by Liz Trenow
What must it have been like for my grandmother, knowing only too well the sorrow of childlessness, finding herself face to face with the woman whose child she had quite unwittingly, and at first unwillingly, taken as her own? And then enduring the pain of guilt and shame, living with it every minute of every day for most of her life, a terrible burden she had been unable to share with another soul? What a bitter irony that she too had ended up in the same hospital, having had a nervous breakdown.
I could still hear Maria’s voice describing the day she arrived at Helena Hall and the child she nearly died giving birth to with only the aid of inexperienced and probably uncaring nurses. I began to ache all over again for her too; for the baby snatched from her, for the lie she was told. And all the while she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she had heard his cry and that he might, just possibly, still be alive. I could understand why this had sent her crazy.
The labyrinth of sorrow and guilt that had bound these two strangers’ lives together was almost impossible to comprehend.
In the deluge of emotions the notebook had triggered, the most extraordinary consequence of this tangled web had, at first, passed me by. Now, it slammed me in the stomach with a sickening whack: the realisation that if a) my own father was very probably – no, almost certainly – Maria’s baby and b) the crest on the letter really did prove Maria’s claim that she’d had an affair with the prince, and if c) her child really had been his, then d) my father was the bastard son of the Prince of Wales!
For God’s sake, that was just mad, stupid, plain ridiculous. Me, a lifelong republican who didn’t care a jot for the royal family, who didn’t even watch Diana’s wedding on television or turn out to see the queen when she came to Eastchester to open a new school?
The idea of a royal grandfather – especially a man who had been a disgraceful philanderer in his youth and a Nazi sympathiser in middle age – was distasteful enough, but further alarming visions swam into my head: of the story leaking out, of being doorstepped by the press and papped as I went to the supermarket, followed of course by palace denials, setting me up to look like an attention-seeking idiot.
No. I would never let it happen. In that moment I vowed that this was the one proven part of Maria’s story that I’d tell no one. Not Mum, not Ben, not any friend, boyfriend or even any future husband and family I might have.
Only Ellie Bevan knew about the crest on the template. I would call her tomorrow and request her professional confidentiality. Granny’s letter and notebook made no mention of the Prince of Wales and, though Patsy Morton had of course heard the tapes, she had no reason to believe Maria’s story. Mum probably hadn’t known in the first place, and it seemed unlikely that she would tell anyone, not now. I might whisper it to Jo one day, out of friendship and loyalty, but she would entirely understand why no one else should ever know.
I determined that the secret would remain hidden in the quilt, just as it had already been for nearly a century.
I poured another glass of wine and tried to rationalise my emotions. From the moment I had pulled the quilt out of its suitcase, just a few weeks ago, and read that verse sewn into its lining, I’d known that there was something special about it. Now I understood.
I took out the photograph. There was Granny, still sitting on her sofa, with Maria behind her, her shoulder turned as if she was just leaving, or perhaps arriving. But there was something familiar about it that I hadn’t noticed before. The pattern of Maria’s dress – was it one of the cottons she’d used in the patchwork? I fetched the quilt from the boot of the car, and spread it carefully across Mum’s dining table, scanning the patches, comparing them to the dress in the photograph.
None matched. So where could I have seen this fabric before? Then I had a brainwave, went to the bookshelf, pulled out the album and turned to the back page where I’d found the photograph. There was the other snap of me, sitting on Granny’s knee. Her face is out of the picture but she is holding a book, in which I appear to be totally absorbed.
Except that Granny is wearing Maria’s dress.
It took a second to click: the knee on which I was sitting was not Granny’s, it was Maria’s. She was holding me on her knee and reading to me. I peeled back the transparent film and lifted the photo from the page. Then I turned it over: on it was pencilled: ‘Maria meets Caroline, February 1972’.
As the memory flooded back, with almost painful clarity, the breath seemed to leave my body. That time I had stayed at Granny’s house, the night she told me about the quilt, she had mentioned an ‘important person’ coming to tea the following day. She must have been referring to Maria, my blood grandmother, the woman for whom her greatest luxury was a bottle of eau de cologne. I could almost smell the lavender-scented perfume all over again.
It was probably our very first meeting.
Tears pricked the back of my eyes once more as I imagined how Maria must have felt that day. She hadn’t found the boy she believed to be her son, but at least she discovered that he’d lived a happy life, had been much loved and cherished, become a successful academic, married and had a daughter. Tragically she never got to meet him but at least now, through the generosity of the woman who once befriended her, she was reunited with her granddaughter.
From the moment I’d heard her voice on the tapes, I had felt an unexplained affinity for her. Was it simply the timbre of her voice that I recognised, or her wicked chuckle, perhaps passed down through my genes? Certainly I admired her fierce determination to make the most of her life, to fight on undaunted, so like my grandmother, like my mother – and, I hoped, like me.
After almost a whole lifetime, Maria had completed her quilt, decorating its outermost border with grandmother’s fan designs that, I now realised, were probably intended for me, her grandchild. And then, through Granny, she had bequeathed it to me, with her life’s history and memories of the people she had loved sewn into its patchwork.
That my beloved Granny Jean was not my blood grandmother made not one iota of difference to me – she would always be the most important in my family memories and my sense of identity. Rather than losing a grandmother, it felt as though I had simply gained another one.
And, after all those years of hardship, there was a happy ending, of sorts. Maria had found the comfort of her friendship with Nora and, in her last few years, contact with her granddaughter. She had come home at last.
‘Coming home’. The words resonated in my head. Being here, in this cottage, always felt like coming home for me. So why was I resisting it?
It made perfect financial sense: selling the flat would enable me to pay off Russell and release start-up capital to support my new venture, such as equipping the garage as an upholstery workshop. It would pay for Mum to stay at Holmfield if she wanted to, or for carers to look after her at home instead, should she prefer.
As I contemplated these possibilities I could feel a heady sense of certainty returning, and my mind began to buzz with optimism once more. In the past few weeks my life had changed so much that I barely recognised my former self: that aspirational, high-earning, eighteen-hour-a-day wage slave. Those values now appeared trivial and irrelevant, and even my visual sensibilities seemed to have been through a radical rethink. The clean, minimalist colours of my flat that I’d once loved so much had started to feel cold and characterless of late, especially in contrast to the brilliance of the fabrics for the new upholstery designs I’d been working on.
I pictured the skeletons of the chair and stool in my flat, and the mess of webbing and wadding I’d left behind. The solution was now obvious. No matter the cost, I would employ a professional upholsterer to complete the work on the chair and footstool. If Justin’s clients were, as I hoped, to fall instantly in love with them, the workmanship must be of the highest possible standard. My reputation as an up-and-coming designer depended on it.
Of course much needed to be done to turn this neglected cottage, with its chaotic, clashing colours and designs, the sagging she
lves and draughty windows, into somewhere that would really feel like my own home. There were obvious priorities, new central heating for a start, and over time I would redecorate the place inside and out.
But, instead of being daunting, the idea excited me: as well as the garage/workshop, I could even use the rooms as a showcase for my interior designs. There would be no cream carpets or soft leather sofas. It would be a warm, inviting family home. The phrase felt so right.
And the quilt, when it was restored, would take pride of place – always there to remind me of my two remarkable grandmothers.
Just then, my phone beeped. The text read: See you in ten. Ben x.
Book Club Q&A for The Forgotten Seamstress, by Liz Trenow
Q1: What was your inspiration for writing The Forgotten Seamstress?
I come from a silk weaving family and have always been fascinated by fabrics. One day I was visiting the famous Warner Archive, in Braintree, Essex, when I saw a case of ‘May Silks’ – beautiful cream and white damasks and brocades, some with interwoven gold and silver threads, hand-woven for the trousseau of Princess May (1867–1953), also known as Mary of Teck, for her wedding to the heir to the British throne, the Duke of Clarence.
Sadly, the Duke died just six weeks before the wedding and, with typical royal pragmatism, it was decided that she should instead marry his younger brother George, who later became King George V. Another design from the May silks was chosen for her wedding dress.
More than a century later, these silks still glimmered and shimmered in their case, and I became fascinated by the way that the designs, featuring roses, thistles and shamrocks with May blossoms and lovers’ knots, had been interpreted into the weave of the fabrics. They are truly unique, and have never been woven before or since.
Q2: Are you a quilter yourself?
I’m afraid not: I once made a very small patchwork cushion cover out of simple hexagons, but beyond that have absolutely no experience of quilting. However I have always been captivated by the way that quilters manage to juxtapose and manipulate fabrics into such extraordinary and unexpected effects.
A few years ago I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Quilt Show, of 70 quilts dating from 1700 to the present day, and this fascination was revived. Most of all, I was reminded of the many different ways in which quilts tell stories, and decided that I would write a novel one day in which a quilt would become a ‘main character’.
As I set out to write The Forgotten Seamstress, I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to the internationally-acknowledged patchwork quilter, teacher and author: Lynne Edwards, who in 2008 was awarded an MBE for her services to arts and crafts. With typical enthusiasm, Lynne completely embraced the project. We met several times and, over bottles of wine and lots of laughter, ‘devised’ the quilt that Maria made, taking into account the influences and sources of inspiration that she would have had at different times of her life, and the sort of fabrics she might have had at her disposal.
By the time we had finished I had, in my mind’s eye, a very clear view of what the quilt would look like. We very much hope that someone, someday, will be inspired by the pattern Lynne has very generously devised (available for free at www.liztrenow.org) and create ‘Maria’s quilt’. If you do, please let us know!
Q3: Setting the story in a mental asylum creates quite a contrast to the royal theme. What inspired you to do that?
I love novels with a great sense of place, and having set my first book in the house where I grew up, I was determined to find somewhere just as evocative and atmospheric for this one.
When the Severalls Mental Asylum, on the edge of my home town of Colchester, first opened its doors to patients in 1913, it was considered to be a state of the art institution which would become a centre of expertise in the very latest treatments for mental illness. It was built on a vast scale like the estate of a country mansion, with gardens and sports facilities and a range of other houses for staff, with the ideal that patients could be safely contained and soothed in these beautiful surroundings.
Of course, with hindsight, we now understand that the treatments used were sometimes inhumane, even brutal, and patients often became institutionalised by the strict routines. Occasionally its use was also sometimes abused, and tales of people being locked up for little more than social breaches (such as umarried pregnancy) once used to abound.
In the 1970s, when patients began to be discharged into ‘care in the community’ (now itself discredited) some of the buildings and wards were used by other hospital departments, for example clinical treatments and minor surgery. This is how, as a teenager, I became an in-patient at the hospital, having a benign cyst removed from my arm. It was only two days, but that experience of the place has never left me: the scale of it, both impressive and oppressive, the locked doors and bars, doctors riding bicycles down the miles-long corridors and the people – mental patients – sometimes behaving or reacting quite oddly, as they walked or worked in the gardens.
A collection of old photographs is available on the website www.severallshospital.co.uk and, although most of the buildings are now closed (pending redevelopment), it is still possible to walk in the grounds among the pine trees. The atmosphere of the place remains as strong as ever.
Q4: Where did you get the idea of using old recorded cassette tapes of Maria, to tell her story?
Because there is a century between the two characters they could not have met, so there had to be a way for Caroline to learn about Maria’s life story. While researching the history of Severalls Hospital, I came across a wonderful book by the sociologist and author Diana Gittins called Madness in its Place (Routledge 1998), in which she quoted from her recordings with staff and patients. These first-hand accounts really brought the place and the people to life, and in one of those light-bulb moments, I realised that this was exactly what I needed to do with Maria.
So I created a character – Professor Patsy Morton – who had undertaken a research project not unlike that of Diana Gittins’, although a couple of decades earlier. This was the perfect way of allowing Caroline – and the reader – to hear Maria’s story first hand. Although we never actually meet her in the book, the tapes help us to feel that we know her.
Q5: Your main character, Maria, is a very ‘unreliable narrator’. Did you find her difficult to write?
Maria was not difficult to write at all – she just flowed onto the page! The tricky bit was managing the reactions of the other characters, especially Caroline, to the fantastical things that they learned about her. Because I knew the outcome of Maria’s story, I had to imagine what it would be like to know nothing about her except for the small clues that we gathered along the way, so that I could establish how much (or how little), Caroline should believe (or not believe) about Maria’s story.
Q6: People always say that the second book, or music album, can be trickier than the first. Did you experience this with The Forgotten Seamstress?
And how!
My first novel, The Last Telegram, was based on real-life characters, events and places from my family history and childhood, and by the time I’d finished writing it I felt that a lifetime of memories and experience had been ‘used up’. What would I turn to next? My husband wisely counselled me to write ‘something completely different’ and not to try to recreate the atmosphere of the first one, which is what I set out to do.
As I wrote, The Last Telegram was published and received almost unqualified five star reviews. Each time someone told me how much they loved it I would start to panic again, wondering whether The Forgotten Seamstress would ever match up.
About half way through, I watched a television documentary in which the crime writer Ian Rankin talked about the process of writing Standing in Another Man’s Grave (now out in paperback). He talked about how, with each novel, he experiences what he describes as ‘the fear’, a point at which he thinks he’s writing complete rubbish that will never get published, and even if it did, that reviewers would
slate and readers hate. He talked about having to work your way through it and hold faith that it will come right in time.
It was so reassuring to hear that even Britain’s number one bestselling crime novelist should suffer such crises of confidence that I came back to my manuscript with renewed determination. After a major restructuring and quite a lot of rewriting I found my rhythm again, and now believe it is just as good as the first (although very different).
I hope you think so too.
Footnote
Chapter Eleven
1 The aphasia appears to be selective, thus ruling out fears of any long-term damage, and is considered to be a condition imposed by the patient herself.
Acknowledgements
Many might think it a foolhardy enterprise for a non-quilter to write a novel with a patchwork quilt as one of its main ‘characters’, but I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to a true expert, teacher and fellow-author Lynne Edwards, MBE, who embraced the project with such enthusiasm I knew at once that our collaboration would produce something remarkable.
With her years of experience and expertise, Lynne knew precisely what fabrics, techniques and other influences Maria would have had during the various stages of her life, and we had great fun creating her ‘virtual quilt’. The pattern is available on my website at www.liztrenow.com and we would both be thrilled should anyone be tempted to try it. Any technical inaccuracies about fabrics, quilting and patchwork in the novel are, of course, entirely mine.
As a teenager I was an in-patient on a clinical ward at Severalls Hospital, on the outskirts of my home town of Colchester, and that brief experience of the place has never left me. For my research into its history for this novel I am indebted to those who created the website and collection of historic photographs at www.severallshospital.co.uk, and in particular to the writer and sociologist Diana Gittins, author of a remarkable exploration of the hospital’s work entitled Madness in its Place (pub. Routledge, 1998).
