The Forgotten Seamstress

by Liz Trenow

  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.

  Chapter Eleven

  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.

  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 hea
rt.

  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.