Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

Author:John Berger [Berger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90692-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

For me it epitomised warmth. Warmth of two kinds. The warmth which such thick wool, when worn, proffers the baby. (Last night it was -15ºC outside.) And the sentimental warmth which inspires the neighbourly tradition of knitting for the newly born.

Next day an e-mail announced that the knitted jacket was a present from M-T., who lives 300 metres away and is herself a grandmother.

There’s a Greek statue from 500 BC which shows a kore (a young woman) with plaited hair, a bracelet and a crown, and she is wearing a knitted woollen sweater (carved in marble!) whose cable stitch is similar to that used by M-T.

I first met her thirty-five years ago when she was a young woman. It was in one of her father’s fields where several of us were haymaking. He had a large moustache and intense eyes. The hay cart was drawn by a mare – there was no tractor and no mechanisation of any kind. Six or seven of us loaded the cart with wooden hay forks and used them again to arrange the hay in the stifling barn. After four carts we’d sit in the kitchen to drink coffee and cider before unloading the last cart in the barn.

Today M-T. is a computer fan – hence the explanatory e-mail. She adores downloading and dispatching. I walked across the village to thank her for the knitted baby jacket. It was dusk and I could see a light on through her kitchen window.

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