I was reminded recently of toolboxes. Sons tend to inherit their father’s toolbox while daughters inherit their mothers sewing box and the history of these useful if not valuable inheritances is interesting. We overlook their importance and the tales they tell about division of labour, of men working silently in the sanctity of their sheds with drills and hammers and the smell of wood shavings, of women seated together sharing the secrets of darning socks, hemming or knitting patterns in low soft voices.
These collections go back generations. My own, photographed here, goes back to my great grandmother in the form of an early Singer sewing machine, hand wheeled in walnut wood, lovingly polished and cared for, with all its original spare parts and spools and instruction booklet and key. It has served all my purposes and Ive never seen the need to upgrade it. Besides, I enjoy the feel of the wood, the slow turning wheel, the clunk of its mechanics. My daughters also use it with some amusement. Its not just a thing but an experience.
My Pakistani friend would visit to alter her clothes and help by turning the wheel as I held the cloth through the needle, a strange situation for me. I realized this was how work was done in Pakistan, that work was just as much about a bonded experience as about efficiency. In fact, ultimately this way of work was more efficient because it created a community and that community was the durable economics of itself. So the Singer machine takes me to Pakistan and also to Egypt because the antique shops there are full of these old sewing machines, a remnant from the colonial period,like the antique Rolls Royces that are still driven in Cairo. It tells me of worlds that aren’t consumer driven, of their significance.
My grandmothers elegant small scissors are photographed here, and some of her needles and buttons in the button box.( We used to trade buttons and beads from this box in “swapsies” in the school playground.) All of this came to my mother who added her own touch of cotton threads and pin cushion, needle threader, thimble, knitting needles and crochet hooks. She loved to sew, make afghan throws and patchwork blankets. It seemed to give her a rhythm and order, a sense of peace. Women sewing threads is an archetypal image, part of the mythology we also inherit. It ties you in to a culture.
Images flood in through these artifacts. I see my paternal grandmother’s Victorian house, the huge mahogany dining table, the tea caddy with lock and key, the scullery with dairy products kept in a gauze fronted cupboard in the cold cellar, no fridge, the winding staircase to various levels, the pet tortoise in the garden, the grandfather clock loudly ticking and chiming, the coalman pouring coal into the coal cellar with the leather on his shoulders to protect his back, the marble frontsteps washed and wiped every week, the washing collected every Monday…but NO sewing on a Sunday. It was a house of three women whose men had died in the Wars, and a male child who was too sickly to go to school until he reached double digits. Co-operation was important to survival in those days, and sewing together seemed to epitomize that.
I also see my mother mending, darning, making do after the war years with these needles and pins. When the middle of the double sheets wore thin she cut them in half and sewed “sides to middle” to extend the life of the sheet. She darned socks and stockings, the stitches so neat and small. It was an artform with secret skills. By the time she finished you could hardly see the stitches. Sadly I never mastered this art form. The skill is lost in our throwaway society. When she finished she showed tremendous satisfaction, that she had made something out of nothing and saved expenditure. It was a display of virtue perhaps, not just a chore. As society moved forward into the 1960’s she seemed to live back a generation into the Victorian era. It was as if a world that no longer existed existed here in defiance, preserved in anachronism. That gave me a strange view of the Present as I struggled to live it.
So the sewing box and its accompaniments hold many memories and happenings, not something you can buy but something you accumulate from lives lived, like wrinkles. My daughters will accumulate it too, though I wonder what images will flood back to them when they inherit. Images of togetherness I think, so that although the specifics are different the sentiment is the same. The sewing box is a woman’s chain of transmission, linking us all together in space and time, practical and mythical. We build it up from past collections, and we pass it on.
