The Forgotten Seamstress (17 page)

Now I think about it, we even sewed for stage sets when the staff put on plays in the great hall, and bunting for the dances. Did I tell you about the dances? Yes, for patients too, that was another of the things they introduced – they wanted us to have a bit of fun.

The first time they put a needle into me hands the fingers just seemed to know what to do without me telling them, and after a few moments the tears was pouring down my face so much that I couldn’t see me work.

The supervisor gave me a hanky and waited a moment till I’d sorted meself out, then she tried to show me again how to make a stitch. ‘It’s not difficult,’ she says, ‘have another try.’ She thought I was crying out of frustration, you see, because I didn’t know how to do it, and how was she to know that it was out of happiness, that having a needle in my hand was the most natural thing in the world? I couldn’t tell her, of course, because I was still dumb at the time. After a while she got the measure of me, because I’d fly through the work and she’d give me harder and harder tasks to do – buttonholes, darning, gathering and piping – the more complicated it was the more I loved it. I started to smile and even laugh again, in that place. Three hours every weekday, it was, and they was the best hours since I’d arrived in the place.

One day, a new woman turned up and the supervisor told us she would be helping out once a week. She spoke in a posh voice, not like most of the nurses who was real Essex girls in the main with a few foreigners thrown in. She was tall and well-dressed, severe-looking, like one of the head nuns at The Castle. At first I thought her stuck up and kept clear of her, but over the weeks she relaxed and became more friendly, and took a special interest in me – she seemed to have set herself the challenge of getting me talking again. She spoke like I was a real person, quite a novelty as you can imagine, trying to get me to answer her questions: what was my name, where did I used to live, how I come to be in here and suchlike. She was so kindly that I became determined to talk again, if only to please her. I started practising, in private, like, shaping my lips to the words, and making sounds to fit.

My first out-loud word in six years was ‘David’, which made her very happy, and she shushed the rest of the room and asked me to say it again.

‘David,’ I said again, and everyone else all put down their sewing and clapped, which made me proud.

‘Is David your husband?’ she asked, and I shook my head.

‘Not my husband,’ I wanted to say. ‘My lover. The father of my child.’ But I didn’t have the words, not just yet.

‘Perhaps your son?’

It had always troubled me that he’d never had a chance to be christened, but I was so out of my mind with the sadness and the drugs when he died that it never struck me that I could have named him anyway. So now I realised that I should give him a name. ‘David, my son. My son David,’ I said to myself, over and over. He had lived in this world, if only for a short while. Getting my speech back returned his memory to me. It made the loss sharper but somehow easier to bear.

A little later that day she praised my sewing and out of nowhere the word came into my head and out of my lips. ‘Quilt,’ I said, but my mouth and tongue was that out of practice the word didn’t sound right, more like ‘kilt’.

‘I didn’t quite catch that, can you say it again?’ she said, and I repeated the word, but it still came out fuzzy.

‘You mustn’t upset yourself,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to feel guilt about and even if there was, I am sure David would understand.’

Her misunderstanding me made me even more desperate to explain and I managed to say the word ‘quilt’ again till she recognised it properly. The following week she came in with a bag of fabric pieces and started showing me how to make templates and the rest, sweet soul that she was. What I wanted, most in the world, was to find my old quilt again, the one that I started in the palace before the baby was born. I was sure it had come with me in my old kit bag, but I’d never seen it since that day that Finch dumped me here. It was the only thing that I had left of my former life, my only connection with David, and now that I was getting back to some kind of sanity, all I could think about was finding the quilt again, to sew the next panel, in memory of my son. In my mind it became a sort of life-raft that would help to save me, by some kind of magic, I suppose.

Strangely enough, looking back, that’s pretty much what happened.

Over the next few weeks my lips managed to form more words, enough to explain about the kit bag, and I must have gone on about it so much that eventually the woman said she would ask the authorities and try to find it for me.

What a red letter day! The sewing room supervisor arrived, with Margaret – did I tell you that was her name – and they had my case, would you believe it? The battered old brown canvas bag that the nuns at The Castle had given me – oh, it would have been twenty years before. My name still on the label, and untouched, as far as I could see.

‘Is this the one?’ she asked, and I nodded with my heart pounding fit to burst, and right then and there, in front of all the other women in the sewing room, she untied the canvas straps and opened it up for me.

Inside it, still there after all that time, was my few belongings from what felt like another lifetime, what I hadn’t set eyes on since I’d packed them hurriedly that day at the palace, not since I arrived nearly fifteen years before, that simple chit of a girl eight months pregnant, the day Finch disappeared in the cab without a word of goodbye. A short length of pink gingham ribbon wrapped around the handle of a mirror reminded me of what I had lost: once I had been a young woman with nimble fingers and ambitious dreams. Now I was a hopeless wreck of a crazy woman, unable to speak and likely to end my days in a madhouse. I was weeping fit to burst over the sadness of it all when the bell rang for lunchtime and instinctively I grabbed the bag, holding it tight in my arms – I wasn’t about to let anyone take it away from me again.

‘You can’t take it to lunch with you,’ the supervisor said, trying to lift it out of my arms. ‘I’ll keep it safe for you,’ she said, but I didn’t believe her and held onto it even more tightly, starting to kick off with me noises as usual. After a bit I recognised what I was yelling – it was ‘no, no, no,’ over and over again. I had found another word.

In the end Margaret managed to persuade me that she would make sure the bag was kept safe, and I had no choice but to hand it over, join the queue and file out with the others.

The following day Margaret was there again, though she usually only came once a week.

‘I came especially to make sure your bag was kept safe for you,’ she said, holding it out to me. ‘To make sure no one snooped or stole anything. We’ll unpack the rest of it at break-time, shall we?’ I’d been on the machines for several weeks now, what I disliked most of all because it was boring sewing long seams in sheets and other large items. There was no craft in it. That day the machine seemed to sense my impatience and frustration – the shuttle jammed, the thread twisted and knotted itself, and I broke several needles.

At last, break-time arrived. It was usually when the women got together to have a smoke and gossip about what was going on in the wards, though of course I could never take part in the talking and usually just hung around on the edge of the group to listen.

This time, Margaret took me to the side, away from the rest, and together we opened the case, taking the items out slowly, one at a time: two flowery cambric blouses and a woollen skirt, a pair of sturdy leather shoes, a hairbrush and a tortoiseshell-backed hand mirror. There was my bottle of
eau de cologne
what the prince had given me, though it had gone all yellow with the years, and the bible the nuns had given me when I left The Castle – I don’t think I’d ever opened it.

Then, at the bottom of the case, was the small linen bag like what we used to keep our shoes in. I untied the drawstring and pulled out the panel of quilting that I had started in my long lonely hours at the palace, all those years ago, when the prince disappeared and broke my heart.

And there, wrapped inside a bundle of fabric scraps, along with my design scrawled on the back of a laundry order and an envelope containing the paper templates, was another piece of paper, which I didn’t recognise. With my hands shaking, I ripped it open.

Dearest M,
it said.
I put some extra scraps in so you can finish this for the baby. Let me know where you end up, and I will visit. I’m going to miss you so much. Love and kisses, Nora

I sat down with a bump, and started to howl like an animal – oh yes, I could still make a noise, just not words. The supervisor and some of the other patients rushed towards me, but Margaret sent them away and drew up a chair, putting her arm around my shoulders. At first I pulled away, I was such a stranger to human contact. I’d not known a gentle touch since my final hug with Nora, that day I left the palace. Where was she, my childhood friend? What had the years brought for her? Suddenly I so wanted to hear her voice, to laugh again with her.

‘Nora,’ I said, out loud. ‘Want to see Nora.’ It was the first sentence I had spoken for six years.

‘Who is Nora?’ Margaret said gently, keeping her arm around me. The warmth of her helped me relax and focus my brain on forming words.

‘Long ago,’ I said, amazing myself with the sounds that came out of my mouth, without even trying. But it stopped as suddenly as it arrived. I struggled and stuttered my hardest, but no more words would come. She seemed to sense this and tried to change the subject, to distract me.

‘What beautiful silks, and delicate embroidery,’ she said, picking up the scrap of quilt, and looking at it closely. ‘I’ve never seen anything like them before. Did you make this?’ I could only nod. ‘Perhaps you would like to complete it some time?’ she carried on, and I nodded again. The notion of finishing the quilt for my lost child seemed the most obvious idea in the world. Now that I had named him, I was going to treasure him with every stitch. I took a pencil from the supervisor’s desk, unfolded the laundry order and started to add new detail to the designs I had started all those years ago on the second panel, for the baby.

The room seemed to disappear as I got wrapped up in drawing flowers and animals, shapes and shading, but I could feel Margaret beside me, watching in silence. At one point I stopped and looked up at her, and felt the smile spread across my face, before turning back to the design. I was happier than I could remember.

A long pause.

‘Would you like me to stop the tape now?’

Yes please, dearie. I could do with another cuppa.

‘That’d be nice. Let’s take a break.’

I had to do my shifts of sewing for the hospital, of course, but after that I spent every spare moment designing, cutting, preparing templates and quilting. Margaret would sit with me as I worked, praising the delicate embroidery, or the neatness of my appliqué, asking questions. At first I would only nod, or shake my head, but every now and again a word would come out: ‘template’, or ‘daisy chain’, then I’d blurt out sentences, odd thoughts that might be running round my head at the time, like ‘daffodils for David’ or ‘rabbits have such sweet noses’.

After a few weeks I began to trust her, almost like a friend. The sewing room manager cut us some slack, too, allowing us to use the sewing room outside of the usual shifts, so long as Margaret was there to make sure I didn’t smuggle the needles and scissors out afterwards. She even offered to do some of the more straightforward sewing, although at first she made great clumsy stitches and I had to make her undo it and show her the way I wanted it. ‘These long fingers were not made for holding needles,’ she’d laugh, ‘they’re more suited to holding a pen.’

Over the months me talking improved and the more questions she asked the more I found the words to tell her about meself, about my childhood and the whole rigmarole just like I’ve told you, dearie. She wanted to know why the staff and patients called me Queenie and I told her it was ’cos Nora and me had got chosen by Queen Mary as her special orphans and how I went to work at the palace.

To be honest I don’t think she believed me, but she played along, like all the rest of ’em did – just like you’re doing, bless you, dearie. I dare say they’d told her to, so as not to anger me. That was the new thinking in them days – they’d stopped trying to deny our fantasies and just let us rage on. Old Ada wore a pillow under her dress most days and told us several times a day that baby Jesus would soon arrive – blimey, that must have been the longest pregnancy in the world – and Winnie got away with stealing food because she genuinely believed that was what she was being told to do. My foot.

I didn’t tell Margaret nor anyone about the prince, of course, because I didn’t want to get him into any trouble or cause a scandal. She offered to try to find Nora for me, and I believe that she did write to the palace but there was no reply. Anyway, I was sure that by now Nora would have married and left service, so it would be impossible to trace her.

When she pressed me about how I came to be in the Hall, I couldn’t find the words, at first. There was no making sense of it, you see. Why would I have got locked up just for getting pregnant? It was only the grief of losing the baby that sent me mad, that and their so-called treatments. And now I felt saner than ever, but there was no way of proving it, and in any case I reckon they’d told the medical superintendent to keep me shut away, in case I told my story.

In the end there was no hiding, because my first word had been David, and she soon twigged what the stitched swirls of the central design represented. She was a clever lady, that Margaret, who knew how to look things up in books.

‘That’s a lover’s knot, isn’t it?’ she asked, one day, and I couldn’t stop myself blushing crimson and giggling. ‘Was this for David, the name you spoke, your boyfriend? Or was he your husband?’ she pressed, and eventually I had to admit it.

‘I loved him,’ I said, ‘and I think he loved me, once. But …’ I stumbled over me words and wished I’d thought about it before blurting it out ‘… I didn’t come from the same background.’