i.
Each week the headmaster’s wife

darns us into her web of chairs: a design

to mirror the range of her eyes.

She is austere, and caught in the snare

of her husband’s alarm-clock life,

she ticks us off

when our stitches don’t mend her morning.
The fabric is too big for childish hands,

and the needle too small to fit my desire

to quit this room    with its young girl giggles

and smell of teacher’s perfume.

She has given me too hard a task:

the needling of a cloth

to make a pattern

for a life I can’t conceive.

But, we are her debutantes on our way

to womanhood, so she stoically treads her path

by fidgeting feet and sew-spastic fingers.
Cotton eyes the needle greedily

pushing through the vacancy

like a cat through its flap to a freeing sunrise.
Needle-threading is much like tying shoelaces;

poking an ant nest with a stick;

or riding a broom-proud steed

through a small gap in the fence to a wood ―

hanging there, the thread is secure as the tie

on the legs of a store-bought chook.
While other busier fingers

brook the challenge of Mrs N’s stare,

my mind wanders to methods of escape.
Bending slowly, head inching over genuflecting knees,

I undo a shoelace.

It’s the start of an idea.

Knots! Knots! and more knots!

So the dangling thread becomes a hangman’s noose;

a yachtsman’s ropey artistry; the tangle of fishing line

in the hands of a tyro on holiday.

                      Excuse me, please, I have a knot!
It’s one deserving of a prize.

I try not to smile.

I try not to look proud.

She sighs, releases me from the torture-tool of linen

and starts unpicking my knotted herd.

It takes a while.

Knots can be tricky

knots can be hard to tie, unseen,

and she is soon on my third.

I am nine

and the clock tells me it’s eleven.
ii.
Bridging the gap from youth to freedom

is High School and The Treadle.

In these mechanised rows knots are irrelevant.

Each machine wakes its latent industry

by the cradling of a bobbin.

We are given one to keep

so mine will live in a drawer

at home.

It will never meet the Singer, or seam its voice

to the room’s robotic choir.

I am proud I will never sew a stitch

on that maternalising denier of youth.
I am told that next term I will study nutrition;

learn how to cook and how to clean a kitchen.

They are unpicking my world

and sewing me into their fabricated fiction.
I am twelve

and being primed for motherhood.