Friday October 10th – Knitted to Death

I have made a startling discovery this morning and may well be on track for some kind of Nobel prize in the near future.  It’s amazing what comes you to as you’re pottering around shouting at small children and talking nonsense on the phone with your mother, who, by the way, is still snugly tucked up in bed. Tsk!

We were talking about what books we were reading at the moment.  I am currently ensconsed in ‘Driving Miss Smith’ a memoir of Linda Smith, the comedian who was a regular on Radio Four’s The News Quiz and would often pop up on QI.  She had a lovely, dry, Victoria Woodish sense of the ridiculous and used to make me laugh a lot.  Anyway, I have just read a section where she talks about the fact that her mother was a compulsive knitter and would knit her everything including pencil boxes and rain coats.  She said that when she went out in the rain it would be a nightmare, as the water soaked into the wool and she was effectively stranded, weighed down by her mighty clothes.  I’m not describing it very well, she is superlatively funny and has done it best, so probably best just to read it for yourself.

Anyway, this led on to a conversation about knitting in general.  I remember once talking to a girl whose mother knitted her a swimming costume! Duh! Apparently she ran into the sea and promptly drowned due to the weight of the wool dragging her into the briny depths.  How embarrassing to not only have to be rescued by a life guard, but rescued because your mother had encased you in what was basically a woolen death trap.  I bet it itched like a mother as well.

My mother also used to make a lot of our clothes.  I didn’t mind her jumpers too much, mainly because she used to take us to the little haberdashers shop in the next village and choose novelty buttons to put on her creations.  My favourites were ones with tiny ducklings with gingham headscarves on.  Sad, but true. 

I did get very agitated when she knitted me a winter hat once which she said would make me look like a pixie.  It was one of those knitted bonnets, much like this fine specimen which I have purloined from somewhere:

Except that it was slightly squarer and had a kind of chin strap with an alarming button on it.  I thought I was going to look like Tinker Bell.  I looked more like a poor guttersnipe or the boy off the collection box they used to use when Scope was still called The Spastics Society.  It made my head itch permanently, gave me a sore chin, and all my friends laughed at me.  I loathed it.  My mother forced me to wear it, presumably because she had spent several months squatting over her knitting needles by the power of a candle (it was the seventies, we had many power cuts) and swearing over it.  She hated knitting and making clothes.  She just did it because we were broke and would otherwise have been forced to wear her cast off loon pants fashioned into dungarees I think.

She used to make me lots of pinafores.  Some of them were cool, some of them were hideous. My worst pinafore type memory was one she made me in shit brown nylon.  It had two large buttons at the shoulders and they used to randomly come undone.  I remember going to school, sitting on the mat with my arms folded nicely and doing the register, getting up and my pinafore coming undone and pooling round my ankles.  Everyone could see my pants and I was mortified.

As for other knitting, my gran on my mum’s side was dreadful at handicrafts and rarely attempted them.  Apparently my grandfather had been a whiz with the knitting needles and had knitted all the baby clothes for my mum and her two sisters.  He was a bit like Ray Mears in that way.  He used to build his own sheds, grow all his own fruit and veg and was a man of the country. I was always very impressed when I was little because he was able to tame the birds in the garden and they would fly in and perch on his chair while he was reading the paper.  My gran on the other hand was not like this at all.  She loathed domesticity in all its forms and in another life would have probably ended up being a fighter pilot or an Amazonian explorer.  I think the only reason she even tried being domestic was to cheer my grandad up.

She did get into knitting slightly later in life.  She and my aunt took it up, and knitted blankets and scarves for everyone one winter.  I was in my late teens at the time.  Luckily for me I think they decided I was far too adolescent to be trusted with a home made scarf.  I remember seeing them though.   They had bought a job lot of iron grey wool and had knitted each scarf about a foot and a half wide and as long as Tom Baker’s in Doctor Who.  Each one weighed about a metric tonne and would snap your neck if you ventured to stand up in it.  My mum used to joke that they would be a good deterrent in a nuclear attack.  We could all shelter under one for about two hundred years without fear of radiation sickness because nothing was getting through the density of that wool.

My nan on my dad’s side was a knitter though unfortunately.  She used to knit us many things. Her knitting was evil.  She had no truck with fashion and just knitted stout, hearty clothing that was the knitted equivalent of mashed swede, good for you, but wildly unpleasant and made you feel sick when you looked at it.  She would also never buy anything nice on principle, presumably because it cost quite a lot of money and she didn’t like parting with cash.  She used to knit with wool she had stolen off the bodies of homeless people in shop doorways, or anything that was a bargain.  Invariably this meant colours approaching that universal colour ‘breen’.  Breen, for the unintiated, is the colour that all paintboxes go after you have swirled all the colours together. It is a kind of muddy brown, green colour.  I don’t care what they say about the universe being beige.  You know, I know, everyone knows it is actually breen.  How can it not be?

Anyway, these breen items of utilitarian functional clothing were hideous.  She would pick wool that was specifically made from cactus spikes, infect it with chiggers, boil it for fourteen days just to make sure it was really, really tight and had no give in it whatsoever and would present it to you as a ‘gift’.  Invariably it would be about as thick as the average medieval castle wall due to the fact that because she was knitting with remnants of other peoples’ wool she would knit in triple and quadruple ply to use up all the random bits.  You would always know what it was because there was no way of folding said items, they would just sit there in their solid, ungiving form, glowering at you.  Then she would want you to try it on.  You would spend four hours squeezing your head through a hole the size of a gnats arsehole and come out the other end looking like a kind of crucified Plug from the Bash Street Kids. 

She would be delighted.  You would be in agony. No doorway was wide enough to take your bulky, outstretched form and you would have to progress crab like through every opening.  After fourteen nanoseconds inside it you would be boiling to death and itching like mad.  Naturally you could not actually scratch yourself because your outstretched arms would not bend to reach the offending areas.  This did not bother nan because she thought that scratching was unladylike.  So was wearing jumpers that would have made foundations for a forty storey tower block, but that was by the by. 

They were so heavy that after mere yards you would have to flop down on the nearest available surface and have a rest.  If you had had asthma it would have undoubtedly brought on an attack and you would have been doomed unless some kind soul would have held the inhaler to your lips out of charity.  They were total death traps.

After she had gone, our mum would have to spend several hours cutting us out of the offending article so that our limbs didn’t snap off.  We would always dread going round to her house for Sunday tea, because not only did we have to watch Bullseye and Wish You Were Here with the luminous orange Judith Chalmers, we would also have to climb back into whichever hideous monstrosity she had last created to show our gratitude.  According to my mother she saved us from many of the creations by simply hiding them.  I know the airing cupboard shelves weren’t strong enough to take the strain, so she must have buried them in the garden somewhere.  They’ll probably be perfectly preserved in two hundred years time when some crazed archaeologist digs them up and displays them as something the peasant tribes would have worn in those barbarian 1970’s.  Urgh!

Anyway, my theory, my prize winning theory is that osteoperosis is so prevalent in women over sixty, not because of poor diet etc, etc, but because of compulsive knitting during the inter war years and the damage the weight of all that boiled wool to their fragile, under nourished bones.  I too will probably be a goner in later life, all thanks to nan’s cardigans, but save your own children now by refusing to allow home made knitted articles on their tiny frames.  They will thank you for it, now and later.  I’m off now to write a prize winning paper on it.