Reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf the other night (now there’s a man upstaged) I happened upon a reference to knitting. It pulled me up short. You don’t trip over knit-mentions too often in books. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have leapt out at me, if I hadn’t been about to begin on a cardigan for Scarlett.  Fine stripes, pink and yellow (it’s good to move on, if but a fraction–it’s been nothing but pink these past five years). So I’d been thinking about knitting. It’d been on my mind. Such a female activity. I know there are male knitters out there, but I can’t imagine too many write about knitting. Not seriously. Not in novels. In literary fiction, people are concerned with other things. Talking. Thinking. Reflecting. Gazing out of windows. Or into people’s eyes. Like most people, the only knitter I can think of in literature, is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple–and I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be calling Agatha ‘literature’, either.

And it’s not just knitting. What about crocheting, weaving, sewing? What are people doing with their hands in fiction? I know knitting is good for mine. Good for me. Hypnotic. Soothing. And that it allows me to watch crap TV, guilt-free. When my mother began to gradually vanish before my eyes, it gave me something to do with my hands. Somewhere to look, other than into those fathomless blue orbs. Strange how people seem to know, even if unable to say it, that they’re going to die. And seem as much embarrassed by it, as sad or sorry. My mother was a good knitter. And a sewer, potterer, painter of bad, blowsy, colourful oils. I have two in the Mountains house (not the tiger, or parrot–but a piebald cat, and a vase of orange flowers), brought all the way from Cape Town in a suitcase.

But back to knitting. I like to do it in odd places. I’m hardly Banksy, but it gives me a bit of a buzz, doing it in public. It’s not unsociable. You can talk and knit. And listen–I did, for hours, when my mother was fading, and most often to the same stories. People with dreadlocks have been known to ask me what I’m making. It’s usually something pretty boring, something I can do by rote. A square, for the blanket that I badly covet, but will one day give away to the ABC Knit In, pure wool, no synthetics for my great unhoused and unwashed. I like knitting in the hairdressers. I like the way the young assistants carefully gather up my wool when I’m off to have the colour washed out. They’ve probably never touched something so unrelated to something else. Wool is nothing, until joined. Like writing, making stitches is fine, painstaking work. And as rewarding. Except in writing (unlike most knitting) the pattern is your own.

So, who does knit, in novels?  Googling, it seems there’s a whole world of knit-fiction out there. And great titles: A Deadly Yarn (Maggie Sefton); Knit Fast, Die Young (Mary
Kruger–though surely that ought to be Dye?); Crewel World (Monica Ferris); and the
unadorned (plain stocking-stitched) Knitting by Anne Bartlett.

Despite being an avid knitter (and despite all of the above) I admit I’m still a bit wobbly about inserting one into a book. It’s not something to be done gratuitously. Besides, I’ve already (briefly) had a milliner, and am currently at work on a seamstress. How dismissive we are, generally, in fiction and in life, of female making and fixing–and not just female, but of bricklayers, plumbers, electricians. I’m sure Elizabeth Jolley wouldn’t have baulked at a handyman. I still recall (I think it might have been Mr Scobie’s Riddle) how tenderly she wrote of the back of an ordinary man’s ears. Such a wonderfully acute and forgiving chronicler of our little vanities and vulnerabilities. I’m going to try and find a poem about knitting. I’ll let you know how I go. Or, bugger it. I might even write one. (And did…)

Knitting

I hate synthetics.

Yarns that snag.

Unwieldy as string. Or cardboard.

Too thick. Too thin.

I like to feel the growing weight of the thing in my lap.

And my fingers. Going about their business.

Like typing. Or playing the piano.

You have to approach the pattern slant.

Think too much. You’re buggered.

Like noticing words. Reading.

No need to overcomplicate the thing.

It’s only wool. A pair of needles.

I sat on one once. 21. Pregnant.

Knitting booties.

Fiddly little buggers.

Worse than socks. Or gloves.

No-one warned me.

Knitting’s not the half of it.

It’s buttonholes.

And joining seams.

To press. Or not to press.

And when it’s finished.

The shape.

And too long in the sleeves.

Dear God.

Is there anything not a kin to writing?