My Mother's Sweater

 (I wrote this post for my FB page and it is backdated to reflect the date of my original post.)

My mother knitted this sweater when she was a teenager in England circa 1952.  When I was a teenager she told me lots of stories about WWII and the London Blitz, a few about her high school and college (where she met my father), but she didn’t tell me anything about this sweater. Given the small size knitting needles she must have used for the dense knit, it may have taken her weeks.  It has a zipper which I assumed was designed to go up the back of the neck, but it’s actually more comfortable to wear at the front.

I would say that making this sweater was quite an accomplishment. One she could be proud of for her to have taken it with her to Thailand where there would be no need of sweaters and then pack it again to come to California where she passed it on to me once I was big enough. And I in turn saved it for decades because I had so few things from my mother’s childhood. Just a few books and a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe.

My mother’s stories were mostly about the austerity of her childhood, the war, the rationing and how they reused materials to make new things, and having to sit in bomb shelters at night during the bombings. She told me about the whistle sound of the doodlebugs, (a flying self-propelled bomb) as it flew overhead. If it went silent they knew it was falling so everyone would look up when they heard the sound and say to themselves or maybe even aloud “keep going, keep going”. She told me these stories with a smile so as not to traumatize me or perhaps herself too. We being of the stiff upper lip tradition.

It was not until recently, when I found a written account of her wartime memories that I realized how young she was at five years old (during the London Blitz) and that they were sitting in the dark. Raised on the movies of the war, I had pictured a naked bulb hanging overhead. This fact of being in the dark made me angry for some reason. But the emotion that really got me was that she was so bored sitting there. And remembering how mad I had made her when, one summer, I had complained to her of being bored. 

“Do something creative,” she had told me as if boredom was a luxury. I never complained of being bored again. This tense boredom of sitting in the dark gave this message a whole new meaning. 

When war breaks out I think of embedded resilience. How this emotional self sufficiency is taught in a culture (and how it is not). And during times of crisis how tough it makes you by necessity. And how these lessons of wars are carried (and passed down) by the immigrants to this country. Along with skills to learn to do something creative as in this sweater.