Every Wednesday afternoon would be spent in the outside toilets being sick or, to be more exact, pretending to be sick.
When I was nine, needlework lessons were a nightmare to me and my only method of escape was to plead that I felt ill and “please could I leave the room?”
Fifty years later and after nearly forty years of teaching, I sometimes wonder why Miss Woods let me get away with it. She must have known that I was trying it on.
At the beginning of the term, we had each been given a square of pretty cotton material which we were supposed to turn into a handkerchief and, in the first lesson, I was reasonably successful as I turned down the edges and pinned them into position.
The problems began when tacking them into place because I had never used ordinary sewing cotton before and had no experience of threading a small needle. By the end of the second lesson, I had only completed two stitches.
However, by half-term, I had finished the tacking and had become reasonably proficient at needle-threading. But unfortunately, I then had to hem all round what had deteriorated into a very scruffy dirty piece of rag.
It was shortly after that that my ‘sickness’ came on. The first time it was perfectly genuine as I really did feel ill, but, when I discovered that on that occasion I was able to escape from the classroom for nearly an hour, I decided to feign sickness the next Wednesday afternoon.
Miss Woods showed great compassion, allowing me to leave my sewing to go out in the fresh air. I dare not stay out too long in case I was seen by the headmaster so after half an hour I returned and attempted a few hemming stitches before putting my head down on my desk because “I had a headache”.
This continued week after week. By the end of the term, I had not even completed one side of my handkerchief. Then the blow fell: the headmaster expressed his intention of inspecting everyone’s needlework. I genuinely felt sick with fear imagining the awful consequence when he saw the beautiful pieces of work completed by the other girls in the class before looking at my grubby offering.
He sent for a girl at a time and, as each one disappeared to see him in his office and reappeared beaming as a result of his praise, I became more and more terrified.
Perhaps there are such things as guardian angels. Just before my turn to visit the headmaster, Miss Woods received a message to say that he had to deal with two boys who had been fighting so he would be unable to see any more needlework that day. Better still, we were told that as it was the end of term we could take our needlework home whether it was finished or not. It’s a pity I dropped mine in a puddle on the way home so I had to throw it away.
The next term I heard to my relief that, now that we all supposedly knew how to hem, we could progress to something more interesting involving simple embroidery. We were to make and embroider a nightdress case. Amazingly, I completed the preliminary processes of pinning and tacking quite speedily and, as we were to leave the making up until we had finished the embroidery, I was soon able to start on my design.
We were able to make our own choice of stitches so I decided to play safe and restrict my efforts to variations of running stitch. We had been supposed to make a bag out of cross-stitch canvas. I had made excellent progress with my first two circuits of the material but, when I was expected to do a whole round of chain stitch, I encountered innumerable difficulties and spent almost a whole year struggling to no avail.
That teacher was not so gentle as Miss Woods and my bag did not even reach a puddle: it was consigned to the classroom waste-paper bin.
The night-dress case fared
much better. I carefully drew two elephants on the flap and outlined them with pink backstitches. I filled them in with tiny pink running stitches which were so neat that I had difficulty in persuading Miss Woods that they were all my own work.
Those two pink elephants began a complete change in my attitude to needlework lessons and were the start of a great love of embroidery which has remained with me.
When I became a teacher, I avoided teaching needlework whenever possible but, as attitudes to the subject changed, I began to enjoy teaching it and had great fun helping the children to make puppets and soft toys or showing them how to embroider their own designs. They always knew that needlework lessons were a time when we could relax together and enjoy each other’s company. Sometimes, as they struggled with their chain stitch, we would laugh together as recalled my own early efforts. But I never revealed to them the secret of my handkerchief and my ‘sickness’!
Margaret Shephard
