Things to Make and Mend Read Online Free Page A

lilies. And Sally was supposed to smile, to giggle and sigh over the steaming soup bowls in a pretty, girlish way. She did not manage the giggling often, though, because her life had recently collapsed around her. So she stomped about in her big shoes, sweeping crumbs off the tables into people’s laps, scalding herself against the stainless-steel serving dishes, dropping boxes of loose tea and having to clatter around the too-small kitchen, sweeping up with a plastic dustpan and brush.
    She put on weight and her apron became too tight. She dropped a tray, breaking five smoked-glass ashtrays, three cups and a soup bowl. She swore at one of the middle-aged men, telling him, in a not very Goldilocks way, to ‘get out of my face’. She was not having a very good time. She had become coarse and jaded.
    The next job she got was in the accounts department of a plumber’s merchants. She sat in an open-plan office full of smoke, investigating the company’s dozens of unpaid bills, which appeared as tiny account numbers on a microfiche. She sat opposite a woman called Brenda Bright who always wore red and smoked one high-tar cigarette after another, pausing only to take swigs of ink-black Maxwell House from a mug that said ‘I’m a Mug’.
    ‘Get out while you bloody well can,’ Brenda Bright used to advise her, as if she was Andromeda chained to the rocks.
    The accounts office of the plumber’s yard was a terrible shock after her school’s wholesome classrooms – which I left willingly, Sally began to realise, of my own free will. Now she remembered St Hilary’s School for Girls with something approaching grief. She even thought of Miss Button with a kind of fondness. I was supposed to do A-levels! I was supposed to go to university and study French! And then catastrophe had intervened and she had done the only thing she could think of doing. She legged it. She ran.
    She used to run from the plumber’s yard in the evenings, on to the wet, sparrow-chirping pavements, and not be able to make out the numbers of the buses home. ‘Three?’ she wondered, squinting, as they hove into view at the top of the hill. ‘Or eight?’ She can trace her short sight from her month-and-a-half at Capel’s Plumbers.
    Now, peering at her hemming in the back of the shop she sometimes has a fleeting vision of that desk at the plumber’s yard, and that mug and that smoke, and Brenda Bright in the most enormous pair of glasses. What a vision, that vision of Brenda Bright.
    Wise people are in the minority, she has found, over the years. Despite the owl on her school badge, she herself has not made wise decisions. Practicality has little to do with wisdom.

Knotted
    Take care, when threading the needle, not to use too long a thread because it will be inclined to knot. There is no need to knot the end of the thread. An unknotted thread makes for a neater finish.
    *
    Sally used to write quickly, heedlessly, her ink-pen pressing a groove into her finger.
    ‘Put your sewing away neatly now, girls, and tidy up,’ Miss Button would shout after fifteen minutes’ dictation and an hour’s hopeless practical. And there would follow a desolate scraping of chairs, a flinging of material scraps into the scraps bucket, a lobbing of cotton reels into the haberdashery cupboard. At the back of the cupboard lurked the sequin box, which had been there for years and was hardly ever brought out. It was pretty, like a tiny treasure chest. Sally used to like that sequin box. But there was never time to apply sequins to things.
    *
    All the girls in her class that year had worn long, floating scarves. Rowena’s was turquoise and green and had a badge pinned to it that Sally had given her. It said, in tiny letters, ‘What are you staring at?’ Sally’s was blue. They used to wear them all day, even though scarves were disapproved of by the teachers. Memos had been passed around the staffroom.
    ‘Remove that unbecoming item now please, Rowena Cresswell, ’