Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

at school: those gasps for breath over things that were not even funny. Except they were, they were. Certain sights. Sounds. The way their Geography teacher’s briefcase used to snap importantly shut, and then flop open again, half an hour later. The way Miss Button used to strut, peacock-like, around the Portakabin. The vision of a distant, struggling line of cross-country runners wearing numbered sports-tunics. And words. The word ‘sports-tunic’ had once made Sally Tuttle and Rowena Cresswell laugh, hysterically, for days.
    East Grinstead has changed a lot since then. Changed, altered, developed. Rowena Cresswell’s house, for instance, brand new in 1974, has acquired an established look. It has softened, gaineda kind of bloom; it has ivy and honeysuckle growing up the wall and a front gate that doesn’t sit properly in its frame. (A young family lives there now: a resilient young couple with three wild little boys who are always swinging on the gate.) After the death, nearly twenty years ago, of Mrs Cresswell, and Mr Cresswell’s subsequent death four months later (heartbroken, apparently), the Willows was renamed. It is now the Gables. And when she thinks of it, she can recall gables, and baby birds nesting in them, beneath Rowena’s window.
    On her way home from work, she still walks past their garden. She walks past the yellow roses and the crazy-paving and the cherry tree and remembers Mrs Cresswell planting it, clad in apron and spotty-palmed gardening gloves. Now, on early summer evenings, the tree is often completely covered with little birds. Sparrows, singing in the pale light …
    ‘Did you actually do Needlework at school?’ Pearl asked her the other day.
    ‘I did.’
    ‘So your school wasn’t very emancipated, then?’
    ‘Well,’ Sally replied, feeling somewhat crushed. She thought of St Hilary’s, now a housing estate with selected Victorian features. ‘Considering we survive on my sewing abilities, sweetheart, I think …’
    But she trailed off. She knew what her daughter meant. Needlework lessons had not been emancipated. Even in 1979 they were archaic. They might as well have been doing needlepoint or crewelwork. They might as well have sat in an inglenook with their tapestry frames, sipping mead from pewter goblets while the pallid sunshine seeped in through the Portakabin’s high, metal-framed windows.
    *
    Select pattern pieces needed. With right sides together, pin sleeve into armhole, matching symbols and large * to shoulder seam. (* indicates Bust Point and Hipline) 
    But everything, it seemed then, could be made to fit. There was an armhole for each sleeve, an adjustment line for each non-standard waist.
    ‘Bust point and hipline,’ Rowena whispered, and they would both begin to laugh.
    *
    (‘What do you get out of embroidery?’ Graham the estate agent asked Sally on the last occasion she went out with him. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you don’t strike me as someone who’d be into fussy little stitching.’
    Fussy little stitching. Sally looked at him.
    ‘I enjoy it,’ she said. ‘I like the feel of the cloth. I like getting a load of different-coloured threads and turning them into a picture. You know, what do you get,’ she added, ‘out of writing “this delightful room boasts a dado rail” God knows how many times a week?’
    This was when she and Graham had begun, slightly, to hate each other.)
    *
    She is currently working on a commission she received after winning the award. She is going to talk about it at the conference in Edinburgh. It depicts Mary and Martha, of Biblical fame. Large frame, satin stitch, straightforward in style, apart from the fact that she is sewing on hundreds of sequins. A fiddly, laborious task. But there is something irresistibly cheerful about sequins, like the sparkle of neon lights.
    Her Mary and Martha are possibly a little too bejewelled for religious figures, so she has toned them down by giving them very plain dresses. Mary, the most