Nobody knits anymore, we have broken the skein. I don’t know why, but this is what I’m thinking as I park up in the shade of the cherry trees. The blossom’s going over, the ground is covered with bruised pink snow. This is a duty visit, she’s hardly there anymore. I suppose I’m thinking about her as she was when I was a child.
Nanna knitted for us, new navy blue school jumpers every September and fancy ones at Christmas. I remember a pearl-buttoned fawn cardigan for me with raspberry and pale blue fairisle patterns across the shoulders, and a cream Arran jumper for my brother with fisherman’s cables all up the front and back. And when Lucy came along late to our family, when Leo and I were already half grown, Nanna made a mint-green and cream squared pram rug with tassels at the corners, and a little pink and white cardigan with heart shaped buttons. There must have been others but these are the ones I recall.
I did ask her to teach me, but I had no patience. She said the first lesson was helping her to skein the wool. She wasted nothing, unravelling old frayed grown-up’s jumpers and re-knitting them into smaller ones for us. My job was to sit with my fingers stiff and my hands held apart like a spinning jenny, whilst Nanna, ash-laden ciggie in her mouth and her eyes squinting, rhythmically tugged the thread up from the unravelling edge and wound it round and round between my palms and my thumbs. While she worked she told me about her own Gran, born when Queen Victoria was still a youngish widow, and how as a child this Gran had worn skirts and "petties" but no knickers because they were too poor, and hand-me-down boots from her older brother. Nanna remembered him from before the first war as a crusty old uncle, with tweedy jackets and trousers that smelled of pipe tobacco. When Nanna had wound the whole hank and my arms were aching from holding the wool pulled apart, she slipped it off my hands and tied it in a large loose knot. Then she would wash the wool to get the kinks out, and dry the skeins over the edge of the fire guard. Later when they were dry I had to hold them out again, my fingers playing cat’s cradle between the threads to sort them, whilst this time she looped the straightened wool off my hands and rolled it into a ball ready for knitting. She tried to teach me to knit, showing me how to make a scarf for my teddy, but I wanted to be able straight away to do the pink and white cardigan with the lacy panels and the tiny neat little button holes all knitted in. The bit of tomato-red garter stitch that she had laboriously coached me through scuffed about my room for a few weeks on its blue Bakelite needles until Mum threw it out. Later I put the little pink and white cardigan on Big Ted but I had already fallen out of love with my teddies and dolls by then and given them to Lucy.
Mum had a creative phase when Dad left us. This was the way she furnished the smaller house when we had to leave the big one. She cut up some of the old jumpers and made them into cushion covers, machining them together to stop them, like her life, fraying and unravelling. The scraps and the ugly ones she cut into strips and plaited them into an endless snake, sewing it into a spiral rug like something out of the little house on the prairie. Miraculously it absorbed and made one harmony of all the different textures and colours, the greens, reds and purples and the spots and stripes. She surprised and delighted herself, and it seemed to us she was stronger and renewed without Dad. She began going to evening classes and then she went to college to do art and design. In due course she met Andy who was a widower, and the new family was fashioned with the remnant children from each.
Leo and I were both away by then, me at college and him living in a shared flat in North London and working for the firm that later trained him to be an accountant. So Mum, Andy, Lucy, and Andy’s little daughter Becky, all set up house together in the new big place in the road by the park. Lucy wasn’t the baby anymore in this newly woven family and she started going round to Nanna’s all the time, and in the end, once she was at secondary school she sort of moved in. I wondered, from my superior position as grown-up, left-home daughter doing psychology at university, what this all signified. Leo and I talked about it on the phone. Did Lucy hate Andy? Was he horrible to her and favour Becky over her? But everyone treated it as normal. The accepted reason was that Nanna lived nearer to Lucy’s school and was there when Lucy came home, and there was no-one at the park house because when Becky was nine she became a weekly boarder at a posh school, paid for from the insurance money from her mother dying.
That was the time when Nanna taught Lucy to knit. She had run out of old jumpers to re-cycle by then, and Lucy chose psychedelic colours in keeping with the times, knitting red swirls into purple and maroon. The creation I remember best was one she made up as she went along, impractically low in the neckline, short in the body and long in the sleeves, constructed mainly from holes and with knitted flowers hanging off it. Lucy wore it to Knebworth one year and we saw her for a few seconds, sitting on someone’s shoulders and waving her arms on the six o’clock news, we only recognised her because of the jumper.
The last time I did anything like knitting was later, in those awful eighties, at Greenham Common, when we went and wove coloured webs on the fences. I confess I was a day tripper, I only went once, a day out with my women’s group and other assorted friends, we were right-on in those days. It was having children myself and all the talk of winnable nuclear war that did it to me, and I spent half a decade reading Spare Rib and being angry with men, which when I think of it now couldn’t have been easy for my boys or their father. But I brooked no excuses for gender in those days. We took luxury presents for the full timers, soap, chocolate and cigarette tobacco, and of course wool by the carrier bag-full. I remember joyful, exhilarated moments in the sun that day, winding and weaving warps and wefts of colour on the wires of the chain link fence, and great skeins of women singing and "hugging the base". There were baby clothes sewn and pegged up there, fluttering ribbons, pictures of children, and teddy bears I recall. Most of all I remember one particular, wonderful rainbow web with the sun catching the colours of the ribbons and threads and a woman with braided hair sitting under it, crying openly, keening. We didn’t know how to react to her but we felt it was profound and we admired and were even a little intimidated by her utter dedication and commitment, she was clearly a long term resident of the bivouac village on the verges. And then home to guilty home comforts but barbed with dark sarcasm and veiled anger, expressions of bewilderment, hurt and rejection I can see now, but then - I was woman, I was invincible. I was angry back.
Lucy never felt the need to be angry, she pursued pleasure - and does to this day. She followed in Mum’s footsteps and went to art college, where she majored in textile design. Sometimes people have actually heard of her, she’s Lucy Lovage the fashion designer. She’s quite famous for her knit-wear nowadays among other creations. Lovage is a made-up name, or rather, it was Nanna’s maiden name. Lucy chose it because of the double "L", for the "love" part and because it’s the name of a herb. She creates clothes for pop stars and footballer’s wives, and, until she had her daughter India, lived a life far elevated in glamour and resources from mine and the rest of the family. Lucy was nearly forty when Indie was born, and had long declared she didn’t wish for children. She didn’t tell us she was pregnant until a few weeks before the birth, and only then I suspect because she was taken into hospital early. I went to see her and she was sitting in bed, knitting suprisingly conventional baby clothes in cream, smooth little cardigans and tops with delicate edging and little running holes for ribbons. When Indie arrived she was enchantingly dark with a soft, static-laden halo of black hair, and huge eyes. It was clear she was the child of Lucy’s long time friend and collaborator Raz Malik, although no-one had taken them for a couple until then. This little family became established to a loose-knit, unconventional pattern, the parents living in separate houses yet very much together with Indie. I came to envy Lucy this way of life, and Indie seemed very secure and delightful. Nanna was greatly smitten with her and knitted again like she hadn’t for years and never would again. She had a season of making good, practical cardigans and jumpers for the toddler Indie, whilst Lucy, who was well-off enough to do it, indulged in outlandish designer baby gear. The child was a miniature rainbow, a fairy, and Nanna tutted at the sequins and ribbons and the silk flowered hair clips in her great-grand-daughter’s hair but Mum was delighted with her. This last grandchild of hers was one she hadn’t expected, a bonus, and the only girl. Indie expanded into beauty as she grew older, and now at nine she is exquisite and, better still, doesn’t know it yet. I am jealous; with my sturdy, loveable but unremarkable-looking boys, I can freely admit it. Perhaps because I never was jealous of Lucy when we were children, the emotion seems natural and un-snaggled now, almost pleasurable, the reasons rational, and somehow alright, because Indie just is a wonderful child, the darling of us all including my young men – I can’t call them boys any longer!
I sit and tell all this to Nanna, just unreeling talk in an endless thread with no snags or hitches, since she makes no reply. She lies in the cream painted iron bed with her hand resting paper-cool on the frayed, starched white cotton sheet; it has a red number embroidered on the corner, half unravelled from wear. She watches me and I feel she is still there inside her eyes. The thought comes that this may be the last time to tell her things.
"I love you Nanna," I say. Her eyes flicker a little but stay on my face. She’s right, this wasn’t ever the language between us. I reach up and stroke her hair. It’s long and needs a comb. I shift closer to her and begin to run my fingers through it as if she was the child and I her mother. She moves her head slightly and I realise she’s making it so I can reach more of her hair. The silver threads skein through my fingers.
"Do you remember making me hold the wool Nanna, when I was a little girl? It used to hurt my arms and I wanted to run outside and play, but now I think of it…" Her eyes are bright on my face. I begin to weave her hair into a soft plait and I love the feel of it between my fingers, soft, warm and familiar. I think for a moment of a future time when I’ll tell Indie and all the children yet to come about Nanna. Her breath is short and her face is trembling with the effort of watching me, but she holds her gaze on me. I bend to kiss her cheek.
"I always felt special. I always felt loved."
Copyright Harriet Hill 2006
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