The Forgotten Seamstress (16 page)

‘Sorry, no news,’ he said, ‘But the stolen item is only described here as a coloured quilt, Madam. Have you got a more detailed description, perhaps, or a photograph, to aid our search?’

At least this was a positive suggestion. Regretfully admitting that I had no photograph, I offered instead to make a sketch and drop it off at the police station tomorrow.

The quilt had become so familiar to me but, now that I was faced with a large blank sheet of creamy white cartridge paper, recollecting its complex design in sufficient detail to draw it turned out to be surprisingly difficult. The scale of each section was relatively easy to remember, and the scrutiny of Jo and her curator meant that the shapes and colours of the central square and frames were imprinted on my brain. But the patterns of the outer panels were much harder to visualise with any accuracy. Two hours later the table was thick with pencil dust, but I had at least managed to create a reasonably accurate sketch.

It wasn’t just the patterns, but the brilliance of the colours and the texture of the fabrics that made this quilt so unique. I ferreted around in cupboards and dug out my old acrylic paints and a palette, untouched since leaving college, and started to mix and apply colour to the squares and triangles, circles and appliquéd figures, as close to the originals as my memory would allow. Of course it was only the general likeness, colours and main distinguishing features that the police would be interested in. But it had come to matter very much to me.

When my recall became too hazy I tried to visualise the quilt in its most recent home, slung over the back of the sofa. As I mixed and painted, using a hair drier to speed up the drying, I became fascinated all over again with the way that it had been constructed, the techniques used to join the pieces together, embroider or overlay them, and how the colours of the patches clashed with or complemented each other – sometimes both at the same time.

As I worked, I found myself humming. I was rediscovering something that I had lost: the thrill of using colour to create dramatic effect, the way that two tones placed next to each other could battle so fiercely it could actually make your heart beat faster, or blend so beautifully that it made music sing in my head. In my teenage years, nothing mattered so much as using paint, or dyes, or fabrics; I covered almost everything I could lay my hands on in vibrant colours and patterns, not just paper and canvas, and fabric for making clothes, but also my bedroom walls, my chest of drawers and curtains, my fingernails and hair and my schoolbag.

I completed the coloured sketch in far greater detail than the police would ever need, photographed it and then wondered what to do next. I’d enjoyed the process so much I didn’t want to stop. This time, I found myself sketching the living room around me, with the sofa at its centre. But in my drawing, instead of dove-grey velour, the sofa and chairs were upholstered in patchwork, the cushions a blending set of hues, the curtains striped in the same colours. Even the lampshades were patchwork in effect.

Only the carpet and walls remained cream, the rest of my design used shocking combinations of vibrant greens, sapphire blues and cherry reds – and it seemed to work. I sat back, hugely satisfied with my evening’s achievements, and understood what I had been missing, all these years. I’d been hungry for colour.

I took a quick photo of the room design and texted it to Jo:
Gone a bit crazy! What do you think?

Wow, brilliant. Amazing colours! Good start. What news on decision? Jxox

No decision yet … xxx,
I replied.

The following afternoon I returned to Marylebone Police Station with a copy of my quilt painting, carefully labelled with the incident number, my name and the date of the theft, and then wandered back through the darkening streets towards Tottenham Court Road tube. The weather forecasters were predicting a cold snap, suggesting sleet or even snow, and workers poured out of shops and bright-lit offices in a purposeful stream, desperate to reach home before night set in.

The homeless are almost invisible in London, until you start looking. Then they appear everywhere, men and women, old and young, drunk, drugged, or just miserably sober, and some with dogs always in far better condition than their owners. As evening approaches they lurk close to ventilation outlets and covered porches ready to claim their pitches just as soon as office doors are closed, the lights turned out and security staff safely tucked inside. As they waited, so did I, for the moment when they would unravel those elaborate constructions of cardboard, plastic sheeting and scraps of blanket under which they hope to survive another night.

As I scrutinised each encampment and its owner, trying to remain inconspicuous, I wondered what I’d do if I saw my quilt. I should have brought another blanket or covering, just in case, to offer in exchange. They’d accept money, of course, but more booze or drugs would never keep a person warm on what was predicted to be the coldest night of the year.

Tentatively approaching a couple of men hunkering down in a doorway, I said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Depends what it is,’ one of them muttered in a broad Scottish accent, distracted by the contents of his luggage, contained in several plastic bags.

‘I’ve lost a quilt,’ I said, ‘and wondered if it might have been picked up by someone.’

‘A kilt? That’d be yours, Jock,’ he slurred, with a bronchitic laugh that turned into a ferocious coughing fit.

‘Who’d wear a feckin’ kilt in this weather?’ his mate replied. ‘Freeze your balls off.’

‘It’s a
quilt
, you know, patchwork,’ I persevered. At least they hadn’t told me to get lost. ‘Like a bed cover.’

‘Aye, a
quilt
,’ the Scotsman said. ‘Naah, haven’t seen such a thing in a long year, lassie.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘Well if you see such a thing would you let them know, down at the police station?’ I asked. The suggestion was received with stony silence. ‘Sorry … I mean …’ I stuttered, realising how naïve I’d been. ‘But perhaps you’d look out for it anyway?’

‘Fair enough,’ the other one said. ‘Spare a tenner, Miss?’

Flustered now, and knowing that it was probably the wrong thing to do, I fumbled in my wallet and handed each of them a ten-pound note, before dashing for the warmth of the tube station.

On the way home I got a text from Jo:
Mark’s sent your design to Justin! Woohoo J xox

This made me smile, even though I was certain nothing would come of it. Jo’s boyfriend Mark was just being kind. He also worked in interiors, though not as a designer, and we both knew Justin, a fast-rising hot-shot who had recently featured in the trade media for having picked up several celebrity clients.

My patchwork upholstery idea was fun, but it was not entirely original and, in the ephemeral world of interiors, no one could ever predict what might catch on next. Everything depended on the name and the network. I had neither.

That night I dreamed of my patchwork room. The sofa grew stumpy legs and began to shimmy around the room like a starlet, singing an unmemorable nightclub song through fat, cushiony lips as the yellow and white striped curtains at my window drew back to reveal an audience of bedraggled homeless people outside in the street, pressing their noses to the glass, enjoying the cabaret. The sofa threw a cushion at the window, mouthing something angry but unintelligible and I turned to look, only to see that the faces were all grimacing, toothless … babies.

I woke myself shouting at them to go away.

Cassette 3, side 2

Well, here we are again, dearie. Sorry Nora’s not up to receiving visitors. But it’s good of you to come all this way to Bethnal Green, just to listen to me rabbiting on.

‘It’s good to see you again, Maria.’

Shall I be mother?

‘That would be lovely. No sugar for me, thanks.’ Tea tinkles into cups and they laugh together comfortably, like old friends.

Now, where would you like me to start?

‘Wherever you like, the tape’s running. You were describing how you lost the baby.’ There’s a very deep sigh, before she starts again.

Christ, them was dark days, believe me, it makes me hot and angry just to think of it now. But they would keep on telling us we was in the best place to get us better – the Hall was considered the bees’ knees when it came to treating lunatics, so they’d have us believe. Them chemists who was kept so busy devising poison gases and shells for the first war must have had a lot of time on their hands, because in the thirties there was no end of new treatments popping up. Us lot was their guinea pigs, a load of captive animals what they could try out every new experimental theory on. We went along with it, in the main, ’cos we had little to lose.

I was that desperate, if Satan himself had come in offering me a new treatment, I’d’ve taken it. So when they said they’d found a new drug that could put me into a coma for weeks on end and I’d wake up sane, I went for it. Narcosis therapy, they called it. It was so weird – you’d be put to sleep in the height of summer but when you woke up the leaves on the trees were already starting to turn. When I come round I was so bewildered it took me a few weeks to get my bearings again, and of course then the terror and despair came back just as bad as before.

You wander round in a daze for weeks, meek as a lamb, and then just as you’re getting back some of what you’ve forgotten, and start to be a bit more lively, they do it again. I tried to deceive them into thinking it had cured me by staying docile, whatever was going on in my head. The ploy didn’t work, and I must have had half a dozen doses when one day I come round and discovered that my power of speech had gone. I knew what I wanted to say, and could hear the words in my head. I could move me lips and make some sounds, but they was not words, not like anyone could understand. It made me mad with frustration, not being able to tell people what I wanted, but I suppose it was a bonus for the staff. They’d always been telling me to shut my gob, and now they’d drugged me dumb, and that’s how I stayed for quite a few years. The foggy years, I think of ’em now, because it was like walking through one of those old East End smogs, when you could hold your hands up in front of your face and barely be able to see them. Only this fog was inside my head, if you get my meaning?

Looking back, perhaps it was better that way because otherwise I’d have literally died of boredom. Every day was exactly the same: dragged out of bed at seven, stripped naked and showered with all them other women naked as Eve – an ugly lot we was and all, in our pale baggy skins. The nurses would sometimes sponge us with the carbolic but otherwise the only cleaning was what the water washed away – so we wasn’t ever that fresh, if you get my meaning, not in the hidden bits. We’d then be wrapped in sheets and dried down, that was the worst bit because some of them nurses was angry souls and they took it out on us sometimes, rubbing you down so roughly you felt your skin was coming off – they’d pull your hair and all.

We always wore regulation hospital clothes in them days, dresses like sacks that went over your head and didn’t need buttons, made of stripy materials so they’d know you was a patient. No bras in case you tried to hang yourself, and ‘open drawers’ so you didn’t have to pull ’em down to go to the lavvy. There was no dignity for us poor lost souls in them days, though it got a bit better after the second war.

Breakfast was porridge with bread and marg, every day of the year, then we’d sit around the ward for an hour or so till they shovelled us outdoors into what they called the ‘airing court’, which was a huge paved area with chain-link netting all round. Can you imagine, hundreds of women, all padding around like caged animals, for exactly an hour and a quarter, rain or shine? We didn’t mind even if it was snowing, at least we was out of doors and in the fresh air, away from the stink of disinfectant and other people’s bodies. Some of ’em even used to scream and try to rip their clothes off with the pleasure of it.

It was best in summer, of course. I’d spend my time peering through the chain links, watching to see how the trees and flowers was growing. Even the daisies and dandelions in the grass just beside the fence was a special little pleasure to me. Men were strange creatures to us because there was absolutely no mixing in that hospital, but some of the less crazy ones was allowed to work in the gardens, and they would come and talk to us until the nurses shooed them away.

After lunch we’d get out into the courts again till teatime, and you’d be starting to feel a little more like a human being by then as the drugs wore off, but come seven they’d bring round the pill trolley and then it was off to la-la land for the rest of the night. Some of ’em will tell you of cruelty, of forced enemas and the rest, though it was never that bad in the wards where I lived.

But there wasn’t any kindness, neither, no one spoke to you in a friendly way or called you by your first name, you know. We was regarded like dumb animals in the main, sub-human at best. That is what I had become, and I’d stopped caring any more. Even if I’d had the gumption to complain I had no voice to do it with, from all the treatments I’d been given.

Well, I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but things started to get better at some time during the thirties. Perhaps we had a new medical superintendent, who knows? Either way, that was when I first got invited to work in the sewing room and I’m not exaggerating when I say that, looking back, it saved me, dragged me back to life. I was mute, drugged, and out of it most of the time under the old regime and I suppose they started to understand that doing something useful actually helped patients get well.

The sewing saved them money because we made everything the hospital needed: bed linen, curtains, aprons, clothes for patients, uniforms for staff, the lot. It made us feel human again.

The sewing room was in the central block, which meant I got a good walk there and back through the gardens from my ward each day – an extra bonus because fresh air always seems to help clear my brain. It was a long rectangle, lit with windows all along one wall, and electric light bulbs hanging over each of the tables – about eleven of them in rows from front to the back of the room. Along the front was ten treadle sewing machines what the more able women worked on, and at the back was the cutting table. We wasn’t allowed to use scissors ourselves, in case someone took a mind to killing themselves, or someone else, with them. Of course we had to use needles and pins, but these were counted out and counted in again at the end of each session, of course.