The Woolly Hat Knitting Club

by Poppy Dolan

  I’ve been running every chance I get, looking to exhaust my twitchy muscles and my twitchy mind in equal measures. And when Becks messages me to ask if I’ll come along to a new exercise class she wants to try, it seems to come at the perfect time – a Thursday morning when I have exactly zero tasks on my To Do list. The flat is clean; JP’s out with Stan again; I’ve done all I can to date on the MCJ presentation; and staring at the clock wasn’t going to speed up time and make my appointment with Douglas come any sooner. I’ve even been forced to pick up my sorry attempt at knitting a baby hat: JP says if I’m truly going to get behind him and his craft collective, I have to live the cause. So over three days I’ve managed to cast on the 71 stitches necessary and so far I’ve done half a painstaking row. It’s given me two migraines, concentrating so hard. How JP does this every sodding day when he’s fit as a fiddle, I do not know. But when my phone bleeps with a message, I let my knitting drop and bolt upstairs for my gym gear.

  But there’s one key piece of equipment Becky has failed to tell me I’ll need for this class: a baby. It’s just gone two p.m. and I’m standing with a clutch of about 20 women in the park, each with a brightly-coloured pram by her side.

  ‘Sorry,’ Becky whispers out of a tiny corner of her mouth. ‘Um, can I blame it on sleep deprivation? I felt a bit too nervous to come on my own, so I thought of you. But I forgot that you need one of these to push about. Apparently the resistance is really good for you?’ She points down at her sleek lime-green pram. It has massive wheels and a sturdy frame, like it was built to compete in monster-truck rallies rather than just scoot up and down pavements. Chester is tucked up under a thin blanket inside, snoozing with his sunny-yellow woolly hat pulled down over his sweet little head. It’s impossible to be cross with someone when they have their cute baby in tow.

  ‘That’s… cool. No worries.’ I smile through gritted teeth. I can take a few weird looks in the name of friendship. And besides, any kind of workout is a good workout. With all the energy fizzing through me today, I could offer to push two prams at once, if any of the mums need a breather.

  ‘Afternoon, ladies!’ Oh God, it’s the hunk from the knitting class. He’s the instructor. Perfect. ‘Everyone find a space, get behind your buggies!’

  Becky is just mouthing an ‘Oh my God!’ accompanied by a lavish, lusty eye roll as everyone finds their spot. And suddenly my buggy-less-ness is pretty obvious.

  ‘Oh, hi!’ Marcus spots me and waves. ‘From the knitting class, right? Ladies, if you want to learn how to make your little one a hat from scratch, get over to the haberdashery in the village. They run amazing classes. I went to one last week.’ The collective hormonal sigh from the group nearly blows me off my feet. No wonder this class is so well attended. Hot guy who is sensitive to your baby and can knit? I think most new mums would happily pay for six sessions of that, and then some.

  ‘Blackthorn Haberdashery, that’s us!’ I try to stop my embarrassment making my voice squeaky. I try to channel professional Delilah, who can keep herself steady in the most stressful situations, because I actually feel more like 14-year-old Dee who once forgot her Home Ec ingredients and the hacked-off teacher made her whip air in an empty bowl for an hour, while tears brimmed in her eyes. But Marcus has given me an opportunity to get the shop name out to potential customers, and I can’t let that slip.

  ‘Yes, my boy is modelling one right now! It’s gorgeous!’ Becks does a big wave to catch everyone’s attention, hearing the wobble in my voice and taking the spotlight instead. There are a few murmurs of interest so I vow to myself to hang around afterwards and make sure they remember to drop in and see us.

  ‘But no baby with you this week?’ Marcus frowns good-naturedly.

  ‘Um, no.’ I hold my hands open by my sides, as if to prove there isn’t a set of twins hidden in my palms.

  ‘Well, every mum needs a day off! Good for you.’ He smiles. The mum next to me looks like she wants to choke me with her baby’s teething necklace. ‘You don’t have your pram in your car, do you? Because that really helps in the class.’ He’s looking at me like I’m a total idiot, and maybe he’s worried about me being allowed to drive a vehicle at all.

  ‘Again… no. Sorry. I’m not actually…’ The teenage me takes over and my voice disintegrates into a mumble.

  ‘Sorry, can’t hear you. What was that?’

  ‘I’m actually not… a mum.’

  ‘She’s my friend! She’s super sporty!’ Becky chimes in loudly.

  I can now tell I’m being mentally labelled by all the other women here: Bloody Show-Off. Maybe I’ll just go at a half-pace today, then.

  * * *

  Marcus has got the ladies squatting at their prams, holding on to the handles for support, so I’m left crouching down on my tod, not going as deep as I maybe could because I don’t really want to be lynched by women who are operating on four hours’ sleep. God only knows how feral they feel right now.

  Becky winces with each dip. ‘I know this is… good for me. But why can’t it be easy?!’ She wheezes on the last word. Chester’s hands flick open and then closed as the buggy jerks a little, but it doesn’t seem to wake him. He is truly a poppet.

  ‘It’ll get easier, before you know it.’ I feel my muscles complain and push against them even more. It’s all part of the process, even if it hurts like a mother.

  ‘O… K.’ She wobbles as she heads down into another squat.

  ‘And let’s break for five minutes before a bit of High Intensity!’ Marcus yells, and I’m the only one not to answer him with a groan. You can’t beat a bit of HIIT for brain-numbing exhaustion.

  Becks folds onto the grass like a damp towel. ‘Jeez!’ She prods her tummy. ‘Abdominals, I’m sorry! I know I stretched you beyond all recognition with this kid, but do me a favour! Come back to meeeee.’ She stage-weeps and flings her hand over her eyes.

  I laugh and flop down next to her. ‘Worth it, though.’

  Becky pulls herself up into a kneel to check on Chester. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’ve booked your post-baby shower, by the way – the fanciest afternoon tea money can buy. At Cheeky’s!’

  Becky hoots with laughter.

  ‘I’m serious! Bob has agreed to let me order in a really fancy cake from a patisserie and he’ll even get out nice tablecloths and bunting. You, me and JP. You don’t have to invite anyone else if you don’t want to.’

  ‘That sounds like bliss. Thanks, love. The thought of fancy cake will get me through this sweaty hell. Oh, and I meant to say – my other premmie mum mates would love a few hats, when JP gets any more in the post. And when my health visitor admired Chessie’s red beanie, I told her about what you guys are up to and it was like she’d won the lottery or something. Apparently, some of the health visitors run a scheme where they redistribute clothes to mums in need. And premmie clothes are high on their wish list. She said any that we can’t find homes for she would gladly take off our hands. So that’s good for JP’s craft collective, right?’

  I’m stretching my arms above my head as I listen. ‘That’s brilliant. I was getting a bit worried about JP’s plans to get the hats out to new mums, how it would work in practice. Had visions of our living room filling up with towers of hats without homes. Like fluffy stalagmites everywhere.’

  ‘Ha!’ Becks flops back onto the grass.

  I look at the mums huddled in little clusters around us, swigging water and blowing out their cheeks in exhaustion. On a normal Tuesday, I would be in an office, barely looking out of the window let alone watching a Buggy Fit class taking place. You can get so lost in what you’re doing, in keeping your head down and working, that you can forget thousands of other lives are going on around you. My head turns to Becks, her arms spread wide in a position of total abandonment. People are having really tough times, right under your nose, and if you don’t look up now and then, you can totally miss it. They can just be struggling, silently, and you’d never know if you didn’t look out for
it. If JP hadn’t broken his arms, if I hadn’t lost my job, I’d never have known the worry, the heartbreak that Becky went through, all squeezed into just a few short weeks. I wouldn’t have been able to help, even if it was just delivering junk food and woolly hats. And if I hadn’t been hanging around Fenwild for a prolonged, enforced stay, I wouldn’t have been here to witness her coming out the other side, happy, and making her way forward in a new way of life.

  ‘OK, up and at them!’ Marcus claps and rubs his hands together. I think the only thing motivating Becky to get up from her recumbent position is the thought of his tight running shorts and toned legs. Hey, whatever works. An increased heart rate – however you get it pumping – is a good thing.

  As we start a march on the spot to warm up for bouts of sprint pram races (or pretend-pram gentle jogs in my case), Becks leans against me for a beat. ‘Actually, the health visitor lady asked me if your brother knew how to knit a perfectly working incubator, because that’s something else they really need. But you can’t knit everything, hey? There’s only so much a gang of knitters can do.’

  As my legs stamp out a steady rhythm, my brain gets thinking at full speed: if only we could take that crafty passion, that community spirit and turn it into cash. We’d be able to kit out a million hospitals if we could.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Has anyone helped to strap in JP?’ Stan calls gently from the driver’s seat. He has the kind of always-level voice that can get loud, but never cross. Not that I can imagine Stan ever being cross, at all, in fact: every time I’ve seen him he has a gentle smile and a new load of praise to heap on JP. Not only has he taken to the challenges of keeping hygienically sound with two wrists in plaster but, apparently, he’s one of the most well-adjusted young men Stan has ever come across. My brother, of course, emailed this straight to my mum, which I think shaves a few ‘well-adjusted’ points off his score. But I’ll keep that to myself. For now.

  The one thing I didn’t imagine super-chilled Stan to be was a van owner. But when JP told him about CraftCon and what a juggling act it would be to get all our helpers, stock and display kit in Mags’s Skoda, he volunteered his vehicle for the day. It’s a VW camper, so I suppose it does fit a little with his hippie vibe, though there’s an AA sticker in the back window rather than a surfer slogan. I’m just super grateful not to be doing three round trips to the centre in Milton Keynes with pom-poms stacked in their hundreds on my lap while I read out instructions to Mags. She’s never liked satnavs and worries she’ll get distracted by the screen like it’s an episode of Shetland, then crash into a tree or something. So it’s me reading out loud from my iPhone if we go on any long distances together.

  Stan’s van means we can fit in JP, myself, Ben, Mags and Patti. I’d thrown an invite open to Becky but she said she hadn’t done a car trip longer than ten minutes with Chester, and just in case he hated the whole thing and screamed the roof off the place, for this time, she’d stay at home. But she wanted an almost live stream of pictures and messages to keep her in the loop, especially at the big reveal moment. JP was going to unleash his plans for a national craft collective when he had a big enough gathering at the stall and beyond recruiting the passionate crafters there in the flesh, the coverage on social media should pull in loads more all over the UK, maybe even beyond. We’d soon have a truckload of premature baby hats to donate to the health visitors and, as a lovely by-product, a website chock-a-block with traffic that would send JP’s stats soaring. This is what you call a win-win in my book.

  ‘I’ve strapped JP in,’ Ben reports, saluting Stan in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I feel like one of the X-Men about to take off in their special jet,’ I say, pulling my belt around me. I certainly feel like we are about to set off on a special, if slightly unreal, mission. The problem is, JP is the only one amongst us with any special powers and he’s bound up in plaster; it’s like someone has stuck Wolverine on a giant magnet.

  ‘It’s called the Blackbird,’ JP and Ben say in the same moment. And then they both crack up and yell, ‘Jinx!’ at each other.

  I should have seen that one coming: introducing comic-book references to a couple of blokes and they’re right back to puberty. If they ever left it.

  ‘Room for one more? I’ve brought sausage rolls!’ Mags’s profile bounces along the van’s windows until she reaches the open door at the back. There is room for one more back here, but I want her up in the passenger seat next to Stan. Firstly, because I think they might hit it off, and Mags has certainly been going all fluttery around him. And secondly, because I’m keeping this back seat free for Patti so JP can work his supposed magic over her during the journey. I don’t necessarily get his point that I overstepped the mark the other day but it can’t hurt to put things right and let him stand on his own two feet. I’ll keep my lip buttoned. And then catch up with him later for sisterly feedback. I mean, I can’t just switch off the habits of a lifetime!

  But before I can say anything, Stan sing-songs, ‘I’d love a map-reader! I just can’t be doing with these little satnavs, with their funny robot voices. If you don’t mind.’ Mags is in the front seat and buckled up before I can even open my trap. Well, there’s a turn-up. That skips about three steps in my plan for getting Aunt Mags back onto the dating scene. She’s not had any time for herself over the last… well, decades, really, and I think it’s high time she had some fun, as well as realizing how special she is.

  Patti joins us soon after, climbing into the back wearing faded denim dungarees and carrying a red patent rucksack. JP introduces Ben to Patti and vice versa, with a swift look passing between the men. They’ve already talked about her, I can tell. Ben is fully briefed about JP’s big crush. A pang hits my stomach, a small and childish one – I want to be the person that JP talks to about girls. But I can’t begrudge him more friends in life. He’s never been a beer-swilling macho man so hasn’t always easily found his tribe. And Ben is at least sensible, I’ll give him that.

  ‘Let’s hit the road. Milton Keyes, we’re coming for you, baby!’ JP shouts.

  And with a whoop from Stan, we pull out onto the road.

  * * *

  If you squint a bit and don’t notice every single detail, CraftCon could be a fashion week in some slick city: there are vivid colours and striking prints everywhere, bolts of fabulous fabric draping like sails on a big trendy ship and there are legions of leggy teens inspecting the stalls. Except that they don’t want to buy a pinafore dress in acid-lemon corduroy, they want to buy the pattern to make it themselves. Personally, I love the instant gratification of seeing an outfit on a dummy and then – whoosh goes the debit card – and I’m taking it home twenty minutes later. Dressmaking seems like it’s a whole lot of investment for an unpredictable return. I drop by a demo in the next hall to the stallholders, to see what kind of thing goes on, and it’s all about pattern cutting. Forty-five minutes spent on how to accurately cut out the fabric pieces, before anything even begins to get sewn up! So God knows how long making an actual dress from start to finish would take. And then if you haven’t cut the pieces the right way or in the right size, or if you’ve accidentally sewn a gusset where your elbow should be, the bloody thing might not even be wearable.

  But I can’t fault the energetic buzz here, along with the bright colours and interesting textures on display, there are all sorts of people starting to fill the corridors: young, old, mostly female but the odd perky-looking bloke getting stuck in; goths and pop kids, and hipsters and grans. All clutching their free tote bags and stuffing them with yarns, patchwork fabric rolls, card-making kits and more besides. We luckily bagged a stall that’s a quarter of a big central block, so each stall has its own ‘back room’ – about as big as a shoe cupboard, but still somewhere to take a breather from customers and a space for me to set up the iPad. I splashed out on a wireless keyboard last week, seeing as I was doing so much work on it and my fingers were getting numb from speed-typing on the hard touchscreen. The keyboard m
akes a satisfying clicky sound as I log into JP’s YouTube and Twitter accounts, then his Facebook page for the shop. It’s linked to his personal profile, but he trusts me enough not to snoop. He wouldn’t have trusted the 18-year-old me to do the same, and neither would I, frankly. But now he knows my interests are purely professional. And he can be snogging whoever he likes behind the Cineplex these days.

  I’m interested to keep a watch on the hashtag JP put out with his vlog about his big reveal – #AboutAKnit – and see how it spreads throughout the day. Plus, I want to take plenty of pictures of the stall when it’s full of happy, money-paying visitors for future PR and maybe get some informal customer feedback in person, too: why people love JP’s blog so much, what they might want him to do more of, any products we don’t stock that they’d like us to. It’s all helpful. Plus, it’s all free. The best kind of market research.

  Patti volunteered alongside Ben to get merchandizing the stock we’ve brought for sale when we arrived. Our theme is that we’re the yarn greengrocer. It kind of boggled my mind a bit when JP outlined his idea to me over Frosties and tea one morning, but he reassured me that you have to have an ‘angle’ at these things or you’re just one of 100 haberdashery businesses blurring into the backdrop. Having a USP and strong branding always makes good business sense, so I went with it and sourced some big wicker baskets and a black foam board for us to write up our ‘chalkboard’ signs. Patti gave us lots of direction about how to go about creating the look in practical ways – we didn’t have to fill the big baskets up entirely with wool, if we didn’t want to lug that much with us to the venue; they could be half filled with a cushion, then twenty or so skeins could top up the rest. Green balls looking like apples, rose-pink ones like peaches and long yellow skeins could be hung from clips along the front of the stall like bananas. She stamped paper bags with BH, the shop’s initials, and was adamant that the little chalkboard signs we wrote with the wool prices were authentic with greengrocer’s apostrophes all over the place. That part kind of irked me, but she’s the creative, not me. I’m quite literally keeping the back end of the business shipshape, tucked away in the cupboard while more crafters pour into the venue and the noise levels creep up.