The Power of Knitting by Loretta Napoleoni

Author:Loretta Napoleoni [Napoleoni, Loretta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

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There are few boundaries left. We, the knitters and the future knitters, are more and more free. What defines us is the yarn that connects us, the gift of nature we spin and knit, together, everywhere, and forever. We are breaking out of the yarn cage.

CHAPTER FIVE

Wool Is Cool

Derek is a Rastafarian house painter in his fifties from South London whom I hired to paint some rooms in my house before I rented it out. One day, he was finishing a section of the sitting room while I was knitting there and I noticed that he kept glancing over at me. I was working on a charcoal lace shawl with a very fine silk-cashmere yarn I had bought in Milan a couple of years earlier and forgotten at the bottom of an old knitting bag. I found the bag with the precious yarn and pattern while I was clearing out my storage unit. I was so happy when I saw it that I started the scarf that very evening. The pattern was complicated and I needed to be focused until I got the hang of it, but Derek’s interest in my knitting kept distracting me.

“Do you knit?” I finally asked him. He shook his head but added that he used to when he was in an orphanage. He said that he loved knitting because it was the only activity that calmed his anger. I made him a cup of tea and invited him to tell me his story.

“I moved to London from Birmingham when I was eleven,” he began. “My mother had got a job as a secretary and as is custom in our culture, she took me, the oldest one, with her, and left my younger brother and sister with some people she knew in Birmingham. The plan was to save enough money to have a place for all of us in London, but she fell very ill. The doctors said that she needed a kidney transplant. While we were waiting for a donor, social workers found my brother and sister living in the streets of Birmingham. They were only eight and nine years old. The people who were supposed to look after them had chucked them out suddenly. We never knew why, but I suspect that with my mother being ill, they feared she would stop sending money for them. My brother and sister were brought to London and put in a children’s home.

“I remember being very angry at the time, angry at those people who had treated my brother and sister like old furniture, angry at the doctors who insisted my mother had to have a transplant, angry at the father I had never met and never even knew who he was. I was angry, angry, angry. I loved my mother, I loved her and wanted to protect her, but I was a child and I was alone.

“My mother’s family, who was originally from Jamaica, had emigrated to Canada. My mother had come to the UK alone; I really do not know why.

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