by Ruth Thomas
RUTH THOMAS
Things to Make and Mend
For my sister Ann
… and then, while she threaded her darning-needle with the right worsted,
she would fish about in her memory for a tale to fit the hole.
Eleanor Farjeon, The Old Nurse’s Stocking Basket
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Here are some of the things you might make…
Hem
Back
Spider’s Web
Couching
Quarter Cross
Knotted
French Knot
Long-legged Cross
Scottish
Buttonhole
Mirrored
Zigzag
French Knot on Stalks
Kensington Outline
Star
Fly, Attached
Pearl
Stem Outline
Rosette Chain
Fern
Twisted Chain
Couching
Chain Twisted, Detached
Know what is meant by the International Textile Care Labelling code…
Petit Point
Burden
Cross
Up-and-Down Buttonhole
Thorn
Battlemented Couching
Four-legged Knot
Needleweaving
Double Back
Arrowhead
Wave
Tête de Boeuf
Long and Short
Renaissance
Acknowledgements
Note
About the Author
Copyright
Here are some of the things you might make:
Tray cloth
Handkerchief
Curtains for a puppet theatre
Belt
Hairband
It is best to use:
Firm material
Largish needles
Embroidery silk or cotton
The Brownie Guide Handbook, 1968
Hem
Sally Tuttle loves haberdashery departments.
Sometimes she will walk into one just to gaze at its beauty: at the ribbons and feathers, the broderie anglaise, the stacked rainbows of silk and cotton. It is like admiring a mountain or a still lake. Sally stands and regards the rows of threads, the baby wools, the beads, the sequins, the poppers, the cloth-covered buttons. She is soothed by the stiff, wicker dummies modelling their cardigans; the wide strips of satin, the magazines with their racy titles (Creative Cloth! Stitching Today! Cross-Stitch!). She even admires the word Haberdashery, printed on the swinging sign above her head. Haberdashery, with its hints of the Middle East and of the village hall.
There is also the fact that you hardly ever see a man in there. Haberdashery departments are havens; convents dedicated to the Patron Saint of Quiet Women. She walks into them to kneel at the altar of stranded cottons.
*
Most nights at the moment Sally has a curious dream about haberdashery. Her latest one involved a vicar sitting on a three-legged stool, eating peanut-butter sandwiches and stitching together a patchwork quilt. When Sally – her hovering dream-self – looked more closely at the pieces of cloth, she realised they were all her old school badges. The vicar had a huge pile of them beside his sandwiches: grey flannel badges bearing the picture of an owl and the motto patione et consilis. Patience and judgement. What was that all about? Sally wondered when she woke up.
She once went to see a counsellor who talked about the value of dream analysis.
‘Dreaming about water, for instance,’ said the counsellor, ‘can signify something to do with your relationship with your children.’
‘Not something like dodgy plumbing?’ Sally asked. ‘Or a burst water main outside your house?’
(This had in fact been the case at the time – their street had been awash for two whole days, like a fast-flowing river. At night the rippling sound was calming, taking her mind off things.)
The counsellor looked at Sally. She had big, eye-magnifying glasses.
‘No,’ she said sternly. ‘It is often nothing to do with actual’ – she paused – ‘watery events. How are you getting on with your daughter?’
‘Fine.’
‘And your parents?’
‘Fine.’
‘How about, erm …’ She looked at her notes.
‘Yes, fine thanks,’ Sally said.
Dream analysis has always seemed a bit airy-fairy to Sally. As does counselling. She has no patience with it. She only saw the counsellor (a Mrs Bonniface) three times before saying, ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t think this is for me.’ Looking relieved, Mrs Bonniface said, ‘You have to be ready, Sally. You are obviously not ready.’
‘No,’ Sally replied, picking up her bag, the one with far too many straps and buckles, and heading for the liberating rectangle of the doorway. ‘But thank you very much,’ she said. She felt as if she had failed an exam.
She wishes she could be one of those people who embrace things. But even though she likes the floating styles and pensive music of the Seventies, even though she is, she hopes, a gentle child of the Sixties, she is impatient with anything New-Agey, crystallish, alternative. It must be her upbringing – her practical, pragmatic parents with their routines and their slippers and their slices of sponge cake. She was picked up from that life, though, and dropped into another. That is the problem. It causes confusion. So she puts her trust in tangible things, material things, things that connect to other things. She likes her cat-shaped keyring fob, her lined curtains, her folksy wooden bookends, her crocheted, beaded doilies. They make her feel safe. In any case, her own vagueness, her ‘gossamer-light hold on reality’ (to which one of the men in her life once alluded) does not need further encouragement. Maybe that is why she became a needlewoman. There is nothing more tangible than threads sewn through cloth. She is happiest with something that is stitched down, not given the chance to slip or unravel or change.
*
The clothing-alterations shop where she works is called In Stitches. She has been there for eleven years. On difficult days it is a solace, requiring just enough concentration to take her mind off things, but leaving her daydreaming space. At other times it can be tedious, tedious, as she sits at her work-table surrounded by boxes of pins and name-tapes to sew into the collars of some unknown schoolchild.
Occasionally it is a source of amusement to others. (‘In Stitches as in had me in stitches?’ asked Graham, a man Sally was seeing recently – an estate agent from Hither Green. ‘Can I have you in stitches?’ he had asked clumsily – they were sitting in a dark cinema at the time, on their second date. ‘No,’ Sally hissed back, failing to achieve an intended tone of high spirits, clenching her ticket in her right hand. Neither of them had been any good at innuendo.)
Most people would have left In Stitches straight away if, like Sally, they’d suddenly been awarded a large amount of money. But Sally hasn’t. Sewing is a job she can do. It will still be there when she has spent the money. She is in fact a little scared of leaving. In Stitches is a comfort in her life, despite being a poky little shop located down a side street in East Grinstead, between a car-display showroom and a dog-grooming parlour. (‘A thorn between roses,’ Sally’s mother calls it.) It is owned by a man called Clive Brayne, who is hardly ever there, and is worked in by three women, Sue, Linda and Sally, who seem to be there all the time. Over the years they have developed their own specialities: Sue works on trouser legs, Linda takes in side seams and Sally restitches broken hemlines. The shop is busiest at lunchtimes, just when they are tiring and need a break themselves. The over-locker invariably locks. It is al
ways too hot, ‘Evil Edna’ the steam-iron creating a kind of jungly atmosphere which they try to counter by wedging the front door open with a needle case, allowing the cold winds of East Grinstead to blow in. By one-thirty they find themselves confronting a pile of broken-down clothes, their stitches burst and buttons lost. And Sue, Linda and Sally have to mend them within an hour. The shop has established itself upon its one-hour alterations service. They stitch against the clock, the silence broken every so often by the swearing that accompanies a stabbed finger. Sue and Linda and Sally. They have become friends in the detached but intense way of put-upon work colleagues. They love each other in a sense, and also know that any day one of them could leave and never return. I’m out of here, girls, and away one of them will go, into her future. But who is it to be? Meanwhile, they share each other’s submarine rolls and talk about their husbands, exes, children, parents. They would never dream of inviting each other home. They went carol-singing together once, for charity: they called themselves The Needlepoint Sisters and traipsed around in the snow outside other people’s homes. They had all had a hard autumn and early winter, culminating in this: three grown women shuffling around in the cold, ringing doorbells, singing ‘We Three Kings’, ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’. Sally shook the collection box, Linda held the torch, Sue started off the singing. They harangued the suburbs. Sometimes, people’s living-room lights would be on but no one would come to the door.
*
‘Isn’t it funny,’ Sally said to Sue the other day, ‘the way you suddenly realise you’re not twenty-eight any more?’
Sue looked at her. ‘I realised I wasn’t twenty-eight a long time ago.’
‘Yes,’ Sally said, ‘but you don’t notice it catching up on you, do you? Age. You just think you’re in your late twenties for years, and then suddenly you’re not. You’re in your forties. And the father of your child’s nearly fifty! And people start calling you madam. And you never get whistled at by builders any more …’
Sue stilled her work – a floral skirt – in her lap.
‘… and you think,’ Sally continued, ‘why have I got these lines on my forehead? And where have all these white hairs come from? I didn’t know I had all these white hairs.’
‘Sally’s having a midlife crisis,’ Sue yelled to Linda, who was taking in an enormous pair of trousers at the back of the shop.
‘Been there, done that, got the postcard,’ Linda shouted back, pins in her mouth. ‘Except people never call me madam.’
‘And you’re halfway down the ages in those tick-the-box questionnaires,’ Sally said. But now she was thinking, Stop it, stop it, stop talking. She really had been worried, lately, about her life. She laughed, rearranging her position on her locked swivel chair. ‘It’s just funny,’ she said.
And she shut up.
Sue hung on to her hemming. Then she leaned forward to pat Sally on the knee. She smiled, her lips warm and lipsticked. She said ‘You’ve still got to get on with it though, haven’t you?’
She is a sensible woman, Sue. Sage, owlish. She is heavily built and wears a lot of floating chiffon to counter-balance her girth. Despite this concession to impracticality she always washes up everyone’s mugs at the end of the day.
‘Why can’t I be as wise as you?’ Sally asked her.
Back
St Hilary’s, the school Sally attended in the Seventies, had a peculiar preoccupation with the gentle arts. Arts for girls. Cooking and needlework. Quiches spilled out from the ovens, haberdashery from the cupboards. St Hilary’s itself was hidden behind skeins of conspiratorial rhododendron bushes. Several grey, unalluring Portakabins adorned the grounds, plonked down beside the high-windowed classrooms. There was the Arts Block and the Science Block. There was a ‘playground’ where the girls slouched and whispered. There was a netball pitch, a hockey pitch and an outdoor long-jump, to which girls were sent out in midwinter in tiny shorts, their thighs mottled with cold. Sally will never forget the desolate wail of a sports-whistle across mud-whorled playing fields, or the pointless thud of hockey ball against stick.
She hated needlework then. Every Thursday morning, from ten to eleven thirty, the girls were supposed to sit in the Arts Block (classroom H) to improve their skills with needle and thread. And most Thursday mornings they did: they sat there, dutifully sewing. But they all destested it. Why bother making a ‘young woman’s skirt / jupe pour une jeune femme’ when you could go to Miss Selfridge and buy one? Their teacher’s name was Miss Button, as if she had been destined all her life to do this: to instruct teenage girls on the importance of neat fastenings. She was as unyielding as a newly-sewn button, too. She appeared at school, taut and disconcerting, the term Sally began her fourth year. Sally and her best friend Rowena Cresswell had been sitting in a Chemistry lesson at the time, trying to analyse the properties of carbon dioxide (Method: First we removed the oxygen from the gas jar by holding it underwater. Then we placed the gas jar over the …). They had turned their safety-goggled gaze to the window to observe a young woman dressed in shades of brown and tan, disembarking from a Spider car. She looked very neat. She glanced up, registered Sally and Rowena and then looked away.
The girls discovered, after Miss Button’s arrival, that Needlework was not a peaceful occupation, not a pleasant hobby with which to while away the afternoons. Miss Button possessed a ruthlessness that was alarming.
‘Karen Worthing, do you honestly believe this hemming is adequate?’
‘Rowena Cresswell, you have pinned the pattern on upside down.’
‘Sally Tuttle, this is a part of the trouser leg, it is not the pocket.’
She possessed something called a ‘Kwik-unpick’: a cruel-looking metal instrument with two prongs, one sharp and one blunt. It was very efficient at dismantling bad sewing. Miss Button loved her Kwik-unpick and was always very quick to use it.
When her mood was light she would sometimes issue photocopied sheets of ‘traditional sewing songs’ that she wanted the class to sing. This constituted the ‘fun’ part of the class. They would, she informed them, have fun.
‘Today,’ Sally recalls her saying one autumn afternoon as she returned magnificently to her desk, ‘we are going to sing “Wee Weaver”.’
And Sally and Rowena Cresswell had sat up straighter and looked at their photocopied sheets.
I am a wee weaver confined to my loom,
My love she is fair as the red rose in June,
She’s loved by all young men and that does grieve me,
My heart’s in the bosom of lovely Mary …
Confined. Sally knew exactly how that person had felt.
‘Wee Weaver?’ she mumbled to Rowena Cresswell.
‘Bosom?’ Rowena mumbled back, and they both began to snigger. Sally placed a Black Jack in her mouth and offered one to Rowena. Black Jacks were good at stifling sniggers; it was not a good idea to undermine Miss Button’s appreciation of Needlework. Because Needlework was extremely important. The term Miss Button arrived, she had arranged for the class to go on a French exchange specifically to stay in a village close to Bayeux and its tapestry. Sally can’t remember the name of the village now, but it had had dozens of road signs pointing the way to Bayeux, a café called La Bataille and a small gift shop that sold mini-tapestry gift-sets. It had been very rural apart from that, with old cars rattling down white dust-tracks, fields full of sunflowers, dead chickens hanging from their ankles in the market. At school the girls had sat with their penfriends and marvelled at the relaxed maturity of the class. Where were the serried ranks of desks? Where were the uniforms? They still, however, had to sing traditional songs, just as they did in Needlework classes back in England. And their French Literature teacher still issued photocopied sheets.
Le coeur de ma mie est petit, tout petit,
J’en ai l’âme ravie, mon amour le remplit.
Si le coeur de ma mie n’était pas si petit,
Il y aurait de la place pour plus d’un ami;
Mais le coeur de ma mie est petit, tout petit,
J’en ai l’âme ravie, mon amour le remplit …
‘I dunneven know what “ma mie” means,’ Sally remembers whispering to Rowena.
‘I presume it means “mon amie”,’ Rowena hissed back, ‘I presume it’s one of those thingummies.’
‘What – a corruption?’
‘Yeah. Is that the word? A corruption. Or a declension or something.’
Rowena and Sally had both gone to look at the famous tapestry of course; they had both located poor Harold with the arrow in his eye and all the fallen soldiers in their chain mail. They had admired the satin-stitch and the intricacy of it all. Rowena had got l’autobus to Bayeux with Miss Button and a motley assortment of girls. Sally had been taken there in a car by her exchange family, la famille Duval, who had been genuinely keen for her to appreciate their region’s celebrated artwork. They were a very cultured family, Sally recalls, although she picked up all kinds of swear words from her elegant penfriend. She learned to speak with a freedom she never acquired at school. French words tumbled out of her mouth. Les idiomes, les colloquialisms, les bons mots.
‘You speak French absolutely,’ said Madame Duval, holding Sally’s face between her warm palms and squashing her cheeks slightly, as if she was still a small child. She smiled. ‘You have an ear.’
Sally loved that family, that fortnight, that trip. That was when she thought she would go on to study French at university. Ha ha ha.
Rowena had had a less successful ‘placing’, she recalls, with a policeman’s family on the outskirts of the village. Her penfriend Laurence was surly and uninterested – she would not even go to look at the tapestry with the other girls; there was a deranged Alsatian called Bertrand, and they ate undercooked steak all the time. They never went out in the evenings. En famille, they stayed in and watched football in their small, overheated salle à manger. Eventually, Rowena came out in a rash – a stress-induced rash which itched and bled and turned out, when she had it diagnosed back in England, to be impetigo.