“They sent us down to the strand wearing hand-knitted woollen swimsuits,” my cousin Marion reminded me recently. “What were they thinking?”
Rough wool is itchy and scratchy next to the skin; it was then, just as it is now.
To be honest, I think that, in my case, I was supposed to wear the woollen trunks my mother had dressed me in just to putter about in the sand with a metal sand castle bucket. There I could create worlds of my own imagining.
The salt water was probably too cold to have contemplated a swim or even an ankle paddle in. This was out the Connemara road from Galway, “backside Spiddal”, as my father used to call it.
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There were small boreens between stone walls that led down off that road to the left to stretches of sand surrounded by large brown Connemara outcroppings. The introduction of my hand-knitted drawers to the salt water was my mistake, I admit that. I slipped and fell into a pool of trapped seawater between some smooth and slippery Atlantic rocks.
I sat there surprised as the water seeped into my woollen shorts.
Did the assembled family laugh? You can be sure they did.
Did I laugh? Not at all.
The seawater-soaked woollen shorts were already beginning to irritate.
My mother grabbed me out of the water, wrapped a towel around me, pulled down the soggy wool lot, and dried me off.
I think it was my aunt Una who went to one of the two cars that we had driven down the boreen that Sunday. She came back with a pair of clean, dry, yellow and very adult women’s knickers.
Why did they happen to have an extra pair of fresh women’s knickers in the Commer? That I don’t know. Where were my own day clothes? Again a mystery. Had we left home with all the children dressed in our home-knitted woollen beach outfits with no plan B? It seems that we had.
As my Aunt Una handed the mystery yellow knickers to my mother, I realised that they were intended for me. I knew, even then, at age four or five, that something was seriously awry. I struggled and resisted, but my fighting strength was limited; I was small then.
Once dressed in the unauthorised and illegitimate knickers, I became aware of further laughter from the assembled and now more-interested-than-ever extended family.
They laughed and laughed, as I ran and ran with all the speed that I could, at the age that I had, to hide in the car until they could take me home. Which they eventually did. When the car stopped in front of our house, I took off like a bat out of hell till I got to my room, where I removed the offending yellow knickers with a speed that might have won me Olympic gold.
This is all by way of saying that my mother was a very good knitter, and that wool was once not only a way to inflict emotional pain on the young of Ireland, but a necessity wrought by the exigencies of the times. What you didn’t have you created in the 1950s, and wool was the undisputed interactive software of the day, pun intended. I think that my mother knitted all of the scratchy outfits for the kids assembled on that particular Sunday.
Knitting, mending and darning were skills much in demand. The three activities were essential women’s skills, and the men of the time depended on women for such basics in life. I’m sure there were men who enjoyed knitting, mending or darning in the privacy of their own homes in Ireland then, but they never did publicly. There were tailors, of course, but that was different.
Other than our swimming outfits, my mother knitted our socks, gloves, scarves, jumpers and cardigans. In their wedding picture, my father is wearing a hand-knitted V-neck sleeveless woollen jumper, as did is his brother Mattie, his best man. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother knitted both.
My mother Brigid knitted wherever she happened to be, at the hearth, at the kitchen table, in an armchair; and, when the weather was warm, sitting outside. I have a memory of seeing my mother sitting around in a circle with my aunts knitting, while a black kitten leapt and jumped after the unwinding balls of wool.
Wool was flecked or plain in the 1950s. Colours were dull, more often than not; dull reds, dull blues, dull greens and browns. Even light colours were dull; dull light green, dull light blue, flecked dull light red and flecked dull light grey. Phosphorescent hues were still a long ways off in the shock of the future, as was the universal availability of cotton thread.
‘Bogotá, Colombia, as it turns out, is much more amenable to wool than many other places on our planet. High in the Andes, nights are cool, and air conditioning and central heating are unknown’
All of my mother’s knitting left a large amount of leftover wool; half skeins and half balls of yarn and jumbles of colours bound together of what remained after a successful jumper or pair of gloves was complete.
What to do?
Well, my mother decided to knit a blanket in widths of about a foot, and lengths of about a yard. She knitted her blanket with double threads; at least I think that’s how she ended up with such a rich and heavy warmth of interwoven colours. As she knitted, she wove her thoughts and daily dreams into her work. She thought of her sister who had recently died, and of her sister’s children who were now motherless. She thought of her sister Nellie who had swapped her name out so that she could migrate to Massachusetts. She thought of the whitewashed home where they had all grown up, now left to the winds of time in Clonboo. She saw her youngest son fall into a pool of saltwater in “backside Spiddal” and sit there not knowing what to do, and she laughed.
My mother saw a thousand things and felt a thousand things as she knitted, and she knitted one and purled each and every one of those images and feelings into her lengths of blanket. She knitted a dozen or so panels of leftover wool. Then, she sewed them all together to make a blanket that is as representative of Ireland of its time and as magical and mysterious as Lebor na hUidre – the Book of the Dun Cow – is of another.
My mother recorded what she knew for us going forward and she did it effortlessly. Did she think that one day we might remember her because of her blanket? It never crossed her mind.
Did she think of the future of her three young boys? Of course she did. Did she see their futures? Not at all.
Of their offspring, she saw nothing either, and nothing of her great-nephews and grandnieces. Did she wish them all well? Innately; it’s all there in the knitting. She ordered the world into knit and purl and left it safe for future generations. My mother gave us everything of the truth as she knew it in her knitting.
I don’t know when I first became aware of this blanket, but from when it first entered my consciousness, I loved it intuitively. For decades, it sat on the back of the sofa in my parents' living room. However, with the coal fire blazing in the fireplace in winter, there was never any reason to use it. The blanket sat there completely satisfied with itself, but unnoticed and unused.
Then, on one of my visits to Ireland, my mother said: “You should take this to New York.” She knew how much I loved her blanket. She was getting older and wanted the blanket to be appreciated after she was gone.
So I packed my mother’s multi-coloured blanket into a suitcase. It came with me to Shannon and then on to New York.
In Brooklyn, the blanket enjoyed a new life, and yet old, on the back of my sofa for many years. The weather was too hot in summer to contemplate wool – yes, rough wool is anathema to cooling off now, just as it was in the 1950s. In winter, the stifling heat of a centrally steam-heated New York apartment meant that the duvet was too hot; never mind adding a wool blanket to the bed.
Then, my mother’s blanket moved with me to the country in upstate New York, and there it found its place, its home, for a time.
Winters, and even springs and autumns, were cold enough there to appreciate the fine wool-woven knots of my mother’s ambition. Her blanket covered one bed or another there, with various other blanket companions, on many a night.
Even my mother herself came and enjoyed the deep solace that one of her previous lives offered her; her hand-knitted masterpiece containing her thoughts from the 1950s lay comfortably over her legs as she slept in Upstate New York in the 1980s and early 1990s. We never mentioned it, never talked about it, as if it was the most common thing in the world.
Of course it wasn’t.
My mother left us.
And I left New York.
I moved to Florida, hardly the ideal home for a heavy wool blanket. So my mother’s blanket retreated to an Irish pine blanket chest even older than itself, until I decided to move to Colombia at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.
Bogotá, Colombia, as it turns out, is much more amenable to wool than many other places on our planet. High in the Andes, nights are cool, and air conditioning and central heating are unknown. There is often the need for a heavy woollen blanket.
The Irish blanket settled into my new home in Colombia as if it had been knitted with Bogotá’s climate in mind. My ageing cat, Figueras, took a special liking to the warmth that the blanket provided, and spent many days and nights of her last years ensconced in the blanket from Galway.
And all the while, the blanket’s secrets that my mother had imparted decades earlier lived on unnoticed as time swept us on unawares.
‘I’m absolutely sure that my mother’s blanket will one day end up in a museum, hopefully in Galway, where AI will unlock its secrets to throw light over life as it was lived in Galway and in the west of Ireland in the 1950s’
AI has been much in the news, and on our minds, in the last couple of years. The capacity of AI seems unlimited, and even if just a small percentage of what has been predicted for AI comes true, our lives will be much altered. For now, the promise of AI has allowed me to imagine the “what-ifs” of my mother’s blanket, however farfetched.
What if AI, one day in the not-too-distant future, can learn to see the past through the remnants and artefacts that remain with us?
What if, one day, AI can learn to read my mother’s thoughts from the blanket that she knitted?
What if one day, AI can see the video of me falling into the seawater between some slippery rocks “backside Spiddal!!”, just because it was there in my mother’s mind when she knitted her blanket?
Oh, you scoff.
As I opened my eyes, I saw the scratchy wool blanket on top of a hill of blankets, some Peruvian, some Guatemalan, in the blue-painted antique wardrobe that my mother’s blanket now called home. Like my mother, I too am soon to be gone. Once I am gone, what is to become of my mother’s blanket in Colombia, I wondered. The blanket is too full of the mysteries of time, too full of my mother’s history, just to become a wayward piece of knitting in the flea markets of Bogotá, Buenos Aires or Mexico City.
My mother’s blanket needed to be home in Ireland.
On that April morning, I made a decision. How perfect! The 1950s blanket would travel home to Ireland in my brother’s empty suitcase.
And so it did.
“I have a surprise for you,” I said to my brother. “Do you remember this.”
“Of course, I do,” he said. “Our mother knitted that blanket!”
Odd things happen in your mind when pieces of the past come back to you. Sometimes, old pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
Sometimes, life surprises you.
My brother’s daughter’s daughter, Amélie, a new knitting enthusiast at an early age, came into the room and saw the blanket. She took it into her hands and looked it carefully up and down. I don’t think she had ever seen anything quite like it.
She threw it on the floor as if it were a rug to a carpet, and then she lay down on it.
I was overjoyed.
I knew that my mother’s blanket had found a new soul who would treasure it and take care of it going forward.
Amélie will have it now.
She will love it and, more likely than not, put it on the back of a sofa somewhere in a future that none of us can imagine.
Oh, and I’m absolutely sure that my mother’s blanket will one day end up in a museum, hopefully in Galway, where AI will unlock its secrets to throw light over life as it was lived in Galway and in the west of Ireland in the 1950s.
You scoff again! But you shouldn’t.
Who will be here to celebrate that day?
Perhaps Amélie will.
- Christopher Burke is from Galway City. He got his BA from UCG and left Ireland in 1971. He lives in Bogotá, Colombia.
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