The Forgotten Seamstress

Chapter Two

London, January 2008

‘Panic stations, darling. The Cosy Homes people are coming next week, and they say I have to clear the lofts before they get here, and Peter down the road was going to help me, you know, the man who suggested it all in the first place, but he’s gone and hurt his back so he can’t come any more and I don’t know what I’m going to do …’

My mother Eleanor is seventy-three and her memory’s starting to fail, so it doesn’t take much to upset her. Plus she’s always nervous on the telephone.

‘Slow down, Mum,’ I whispered, wishing she wouldn’t call me at work. The office was unusually quiet – it was that depressing post-Christmas period when everyone is gloomily slumped at their desks pretending to be busy while surreptitiously job hunting. ‘You’re going to have to tell me what all this is about. For a start, who are Cosy Homes?’

‘The insulation people. It’s completely free for the over-seventies, imagine that, and they say it will cut my heating bills by a quarter and you know what a worry the price of oil is these days so I could hardly refuse, could I? I’m sure I told you about this.’

I racked my brains. Perhaps she had, but with everything that had been going on in the past few days, I’d clearly forgotten. On our first day back after the break we’d received an email announcing yet another round of redundancies. Happy New Year, one and all! Morale was at an all-time low and the rumour mill working overtime. And, joy of joys, next week we were all to be interviewed by some of those smug, overpaid management consultants the company had called in.

I didn’t really want to be here anyway – it was only meant to be an ‘interim job’ to raise enough cash to realise my dream of starting my own interior design business. But the macho, target-driven environment, the daily bust-a-gut expectations and ridiculous deadlines had become surprisingly tolerable when I saw the noughts on my monthly pay slip and annual bonus-time letter. The financial rewards were just too sweet to relinquish. Especially now that I was newly single, with a massive mortgage to cover.

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I said, distractedly scrolling down the recruitment agency website on my screen. ‘I was planning to come at the weekend, anyway. I’m sure we can get it sorted together in a few hours.’

I heard her relieved sigh. ‘Oh could you, dearest girl? It would be such a weight off my mind.’

My Mini can virtually drive itself to Rowan Cottage, home for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents moved there in the 1960s, after they married and my father was recruited by the new university that had recently opened on the outskirts of Eastchester. He was already in his fifties and there was a twenty-year age difference between them – they met at University College, London, where he had been her doctorate tutor – but it was a very loving marriage. I was born five years later, to the great joy of both.

When I was three years old, he and my grandfather were killed in a terrible head-on collision on the A12 in heavy fog. All I can recall of that dreadful night is two large policemen at the door, and the woman officer who held me when my mother collapsed. She took my hand and walked me down the lane in my pyjamas and slippers, clutching my favourite teddy, to be looked after by our neighbours.

My grandfather was fairly senior in the local police, and my father by then a noted academic, so the accident was widely reported, but no cause ever explained. When I turned seventeen and began to take driving lessons, I asked Mum who’d been at the wheel that night, whether anyone else had been involved or whose fault it had been, but her eyes had clouded over.

‘We’ll never know, dear. It was a long time ago. Best let sleeping dogs lie,’ was all she would say.

Thanks to my father’s life insurance policy she managed to hang on to the house and kept his spirit alive by displaying photographs in every room and talking about him frequently. He looked like a typical sixties academic, with his gold-rimmed glasses and baggy olive green corduroy jacket, leather-patched at the elbows, often with his head in a book or a journal. Mum always says that she fell for his eyes, a kingfisher blue so brilliant that they seemed to hold her in a magic beam every time he looked at her.

There he is, frozen in time, lighting his pipe, playing cricket at a family picnic, sitting in the car with our small dog, Scottie, on his knee. In the photographs he seems to wear a perpetual smile, although apparently he could also be impatient and bossy – traits which, alas, he seems to have passed on to me. I have also inherited his slight stature, blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin, although the genes that gave him a brilliant academic brain seem to have passed me by. I’m more like my mother in temperament: always daydreaming and with a tendency to become distracted.

Money must have been tight. We had few luxuries but I always felt happy and loved, and never overly troubled by the lack of a father in my life. Mum never had any other relationships, not that she let me know about, at least. ‘You should join a dating agency,’ I suggested once – such things appearing to my teenage self as exotic and daring.

She brushed away the suggestion. ‘What a stupid idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I want a new beau? I’ve got my house and my health, my friends and my singing. And I’ve got you, my lovely girl. I don’t need to go out dating at my age.’

I took the slip road off the A12 and into the peace of the lanes. After the urban sprawl and unlovely highways of outer London, North Essex is surprisingly rural and beautiful. At this time of year, furrows in the bare fields collect rainwater and reflect silver stripes of sky against the brown soil; giant elms and oaks stand leafless and black against the wide sky, and rooks gather in their branches each evening, their fierce cawing echoing across the countryside.

Every village is dominated by an outsized flint church, each with its tower reaching robustly towards heaven, built in medieval times by a landed gentry grown fat on wool farming, who sought to secure their seats in paradise. These days the villages still attract fat cats: sleek City types drawn here by the newly-electrified line to Liverpool Street, who worship the great god of annual bonuses and whose vision of paradise is a new Aga in the kitchen, a hot tub on the patio and a sports car in the double garage.

At the end of the lane, in a shallow dip between two gentle hills, is a small green clustered around with a dozen cottages and farm buildings now converted into the price-inflated dream homes of weary commuters. At the edge of the green is Rowan Cottage, once a pair of farm labourers’ houses, with a pantiled roof and dormer windows. It’s the scruffiest property around but, unlike most of the others, seems to be fully at ease with the landscape, as if it has always been there.

As a teenager I hated the isolation, and the fact that the last bus left our local town at the ridiculously early hour of nine o’clock. But Mum still loves it here. After her shockingly early widowhood, she gave up her own academic ambitions and took a job as a school secretary so that she could be at home for me. Then, when I was about ten, she took a part-time job as a lecturer at the local polytechnic and, on those days, my grandmother would pick me up from school, take me back to her house and indulge me with chocolate biscuits.

Granny Jean, my father’s mother, was a feisty old woman with strong views, who read The Times from cover to cover, finished the crossword in a few hours and always had a book or a notebook and pen at her side, and sometimes a needle, darning, sewing up a hem or taking in a seam.

I loved going to stay with her, even though she refused to have a television. After tea, she would read to me all the children’s classics: Wind in the Willows, the Just So Stories and, my favourite, Alice in Wonderland. Of course I was too young to get Carroll’s surreal humour, but I loved the illustrations, especially the ones of Alice with long hair held back with that trademark hairband, her white apron, puffed sleeves and blue stockings. Oh how I wanted long hair and a pair of bright blue stockings!

When I grew old enough, Granny taught me how to sew: embroidery stitches and some very basic dressmaking. One memorable weekend, when I was about twelve and desperate for the latest fashions, we made a lurex mini-skirt – I cringe to recall it, but this was the 1980s after all – which I adored but never had the courage to wear. I’m sure it was Granny’s influence which led me, in the end, to study fashion.

But after she died and there were just the two of us left, it became ‘Mum and Caroline against the world’, a close, almost hermetic relationship which has left me with an overdeveloped sense of duty and a fear of letting her down. Her job was demanding, dealing with unruly students and warring staff, and I sometimes wonder whether the stress of being a single working parent, on top of the grief of losing her husband and father-in-law on a single day, caused changes in her brain that, many years later, have resulted in the tragic and insidious onset of her dementia.

Mum’s face lit up when, after a second’s hesitation, she recognised me.

‘Caroline, dearest girl, how lovely to see you,’ she said, reaching out with skeletal arms. She used to be tall, with dark curly hair and high colour to her cheekbones, but she’s shrinking now and her hair is now almost pure white, her skin pale grey. She seems, literally, to be fading away.

‘Come in, come in, I’ll get the coffee on,’ she said, leading the way to the kitchen, all stripped pine and eighties brown-and-orange decor. Little has changed at Rowan Cottage since I left home, and my interest in interior design must surely have been triggered by my parents’ lack of it. Their minds were focused on higher matters; what did anyone care what the inside of their house looked like, or how ragged the furnishings, so long as they were still serviceable and comfortable?

As a teenager I was so embarrassed by what I perceived as my parents’ lack of style that I refused to invite friends home. These days I’ve come to accept that Mum feels comfortable here, and will never change it. Colours and patterns clash with joyous abandon, chintz loose covers fight with geometric cushions, Persian carpets lie alongside rugs in swirly sixties designs – quite retro cool these days. Books jumble higgledy-piggledy on cheap pine bookshelves that sag under their weight of words. Some of the furniture, such as the Parker Knoll chairs and G-Plan coffee table, is so old-fashioned that it’s become desirable again.

The bedrooms are built into the roof of the cottage, just two of them, each with a dormer window, so there is hardly any proper ‘attic’ above them. But the space between the walls and the angle of the roof has been converted into long cupboards, triangular in section and too low to stand up in, accessed through sliding doors in each bedroom. Despite their awkward shape these cupboards are spacious and, I knew, contained the junk of a lifetime. Clearing them was going to be a mammoth task.

My initial plan was to help Mum do a kind of ‘life laundry’, sorting out what she wanted to keep and giving the rest away. But the idea was stupidly ambitious and it soon became clear it was going to take far too long. We ended up hauling everything out of the cupboards and piling it up in my old bedroom, now a spare room.

Before long we had constructed a small pyramid: boxes of books and papers, old toys, trunks of clothes too good to give away but too outdated ever to be worn again, loose off-cuts of carpet, broken chairs, ancient empty suitcases, stray rolls of wallpaper and even several pairs of old-fashioned leather ice-skates, kept in case the pond should freeze over as it did in the seventies. We could sort it all out later, I reassured Mum, once Cosy Homes had done their work.

It was back-breaking, stooping inside the low spaces and lifting heavy cases and, after a couple of hours, the pyramid had become a mountain almost filling the room. My hands were black with dust and my hair full of cobwebs.

‘However did you manage to accumulate so much stuff?’

Mum gave me a stern look. ‘It’s not all mine. Some of it belongs to you, all those toys and children’s books you wouldn’t let me give away. If only you’d move into a proper house you’d have room for it.’

I hadn’t told her yet, but the prospect of living in a ‘proper house’ and having any need for toys and children’s books was looking extremely remote. A few weeks ago, just before Christmas, my boyfriend Russell and I had, by mutual consent, decided that our five-year relationship was really going nowhere, and he’d moved out. Of course I was sad, but relieved that we’d finally made the decision, and ready to enjoy my newly single status. At least, that’s what I tried to convince myself although, to be totally honest, what I mostly wanted was to find the right man, whoever that was. At thirty-eight I am only too aware of the biological clock ticking ever more loudly as each year passes.

‘Not just the baby things,’ Mum was saying, ‘there’s Granny’s stuff that I’m keeping for you.’

‘I’ve already got the books, the clock and the dining chairs she wanted me to have. Was there something else?’

‘There’s that quilt.’ She looked around vaguely. ‘It’ll be in one of these bags, somewhere.’

‘The patchwork thing that used to be on her spare bed? She used to tell me stories about it.’

‘I wonder where it’s got to?’ She gazed, bewildered, at the mountain.

‘Let’s not get distracted. Just a couple more things to clear.’ I bent into the cupboard once again, crawling to its furthest, darkest corner. Almost the last item was an old brown leather suitcase. I hauled it out and, as I dusted it off, three letters embossed into the lid became clear.

‘Who’s A.M.M., Mum?’

She frowned a moment. ‘That’ll be your grandfather, Arthur Meredith Meadows. I wonder what …?’ She struggled to release the clasps, but they seemed to be rusted closed.

‘Why not give yourself a break, Mum? I’ll have a go at opening that later. Go downstairs and make yourself a cuppa. I can manage the last few boxes on my own, and then we’re done.’

When all of the loft spaces were cleared, I lugged the old suitcase downstairs into the living room and, with the help of a screwdriver and a little force, the locks quickly came free. Inside, on top of a pile of fabrics, was a faded yellow striped sheet.

‘It’s only old bed linen,’ I called through to the kitchen. ‘Shall I take it to a charity shop?’

Mum set down the tea tray. ‘That’s it,’ she said, her face lighting up, ‘the quilt we were talking about.’

She was right: the sheet was just a lining. As I lifted the quilt out and unfolded it right side out across the dining table, light from the window illuminated its beautiful, shimmering patterns and dazzling colours. True, it was faded in places but some of the patches still glittered, almost like jewels. Textiles, plain and patterned, shiny satins, dense velvets and simple matt cottons, were arranged in subtle conjunctions so that groups of triangles took on the shape of a fan, semicircles looked like waves on the sea, squares of light and dark became three-dimensional stairways climbing to infinity.

The central panel was an elegantly embroidered lover’s knot surrounded by a panel of elongated hexagons, and a frame of appliqué figures so finely executed that the stitches were almost invisible. And yet, for all the delicate needlework, the design of the quilt seemed to be quite random, the fabrics so various and contrasted it could have been made by several people, over a long period of time.

‘Did Granny make this?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mum said, pouring the tea. ‘She liked to sew but I never saw her doing patchwork or embroidery.’

‘Why’s it been hidden away for so long?’

‘Not really sure. You wouldn’t have it on your bed – said it was too old-fashioned or something.’

‘Can I take it home with me now?’

‘Of course, dear. She always wanted you to have it.’

It was only when I went to fold the quilt back into the suitcase that something on its reverse side caught my eye. In one corner of the striped sheet backing, cross-stitched inside an embroidered frame like a sampler, were two lines set out like a verse. Some of the stitching was frayed and becoming unravelled, but I could just about make out the words:

I stitched my love into this quilt, sewn it neatly, proud and true.

Though you have gone, I must live on, and this will hold me close to you.

I read it out to Mum. ‘It’s a poem. Did Granny dedicate it to Grandpa? Or was it for Dad?’

‘Just a mo … I’m just trying to remember something.’ Mum rubbed her temple. ‘I don’t think it was Jean who sewed it. It was something she said once …’

I waited a moment, trying to be patient with my mother’s failing memory.

‘Something about the hospital …’

‘Eastchester General?’

‘No, the other place, you know? It might have been someone she met there. Oh, it’s all so long ago now,’ she sighed, wearily. ‘When your father was a boy. Had a bit of a breakdown, poor old thing.’

‘Granny had a breakdown? I never knew about that. She had to go into hospital?’

‘Not for long. Just till she’d got better. It wasn’t far from here …’

‘And you said she met someone there who might be connected with the quilt?’ I prompted, but it was no good. I could see she was exhausted now. I started my usual routine before leaving her: cleaning up the kitchen, sorting out the fridge, taking out the rubbish and making a sandwich for her supper.

When I returned to the living room she was fast asleep. I wrapped a rug around her and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. It tore at my heartstrings to see how vulnerable and old she looked these days, and I wondered how long it would be before she was unable to manage on her own.

Back at my flat in London, I unfolded the quilt across the spare bed, scanning both sides to make sure I hadn’t missed any clues, and re-read the cross-stitched lines of that sentimental little verse several times, as if by studying them long enough they might yield their secret. One thing was clear: it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing my feisty grandmother would ever have composed.

Chapter Three

Cassette 1, side 2

That was a nice cuppa, thank you dearie. Much needed. So where was I?

‘You and Nora were going into service. You had just arrived at the big house.’

Oh my lord yes. What a day! We was terrified, of course. Nora, me and Emily got bundled out and straight down some steps into the basement; the servants’ entrance, you see, away from the eyes of upstairs. We stood in a dark, echoey hallway for what seemed like an hour while they called someone to call someone else, and finally a maid came and said she was to take us to our room.

We said goodbye to Emily and dragged our bags up hundreds of stairs to our room, which had four beds in, and the two closest the fire was already taken so Nora and me put our things on the other two cots and waited for someone to come and tell us what to do. The room was bare and the beds narrow and hard, but we weren’t much bothered by that ’cos we didn’t know any different. While we waited, we opened the little parcels Sister Beatrice gave us and ate the biscuits she had wrapped inside – oatcakes with a sprinkle of brown sugar – and the taste reminded me so much of The Castle that I started snivelling all over again.

The maid came back and told us we must hurry now, as we must never keep Mrs Hardy waiting. It turned out that Mrs Hardy was the mountain of a housekeeper, the one who came to interview us. Her office under the stairs was not a large room and felt even smaller with her filling up most of the space.

‘Ah, you two, wherever have you been? Come and get your uniforms. Now!’ she bellowed. I started to say we haven’t been anywhere, Ma’am, but Nora dug me in the ribs and put a finger to her lips to remind me that we was not allowed to answer back, or do anything except be clean, neat, hardworking and obedient. Them nuns was so quiet spoken that we was petrified of the woman’s shouting but we soon learned that was how she usually talked to anyone beneath her station.

We grew used to life at the new place pretty quickly, Nora and me, and it wasn’t a bad one. It was nothing near as friendly as at The Castle, mind, but we just had to get on with it and we had hardly any free time to dwell on anything. Our uniforms was plain pale blue with black stockings and we got new black shoes, too, and it was a relief to get out of the clothes what was growing too small for us anyway.