KNITTING

Mary Hardcastle’s mum was a knitter, like my mum. She tucked her needles under her arms and clickety clacked grey socks. Sometimes she used a round needle, with a safety pin. I was riveted. So this was English knitting. Was the round needle English? The grey wool or just knitting socks?

They tried to teach us knitting in school, the English way, everyone brought grey wool and cast on in slow motion.

I struggled with English knitting.

A pair of giant needles lay on the teacher’s desk with a square piece of plain knitting in lime green string. Every time one of us dropped a stitch we had to stand in front of the class and knit a row of lime green.

I often stood there, six years old, scabby knees and grubby socks, one up, one down. I worked the needles painfully, attempting to reach the end of the row with all my stitches intact. At the end of term the teacher presented me with the green object, ‘a dish cloth’ she said, 'you’ve done most of it, take it home to show your Mother'.

My mother was the creator of pink wool dresses, soft jumpers with scalloped edges, fluffy striped scarves, the knitter with flashing needles.  They knitted the continental way, the women in my family, holding the needles close together whizzing along rows creating my new jumpers. I watched wide eyed, sometimes holding the wool skeins between my little arms, whilst they wound the wool round and round into new balls.

My granny was the maker of my precious royal blue pixie-hood with scarf attached. She also made wild multi-coloured pomp poms and embroidered delicate flowers on my cardigans.  I stood on the table as together they measured the length of small knitted dresses. I stretched out my arms so they could attach the sleeves, one holding the pins in her mouth, the other holding my arm straight chattering away, foreign sounds and foreign laughter. Continental afternoons, with continental cakes and continental knitting,   only the grey English winter drizzling outside the window

I walked disconsolately out of school, tearing the lime green yarn with my teeth, but it was stringy and hard. I slipped into a shaded driveway and dug into a stranger’s flowerbed with my bare hands, burying the shameful object, like a puppy, this secret of my failed knitting.

Older now, I watch the new knitting movement explode. Knit and bitch groups of young women sit on sofas in smart bars clicketting, clattering, knitting and chattering away. I venture into a new wool shop and embark on new knitting for a new era. Large needles, I can't go wrong, knit something with big holes in the pattern and dropped stitches won't show.

My mum, now 90 casts on, nimble fingers weaving the yarn under and over; I struggle to learn, good for my own ageing brain, I think, different use of neurotransmitters, I can do this.

Looping the yarn in front of my knit two together confounds me, After several hours I go back to the shop. The lady’s nostrils flare, 'you have made a mess '; she unravels the mess and my years unravel back to the shame of my childhood. 'The casting on’s wrong.'  It can't be, I still believe unequivocally in my mum's flying fingers as she magicked stitches on to the needle....'The yarn is on the wrong side, start again'.  I walk out of the shop defeated

I google ' knitting ' on the internet and an American website shows videos starting with casting on, progressing to the dancing needles, intricate patterns and multi-coloured yarns of my knitting dreams.

I click on the continental knitting video and before my very eyes flying fingers appear, casting on just like my mum. Hands hold the needles with the yarn on the left side, like my Mum and my Granny before her. The women in my continental home were oblivious that in the outside world, knitters held their yarn on the right side. No-one in my English school could know that in my home the world of colour and pattern was created holding the yarn on the left.

I was a little girl in the middle, one foot on the foreign soil of my refugee parents and the other foot making a wobbly print of belonging on its English home soil.    

The internet sorted out my yarn issues and I have completed my first knitting, a shawl on big needles, no dropped stitches.

I am a proud continental knitter, my yarn confidently on the left side, as the women in my family knitted before me. I have earned my rightful place on the knit and bitch sofas in the new multicultural age of   English knitters.

THE GREAT NORTH SWIM

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER

For the first time ever I was to be an athlete. I was in training all summer, building up my stamina in the swimming pool, in a river, in a lake, every day another length, another second faster, I was in  training for the Great North Swim.

I was  never  a sporty child, never singled out for running at school, legs too short for netball. The hockey field squelching with mud on a wet February afternoon was misery. I’d slink away to the trees, with my friend Pat, we’d light up a cigarette between us and watch for boys on the horizon, looking cool in navy woollen knickers and a white air-tex gym blouse.

I danced through my young years leaping about in African print caftans , curtains of dark  hair and bare feet – succumbing  stoned  to the rolling stones and twirling through time, every day a Ruby Tuesday

I missed a step one drunken evening and broke my leg with a resounding crack so I spent my middle years  trudging uphill and down dale, trailing after my strong Peak District lover,  a flask of coffee and brandy in my backpack, a determined smile not to be beaten by the descending grey mist, a dark sky and the wind whipping our cheeks.

So no sporting conviction from me, until now - past my prime, heading over the hill, a small round figure grappling with rubber, squeezing into my wet-suit, falling to the ground as I tame my flippers.  

But hey, just find me wading fearlessly into the surf on the edge of the cold North sea, hear my gasp as I plunge into the icy river and roll over and over in the current  as it rushes down from the hills.  Watch me glide confidently across the still mirrored surface of a lake surrounded by mountains, calm wide strokes as I swim through reeds and rushes, a kingfisher flying past my ear.

Yes, I am an athlete in water; I swim out to the next adventure.

It was to be the culmination of a summer of training - a mile every other day - preparing  to swim across Lake Windermere.

For the first time ever I  would stand breathless, gasping, beaming, clutching my medal of endurance and achievement.

For the first time ever there was blue algae on lake Windermere.

For the first time ever The Great North Swim was cancelled.

But I’m still a swimmer

I’m still an athlete in water, swimming out to the next adventure.


struggling into our wetsuits



J and me in training 



Threads from Alsace

DREAMS OF A CHERRY ORCHARD
Cooked black cherry jam again yesterday. I love jam making it has its own rhythm, watching the cherries get ripe over two months, tasting and deciding the time to pick, standing with baskets under the tree deciding whether to leave the stems on or not. There is a crop every two years.Is that the natural cycle? or  because last year the last frost came late, caught the blossoms in the springtime and arrested the fruit?

John holds the higher branches down and I pick, wearing a large straw hat because the sun is  beating down on us. He cannot get a ladder firm against the tree and breaks two branches whilst grasping the glistening ripe red fruit. The cherry tree is fragile and we have planted it on a steep bank so it is also quite inaccessible, we must share its harvest with the birds.
Later I sit on the terrace with mounds of fruit in different containers and stone the cherries. I am plugged into my i-pod listening to a podcast on pastoral literature which makes me think of 17th c painting, French pastoral scenes with shepherdesses wearing white wigs and sweeping dresses with huge blue bows and ribbons attached to their crooks.

I sit there for hours,  juice squirting into my face onto my arms and shoulders; its in my hair and down my cleavage. We have masses of fruit. Yet I still glance towards the top of the cherry tree ,tantalised by the fruit I cannot reach, whic peeps out from green leaves beckoning to the crows.

We weigh the fruit and put into our huge copper preserving pan with lemon juice.It heats slowly, we stir slowly,breaking up the cherries.We use  my mum’s old recipe written out by hand in German. We stir and break up the cherries, already there is liquid, we let it reduce in the pan and then pour in the pectin sugar. The tension rises. Will it set? Bubble bubble toil and trouble, we stir until the gloop has  a rich dark  colour. The edge of the bubbles are purple, .these are morello cherries ,sharp, tart and delicious bubbling in a hot mass in our copper pan.

Whilst J stirs I sterilise the jars , pouring boiling water over them ready to be filled.

We have to do it twice,the first time it didn’t set. We poured the mass of syrop and broken cherries back, boiled it up again to reduce it more and tried again. We tested by putting some liquid on to a cold plate, anxiously waiting to see if a skin forms, how much it slides down the plate until we decide its there, its setting, its on its way to be jam.

The boy next door came in the afternoon and hooked his little basket on a branch of our cherry tree to pick the higher fruit,we couldn't reach. I longed for him to climb to the summit but he carefully placed his ladder against the tree and climbed as far as he could,  but none of us reached to the sky.

I stoned again as the evening shadows lengthened in the field, we cooked bubbling liquid as darkness fell and a storm rose in the sky.

Today we stand proudly counting the jars of cherry jam, their lids tightly sealed in rows ready to be labelled.

They will be presents for the people we love, their favourite jam,

I look out of the window, the cherries are still there at the top of the tree. I look out at our field, and dream of a cherry orchard, watching  the grey mists covering it in the winter-time.