spirit of the living and linking generations in a combined amplified strength. Kanthas are still made today, but not with the same purpose. They are made for the tourist market, simplified and impersonal. They are still pretty but lack emotional investment; even when older patterns are reproduced, their effect is diminished. But why should that be apparent if the stitches, motifs and techniques are the same? Why do they not look or feel the same as older traditional kanthas? The answer must surely lie in our sanitized age in which we demand cloth untouched by others, in which the idea of recycling the clothes of dead people to make something for ourselves seems disrespectful. Of course we recycle, but we rarely know the provenance of the clothes we buy from charity shops. We have lost the concept of directly connecting to our ancestors by using their garments to endow us with the residue of their spirit. The pristine cotton of modern factory-made kanthas has none of the quality, meaning or emotional value of the originals.

  A similar fate has befallen the molas, the embroidered bodices of Kuna Indian women, most of whom live in the San Blas Archipelago along the Atlantic coast of Panama and Colombia. These appliquéd and embroidered blouse panels traditionally have eight layers of cloth that represent each universe a soul must travel through on its journey to the afterlife. The designs originated as tattoos, but Spanish colonialists in the sixteenth century introduced cloth into the Kuna culture and, advocating modesty, encouraged women to cover their breasts. The women began to wear blouses onto which they transferred their tattoo designs. They adopted a technique called reverse appliqué in which, rather than stitching cloth on top of cloth, layers of differently coloured cloth are placed together and each layer is then cut through to reveal the colour below in an increasingly intricate and detailed design. Traditionally, molas were spiritual objects that carried tribal myths and beliefs passed on through generations. Now, like kanthas, they are made for tourists, but not as blouses. Instead they are sewn as small panels, generally just on two layers of cloth sewn with contemporary motifs. But in private, Kuna women conserve their traditions even today, sewing detailed embroidered molas for ritual ceremonies to preserve a complex and ancient culture retained through stitched patterns, symbols and sewn myths.

  Layers of cloth and patches of fabric were what Ann West used in 1820 to reconstruct the world around her. Her remarkable quilt is a fabric memoir that contains local personalities and familiar scenes from her everyday life, sewn down for posterity on an array of fabric off-cuts, scraps of coats and uniforms and pieces of wool. No one knows who Ann West was or where she lived. There is strong evidence to suggest she came from Warminster in Wiltshire, and an Ann West appears on its 1841 census. If it is her, she was a seamstress, married to a tailor, which might explain her access to so many kinds of scraps of cloth and because she signed and dated her quilt, we are sure of her as its maker. What she did with her scraps was to animate scenes from her life. Here a milkmaid is milking her cow; chimney sweeps are wending their weary way home; a sailor with a wooden leg begs for alms; a rich man goes about his business as his black servant follows on; someone receives a letter; actors put on a play; a gardener trundles his wheelbarrow back home along the road; a fiddler plays out a melody; a man sits under a tree enjoying a leisurely cigarette and a pint of ale. Over seventy tiny figures are represented, real people immortalized, personified, by Ann’s attention to detail: the jaunty angle of a hat, the stoop of a beggar woman, the vanity of a man’s combed whiskers and, amongst it all, m
aybe Ann herself on her wedding day.

  Ann West’s quilt is more than an illustration of what lay around her. In it, she has sewn her curiosity, her lust for life, her empathy, stitching down her social world as it crowded around her. It is an act of connection to, and a commemoration of, a place and a community. With her scraps of fabric she has literally textured the world of early nineteenth-century England.

  Amongst her many portraits Ann West embroidered forget-me-nots and hearts and stitched a final message ‘Remember Me, Forget me Not’. Ann West wanted to stay forever connected to a world she had preserved in fabric in a future she would be unable to share.

  It is 2011 and Harriet’s eighteenth birthday. Her mother wants to give her something special to take away with her on what is to be a new adventure: leaving the farm in Perthshire where she grew up, in a remote rural glen, for the urban excitement of Glasgow. Harriet’s mother enlists the help of family, friends and neighbours to secretly sew a patchwork quilt which, through small, individually designed squares, will be an intimate and personal capturing of the different strands of Harriet’s life.

  There is a stitched version of the Pythagoras theory made by her maths teacher; hearts in the clan tartans of both sides of her family; the embroidered house number of her new flat in Glasgow and the cross-stitched street view of where she sometimes stays with friends in Edinburgh; her dad has appliquéd his red tractor; her mum a reproduction of a much-loved family photo of Harriet, bare-bottomed at the age of two, trying to round up sheep. Among all these are other references and mementoes of her life so far: horses and thistles, fabric-printed selfies. Her interests, hopes and friendships are all gathered together in a personal biography of family and friendship made by those who wish her well.

  On her birthday, Harriet receives her quilt. Its makers gather at the house for a celebration and to see, for the first time, what others have made, how their piece fits into Harriet’s story. For Harriet, the quilt is an unexpected gift of farewell and fortune, made by those who have helped shape her life. It is an album of connection to places and people, redolent with personal bonds and special memories.