A Mother's Gift

A hash of childhood memories including my mother's love of making, schooldays and The Family Circle magazine.

Jemima

When I was a young girl living at home, I remember on dark winter’s evenings sitting watching the television and listening to the click clack of my mother’s knitting needles chattering away in the background. The way she only occasionally glanced down always impressed me, I was fascinated by the the speed of her nimble fingers as they hooked the wool over and under the needle to knit or pearl a stitch.

It was a skill I never really appreciated until my teenage years when I started to become interested in fashion and realised how handy it was to have a mum who could make me the latest in knitwear trends. She never complained when I presented her with the most complicated patterns or fine cotton yarns which took an age to be converted from a ball into a jumper. I asked her to knit me a white cotton bikini once, although it didn’t look quite so appealing on me as the girl on the pattern and I don’t think it actually ever made it to the beach, never mind the local swimming pool. My constant nagging must have driven her mad, asking every day “When will it be finished?” as she tirelessly click-clacked away, probably until her fingers ached.

Despite all her efforts to teach me, I never quite got to grips with a pair of knitting needles as proficiently as her. My stripy scarves were never the same width at both ends and even the simple squares knitted for school charity projects were rarely of equal length on all four sides.

Growing up, every now and then she would make me a new soft toy, made from a pattern out of the Family Circle magazine, a monthly women’s home magazine that she stored in neat piles in the corner of the kitchen. She cooked from them regularly and many of their recipes account for my fondest childhood food memories. Chicken Louisiana was a favourite, as was Corn Beef Dumplings cooked in Oxtail Soup which may not sound very appetising now but I remember always feeling very happy when it was put on the table for tea. It’s a dish I keep threatening to recreate for Michael as he always laughs a little condescendingly when I mention it.

The Family Circle was also the source of the book ‘You and Me’, a short paperback book for young children, handed sheepishly to me by my mum one day. In simple language and child friendly pictures it explained the birds and the bees and that was my sex education done and dusted, never to be mentioned again. Mummy and Daddy lie next to each other in bed and nine months later a baby arrives, well that sounded all very straightforward. A big mistake was taking the book to school where it was promptly snatched off me by the class bully, Clive Tankard, who proceeded to read out loud all the ‘rude’ words and had a great laugh with all the class at my expense. Apart from a couple of girls who went to the same high school as me after the Eleven Plus, I didn’t see my classmates again but I do remember Clive and my first ‘boyfriend’ Nigel Green, who I used to run away from when anyone suggested playing Kiss Chase on the school playing field. Perhaps I didn’t want to get too close to him in case a baby arrived nine months down the line. I remember clearly dancing to Band of Gold at Martine Kay’s tenth birthday party where her brother spent the whole afternoon trying to spear flies with a compass on the conservatory widows. My good friend Mandy who spoilt my birthday party when she told me she was emigrating to Australia. Identical twins Terri and Tracey, who I never did manage to tell apart and lovely Janice, who I walked to school with most days, passing the time with conversations about the new edition of Bunty, TV programmes Follyfoot, my favourite White Horses and what we would call the horse in the America song, A Horse with No Name.

The only teacher I can remember from junior school was Mr Carney, our music teacher, who I still blame to this day for my total inability to sing a note in tune. He was a short rotund man, prone to sweating profusely who wore a brown suit, brown tie and brown shoes. His dark, thin greasy hair was left limp and long on one side which he constantly swept over the top of his bald pate with his stubby little clammy fingers. I could never understand why he was so mean to me as I was a very polite and conscientious student but he used to make me regularly stand up in class to sing The Happy Wanderer which I hated, especially the Val-de-Ri Val-de-Ra chorus which I could never sing in tune, causing him to shout insults at me across the classroom. The thing that really stung was he doted on my older brother, who with his bright blond hair and angelic voice looked and sounded like a text book choir boy, so could do no wrong in Mr Carney’s small and beady eyes.

Interesting but useless fun fact, The Happy Wanderer was No.2 in the UK charts for five consecutive weeks in 1954, sung by the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir.

Around this age when I was about 9 or 10 my mum used to take the various toys she made to show ‘the girls’ at Marks and Spencers where she worked for 22 years. The orders for her gangly three foot clowns, colourful knitted scarecrows and Aunt Sally rag dolls came in thick and fast. My knitting requests took back seat as she beavered away until late at night fulfilling orders for birthday and Christmas presents. Every year as Christmas approached she was absolutely run off her feet making not just toys for the M&S workforce, but tray upon tray of mince pies and squidgy chocolate logs, the same recipes that I am still using today.

Me and Mum, Elizabeth Ann Smith 1933-2021

It is only now I am older I can appreciate the time and effort she put in to making others happy. Small things like the hours she stood at the sink every Autumn with tears rolling down her face as she laboriously peeled hundreds of small pickling onions. Huge amounts were packed with vinegar into massive sweet jars then kept in the cupboard under the stairs until they were ready to give away to the neighbours.

Ten years ago, in the middle of her one-sided battle with dementia, my mum rarely remembered my name but could talk with clarity about her own mother’s rabbit stew and her father’s prize winning garden over half a century in the past. Then gradually her ability to talk disappeared along with every last ounce of mobility, eventually relegating her to bed for the last three years of her so called ‘life’.

When the lines of communication started to close down rapidly and conversation became impossible I noticed I felt a stronger connection to the things my mum had made with her hands. A pretty embroidered tray cloth she made as a young teenager for her mother was pulled out from the depths of my linen chest to grace a dressing table. Running my hands over the embroidery thread I could picture my mum carefully positioning the stitches and choosing the colours she knew her own mother would have liked.

Ted, rescued from a bootsale

Fifty three years ago or there about, my mum made me a beautiful doll, who I named Jemima. She has been with me through thick and thin, accompanied me on several house moves and has seen other soft toys come and go over the years. I hope she forgives me for losing her blue bonnet somewhere along the way, but thankfully she still has both shoes, the same thick hair and overall looks pretty good for her years. I like to think that even at ten years old I appreciated the small details in her clothing such as the tiny pin tucks and lace on her petticoat. She still sits on the chair next to my bed, in the company of my son’s old Paddington Bear, also hatless, and Ted, a little knitted bear that I took pity on at a bootsale last year. The thought of him ending up in landfill was too stressful to countenance on a Sunday morning so he came home to live with me.

Around the same time my mother made Jemima, I made her a simple little needle case at school which she made good use of and always kept in her sewing box. It is such a plain and humble thing but it means so much that it was used and treasured by my mum. It now lives in my own sewing box along with her now unused knitting needles, I still haven’t got the heart to part with.

My Little Needle Case

It took me a long time to recognise that my love of making was passed down to me from my mum. I have always recognised that she installed in me a life long passion for cooking but I now know it was her creativity that inspired me too and I feel quite guilty that her skills were overlooked by her family and taken very much for granted. They weren’t ‘just toys’ that she ran up in five minutes, they were very skilfully made and she put a lot of thought in her work, she was a superb knitter and how I wish I had kept the many jumpers she knitted for me over the years.

Now, I look at Jemima in a different light. I can see the details more clearly, the neat workmanship, the way her shoes are a perfect fit, the curls and ringlets of her hair so meticulously put together, the care and the love that a mother put into making a gift for her only daughter.

Sometimes I do wonder what will happen to Jemima when I’m gone, there are no little girls in my family to pass her on to so I do hope she doesn’t end up on a bootsale stall like Ted, unwanted and unloved. Perhaps by the time I reach a really old age, my son will have found someone to lie close to and produce a baby daughter who will love Jemima as much as me. That would be a very happy ending.

Lots of love,

Lindsey x