My mother was an accomplished needle-woman and I grew up in a household largely focused on art and design. My father was writing a history of flags for much of my childhood, so home was full of images of frayed fabric, tarnished gilt embellishment and gorgeously painted coats of arms.
As the youngest of five, I remember hand-me-downs, dresses revived with embroidery, and a jacket inherited from a stylish aunt. Ann, the sister with whom I shared a bedroom, taught me art at school before she became a textile designer. The first skirt I made for myself was to a pattern cut by one of my brothers, who was studying architecture at the time, and made his own suits. And, when she died, my mother left me a collection of her needlework, and of table-linen worked by my grandmother’s cousins.
Inspiration for my latest novel The Keepsake Quilters came from many sources and memories. I moved to London as a student in the heady days when Biba collided with Laura Ashley, and Kensington High Street was still a fashion parade. Mark’s grandad emerged from my recollections of a rag and bone man who used to work Twickenham’s streets 40 years ago. And Penny, my protagonist, lives above Mark’s shop near Borough Market, close to my own flat in a former jam factory.
In some instances, it was a case of my memory being jogged. A meeting with curator Michael Waldron in Cork’s Crawford Gallery reminded me of the work of pre- and post-second World War Irish artists, which sparked the idea of Ruth’s portrait and offered her storyline. The book’s characters, their homes and workplaces, are imaginary, but I wouldn’t have conceived of Penny’s story if much of my own career hadn’t been in television. And while, unlike Val, I didn’t come upon Cymbeline at college, I spent long hours at drama school dissecting Shakespeare with friends. Who knew that, all these years later, so much late-night discussion would be repurposed in a novel?
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Inspiration also came from people I’ve never met. Kit and Aaron’s characters, and the book’s underlying focus on sustainability, owe much to Greta Thunberg and the schoolchildren across the world who’ve joined her Skolstrejk for climate change mitigation, whose voices came to me via the internet. The link between Simon’s drowning and Drake’s exciting, exploitative voyages emerged from a tweet from someone at Southwark Cathedral, who’d noticed a green shoot from the oak being used to patch the replica of Drake’s ship, The Golden Hinde, and saw in it an image of hope and rebirth.
Sometimes a point occurs in the writing process when the world throws up unexpected resonances with your book. Often it happens in the final stretch when, mentally and physically, you’re flagging. When I’d written the chapters establishing my group of 1950s Dublin artists with their varying ranges of talent and plans for a brave new world, I visited an exhibition of paintings by Jack B Yeats in Ireland’s National Gallery. On the wall was this quotation: No one creates. The artist assembles memories – a perfect expression of an idea Marguerite tries to articulate as she works on the keepsake quilt.
Within a week, an exhibition at London’s Somerset House, featuring art by Malala Andrialavidrazana, Otobong Nkanga, Zineb Sedira and Shiraz Bayjoo, among others, turned out to chime equally well with themes I’d been exploring. Weirdly, such happenstance feels like validation and brings renewed energy to the completion of the work.
Possibly the most unlikely piece of happenstance occurred when the book was finished and I had a chance to do things with family again. It was then I learned that, while I’d been writing, my sister Ann’s daughter Suzy O’Leary, now an architect, had been designing a gallery in Galashiels to house The Great Tapestry of Scotland. Hand-stitched by over 1,000 people led by master stitcher Dorie Wilkie, this piece of needlework, twice as long as the Bayeux Tapestry, is a triumphant image of how art created communally by individuals can assemble memories and preserve them for future generations. A pictorial history embroidered in sections by groups across the country, it’s one of the world’s largest community arts projects and, to bring my personal happenstance full circle, was originally the brainchild of the novelist Alexander McCall Smith.
In The Keepsake Quilters, shared needlework draws together the threads that bind three generations of women. It delights me to think that a similar link exists across three generations of my own family - my mother, my late sister and I, and my niece. The award-winning space Suzy has created is elegant, simple, harmonious and beautiful. As well as the gallery at its heart, it has temporary exhibition areas, a café, and a dedicated space for local stitching groups to meet. A glazed link connects it to Galashiels’ handsome Post Office which, in the 1890s, was a symbol of the town’s prosperity. So, supported by the new railway line linking Galashiels to Edinburgh, it’s designed as a focus for renewed activity in the run-down high street, inspiring a 21st century version of this formerly vibrant textile town.
I was amazed to discover that, in our own fields and unknown to each other, my niece and I had been working with the same themes and ideas. Inspiration, vibrancy, hope and sustainability are central to the gallery’s vision, expressed in the artworks it contains, as well as in its architectural vision. As you walk up the staircase there’s a cascade of colour, where a relief sculpture of acrylic threads, is laser cut with the names of the stitchers who worked the tapestry.
Created by Andrew Crummy, the artist who also designed the tapestry, it focuses on an image of a woman. She gathers the threads together in a needle, pointing towards the exhibition space, where memories, skill and companionship have been stitched into the nation’s consciousness. And, behind her, the threads spill down to the doorway and, in imagination, form new, powerful links through the town, where local businesses, owned and run by people like my novel’s characters Mark and Penny, once again have begun to grow and thrive.
The Keepsake Quilters by Felicity Hayes-McCoy is published by Hachette Ireland
