The Jumper
My mother could conjure a cardigan in a few days – the soft clicking of needles from the back room was the sound track to our lives. An incomprehensible pattern lay open on one arm of her chair, a pile of slaughtered Embassy nub ends in an ashtray on the other. She was never happier than when she was knitting a jumper or cardigan for me or my sister, usually an Aran garment in bottle green or primrose. I was deeply embarrassed by her handiwork. I realise now, how beautiful they must have been and that these days the same hand-knitted number would cost a small fortune. However, I loathed the heaviness of the Aran wool on my shoulders and the awful sticking out bobbles that were a perennial feature – even as a young child, I knew that they were hopelessly un-cool.
When I moved to secondary school, my best friend was a popular girl who lived above a big pub in town. She invited me and lots of others to a Christmas party to celebrate the end of term. I was a pliable child, the eldest, a rather prissy adult pleaser. On the morning of the party my mother unveiled her latest creation – another Aran jumper, this time in cream, a heavyweight, more than a match she said, for the winter ahead. She insisted I wear it to the party – with a kilt. I did as I was told. I still remember, walking into the brightly lit room with its disco lights and Christmas decorations, in an outfit my mother would have worn and realised that I was hopelessly out of sync with the other girls who were wearing bell bottoms, crushed velvet smocks, delicate paisley maxi dresses. I stood in the doorway as all heads turned. ‘She’s got big nipples all over her knitted jumper,’ shouted Michael Bashford. It was the word ‘knitted’ that wounded me the most.
My mother took up knitting semi-professionally when my father installed a machine in the spare room. The previous soft and rapid clicking of needles was replaced by a monotonous swish, swish – as she hauled the machine’s carriage over the needle bed. In no time at all it would regurgitate a sleeve or front panel in red and cream, or worse, mustard and black. She couldn’t get the hang of doing proper necklines, so every jumper I wore for the next few years had a ‘gash’ neck – in fact every jumper in our neighbourhood had a gash neck. She did a roaring trade – her nylon mixes were cheap and cheerful. After a while she abandoned the machine, the needle bed got jammed once too often and she was delighted to go back to ‘proper’ knitting and took up her needles once again.
She and I always disagreed about colours, she would shake her head in incomprehension when I pointed out the swimming pool blue or pistachio green I wanted for my next cardigan. When I reached adulthood, she was still knitting away, still making me cardigans – though I put my foot down after the ‘fireworks’ incident. She presented it to me for my twenty-fifth birthday. Imagine if you can a long-sleeved jumper with four inch silk threads pulled through, front and back, in red, orange, purple, pink, silver, gold, yellow, green and indigo. My upper body looked as if it was on fire. I tried it on in her living room and she could tell by my face she had gone too far. It sat in my wardrobe and never came out. She didn’t ask what had happened to it.
My mother died suddenly a few days before Christmas 1999. It took me and my sister over a year to clear her house, we couldn’t bear to touch the things she had recently touched, they were too alive. Her ornaments gathered dust on the mantelpiece, cupboards remained closed.
When I finally began the clear up, I opened a cupboard next to her favourite chair in the living room and there, still cast on, was a half-finished jumper and a pattern showing a youngish woman wearing a plain v-neck. I knew the jumper had been meant for me, there could be no mistake, it was in a style I liked, with no bobbles and the colour was not moss green or mustard but swimming-pool blue.
* Roz Goddard says “I'm a poet based in the Midlands. I've recently published a short collection with Nine Arches Press: The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems.
