The Forgotten Seamstress

by Liz Trenow

  ‘Hurrah,’ she said. ‘Maria Romano. Now we just have to find the bundle it’s fallen off.’

  In the pile on the desk there was a set of four numbered cassettes held together by a withered elastic band. ‘That’ll be it,’ she said. ‘Patsy said there were four. Now all we need is the cassette player.’

  She delved into the cupboard again with no luck, then wheeled over an office chair and began to climb precariously onto it.

  ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ I said, holding firmly onto the back of the seat. Undaunted, she stood on tiptoe to peer into the upper shelves of the cupboard, shouted, ‘Here we go!’ and hauled out a rectangular black plastic box with a transparent panel in the top and a heavy flex hanging out of the back.

  ‘This must have been the latest technology in the seventies,’ I said, helping her safely down from the chair. ‘An ancestor of the Walkman I used to love as a teenager. Does it still work, do you think?’

  ‘We can but try. I’ve reserved a seminar room so you can listen in peace. There’s a coffee machine if you’re desperate, or the café in the square’s a better bet.’

  As we set off along the corridor, a slim, athletic-looking woman in a figure-hugging cerise cashmere sweater and a showpiece necklace of brilliantly-coloured abstract enamelled shapes came towards us, breaking into a smile.

  ‘You must be Caroline Meadows.’ She shook my hand with a firm grip. ‘Patsy Morton.’ I’d calculated that she would be well into her sixties, but she looked ten years younger, and only the unapologetically grey hair – gently swept into a soft bun – belied her years. She was nothing like the person I’d imagined, none of the clipped vowels, severe haircut, sensible shoes and brisk manner of female academics I’d met in the past.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to help me, Professor Morton.’

  ‘Call me Patsy, please,’ she said, with an appraising glance. ‘I see Sarah’s found the tapes and my trusty old cassette player. Have you got time for a quick chat before you start?’

  Her narrow office, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, had just enough room for a desk and a visitor’s chair covered with a beautiful hand-woven throw. Sun poured in through the windows onto several dusty house plants. Beyond them, the view spread away from the concrete squares, across the valley to the townscape and the clock tower of Eastchester town hall in the distance. On the pin-board above her desk were photographs: a good-looking man on the beach with a small child on his shoulders, the professor with other small children – perhaps grandchildren – all grinning uninhibitedly at the camera.

  As we sat down she looked me directly in the eye. ‘Forgive me for asking so directly, Miss Meadows, but are you by any chance related to the late Professor Richard Meadows?’

  My heart did several skips. ‘He was my father, did you actually know him? I thought perhaps you might have done,’ I said. ‘I was going to ask, but …’

  ‘Yes, I really am that old,’ she replied, laughing. ‘I was lucky enough to have been taught by him for a seminar in my second term as an undergraduate. The university was very new in those days and everyone felt it had been fortunate to attract someone of his calibre. We were all in awe of his reputation, he had a brilliant mind and was also highly respected in the field, but he was very approachable all the same, generous and kindly towards us first years. I’m sure it was partly his influence which prompted my interest in mental health,’ she said.

  It was heart-warming to hear that my father had been so loved and respected, but painful too. ‘I was just three years old when he died. I wish I’d known him properly.’

  ‘You’re his very image, did you know?’ she said, her voice tender now. ‘It gave me a bit of a jolt when I saw you.’

  ‘Apart from my mother and grandmother, I don’t think I’ve met too many other people who knew him,’ I said, feeling self-conscious in the directness of her gaze.

  ‘Is your mother still alive?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s only seventy-three, but sadly losing her memory a bit now. She was much younger than him of course; she was one of his students at UCL, before he came here.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, I think we were all just a bit in love with him. So handsome, still blond-haired even in his fifties, and with extraordinary blue eyes. I think you’ve inherited them.’ She smiled across the desk. ‘He made you feel as though you were in the presence of someone quite special.’

  ‘That’s lovely of you to say so,’ I said, ambushed by a sense of loss, and the deep ache of envy that she had been old enough to know him, even to have been taught by him.

  We both fell quiet for a moment.

  ‘Now, tell me why you are so interested in my research,’ she said, breaking the silence.

  I explained about the quilt I’d inherited from my grandmother, the royal silks, and the woman we knew as Maria, who we believed had sewn it, the woman she had interviewed for her research. ‘She stitched a little verse on the back of the quilt,’ I said, reciting it from memory.

  ‘Hmm. Over-sentimental, but not untypical of the time,’ she said.

  ‘Can you remember Maria?’

  She shook her head, with a rueful smile. ‘It’s all a bit hazy now, but since you contacted us I’ve been doing my best to bring her to mind. All I can really recollect is that she was quite a character, a tiny person with a big personality. The hospital’s medical officer tried to warn me off, told me I shouldn’t believe a word she said.’

  ‘Because she was insane?’

  ‘That’s what he told me and that’s what the hospital notes said but, by the time I met her, she didn’t appear the slightest bit insane. She’d been discharged by then, and had gone to live in London with an old friend. She had an incredibly tough life: her story doesn’t make for easy listening.’

  She glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve got a lecture to get to. Can I leave Sarah to look after you now?’

  We were about to leave the room when she turned back to her desk. ‘I nearly forgot to give you this.’ She handed me a much-worn hardback notebook.

  ‘It’s my PhD research diary,’ she said. ‘There are a couple of references to my meetings with Maria in there which might help for context. I’ve marked the relevant pages. But please make sure you put it back with the tapes on Sarah’s desk when you leave. They’re all rather precious, you understand – but being the Prof’s daughter I know I can trust you.’

  The seminar room smelled of dusty central heating and fatty fast foods recently devoured by hungry students. I closed the door, and sat down at a table marked with cup rings and felt-tip scribbles.

  I flicked through Professor Morton’s diary, reading through the pages that she had marked, and photographed them for later. I propped up the photograph of Granny and Maria against my coffee cup, and clicked the first cassette into the slot of the ancient recording machine.

  Then I took a deep breath and pressed PLAY.

  My heart nearly stopped in my chest as the initial hiss of the tape gave way to a husky voice, burning with humour and intelligence. The bare seminar room and the rain-stained concrete outside disappeared as I listened, totally absorbed, each squeaky revolution unveiling layers of history that had been locked inside these cassette time capsules for nearly forty years.

  The individual in my photograph had seemed fleeting, impermanent, like a willo-o’-the-wisp. Now this voice brought her vividly to life: bold, rebellious, and cheerful, even chirpy in spite of all she had faced. I would so love to have known her.

  Three hours, several more cups of coffee and a stale cheese sandwich later, I loaded the fourth cassette into the slot and then, for the final time, pressed PLAY.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cassette 4, side 1

  ‘How does it feel, talking about your time at the Hall after all these years?’

  Strange, dearie, very strange. Like another life, and I suppose that’s what it was. Not that I minded so much, in the end, being in there. I had me friends and pl
enty of ciggies, and the sewing and that. Enough food, most of the time. The main trouble was that no one ever believed me, so I stopped talking about me past, locked it away inside me, kind of. Whenever I did talk about it they would say it was me voices, the old fantasy stuff.

  But your history is what makes you who you are, doesn’t it? And after all them drugs and treatments I felt like a sort of non-person. Everyone, even the staff, insisted on calling me Queenie, so it’s hardly surprising that I almost forgot who I’d once been. They stole the real Maria away from me. It wasn’t till I got out, around nineteen fifty, that sort of time, that I started feeling like my old self again. It’s been lovely talking to you, my dear.

  ‘And I have enjoyed meeting you, too.’

  Gawd, just think of it. That was more than twenty years ago.

  She sighs.

  Twenty years of freedom, and I’ve counted me blessings every single day of it. Coming out has given me my past back and I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. I was very angry for a while about the life they took from me, but it doesn’t get you anywhere fuming to yourself all the time, so I just decided to put the past behind me and get on with enjoying the years I have left. But I hear the place is closing down for good now, is that right?

  ‘So I understand. Most of the patients, like yourself, have been settled in the community.’

  A fierce, bronchitic chuckle.

  Hah, is that what they call it? I’ve seen them on the streets with their cardboard and their bundles.

  ‘Yes, I am afraid that’s the choice some of them have made.’

  Don’t have no other choice you mean.

  She lights a cigarette, and there is the deep rattle of her inhalation, and a long exhalation before she starts to speak again.

  Still, s’pose I got lucky, having someone to come to. Didn’t have much luck in the rest of me life, so perhaps I was due some.

  It wasn’t easy at first, mind. I was scared of every little thing: cars, and buses, and people everywhere, like swarms of ants. Making up me mind was the hardest thing: brown bread or white, butter or marge, jam or marmalade, tea or coffee? Just deciding what to have for breakfast was like a day’s work. We never had choices in there – you ate what you got, and if it wasn’t enough, or someone like Winnie nicked it off your plate, which used to happen a fair bit, you went hungry.

  We went pretty hungry in the second war, I tell you, that was a miserable six years and all. Most of the male nurses went off to fight and the women into war work so there was hardly any staff left here to look after us. They had to close some wards and pack more of us into the rooms they kept open. I think I mentioned that I’d got myself moved to one of those villas out on the edge of the estate? By then I was sensible enough not to give them any trouble. Anything for an easy time. It was nice out there, peaceful, surrounded by beautiful gardens, very civilised. Almost like normal life.

  But when the war came they closed the villas and moved us all back into the main building, all those terrible corridors echoing with the howls of crazy people. To top it off, we was stuck on the wards for most of the day because they couldn’t spare the time to take us out.

  As the war went on the food got worse and worse – almost everything disappeared: there was no tinned milk or bananas, no lemons or chocolate, and there was very little butter or cheese, and meat. They were all rationed of course. You would hear the cooks grumbling about it, as they slapped their latest concoction of brown slosh onto your plates, made out of carrots and turnips mostly, day after day.

  They dug up the gardens to grow food, the men did, but their seedlings got the carrot fly and the white fly and the black fly, every kind of fly in the kingdom flew to Helena Hall, because they didn’t have the know-how to deal with that sort of thing and no chemicals neither – they was all saved for dosing up the patients. The plants withered in their weedy patches and our stomachs grew hungrier by the day.

  The sewing room stayed open, thank the Lord, ’cos without it I would have truly lost my mind again. But we was full-time sewing heavy khaki serge, into army uniforms, you see, doing our bit for the war effort. It was terrible fabric to sew, especially on our little machines – they weren’t designed for industrial work. The needles would break and the shuttles would jam every few minutes, and our fingers and backs ached from pressing the material flat enough to flow under the foot.

  I still managed to steal a few minutes each day, during the break and over lunchtimes to work on me quilt, though. By now they trusted me with scissors and needles so I didn’t have to be watched every minute, like most of the others. The two central panels – the one for the prince, and the one for the baby – were finished, so I started work on designing a third.

  The supervisor found me some left-overs: scraps of lavender-stripe cotton we’d been making into uniforms for the junior nurses, grey shirting for male patients, and some cream poplin shirts we’d had in from the admin side which were beyond mending. The colours blended well enough, but the fabrics was plain and dull after the brocades and intricate designs I’d been working with on the inner panels. So I decided this panel was going to have to be completely different and I asked for some magazines to give me ideas. Have you heard of cubism, dearie?

  ‘It was an artistic movement, wasn’t it?’

  Something like that. I read about it in one of them magazines, about how they were turning pictures into blocks of colour – even people and landscapes – so I tried to think of a way of using my plain fabric in blocks. They was certainly easier to patchwork than curves, I can tell you.

  The idea came to me as I was doodling my name: M for Maria. Also for Margaret. If I could join a row of capital letter Ms in a row, in blocks of contrasting fabrics next to each other, it might create an interesting pattern. After I’d played about with the ideas for a bit I came up with a pattern that used the Ms and also like the zigzag of a staircase, which felt right to me, given the stairs my short legs have had to climb in all of them tall buildings I’ve lived in.

  I was lucky, you know, because I nearly lost the lot, my life included, one terrible night in 1942. Those ruddy Germans bombed the place and made a direct hit on one of the women’s wards, just along the corridor from where I was sleeping.

  What they thought they were doing, bombing a place full of crazies, we’ll never know. I expect it looked like a factory or a hospital, and of course the army was stationed just down the road so perhaps they thought they was killing soldiers. Anyway, it caused mayhem, and though we pulled a few of them out alive, thirty-six patients and two nurses died that night.

  ‘You helped to save people? They allowed you out?’

  One of the bombs fell that close, the blast blew the door off our ward too. Just as well we was all cowering under our beds by this time otherwise we’d have been thrown across the room. So once the bombs stopped and we could hear the wailing and the shouting all the night nurses ran out to help and I went too, no one stopped me. It had blown the wall right off the end of the building, you see, and the ward with it, just knocked over like a great hand had come and swiped it. The bricks and the roof was all on the ground in a heap and bits of people sticking out, cursing and crying for help … it makes my skin crawl when I think of it, even all these years later.

  There was no one in charge, so I just got stuck in and started pulling lumps of bricks and mortar away from the bits of people I could see, calling to them that help was on the way. My hands was cut to shreds in a few moments but I never noticed, not till much later, that they was bleeding all over the place. After a bit the wardens and fire service arrived and started telling us how to dig without harming the poor blighters any further. We did pull quite a few of them free but they was mostly in a bad way, broken arms and legs and the rest, and stuck into ambulances and off to the proper hospitals for treatment. I’m not sure if many of them ever returned.

  By dawn, and this was August, mind, so dawn came early still, we got a proper view of the terrible damage, and
nearly forty still missing as far as anyone could account for. We was herded back to our wards for a bit of patching up, and they had to chase a few crazies round the grounds to get them back as well. We heard later that they pulled two old dears out of the rubble twenty-four hours later, thanks to the sharp ears of a local copper who heard them whimpering.

  I must have been in shock because they sedated me and I slept for hours after that, but not even the drugs could blot out the cries or the blood and broken bodies we saw that night. They return in my nightmares, even now that I’m an old woman.

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘Are you all right, Maria?’

  The sound of liquid – water? – poured into a glass and gulped down.

  That’s better, thank you. Shall I carry on?

  ‘Yes, please. If you are feeling better?’

  I think we’re on the home straight now, not much more to tell, because it was only a few years after the war ended that the day arrived. The best day of my life.

  We didn’t get letters, you see, not usually. So that morning after breakfast, when I was getting ready to head over to the sewing room, and Matron came walking down the ward with an envelope in her hand I took little notice, until she stopped at my bed.

  ‘Letter for you, Queenie,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Do you need any help reading it?’

  She meant well, of course, but I snapped at her all the same, flustered by the strangeness of the moment.

  ‘I can read it for myself, thank you,’ I said, grabbing it and tucking it into the top of my blouse. She was desperate to know what it said, I could tell, but it was mine and I was sharing it with no one, thank you very much. My heart was hammering so loud in my chest it’s a miracle I could walk, but I got myself into the toilet and locked the door.