As long as mankind has grown crops he has had to devise ways of keeping birds from eating the fruits of his labour. A hungry flock of birds could deprive a family from having enough food to last through the winter, so for more than three thousand years, some form of scarecrow has been in existence.

Egyptian farmers put wooden frames covered in nets in their fields to protect wheat fields from flocks of quail. The birds became tangled in the nets, from where the farmers were able to capture and eat them.

Two and a half thousand years ago, Priapus, the son of Greek gods, Dionysus and Aphrodite, had the dubious fortune of a medical condition, later termed ‘priapism‘, that made him so successful at scaring the birds away from the grapes in the vineyard where he lived, that the harvest at this particular farm was the best for miles around. Neighbouring farmers began to carve nude, wooden effigies of Priapus to use in their own vineyards. They painted the statues purple,  placed a club in one hand to make them appear fiercer and a sickle in the other to effect a good harvest.  The Romans adopted Priapus and began to copy the statues,  conveying the idea to France, Germany and England as they travelled.  

 Japanese farmers began protecting their rice fields at about the same time as the Greeks. They hung old rags, meat and fish bones from bamboo poles before setting the sticks on fire. The smell was so bad that nothing came near the rice. Their word for scarecrows, ‘kakashis’, means literally, ‘smells badly’. The Japanese progressed to making scarecrows that looked like people, dressed in clothes made of reeds and a round straw hat that rose to a point in the middle. Bows and arrows were often added to increase the scare-factor.    

In Medieval Britain, children were employed to act as ’shooers’, patrolling the fields carrying bags of stones. Crows or starlings would be chased away by flailing arms and thrown stones.   When the plague of  1348 killed off half the nation’s population, landowners  were unable to find enough youngsters to protect their crops and began to stuff sacks with straw, adding carved heads fashioned out of turnips, hoisting  the resultant figure on a pole.

As a new generation of children grew they continued to patrol the fields, now having to cover much large acreages, but carrying wooden clappers instead of stones, making a noise which could scare whole flocks of birds. Bird shooers continued to patrol the fields of Britain until the 1800′s when new factories and mines offered better wages and opportunities for the children employed. The stuffed scarecrows really came into their own now, became more elaborate, with a cross beam for arms and dressed in cast off clothing.  They could be seen in almost every field and garden for  many years. Local fetes often ran competitions, mainly for children but not always, to see who could produce the best made, funniest or most like a known personage .

After World War II, farming became big business. There was no longer room for ineffective,  stuffied dummies. Crops began to be dusted, by government order, with poisonous chemicals such as DDT, with no thought of any impact on long term health or genetics for those who worked the land or those who ate the produce. Giant whirligigs were set in place to scare the birds and a bright spark at a British firm invented the ‘Automatic Crop Protector’ - which I remember well. It consisted of a metal box with three metal arms,  set on a pole. The box contained large caps of gunpowder which exploded with a huge boom every 45 minutes or so,  setting the arms flapping up and down, clashing together like tin, roofing panels that had come adrift. This went on all through both day and night. The contraption did what it said. No man, bird or beast wanted to go near the crops and everyone within a four mile radius was either petrified or lost their hearing.  Propane gas powered boomers were another,  gentler,  alternative.

Today, although lasers, recorded bird-distress calls and humming electricity lines are used in very highly commercial sectors, amongst the everyday farming community there is a growing concern for environmental issues, resulting in a swing back to non-mechanical methods of scaring away those pesky crows. Reflective PET ribbons, strings of CD’s and foil packaging can be seen rustling in the breeze, but ever increasingly those quirky scarecrows are back in vogue.

The scarecrow-making competitions never altogether went away, but in 1985, Suffolk College of Art and Design used the theme of  Scarecrows as a springboard of inspiration for their students. The idea grew like Topsy, evolved into  a Great International Scarecrow Competition, held on the lawns of Ipswich’s Christchurch Mansions, attracted entrants from all over Europe and was sponsored by Adnam’s brewery.  A one off  event, not extravagant prizes, but the publicity was overwhelming. The idea just captured the public’s imagination and suddenly everybody lived close to a village that held an annual scarecrow festival.

There are several in our area but by by far the best is at Muston, near Filey.  Muston’s annual Scarecrow Festival was begun in  1999 and has only had to be cancelled once since then – 2007, the year of the great floods when most of Yorkshire floated atop a muddy sea and my own family spent some very comfortable nights courtesy of RAF Leconfield. The festival has international renown with visitors from as far away as Japan and Canada planning their holiday dates around it, there have been features on American television and special coach trips arrive from all over Britain. Last year’s model of the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown,  even got a mention in ‘Hello’ magazine.

Nearly all the villagers contribute  in some way towards the festival. There is one notable exception. The landlord of the village pub complains that he came to Muston for a bit of peace and quiet, but has now become as famous for his disgruntlement as the village has for the mannequins and I suspect that he doesn’t object to the extra custom that the festival brings. This year, two scarecrows sit outside the pub. 

Some of the scarecrows are works of art, taking many hours of thought and construction. Committee member, Mal Magson, runs workshops in the weeks leading up to the event, encouraging participants to put in as much detail as possible. It is community art at its best and I’ll bet there are many stories to tell about folk who thought that they couldn’t but discovered that they could. There are the inevitable in-jokes that visitors are never likely to understand, the professions and likenesses of some of the villagers put in their appearances and commentaries on current affairs sit amongst the fairytale characters and film stars. Last year’s Gordon Brown has re-invented himself as the Phantom of the Opera. The recent royal visit to the area is re-enacted and there is opportunity to discover the unusual truth of what Scottish men really do keep under their kilts.

Within All Saints Church there is a festival within a festival. This year the theme is ‘Screen World ‘ and every corner of the beautifully kept church is crammed with flowers, artwork and displays depicting different movies and television shows.  For the first Sunday of the festival, the vicar, Rev. Jeff Hattan, holds an open-air service on the village green, joined by the congregation of Hunmanby Parish Church, and a number of the morning visitors. Murals painted by church warden, Duncan Bell, adorn the church yard and nave. (I promised lovely octogenarian, Duncan, that I would give him a mention, so I have and this is one of his paintings shown left). Donations from previous Scarecrow festivals have allowed the church to do some substantial refurbishments and maintenance work, but also to make  substantial gifts to local charities.

 This is a village where there is a real sense of cameraderie and sharing. The making of scarecrows at Muston may have little to do with scaring the birds and protecting the crops, but it has had an effect of protecting the rural nature of village life. A scarecrow has limited potential in a field; the birds soon recognise its passivity and settle on its outstretched arms. Muston is a place that has come to settle easily on the far reaching fame that the annual Festival  has brought into its midst and seems all the stronger a community for it.

If you want to catch the Scarecrow Festival at Muston it runs until August 1, 2010, involves a leisurely walk around a pretty village with refreshments and some delicious homemade cakes available at both the village hall and the church. If you fancy something stronger or more substantial there’s always the pub – just don’t mention the ‘S’ word whilst you’re there. There are far worse ways for a family to fritter away a summer’s afternoon.  

 Races have been run…

     Performances have been given …

                                                                                                         Awards have been won …

A  collection of treasured art work has gone on display…

So, now it is time for a well earned rest…

A bit of a party… 

                                                    And lots of fun …   

Remember I said, earlier in the week, that there was one thing at the V and A that kept drawing my boys back, again and again?

What wonderful exhibit was it? The huge staircase of books, perhaps, or the beatle house? Sure they were iinterested in those and everything else they saw, but during the course of the morning, they had to hunt out the little boys’ room, as little boys do, and there they found something like this;

 A urinal with a fly painted in the bowl. The point is to aim at the fly and thus reduce spillage. My two younger ones were well impressed! I’ve never known them need the loo so much in one day!

Apparently, the idea was first developed in Victorian times when a porcelain bee was used – the Latin scientific name for ‘bee’ being, ‘Apis’, every pun intended.

It reminds me of when they were tiny and I used to use Cheerios to train them to aim!  Boys will be boys!

For my last post on the Quilt exhibition, I’m going to give an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek look at some of the contemporary quilts on display. The definition of a ‘quilt’ in the contemporary quilting world is simply this; ‘Three layers fastened together in some way so that the fastening penetrates all three layers’. It is a definition that, in my some would say archaic opinion, throws up some very peculiar efforts. In recent years, I’ve seen silver foil, paper and plastic fastened with shop tags and layers of sheep’s wool and bank notes tied with banker’s tags. In fairness, Sue Prichard had done her best to pick some of the more viewable pieces for the exhibition and I guess, at the end of the day, it is all a matter of  personal taste.

My track record on judging modern art isn’t too good. Years ago, on my very first visit to the Tate Modern, with schoolfriends, I wandered aimlessly past row upon row of exhibits that all purported to have deep, intellectual meaning but for me they were just daubs and heaps of mess that constituted nothing and left me emotionally cold. I just couldn’t work it out.  Then I spotted a picture bearing the title, ‘The Body’. I viewed it from a distance, wandered back and forth to look from different angles and yes, the light was dawning, I began to see what the artist was trying to say. Red and blue wires bounced out at the viewer. A pulsating, lit box was set to the left. I could see it all. Veins. Arteries. A heart beating. Here at last was something I could respond to. I moved closer. Close enough to see the tiny card which read, ‘This exhibit has been temporarily removed. We apologise for any inconvenience.’ I had been studying the security wiring for the previous five minutes!

  I have to say that I hope I’ve grown a little more savvy about contemporary art since then, but I’m still basically a traditional gal at heart, who likes things to look like what they say they look like, and most attempts to show me other routes are like casting pearls before a very stubborn swine. That said, here goes.

First up in the modern take on things was Nina Saunders, ‘Whispers’.  A fascinating and touching scrap accompanied this piece. A mother who had been forced to give up her child to the Foundling Hospital had embroidered a small sampler with his name details and date of birth on. She had cut the sampler in two, sending one side to be kept with the child and keeping the other herself, in the hope that one day they would be re-united again. The inspirational stuff that orphanage musicals are made of. Reconciliation never came. Saunders response to this tragic tale was to lopsidedly cut the legs off a perfectly good, Victorian sewing box and cram it full with the dismembered limbs of dolls. I’ll concede that it spoke of the displacement of the children in the care of such institutions. Infact, I’ll whisper this, but it was actually quite moving. Whether it had a place in a quilt exhibition is another matter.

  I have seen Janey Forgan’s, ‘Liberty Jack’ on a number of occasions and it is actually so traditional in its layout and style as to not really constitute the contemporary title. This piece resonates with me for very personal reasons. As a first-time student, I sewed as an out-worker for Liberty, to supplement my meagre grant. At that time they had a store in York. I made anything from napkins to blouses in beautiful Tana lawns and have many ‘crumbs’ of fabric in my own stash that match up to those in Forgan’s quilt. There was and still is an air of nostalgia about these prints. Cream teas and china cups.  Liberty has moved on ‘though. For anybody who didn’t see the shop windows of the London store in celebration of the V and A exhibition, let me digress and show them to you now. Anybody of a delicate disposition, close your eyes and scroll down fast!

There are some names I expect to see at a Quilt Exhibition. There’s probably a legal clause that says the thing can’t go ahead unless there’s a Pauline Burbridge in place. Nice lady. Very nice, very clever, lady. Her work just doesn’t rock my particular boat.

 Sara Impey’s, ‘Punctuation’, lives up to the reputation she has for being a master of the art. I love this quilt. Beautiful message, excellent use of colour, it looks like a quilt should look and it is exceedingly well crafted.  

Dinah Prentice is another well-known and I adore her husband David’s paintings, so maybe here is something I’ll like? Oh dear, I think I’m just not cut out to get these things. Her, ‘Billowing Maenads’, reminds me of the sheets I used to sling over mam’s clothes line to make a den. Just needs a couple of stones on each corner and a sofa cushion thrown in and she’s got herself a Bedouin tent. I can’t show you a photograph of it here,  but if you google you’ll find lots. Prentice  ‘explores the role of textiles as a surface to be stretched, repaired and patched: a flexible and forgiving medium that absorbs both memory and meaning. Drawn to the seams and an exploration of the female form, Prentice delights in the confrontational potential of patchwork, which becomes a metaphor for compressing unacceptable ideas together.’  Hmm…

Caren Garfen - ‘How many times do I have to repeat myself.’  I understand where Garfen is coming from  ’though I must confess I find this kind of social comment a bit grating and think we’ve all grown up and moved on.  For the record, in this household, man, woman and child all share the household chores and all appreciate each other.  The wadding Garfen uses for her quilt is the fluff collected from the tumble driers of several women, with an analogy being made to the term, ‘a bit of fluff’, being used by a man to refer to  woman. Think what filling this quilt did for the world’s energy resources. It reminds me of the artist in Margaret Attwood’s, ‘Cat’s Eyes’, who used tumble drier fluff in her work – but that was in the 1980′s, when the populace hadn’t caught on to global warming. I find some of Garfen’s attitude quite extraordinary – at one point in the you-tube video, brought out in conjunction with the exhibition, she expresses surprise that the women around her don’t regard the washing machine as their most important possession and the closing sentence is just, well, extremely sad. Ever heard of work distribution, love?  However, Garfen is a genuine needlewoman, with a delight in her task; there is piecing and handsewing, there are three layers and there is a good deal of effort.  Had this exhibit been a contender in the Festival of Quilts, the judges would likely have made a comment along the lines of, ‘A competent attempt, good use of colour but a little more quilting would eliminate the tendency towards ‘puffiness’.'  But it’s not. This is Garfen’s first ever quilt, having made the natural progression from embroidering extraordinarily long tea-towels to the poshest museum in England in the space of only three years. Caren Garfen.

 Diana Harrison’s contribution to the exhibition is described as,  “a diptych of pieced and quilted silk” that “centres on the function and form of the box”. In plain English, she has made a quilt that sets out to look like an unfolded, worn and grubby, cardboard box. Why? Because, opened out and flattened, the box’s “function is questioned and the contents released, leading to an overriding sense of vulnerability”. Get this – she got her inspiration from the cardboard boxes she picks up on her way home from work! Judge for yourself:-  Diana Harrison.

Susan Stockwell is, by her own admission, an artist not a quilter – Susan Stockwell She is also no stranger to the V and A; recently, two rooms were taken over by her giant maps and collages. I actually like her work very much and I’m looking forward to seeing her current installation at St. Mary’s church in York. ’A Chinese Dream’ was intelligent and it stood by the definition of being quilted – just. Yes, I was ok with her being there. 

Clio Padovani didn’t even get a needle out for her piece. It was a sort of animated digital movie of dancing shapes with a very slow, seductive, woman’s voice  describing the way they moved.  Padovani said, ‘The shaped movie clips pulse and breathe on the screen, enlarging, contracting, constructing a collective dialogue. The voice is the thread; it connects and constructs, it pieces together this sequence or story’. Excuse me…  Sue Prichard wrote, ‘It takes an intellectual and indeed, emotional leap of faith to open up to the cultural references embedded in Padovani’s work. No longer do we have time to spend ; yet the same skill, the sense of the hand, is employed in a very different way – the keyboard has overtaken the loom, the bobbin and the needle. ’ Given the choice between a keyboard and a needle, I know which I prefer, but maybe I’m just too thick  to ‘open up to the cultural references’ of the alternative.  

Natasha Kerr is a photographic textile artist who, in the main, undertakes commissions for  celebrities. Her ‘At The End of The Day’ image is the one used to promote the exhibition. As photo montage on textile it is brilliant. There is applique, but quilting? Maybe the needle penetrates three layers at some point, but having studied both the work itself and the youtube footage, it still isn’t at all clear to me.  Natasha Kerr

 Jo Budd’s work isn’t to my taste.  It isn’t something that I would particularly want to have around me, but, having said that, I respect and admire her, greatly, as a quilt artist and would defend, wholeheartedly, her right to  stand alongside the traditional quilts in this exhibition. Infact, I think the juxtaposition of the display and the use of windows looking through from the old to her new was inspirational.  Budd works as a quilter, thinks as a quilter and constructs with a quilter’s eye. Although her subjects aren’t my subjects, I can appreciate and engage with her work and particularly enjoyed this you-tube of her speaking about the process. Jo Budd   

Every exhibition has to have its controversy and what a stir Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin have caused amongst the stitching fraternity.

 Let’s get one thing straight. Grayson Perry made this quilt quite a lot of years ago, when the abortion debate in America was at fever pitch.  I’ve seen it several times and I believe it was his second quilt, so he has got a legitimate toe in the door. Remember he does also have an established portfolio of embroidery and textile work, including some amazing costumes and tapestries. Yes, this quilt is gross in its subject matter, but no matter what side of the fence you happen to stand, abortion is never a pretty matter and sometimes the facts have to be presented in a shocking way to get the point across.   Technically, it is quite an accomplished piece. Tumbling block piecing over -layered with applique detail, involving some intricate and tiny parts. Perry admits, himself, that were he approaching the same project again, today, he would change some of the colourways in it. He knows that he is in a very different place as an artist now to when he first executed this piece. I suspect everyone of us could say the same thing as we look back on earlier efforts – that’s part of learning and developing.  I actually think that Perry was very brave in allowing it to be shown.  In 2007, Perry was quoted as saying, “My work is like poisoned treasure. It is treasure but could be cursed.” Having  read some of the reactions to this exhibit, I’m inclined to think he may be right. 

I’ve already proved that I’m no judge of what is high art and what is not. Tracey Emin’s other bed has been highly regarded by many experts. I know that if I saw it I’d be getting the hoover and air-freshener out pdq! What to make of this offering to the Victoria and Albert, then? She has always referred to her ‘quilts’ as ‘blankets’ and technically that is a better description. They are patchwork pieced certainly, but there is no quilting, as far as I can ascertain. The exhibit here has echoes of her ‘Hotel International’, with lettering and messages scattered across the patches, but this is in far more sumptuous fabrics. The sheet is embroidered with a trail of red stains and the claim, ‘Weird Sex’, is  emblazoned across the hangings. Suggestion of sleepless nights, pain and tears are revealed in other script and a pillow sham cries out for God’s mercy. There’s a provocative hint of childhood incest about it all, but Emin is not telling and it’s difficult to tell whether the allusion is cruel teasing, a cry for help or a calculated bating of  her critics. It was interesting, I’m glad I saw it, I’m pleased it was included in the exhibition but in no way was it part of the quilting story…

then again, I could be staring at the wires and missing the point completely. It has been known.   

Links: Most links are included in the text, but I wanted to make special mention of fellow blogger, Sneaky Magpie, who allowed me to use her image of Caren Garfen’s quilt. Check out her lovely blog (she always has some scrumptious food waiting!) at http://www.sneakymagpie.com/                           

As printing techniques developed, the British market was flooded with a wide range of printed textile cottons and panels commemorating special events or causes became popular. Women began to include these panels in their patchwork, revealing an engagement with politics and public debate. One such example was the Queen Caroline quilt loaned to the Victoria and Albert by St. Fagan’s Natural History Museum. The inscription reads, ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty Caroline, Queen of England’.  Caroline, of course, never became Queen and when the future George IV divorced her prior to his coronation many women were outraged at the treatment she had endured. Jane Austen wrote at the time, ‘Poor woman. I shall support her as long as I can because she is a woman and because I hate her husband.’

Joanna Southcott, the self-proclaimed prophetess and mystic of the early nineteenth century, who still has her followers and who once claimed to be pregnant with the Messiah, had sewn a quilt in which she used her own hair as thread, writing an inscription that cursed George III with every stitch for not paying attention to her predictions. In its own way, it is quite a pleasantly arranged quilt, but you know how sometimes objects give off an odd feeling of  unease? Well, this one did it for me; whilst other viewers leaned in closer, I’m afraid I didn’t linger.

An unknown maker stitched herself into history in a magnificent quilt  commemorating George III reviewing the troops in Hyde Park. In scenic, appliqué vignettes there is an image of a red-haired beauty viewing the event and details of her life are scattered amongst the pieced medallions.

In case this is all sounding a bit gender exclusive, the male quilter has a place, too. This beautiful hexagon quilt made from the tiniest of hexagons – my guess would be ½” each side, perhaps less – was hand-pieced by a soldier whilst recovering from his injuries. The material used is uniform wool, thick and bulky and not the easiest of cloth to work with at the best of times, but on such a small scale without the modern resources of a Clover mini-iron and steam technology it must have constituted a major task. I hold my stainless steel quilting ruler  and rotary cutter up in salute and awe to this man.  

The men are represented, too, in a quilt made by the prisoners of the high security wing at Wandsworth Prison. Based on the hexagon shape because that is the shape of the prison layout, each block is hand embroidered with something meaningful to the individual working on it. One sketches a thread picture of the view from his cell window, another humorously inscribes the words, “I didn’t do it, Guv! Honest!”  A  short but moving film accompanying the quilt, shows inmates explaining how the process of stitching, introduced to them through the instructors of the Fine Cell charity, has calmed them down, absorbed their aggressions and given them a skill that puts a value and purpose into their days. 

Prisoners of a different kind are represented in the stitching of the Rajah quilt, a much celebrated piece on loan from the National Gallery of Australia, where it is only exhibited on one day of every year. Discovered in 1987, the wording around the border gives an insight into the circumstances of its makers;

‘To the ladies of the convict ship committee, this quilt worked by the convicts of the ship Rajah during their voyage to van Dieman’s Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also as a proof that they have not neglected the ladies kind admonitions of being industrious. June 1841.’

Elizabeth Fry’s efforts in prison reform included employing convicts in useful tasks, which meant that when 180 women prisoners set sail from Woolwich on board the convict ship, Rajah, on April 5, 1841, bound for Van Diemens land, 10 yards of fabric, four balls of white cotton sewing thread, a ball each of black, red and blue thread, black wool, 24 hanks of coloured thread, a thimble, 100 needles, threads, pins, scissors and two pounds of patchwork pieces (or almost ten metres of fabric) went with them. When the ship docked in Hobart on July 1941, the sewing supplies had been transformed into a patchwork and embroidered coverlet, to be presented to the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, as tangible evidence of the cooperative work that could be achieved under such circumstances. The quilt has a central panel of broderie perse and some of the medallions show fine craftsmanship. There is a wide variety of skill levels and techniques used across the quilt’s 2,815 pieces, but the ship obviously carried some fine needlewomen. At some stage after its arrival in Tasmania the quilt was returned to England, to be presented to Elizabeth Fry. Whether she knew of it before her death. four years after its completion, we do not know. Its life and ownership during the following 147 years remains to be revealed.

I could go on and on about the different quilts and their histories for page after page. It is the lives and histories of these ordinary quilters who have unwittingly made their mark on history that fascinates me. Women who felt so passionately about their causes  or had such an urge to share knowledge that they spent months of their time piecing and quilting, pouring their beings into these (mainly) beautiful objects. There were so many, but before I  tell you about the dubious contemporaries, I want to share just one more from  the ‘traditional’ quilts. One that moved me to tears.

A simple, incomplete quilt top of pieced hexagons hangs slightly apart from the more elaborate offerings. It was made by twenty British Girl Guides incarcerated in Changi jail during the Second World War. The girls were hungry, threadbare and living in appalling conditions. They had to scavenge for every scrap of material. But they came together in secret to sew the quilt as a birthday present for their inspirational Girl Guide leader, Elizabeth Ennis.  In the centre of each block, with varying degrees of skill, each girl embroidered her name.

One of those girls was Olga Morris (now Henderson), who spoke at the exhibition preview. She was just ten years old when she and her family were rounded up following the Japanese conquest of Singapore in February, 1942. She remembers her mother putting on seven dresses as they started the long, hot walk to Changi prisoner of war camp where nearly two and a half civilians were to be housed in quarters intended for six hundred. Along with Marmite, tins of condensed milk and aspirin, Mrs Morris had packed needles and thread.

To alleviate the boredom of the camp for the young girls, Elizabeth Ennis decided to form a Girl Guide unit. They met once a week in a corner of the exercise yard. Olga recalls reciting her Promise, singing and lying under the stars to learn the constellations. It was a happy escape from the daily work in baking fields, growing and harvesting crops they were to have no part in eating. As a gift to their leader, the girls began to plan and make the quilt in secret, not knowing how long it would take them. When their cotton dresses rotted in the sunlight, they would laboriously unpick the seams, salvaging any fabric and thread that they could for use on the quilt. Drawing only on the instruction given to them in their normal meetings, they learned patchwork and also sewed their Guide badges and emblems. Every time they left their cell, they posted someone on duty to ensure that the needles weren’t stolen and, as they sewed, they were on constant alert for the Japanese guards, stuffing the patchwork into their knickers at the sound of approaching boots. These girls, aged eight to sixteen, knew the brutality of the soldiers, regularly saw decapitated heads on spikes, witnessed body parts being chopped off as punishments and saw women and children slaughtered in front of them. They took it in turns to sleep on a single, stone slab and their diet was rice and water. But their spirit was unwavering and on they sewed. Olga tells how each hexagon is a coin in her memory bank.

Elizabeth Ennis died only seven years ago.  She was proud that, “Out of the grimness and misery of internment something so beautiful could be made by the Guides who had lost all their possessions – but still had courage.” After her death, the quilt was presented to the Imperial War Museum. “Mum was always a keen Guide”, says her daughter, Jackie Sutherland. “She gave the girls a focus. The quilt became part of our family lore. To see how much stock others put in it is very emotional.”

But that was not the end of the remarkable story of the Changi quilt. It gave Ethel Mulvaney, self-appointed Red Cross representative at Changi, the idea of making other quilts into which they would stitch coded messages to let their husbands, brothers or sweethearts in the men’s camp know that they were alive.

The first quilt was deliberately innocuous, flattering the Japanese guards with their national symbols. Once that had been allowed through, two others were made with a more serious purpose. Elizabeth Ennis embroidered a picture of an ocean liner with a banner headline “Homeward Bound” and signed it M. E. Ennis. One patch showed a small figure in a cell with the words: How long, dear Lord, how long?” Jack Ennis, a pathologist, had not heard from his wife for 15 months but one morning the Australian Red Cross representative unrolled the quilt in front of him. “Is that Elizabeth?” he said, disbelieving.

“This message of hope and consolation”, says his daughter, “kept Jack going for the remainder of internment.”

The three other Changi quilts have also survived. One is in the Red Cross Museum in London and the other two are in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. 

Jack and Elizabeth did indeed share a boat home to England in 1945. Elizabeth died in 2003, aged 91, and Jack in 2007, aged 96.  After four years’ imprisonment, Olga arrived back in England severely malnourished and disease-ridden. Her stomach was hugely distended from beriberi and she had malaria. Now 79,  she lives in Eastbourne and is frequently asked to talk about the Changi quilt. 

Permissions: Images of the Changhi Girl Guide quilt and the Raja Quilt are copyright of the Victoria and Albert museum, London, England.

                               Image of the Changhi Red Cross quilt is copyright of the Red   Cross  Museum.

                                Image of the Wandsworth Prison block detail is copyright of Fine Cell Organisation.

Links:            Fine Cell –  http://www.finecellwork.co.uk/aboutus/

                           Olga Morris speaks about the Changhi Quilt – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_PQ-In48A

I would never want to live in London, but I do enjoy the occasional visit when duty takes me that way and we try to fit in as many extras as we can. This time, high on the agenda was a visit to the Victoria and Albert museum. One blog post isn’t enough to share all that we saw, so I’ll be spreading this over several days, but I’m also setting a challenge. I wonder if anybody can guess what was the favourite thing that my boys saw at the V and A; the thing that drew them back again and again. I’ll give you the answer later in the week … unless, of course, anyone  answers correctly.  

I had a complimentary ticket to the ‘Quilts 1700 – 2010’ exhibition, which I’ve been itching to use since it begun way back in March, having already seen preview footage, but circumstances just haven’t allowed us to get there sooner. So, whilst the boys went off to view other exhibits, I took a rare couple of hours by myself to savour what has been one of the most popular exhibitions that the museum has ever run. It has been six years in the making and attracted thousands of visitors from all over the globe. I wasn’t disappointed.

 Had I have been expecting a complete walk through the history of quilt-making, I may well have felt cheated by some obvious omissions and certainly I balked at one or two of the contemporary inclusions, but the curator, Sue Prichard, had given the exhibition a secondary title of, ‘Hidden Histories, Untold Stories’ and the date parameters became mere bookends to enclose the collection.

The first of the themed displays was entitled, ‘The Domestic Landscape’ and begun with a stunning set of patchwork bed hangings. I had seen these before, but in a very different guise. At the Festival of Quilts Gala dinner 2009, an image of these hangings had been projected onto the screen but they were flat, pinned to a board and mounted under glass. Quite frankly, they weren’t all that spectacular. At that time, they were part of the V and A’s Textile studies galleries. To see them re-assembled and set in their right context was an exciting progression and full credit goes to the conservators. The bed hangings are dated 1730 – 1750, are the only set of hangings from this period in a public display and this is the first time that they have been fully assembled since they were acquired by the museum in 1908. They contain 6,482 hand-stitched pieces of cotton, chintz or silk, each scallop is edged with bright, leaf green and the colours just sing, despite their age. The bedroom was the place where the wealthy showed off their luxury goods…after all, the family rested there, servants entered and guests were entertained, and hangings such as these reflected their access to sumptuous textiles.

 The bedroom was also the place associated with childbirth and this was represented in a range in a range of commemorative items. Tiny pincushions, cot covers  and even full size quilts. One of the cot quilts was made by Priscilla Redding  in about 1690 and accompanying the piece was a tiny diary kept by her, in  miniscule writing, telling the events of her life. Priscilla was the daughter of Captain Samuel Tavenor, one time governor of Deal Castle and a Baptist preacher who was persecuted for ‘not conforming to the worshippe of the nation.’

The Elizabeth Chapman coverlet arrived at the museum complete with its supposed history: it was made as a wedding coverlet,  included a love poem and the paper templates were cut from love letters.  The “love poem” turned out to have been written by a dentist who embalmed his wife’s body after her death because he continued to receive her dowry only whilst she remained above ground.  The “love letters” were receipts, copybooks, household ledgers and so on.  The quilt also – rather bewilderingly – contains a panel commemorating Wellington‘s victory at Victoria.

 There were the usual offerings in this section of homily quilts put together by all levels of society, all very beautiful in their own way. I was drawn to a map of the British Isles worked by a child and remembered doing something similar years ago and it’s always interesting to see the quilts that have the papers left in. They reminded me that my mother owned an antique quilt in which the papers had been left, to add to the warmth, and that, as a child, I loved to wrap it around me and hear the papers crunching.

 The Bishop’s Court Quilt is another interesting reminder of how unreliable the assumed provenance of a textile can be. Dated circa 1690, it is a sumptuous affair made of extravagant fabrics and bearing the  crest of an important family. The story was told that it was used by the future King Charles II at the time of the Civil War. When the V and A experts applied their sophisticated dating techniques to the textile, they found it was made much later. Perhaps it would not have survived so readily without the myth.  

But, aside from the bed hangings, my favourite in this section was the enormous Sundial coverlet, an accomplished piece of 1797, perhaps made to show off the maker’s skill. Each sampler block was approximately six inch square and contained appliqués symbolising the maker’s interests such as a pair of scissors, birds and flowers. The corners contained maps of the world, reflecting the growing awareness of geography at that point in history. I’m a big fan of sampler quilts and this one is exquisite.

I’ll tell you more later…

*My apologies; when I captioned the bed-hanging photograph, the correct wording should have been, ‘ ©V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum, London’.

‘If the sight of a blue sky fills you with joy, if a blade of 

grass springing up in the fields has the power to move you,

if the simple things in nature have a message you understand,

Rejoice for your soul is alive.’

                                                     – Eleanor Duse (1858 – 1924)

 ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak.

(Random House 2005).

‘The Book Thief’ was originally marketed in Australia as an adult book, but was been taken on by the American market for a young adult audience and has rather unfairly become stuck in this genre. Like Mark Haddon’s, ‘Curious incident of the dog in the night-time’, it straddles the genres and has a multi-faceted layering that demands ever-deeper examination.

It would be easy to say that this is another book about the holocaust and to imagine that that sums it up. To do so would be wrong. The story is told from the first person narrative of Death, who was ever present throughout the evils of the Second World War and who treats the reader to the story of a German girl who has touched his very existence and wound herself into his conscience. The sometimes simplistic language is akin to a parent patiently relaying events to a child, but there is an underlying complexity and meaning that gives an uneasy mix of the menace to come and the naivety of those who are to be touched by it.  Death opens the book by literally taking the reader by the hand to a snowy railroad track in late 1930’s Germany. Liesel, the book’s main protagonist, is stood by her mother who is holding Liesel’s dead brother; a victim of the bitter cold weather. The train guards force the family off the train because they do not want to be held responsible for a dead body. This is the debut of one of the central themes of the book; that of, the consequences of taking up or casting aside responsibility for actions. Characters live or die because of what they should or should not have been doing.

Liesel gains her title as ‘the book thief’ at the cemetry where her brother is buried. In a desperate bid to maintain her connections with him, she scoops up a book that falls from the pocket of one of the grave diggers. The book is entitled, ‘The Grave Digger’s Handbook’. At the graveside, Liesel is taken from her mother and placed in a small town called Molching with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. We later learn that her mother has been sent to a concentration camp.

Hans is a kind-hearted man, a painter and decorator, who teaches Liesel to read using the ‘Grave Digger’s Handbook’ and painted letters. Rosa swears like a trooper, is brusque and difficult to live with, but has a heart of gold. She takes in other people’s washing, a task which Liesel helps with. Liesel evolves through her grief to some level of stability. She makes friends with Rudy, a typical everyday kid, gets into scrapes, joins Hitler youth, learns how to scrump apples and roll cigarettes, developing a real love of books along the way. All goes well, until, fulfilling a half-forgotten promise to the widow of a friend, Hans takes in the jewish, Max Vandenburg, and hides him in the basement of the house.  The human faces of Nazi Germany become ever more apparent as the war progresses. It seems that Liesel and her family are the only ones in this small town that have the ability to look beyond appearance and do not hate the Jews.   

I made a comparison with Mark Haddon’s work, earlier. There is another. Like Haddon, Zusak uses drawings and naïve writing laced through the typeset to create an intimacy and closeness for Liesel and her relationships with both Hans and Max. The story -within – the –  story of ‘The Standover Man’ shows Max to be someone who has always been controlled and affected, for better or worse, by those who have stood over him. The intertextual use of ‘Mein Kampf’ cleverly stresses the struggle between good and evil, the physical book that instructs the structure of that society becoming in itself the thing that is used to combat the struggle and bring about first freedom and then transformation.

Books become a thread of symbolism throughout the work, presenting a broadening of ideals for Liesel and the reader. They become simply collections of words. Words that explain feelings, remind of the past and look to the future. Words that bring a country to arms and then to its knees. Words of hate and intolerance that make even the narrator, Death, afraid of humanity as he carries away the millions of souls. Words can hurt, and conversely, they can heal and give way to hope.   

Like many things worth pursuing, ‘The Book Thief ’ starts slowly. The tone of Death speaking to us is one we warily tune into, but I found myself heaving with tears over parts of this book as life’s ultimate narrator, that friend of war, revealed the twists and turns, the bleak and the beautiful that all of humanity is capable of, given the right conditions. It is a sobering read.  

Links; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7B8ioiZz7M

It’s important to start the day with a good breakfast…

There’s always one wise guy in the pack;

Ladybird kebab, anyone?

  One joker and suddenly all decorum is lost;

         Serenaded by a handsome young man;

The postman came and even knocked on the door to wish me a Happy Birthday;

            Time for a walk in the countryside with my favourite fellas;

Ice-creams on the way home;

Must  check the football results;

 Cake!

Sending  wishes into the night sky;

And so another birthday drifts away…

Hidden away in the steep, lush Eskdale  valley, just outside the hamlet of Littlebeck,  past the overgrown quarry workings and mysterious pools, is a cave. Carved out of an enormous boulder, the large room has a circular seating arrangement capable of accommodating about twenty people.

On its roof are two, remarkably comfortable, carved, stone chairs.  Local legend has it that if you sit on one chair and make a wish, then you must rise and sit on the other to make the wish come true.

Carved into the boulder are the words, ‘The Hermitage’ and above the pointed door are the initials and date, ‘CG 1790’. The location is perfect. At the time of building, the trees in the surrounding  woodlands would not have been so tall, affording the cave a panoramic view across the gorge. The rushing waters of nearby ‘Fallings Foss’, the birds singing and an occasional twig creaking are the only sounds to punctuate the tranquil silence.

The Hermitage was commissioned by the Littebeck schoolmaster, George Chubb, in 1790, as a place to retreat to when the daily lessons were finished. He was a contemplative and spiritual man who knew the value of stillness, solitude and reflection. It has become for many, in the ensuing years, a place to rest along the way, to take stock of the journey and to partake of refreshment.

The Russian language has a word for such retreats. ‘Poustinia’  literally translates as ‘desert’, and is used to describe any quiet, lonely place, set apart from the world, be that  physical or within our state of mind or inner being, where those who desire can retreat from the hustle and bustle of life for a short while to contemplate, perhaps to pray.

I would venture to say that we all need a place of poustinia in our lives.