Rainbow Pixie Bonnets .....

 Some people knit to reduce stress.   I know that to be true because I was one of them before my problem of painful wrists became so great that I had to give it up.   There were few things I looked forward to more than sinking before a batch of TV soaps with a half-completed garment in a moderately complicated pattern each evening leaving others to stack the dishwasher.   For years it seemed to me to be quite the best part of the day; well, allowing for exaggeration of course.

I didn’t mind too much what it was I was currently creating just as long as it was complex enough to require a modicum of attention whilst I followed the latest frolics and capers of those peopling Coronation Street at the time.   Sadly none of my children appreciated the sweaters I keenly offered to make them and I had wisely learned to make adequate enquiries before embarking upon a surprise project.   They would agree, however, to the very occasional scarf.   Throughout their university years I made a great many scarves though sadly many of them were promptly lost by the recipients and rarely found again. Suffice to say I was eventually reduced to knitting squares for blankets, enhanced by the practice of ever more convoluted stitch patterns.   Well that’s what happens if you have no grandchildren.  We ended up with a large number of blankets and would doubtless have even more if the arthritis had not put a stop to it.

Giving up knitting completely was more depressing than you might imagine especially since I had, over the years, amassed a great deal of knitting paraphernalia - a range of needles, both steel and bone together with up-to-the-minute stitch holders and a pile of attention-grabbing patterns.  Coronation Street was never the same thereafter.   My hands itched to be occupied but the resulting agony simply wasn’t worth any attempt and although I was repeatedly advised that a cortisone injection, though definitely itself not without pain, may well do the trick, being of a cowardly nature it was always put on the nearest back burner.

It was around this time of craftwork withdrawal pains that I at long last began to see how it was that my mother had taken so tirelessly to knitting.   She freely admitted to having been what she called a Worryguts all her life and she had long come to the conclusion that was the reason behind her habit of nail biting.   By the time skeins of wool were readily available in the shops of Gravesend once again after several years’ absence her pastime of choice was regularly creating what she called Jerseys primarily for me and once my brother was born, a variety of babywear in the pale colours of the time.   My father elected not to be dressed by her and looked nervous each time she mentioned the subject.   Even when I was still a young child I seemed to realise that her work lacked a certain finesse.  She was able to completely overlook the minutia of dropped stitches and the transposition of plain and purl rows.   To her these were minor matters amounting to pointless trivia.   Furthermore, upon completion each garment was assembled more and more carelessly and with ever bigger stitching.  She appeared to become increasingly impatient the closer she came to the ultimate conclusion of the latest undertaking .  

This undue haste was alarming to watch and the resulting garments became even more distressing to wear.   I began to dread the start of each new item even when it involved a more exciting than usual trip to the market to allow me to choose the yarn.   In fact I didn’t hesitate to choose the newly launched Rainbow yarn, bursting as it was with a startling array of tints and hues simply because I thought she might refuse and for some reason the purchase could be delayed for a while.   To my astonishment she immediately agreed to my choice and my heart sank because I was beginning to feel more and more ashamed of the lack of skill and general sloppiness of her handiwork.   Later, overhearing her tell my Aunt Mag that her Jean had chosen some lovely colourful yarn for her new jersey and it was as clear as daylight she should always be allowed to do the choosing, I felt embarrassed by my own priggishness and lack of family loyalty.   

Her progress with any new project was invariably rapid but she was more keen than usual to make a start with the Rainbow yarn.  By the time I got home from school next day the skeins had already been rolled into balls with the help of an upturned kitchen chair and I was not called upon to hold them aloft until my arms ached.      

It seemed no time at all until my class teacher Mrs Allen commented on the newly completed and vibrantly colourful garment I was wearing for the very first time and wanted to know who had made it for me.   Ever conscious of the slapdash nature of the work, I put on my sweetest voice and breathlessly told her that mostly it was made by my mother but I had helped out and I was responsible for the sewing together of it in its entirety.   After all, surely a child of only eight would be expected to make mistakes.  She nodded knowingly and said that she rather thought I might have done some of the work but overall I had done a commendable job - although the stitching could have been neater.  It must feel good, she added, to be wearing something I had helped to make myself.   I nodded with false enthusiasm.

 It was then I began to realise that I should pay serious attention to diverting my mother from knitting to some other less troubling pastime.     For a while I managed to steer her away from child size garments via toy size ones by complaining that neither my doll nor my teddy bear had anything decent to wear.  To my satisfaction she immediately obliged by making a start on a whole new wardrobe for each of them, telling me this was an excellent way of using up wool scraps.   Although the resultant apparel was quicker to appear than I had anticipated, I found little to fault it and in any case I was old enough to realise that neither toy was going to be too distressed if the stitching could have been improved.   I then persuaded my younger cousins Ann and Little Violet to demand clothing for their dolls.   Ann, who had inherited hers from her older sister along with a dolls’ pram with proper springs, said it had never had clothes and was quite accustomed to managing without them and declined.  Later I wondered if, though only five, she was already aware of the downside side of her aunt’s work.  Little Violet on the other hand showed an immediate interest which was probably because she reacted warmly on every occasion anyone paid her attention.   My aunts all said this was because she was a poor motherless little soul and my own mother agreed, adding that the dear little mite didn’t ask for much in life.   I privately thought that living as she did with our fearsome grandmother asking for anything would have been a fruitless exercise.  

The reason behind Little Violet’s interest was because her father, on one of his rare flying visits, had very recently turned up at the house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, armed with a Walking-Talking Shirley Temple doll. It was not a new doll but one that had been grown out of and cast aside by his very new and far too-young-for-him wife who had never met Little Violet and was far too terrified of the thought of Old Nan to attempt to do so.    The recipient of the doll was unconcerned that it was a pre-loved Shirley Temple and simply delighted to own it because her life with our grandmother was not one in which toys of any kind played a big part.    Although Shirley Temple was already dressed in a red satin party dress it was agreed that she would greatly benefit from a mini jersey in the same rainbow wool as the one I now wore several days each week.   My mother seemed to whip one up almost overnight to the delight of her small niece and then upon a whim added a rather jaunty matching hat.   The distinctly more careful stitching on the garments made for the dolls did not escape my notice and I began to think that our York Road knitter did a much better job overall with smaller projects.   It was then that I had the brilliant idea of diverting her from jerseys into the general direction of headgear.

I suggested that as winter was approaching fast I would really like a hat of some kind to wear to school.   I had visions of a rather pretty intricate Dutch bonnet constructed from felt as worn by a number of girls attending St Botolph’s.    But sadly my hat was going to have to be of the knitted variety of course and so the dream faded fast.   What was produced in no time at all, from Rainbow yarn was what my mother called a Pixie Bonnet.     It had a pointed hood and long ties to form a bow under the chin.  She was quite delighted with it and called my father to look and he dutifully said that I definitely looked like a pixie.   Furthermore when examined closely the final stitching was moderately neat but even more importantly my mother decided overnight that headgear was her forte and I cannot remember being presented with another jersey for a number of years.

I cringed a little when I was sent to school in matching Rainbow jersey and bonnet especially when my mother commented that it was a pity I couldn’t wear the bonnet in the classroom as the outfit was so pretty.  Her views were definitely not those expressed by my classroom colleagues.  Barbara Scutts, in a new Dutch felt creation to welcome in a new winter was the first to observe that we must have a big store of that Rainbow wool at our house.   When she overheard me telling Beryl Stuart who had voiced half- hearted approval of the matching items that the hat was a pixie bonnet she chortled loudly and said I looked more like a goblin in it to her.   Jennifer Berryman appraised me quietly for a moment or two and then said in her opinion I looked more like her grandma’s garden gnome.   By the time Billy Elliot heralded the opinion of the male members of the class with some comment concerning the characters from Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs I had firmly resolved that the hat would have to go.   On the way home I unhesitatingly tossed it over a garden fence in Springhead Road and then ran as fast as I could to the corner of York Road before nonchalantly slowing down for the last thirty seconds of the journey.  

Strangely its absence was not noticed for a day or two and it took a particularly cold and frosty morning to urge my mother to search for it among the coats and scarves at the bottom of the stairs, growing more and more exasperated when it wasn’t found.   It was a crying shame she said because it looked so lovely with the jersey and it was a great pity I couldn’t be trusted to take more care of my clothes.   It wasn’t too long, however, before a replacement was provided, and I was told I was very lucky as there had been barely enough wool left and in fact the ties had of necessity been dispensed with and replaced with a button under the chin.  

It was several weeks before the alarming afternoon of the replacement yarn supply.   I arrived home from school to find my mother red cheeked and excited saying she had only just that minute got home herself from Gravesend and that earlier in the day she’d heard from Mary Newberry that they had a further batch of Rainbow yarn at the stall in the market so she’d raced hell for leather over there to make sure she got some.  My heart sank and I felt prickling at the back of my eyes when I contemplated the number of pixie bonnets that might come forth from the skeins she triumphantly scattered on the kitchen table. To ensure a bonnetless few days the button-under-the-chin version would have to be lost as soon as possible, which of course it was.

In effect its replacement took less than a week to emerge and when it did it was with an even more pronounced point of the hood and even longer ties for beneath the chin.   My poor mother was enormously pleased with it, so much so that I was instructed to wear it the very next day which I did with a very heavy heart.

The onslaught of scorn and derision concerning which particular kind of mythical character from a Blytonesque world of enchantment I was now emulating was something I of course expected but I didn’t imagine it to cause quite as much amusement as it did.  I was somewhat surprised when imps, brownies and leprechauns were added to the list of faery folk rumoured to be populating our kitchen fireside and my frantically knitting mother’s imagination.    Billy Elliot who was much better read than the rest of us even suggested we might be housing a Hobbit but none of us really understood what that actually was. The end result of all this was that the replacement Rainbow pixie bonnet did not last into a second wearing but instead was discarded over the wall of yet a further Springhead Road garden.   When its absence was noticed a more in-depth enquiry was launched than that which had followed the previous disappearances.   After all did I really imagine that my mother had nothing to do except create pixie bonnets for me?

A pleasing interval of ten days or so followed before the next piece of headgear appeared at the end of my bed like an unwelcome Christmas gift.   To add insult to injury it came with a large safety pin with which it could be pinned to my jersey to avoid any chance of it falling off into the gutters of Springhead Road or The Hill as I wended my way to school.   I pointed out that it would be impossible for me to manage the unpinning once I arrived at school and I was advised that I should ask my teacher for help, the implication being that I was by now much too irresponsible to be treated like a normal eight-year-old.   The thought of asking Mrs Allen for help with something as mundane as a hat having reached the great age of eight and a half was horrifying.   It certainly prevented me from discarding Rainbow bonnet number four for the time being.

The teasing and name calling regarding wayside faery folk that would be more at home within the pages of an encyclopaedia of mythology continued, however because that was the way of children of the time.  This was especially so when the victim was likely to be reduced to tears which of course I was.   Complaining to anyone seen to be in authority would have been unacceptable and largely ineffective and so it was not at any stage considered.     My feelings of fury, however, became ever more acute – with the persecutors themselves, with the blissfully unaware Mrs Allen and most of all with my mother and her habit of high-speed knitting.  

The problem needed a more advanced and cutting-edge solution so having investigated just how many skeins of Rainbow yarn actually remained in the bag at the bottom of the kitchen cupboard I decided they should be the first to go before I tackled the problem of the surviving bonnet itself.    I was far too frightened to discard the yarn in the dustbin; in those days the contents of bins would seem quite foreign to us now.  Rainbow yarn would draw unwelcome attention immediately and the dustmen themselves, though my mother always claimed they were dozy buggers, might even retrieve it and return it to the household.   Instead I waited until a shopping trip to the Co-op was taken together with my small brother in his pushchair.  I then took the opportunity of running as fast as possible to the nearby railway bridge just before the four pm express to London was due to thunder through.   Cautiously climbing onto the bridge wall and being as careful as possible I hurled the hated yarn with all my strength into the path of the engine, all three skeins of it.   To my great satisfaction it was carried atop of the enormous machine immediately in the direction of the city.  

Despite my immediate gratification the problem of the remaining bonnet and its hated safety pin endured of course and although I realised once it did a disappearing act an enquiry akin to the Holy Inquisition would be launched, my desire to rid myself of it was so great I was unable to allow too much time to elapse before it followed its predecessors into the front gardens of Springhead Road.   

The ensuing investigation was like a mini nuclear blast.   My mother found it very hard to believe that she had been mistaken as to the skeins of Rainbow wool remaining at the bottom of the cupboard and was reluctant to believe that my toddler brother had somehow or other disposed of them.   Furthermore my ongoing carelessness with clothing was astonishing.  She’d a good mind to beat me senseless.   I should just wait for my father to get home because he was bound to beat me – mark her words and no mistake.   I was quite unable to be trusted. 

In the end nobody beat me.   My joyous punishment was to be that she would never, ever waste her time making hats of any description for me again – never! Not even if I went down on bended knee!