“See now, here you have pulled too hard, so that the stitches are too tight and the tension uneven. That will not do at all – you will have to unpick that section.”
“Have you mixed two stitches here? Is that cross-stitch and long-armed cross alternated? Oh my dear, no! Miss Pesel is encouraging us to become more adventurous with the stitches we use, but never on God’s green earth should you alternate those two. Start again!”
Each woman nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll rework it,” or some similar response, then scuttled away like dogs scolded for stealing bones from the dinner table. Back at their seats, they frowned and muttered to their neighbours.
“Where is your work?” Mrs Biggins demanded as Violet approached.
“I’ve not done any yet. This is my first time. We spoke on the telephone.”
“Miss Speedwell, is it? No embroidery experience at all? All right, let’s get you started. You can work with Mrs Way. Mabel!” she called. “Here’s Miss Speedwell to help you sort the cupboard.”
A thin woman in a grey dress with hair to match stepped back from a large cupboard in the corner. It was the usher who had tried to keep Violet from the broderers’ service at the Cathedral. She started when she recognised the newcomer. “It’s not looking too bad, Mrs Biggins,” she insisted. “I don’t really need the help.”
“Nonsense. A tidy cupboard sets up the whole endeavour and helps us to work better.”
Violet took a deep breath. She had no choice but to stand up for herself, as she had with her mother when she moved to Winchester, and as she had with Mabel Way a few weeks before. Else there was no point being here.
“I was hoping to learn embroidery, not tidying.” She spoke in a low voice, but it seemed everyone heard, for the room went quiet.
Mrs Biggins sat up straight, as if to rearrange the rod up her back. “Miss Speedwell, I know you are keen to make your unique contribution to the Cathedral with your very own kneeler. But this is a cooperative operation, and in the spirit of cooperation, we all have tasks to perform here, many of which do not involve embroidering but are nonetheless essential to our endeavour. Now, you go over to the cupboard and help Mabel make it the tidiest cupboard in Winchester. Only then will we teach you to thread a needle.”
Violet turned red during this public dressing-down. If this was to be what embroidering for Winchester Cathedral was like – sorting cupboards and being condescended to – perhaps she should walk out and abandon the idea of a kneeler with her initials on it. She could leave the Cathedral Broderers in their room in Church House and go for a walk instead, along the river through the water meadows, admiring the harebells and poppies and campanula on the verges. Or watch the Winchester College boys playing cricket on their grounds. Or she could go home and reach for the bottle of cheap sherry she tried not to resort to too often. Or go to the Royal Hotel and have her sherry there, though she could not afford it, waiting for a man to sit down across from her and pay for another.
She did not have to do any of that, for at that moment the smiling woman who had been in the front bench at the Presentation of Embroideries service walked in. Immediately the tension in the room eased. Violet had never known one person to have such a marked effect on an atmosphere. She was a short woman in her early sixties, with spectacles and a soft double chin, her grey hair drawn back in a low, loose bun. Her wide mouth maintained a slight smile that reassured rather than judged. “Ladies, I am delighted to see you here,” was all she said, and yet somehow it was enough. As is often the case, a leader comfortable with her authority does not need to be strident, but can afford to be generous. It felt like being visited by the nicest, strictest mother possible.
The women who had been scolded went about unpicking their work with renewed energy, and others crowded around, calling, “Miss Pesel, may I have a word? Miss Pesel, I would be grateful if you could check my eyelets – I cannot get them to lie flat. Miss Pesel, have I mixed the yellows as you wanted? Miss Pesel …” They were like schoolgirls eager to please a favourite teacher. Even Mrs Biggins softened.
Eventually, Violet thought, she will get to me. In the meantime, helping Mabel Way with a messy cupboard suddenly did not seem so bad. She did not want Miss Pesel to find her idle. Even as Violet joined her by the enormous wardrobe set against the back wall, Mabel’s permanent frown lessened slightly, as if a rubber had been taken to the lines on her brow. “Perhaps it might help me to see what there is in here,” Violet suggested, “until I can begin learning to embroider.”
Mabel Way nodded, her eyes on Miss Pesel as she made her way around the room, like a bride at a wedding greeting her guests. “I have some work I want to show her. Why don’t you continue to separate the hanks of blue wool into piles, making sure they’ve not got mixed up? Look, I’ve made a start, light to dark.” She gestured at the wool sitting on the wide windowsill next to the wardrobe, then hurried off.
Violet gazed at the hanks. She had not handled wool since she was a girl and went through a phase of learning from her grandmother to knit and crochet. She had made her mother a bed jacket Mrs Speedwell never even tried on, and her father a muddy yellow-green scarf that he loyally wore to work for two weeks while her mother daily complained that he would be made fun of for humouring his daughter. When the scarf mysteriously disappeared, Mrs Speedwell denied all knowledge.
Mabel Way had removed the blues from the reds and yellows and oranges and browns, and it seemed to Violet that there were only two shades – light and dark blue – and they were already sorted. She was not sure what more she could do with them, and peered into the cupboard to see if there was anything else she might tidy – though organisation was not her forte. Her brothers had always kept their clothes and toys and books in better order than she. George had arranged his books in alphabetical order, Tom by colour and size. Violet’s ended up jumbled together, books she loved and despised side by side, books she hadn’t read next to those she had. Her clothes were similar: she brushed her dresses and skirts and hung them with care, yet somehow they became wrinkled and disordered. Her hair too would not stay in its waves, but went flat too easily. It hadn’t mattered so much at home, but now that she was trying to be independent, she noticed these small failures.
The embroiderers’ cupboard was a thing of beauty, if you liked your beauty labelled and tidy. It had been fitted out with numerous shelves, each with handwritten labels glued on: Kneelers; Choir Stall Seat Cushions; Choir Long Bench Cushions. There were boxes of various sizes, separating the coloured wools from one another, and stacks of designs. There were several boxes of Models, and rolls of Canvas made of hemp (Single-Weave or Double-Weave). If she studied the cupboard for half an hour, Violet would understand how the broderers’ project was set up. Perhaps that was why Mrs Biggins had assigned her to it.
The cupboard reminded her of the lessons on stationery at the secretarial college she had gone to a year or two after the War, when she’d finally accepted marriage was no longer a given and she needed to do something with her time other than be a companion to her mother. Mostly the girls were taught typing and shorthand, but there had also been a few sessions on organising stationery cupboards, with rules to learn such as always putting the heaviest, bulkiest things on the lower shelves, or using box lids to sort and keep pen nibs and rubber bands and paperclips in. Violet had thought it all beneath her dignity, yet she failed her first exam in stationery organisation. She chuckled now, remembering.
“You’re here! After the broderers’ service I wondered if you might come along to a meeting.” Gilda Hill had arrived, and hurried over to her. She wore a floral red and white dress with a V-neck that mirrored her triangular face. Her slash of bright red lipstick made Violet aware of her own chewed lips.
“Hello.” Violet felt almost shy as she held out her hand. “I’m Violet Speedwell.”