Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty

Author:Bernard MacLaverty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

They moved from room to room, looking at the quotations – black lettering on white walls – reading the translations, absorbing the photographs. They became separated at one point. Gerry was always lagging behind, taking longer over each exhibit.

Stella, in a new room by herself, read: ‘April 5th 1944, I can shake off everything if I write. My sorrows disappear. My courage is reborn.’ She turned next to a photograph before the war of a line of girls – Anne’s tenth birthday – with their arms around each other’s shoulders, eyes narrowed in the bright sun. Oh, the dresses. The buttons and shoulder straps, the hemlines, the white ankle socks, shoes and sandals. And the hair. Although these girls were ten years before her time Stella recognised everything. Fads and fashions in those days didn’t change much. And she was brought back to her own growing up in her own village in the north of Ireland. In her house they didn’t have a lot of clothes. Style was what you wore. More likely, what someone else wore. Cast-offs and hand-me-downs. Her brothers had the best of it because of a generous Protestant family who lived nearby – all boys. For the girls there were very few shop skirts. They had to make do with ‘remoulds’ – tweeds and summer dresses handed down by aunties, made and fitted by Mrs Johnston. Stella standing there, on the small wooden stool, Mrs Johnston on her knees going around pinning the height of a hem, putting tucks in the waist, her mouth bristling with pins. ‘Aww, I mind when I had a waist that size.’ When she had pins in her mouth Mrs Johnston’s words were distorted. She said them sideways. ‘The day I was married I had an eighteen-inch waist. Can you believe it?’ And she’d make a hoop with her fingers and thumbs the size she imagined herself to have been. ‘But you’re the spit of your mammy’s side of the house. You’re exactly what she was when I first met her twenty years ago. Such a beautiful girl. Being chased by half the men in the country.’ There were pins everywhere and while one sister was being fitted the others played with the horseshoe magnet. Stella loved the way the pins and paperclips clung to it, hanging down like some sort of a plant. Mrs Johnston kept the magnet to look for missing pins so’s nobody’d suffer, she said, running about in their bare feet.

Then parcels came from Canada. Stella remembered a dirndl skirt – such a lot of material that flared out when she spun around. And belts made with tiny coloured beads in Native American patterns – zigzags, totems, triangles – of such bright colours that nobody would dare wear them outside the house. And underskirts – acres of tulle to better display the material and shape of the dress. Unheard-of sweets, like Lifesavers. Unfathomable flavours like sarsaparilla.

Gerry caught up with her and she showed him Anne’s birthday photo, told him about Mrs Johnston and the dressmaking and her magnet.

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