As I write, I gaze up at a framed sampler that hangs in the dining room: a square piece of linen embroidered with gaily-coloured flowers, trees, birds contained within a rich border. A large house and garden edged with trees take up most of the space; cattle and sheep graze on the lawn. A little verse has been painstakingly stitched in black: O God, our help in ages past...It adds a moral tone, a note of severity to the rural scene with which I have become so familiar. Who was Phoebe Beeston? How old was she in 1832 when she stitched this sampler? Is the house with its square windows still standing? Do long-horned cattle still roam past? And whom do the initials, D and W, represent?
There are no more clues, details to take me any further. Like many samplers they begin to tell a story, detailing fragments of time lost with the passing years. Penelope Lively in her novel, A Stitch in Time, weaves a children's story round a sampler displayed in a Victorian house in Lyme Regis, interleaving past and present. It seems every sampler has the potential to stir the imagination and intrigue us.
So who was Mary Hemming whose intricate map embroidered on silk hangs on the other side of the fireplace? She has stitched 1816 but I have seen identical pieces dated 1790. How long did it take her to finish? Not that long, surely?
What of Jean Souter, aged 9, Ann Ravenhill, Alice Amore, Katie Herbert or H.M. Aves whose diligent handiwork lines the stairs? One sampler is unfinished. Did its seamstress die or just give up? Who knows?
However, there are many samplers in museums and collections across the country that are well documented from those in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to the Goodhart Collection at Montacute House in Somerset.
The earliest known, dated sampler was embroidered in coloured silks, metal threads and seed pearls on linen by Jane Bostocke in 1598 to include animals, flowers and strawberries. The stitches used included satin, back, Holbein and cable. It is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Samplers take their name from the Latin exemplum meaning something that may be copied or imitated and were originally used for reference by needle-women perfecting their skills.
Throughout the centuries the general appearance of samplers changed. 17th century samplers were long and narrow, known as band samplers and could be rolled on an ivory stick or a rod of parchment. As many as thirty different patterns of lace and cut and drawn work could be shown on one piece of fabric.
In the 18th century samplers were generally square with a border, a variety of motifs such as houses, flowers, birds, trees. A crown or coronet was a common motif and a verse was usually included.
Embroidered maps were fashionable at the start of the 19th century; the pattern was printed on silk or linen.
As the century progressed there was less individuality. Many samplers were taken from pattern books and often worked in schools showing the alphabet in cross-stitch.
The fashion for Berlin wool work saw the demise of the sampler. However, an interest in embroidery was revived by William Morris towards the end of the century. One of his panels, embroidered by his daughter, May, is on display in the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.
Samplers have regained popularity and a revival in the 1970s produced kits available based on traditional designs, often stitched to commemorate family occasions such as weddings or christenings,as in years gone by. Jane Bostocke's early sampler notes alice lee was borne the 23 of november being tuesday in the afternoon 1596. A sampler worked by S.Stearn in 1826 details the marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth Markham and the births of their eight children, two of whom died in infancy. It is presumed that S. Stearn was a nurse or governess but who can tell?
One sampler that has intrigued me has connections with my local parish church, St Mary's, Woodford. Our local historical society was contacted by a gentleman from Nottinghamshire who had recently purchased a sampler from an antique dealer. It was stitched by Mary Anne Wade in 1835 and includes a poem by Samuel Wade in memory of ''my much lamented friend, John Viney who met instant Death by falling from the scaffold inside Woodford Church Essex March 18th 1817 in the 23rd year of his Age''. Parish records cofirm that John Viney, a workman from London, was buried on 20th March 1817. It remains a mystery why the sampler took 18 years to embroider. Who were Samuel and Mary Ann Wade. Perhaps we may never know.
Anothe sampler with Essex connections can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum: a map of the Farm called Arnolds in the parishes of Stapleford Abby and Lambourn in the County of Essex being part of the estate of... Although the late 18th century sampler includes animals, birds and details of the surrounding area there is no mention of the farm owner's name.
One sampler, that is particularly well documented and researched, was stitched by Eliza Gibbons in 1839 of Chieveley Church in Berkshire, containing many references from the Bible.
I cannot help imagining the lives of those who stitched samplers so diligently in years gone by, including a six year old who completed: This I have done I thank God without correction from the rod. Many 19th century samplers stitched by young girls included 'improving' texts. Isaac Watts' Divine and Moral Songs for Children 1720 was still popular in Victorian times. O God our help in ages past, the verse chosen by Phebe Beeston on my sampler was also composed by Isaac Watts, who lived from 1674 - 1748.
Old paintings reveal that samplers were stitched by both rich and poor across the kingdom. The sampler features in Victorian cottage interiors by artists such as Thomas Webster and William Bromley and in a much grander portrait of Miss Hawkins by George James from the second half of the 18th century. It is as likely that samplers were stitched by Jane Austen's Georgina Darcy, Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett in their younger days and by Hardy's Tess and Dickens' Little Emily, albeit on coarser linen in simple cross-stitch.
Literary associations with samplers include those displayed in the Parsonage Museum, Haworth. These practical, plain examples stitched on rough linen are the work of Charlotte. Anne and Emily Bronte. They are hardly flights of fantasy but who knows the thoughts 'wuthering' in their heads as they stitched patiently by candlelight, surrounded by the desolate Yorkshire moors?
Or those of a girl from Cardiff who stitched The Life of the Happy Man in 1780, compromising of 250 words in addition to: Mary Dudden were 12 years of age when this sampler were worked and some part of it by moonlight?
Samplers cannot help but remind us of the swift passage of time and of our own mortality, as illustrated by these lines stitched by Anne Hooper, aged 9:
Our life is never at a stand
'Tis like a fading flower
Death which is always near at hand
Comes closer every hour...
The fragments that survive into the 21st century are a tribute to the Moral Children who stitched them for posterity.
(Article originally published in The Essex Countryside)
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Shells
Years ago, I bought a Victorian glass dome displaying a beehive surrounded by flowers made from shells. It sits comfortably on the mantel piece in the sitting room and there it will stay. A collection of pretty shells in the bathroom was bought at a museum in La Rochelle and I look forward to making pictures from miniature shells, bought specially and kept in jam jars, when I have time.
We have visited houses and follies studded with shells: a cavern in Ramsgate worthy of Aladdin, a summer house in Ireland and a round house in Devon, to name a few. The scallop shell reminds me of pilgrimages I have made and I chose to have two shells carved on our four poster bed accordingly.
I love looking for shells on deserted beaches, at home and abroad, and have bought necklaces decorated with shells from all over the world: Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Barbados, reminding me of clear lapping azure sea and pale velvet beaches. My quest continues as we travel to Bali, Hawaii, the Barrier Reef and Tahiti in search of shells and the serenity they represent. When we returned from Barbados in 1981 we set out a collection of shells in a miniature Victorian chest of drawers. On moving house it was stored in the hayloft where it has remained ever since. Perhaps it is time to look for it once more.
(from In Search of Shells)
We have visited houses and follies studded with shells: a cavern in Ramsgate worthy of Aladdin, a summer house in Ireland and a round house in Devon, to name a few. The scallop shell reminds me of pilgrimages I have made and I chose to have two shells carved on our four poster bed accordingly.
I love looking for shells on deserted beaches, at home and abroad, and have bought necklaces decorated with shells from all over the world: Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Barbados, reminding me of clear lapping azure sea and pale velvet beaches. My quest continues as we travel to Bali, Hawaii, the Barrier Reef and Tahiti in search of shells and the serenity they represent. When we returned from Barbados in 1981 we set out a collection of shells in a miniature Victorian chest of drawers. On moving house it was stored in the hayloft where it has remained ever since. Perhaps it is time to look for it once more.
(from In Search of Shells)
Sunflowers
Driving to Arles one summer, in search of Van Gogh’s yellow house (sadly destroyed by a bomb in the last war) we came across fields of sunflowers, their heads turned to the sun as their French names, tournesol, implies.
When Vincent came to live there, he wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Gauguin was telling me the other day he had seen a picture of Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, but he likes mine better'.
He had started painting sunflowers in1887 from cottage gardens on the outskirts of Montmartre. When he arrived in Arles he began a series of paintings to decorate Gauguin, his friend’s room: ‘great pictures of sunflowers, 12 or 14 to the bunch.’ He had to work quickly ‘for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do them in one rush’. Unable to complete the series, he painted three more canvasses inspired by his earlier paintings and from memory the following winter. Less than two years later his tragic life was over. His doctor friend, Paul Gachiet, brought a magnificent bunch of sunflowers to the artist’s funeral because ‘ Vincent loved them so much’ and his coffin was covered in masses of yellow flowers, sunflowers, included.
‘The sunflower is mine in a way,’ Van Gogh had written, finding ‘consolation in contemplating them’. Since then, many artists including Gauguin have painted sunflowers in homage to him, about whom Gauguin wrote: ‘those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed warmth’. Perhaps that need is in all of us, as Albert Camus wrote, to find ‘an invincible summer’ in the ‘depths of winter’.
I have a large china jug with Dr. Johnson’s words inscribed: ‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’ I enjoy filling it with rustic flowers, home-grown in Woodford. As summer fades and autumnal leaves start to litter the pavements, I look forward to packing it full of sunflowers once more.
(Article first appeared in St. Mary’s Parish Magazine)
When Vincent came to live there, he wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Gauguin was telling me the other day he had seen a picture of Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, but he likes mine better'.
He had started painting sunflowers in1887 from cottage gardens on the outskirts of Montmartre. When he arrived in Arles he began a series of paintings to decorate Gauguin, his friend’s room: ‘great pictures of sunflowers, 12 or 14 to the bunch.’ He had to work quickly ‘for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do them in one rush’. Unable to complete the series, he painted three more canvasses inspired by his earlier paintings and from memory the following winter. Less than two years later his tragic life was over. His doctor friend, Paul Gachiet, brought a magnificent bunch of sunflowers to the artist’s funeral because ‘ Vincent loved them so much’ and his coffin was covered in masses of yellow flowers, sunflowers, included.
‘The sunflower is mine in a way,’ Van Gogh had written, finding ‘consolation in contemplating them’. Since then, many artists including Gauguin have painted sunflowers in homage to him, about whom Gauguin wrote: ‘those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed warmth’. Perhaps that need is in all of us, as Albert Camus wrote, to find ‘an invincible summer’ in the ‘depths of winter’.
I have a large china jug with Dr. Johnson’s words inscribed: ‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’ I enjoy filling it with rustic flowers, home-grown in Woodford. As summer fades and autumnal leaves start to litter the pavements, I look forward to packing it full of sunflowers once more.
(Article first appeared in St. Mary’s Parish Magazine)
Saturday, 20 March 2010
The Strand of the Seat
It is enough to sit on a rock on the north shore of Iona on a warm September morning, totally alone and lost in thought. Green waves are pounding on to the pale velvet sand and there is no one in sight. I toss four pebbles into the foam and let go their weight as empty shells fill my pockets with grains of sand to remind me to return.
Iona’s pale beaches, green waves and stony paths replenish me with love, abundant as the shells strewn on its shores, and embrace me like a healing rainbow after the storm.
Iona’s pale beaches, green waves and stony paths replenish me with love, abundant as the shells strewn on its shores, and embrace me like a healing rainbow after the storm.
Friday, 19 March 2010
Cider with Rosie
I was barely 16 when I read Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. It was not an ‘O’ level text and made a change from the historical, romantic fiction I was devouring at the time. Although I couldn’t articulate it then, it marked a time when I started to love words, not just those I had gleaned from Shakespeare but poetry of all kinds including glimpses of Sassoon and Owen I had studied the year before. Our set examination texts seemed a dreary selection from A Book of Narrative Verse; I was ripe for something different, modern, accessable. I found it in Laurie Lee’s sensual descriptions of his country childhood:
‘snowclouds of elder blossom banked in the sky…’
‘Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers…’
‘…a motionless day of summer, creamy hazy and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild honey.’
In the author’s words, as he was set down from the carrier’s cart in the opening chapter, ‘I was lost and did not expect to be found again.’
I searched libraries for Laurie Lee’s poetry and drank in lines like ‘There is a pike in the Lake/ Whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars’ or ‘Slow moves the acid breath of noon/ over the copper-coated hill…’
And so it began, a real love of literature, studying it in greater depth and a lifetime of reading – everything, anything; an insatiable appetite for words from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell's lyrics to Chekhov's plays and Flaubert’s novels.
Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words’. Although I can hear Alan Bennett’s mocking voice in The History Boys it is still true that reading took me into other lands of magic casements and withering sedge. The words themselves seemed to sustain me, still do, and I favour novels by writers who are also poets. When I read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels recently I wept at the sheer beauty of lines she had written.
When Laurie Lee wrote, at the end of Cider with Rosie,’ the poems I made which I never remembered were the first and last of that time’ I knew one day I would be a writer – there was music inside me that had to come out.
After years of writing school reports and schemes of work I have finally found time for stories and poems to tumble out from somewhere deep within and I would encourage anyone else with a similar yearning to do the same. Never have I felt more alive, more elated than when I am writing.
The love of reading has never wained and I am grateful to the Reading Circle at the local library for the opportunities to discuss fiction. Once a month kindred spirits meet in my sitting room to share our love of reading poetry and great pleasure is had by all listening to John Clare’s descriptions of birds, Yeats’ Ireland or Philip Larkin’s ‘Cut Grass’.
A few years ago my husband and I spent a weekend in Laurie Lee’s village, Slad, in Gloucestershire, walking the footpaths to soak up the spirit of the place. On the journey there we listened to a tape of the author reading Cider with Rosie again, savouring those harsh scenes of country life through the seasons but hauntingly beautifully in description.
It was good to go back to where it all started for me. Fired with youthful enthusiasm I almost felt I too could have walked out one midsummer morning and found my life all over again.
‘In my end is my beginning,’ as Eliot once wrote.
‘snowclouds of elder blossom banked in the sky…’
‘Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers…’
‘…a motionless day of summer, creamy hazy and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild honey.’
In the author’s words, as he was set down from the carrier’s cart in the opening chapter, ‘I was lost and did not expect to be found again.’
I searched libraries for Laurie Lee’s poetry and drank in lines like ‘There is a pike in the Lake/ Whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars’ or ‘Slow moves the acid breath of noon/ over the copper-coated hill…’
And so it began, a real love of literature, studying it in greater depth and a lifetime of reading – everything, anything; an insatiable appetite for words from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell's lyrics to Chekhov's plays and Flaubert’s novels.
Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words’. Although I can hear Alan Bennett’s mocking voice in The History Boys it is still true that reading took me into other lands of magic casements and withering sedge. The words themselves seemed to sustain me, still do, and I favour novels by writers who are also poets. When I read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels recently I wept at the sheer beauty of lines she had written.
When Laurie Lee wrote, at the end of Cider with Rosie,’ the poems I made which I never remembered were the first and last of that time’ I knew one day I would be a writer – there was music inside me that had to come out.
After years of writing school reports and schemes of work I have finally found time for stories and poems to tumble out from somewhere deep within and I would encourage anyone else with a similar yearning to do the same. Never have I felt more alive, more elated than when I am writing.
The love of reading has never wained and I am grateful to the Reading Circle at the local library for the opportunities to discuss fiction. Once a month kindred spirits meet in my sitting room to share our love of reading poetry and great pleasure is had by all listening to John Clare’s descriptions of birds, Yeats’ Ireland or Philip Larkin’s ‘Cut Grass’.
A few years ago my husband and I spent a weekend in Laurie Lee’s village, Slad, in Gloucestershire, walking the footpaths to soak up the spirit of the place. On the journey there we listened to a tape of the author reading Cider with Rosie again, savouring those harsh scenes of country life through the seasons but hauntingly beautifully in description.
It was good to go back to where it all started for me. Fired with youthful enthusiasm I almost felt I too could have walked out one midsummer morning and found my life all over again.
‘In my end is my beginning,’ as Eliot once wrote.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Saigon
In the courtyard outside the pagoda a bamboo cage was filled with finches with black and tan plumage, all chirping in close proximity. We bought some from the old lady squatting there, transferred them to another birdcage and let them fly free. There is a Vietnamese tradition that says the caged birds take all your troubles with them as they fly up and away, out of sight.
(Originally published in Remnants of War)
(Originally published in Remnants of War)
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