thinking I lifted it to my cheek. Then I caught that knowing smile again, felt self-conscious and handed it back rather too hastily. Gwen’s manner was unnerving; most of the time she was coolly professional and business-like, but sometimes her responses were disconcertingly intimate, as though she could read my thoughts.
She looked up at the clock. ‘It’s nearly coffee-break. Just time for the pièce de résistance.’
At first I thought the taffeta was aquamarine. But when its shimmering threads caught the light, the colour shifted to an intense royal blue. It was like a mirage, there one moment and gone the next. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s shot silk. A blue weft shot through a green warp.’ She held up a length, iridescent as a butterfly wing, into a shaft of sunlight. I almost gasped.
As I took a piece of cloth and angled it to watch the colours change, I could feel Gwen’s pale eyes interrogating my response. And in that moment I realised I’d never before properly appreciated silk, its brilliant, lustrous colours, the range of weaves and patterns. Father and John never talked about it this way.
That morning Gwen showed me how to use all my senses; not just seeing the colours and feeling its weave, but holding it up to the light, smelling it, folding to see how it loses or holds a crease, identifying the distinctive rustles and squeaks of each type of material, examining its weave under a magnifier, enjoying its variety. I was already hooked, like a trout on a fly-line, but I didn’t know it yet. Only later did I come to understand how Gwen simply allowed the silk to seduce me.
The canteen, a large sunny room at the top of Old Mill that smelled not unpleasantly of cabbage and cigarette smoke, seemed to be the heart of the mill. A team of cheerful ladies provided morning coffee, hot midday meals and afternoon teas with homemade cakes and biscuits. Men and women sat at separate tables talking about football and politics, families and friendships. Weavers and warpers kept together, as did throwsters. Loom engineers – called tacklers – were a strong male clan in their oily overalls. The dyers, their aprons stained in many colours, another. But a shared camaraderie crossed divides of gender and trade; old hands teased the newcomers, and if they responded with good humour they became part of the gang.
Gwen wasn’t part of any gang, and seemed immune from canteen banter. We sat down at an empty table and she pulled off her turban, running her fingers through the ginger curls that corkscrewed round her head. Without her working woman’s armour she seemed more approachable.
‘Why haven’t we met before, Gwen? Were you brought up in Westbury?’
She shook her head, stirring three teaspoons of sugar into chocolate-brown tea.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Six years. Six happy years, mostly,’ she said, that rare smile lighting her face and giving me permission to ask more.
‘Whatever made you want to become a weaver?’ I said.
‘I started out wanting to be an artist. Went to art school. One thing led to another …’
I was intrigued. I’d never met anyone who had been to art school and, from what I’d heard, they were full of bohemians. But Gwen didn’t seem the type. ‘Golly. Art school? In London?’
‘It’s a long story,’ she said, stacking her teacup and plate. ‘Another time, perhaps.’
‘So what brought you to Verners?’ I persevered.
‘Your father, Lily.’ She paused, looked away, out of the canteen window towards the cricket willow plantation on the other side of the railway line. ‘He’s a very generous man. I owe him a lot.’ I felt a prickle of shame for not having appreciated him much. He was my Father, strict but usually kindly, rather remote when he was wrapped up in work. I’d never considered how others might regard him.
The squawk of the klaxon signalled the end of break-time. Over the loud scraping of utility chairs – the stackable sort of metal piping with slung canvas seats and backs – Gwen shouted, ‘Time to learn about the heart of the business, Miss Lily.’
After the peace of the packing hall, the weaving shed was a shock. As the door opened the noise was like running into a wall. Rows of grey-green looms stretched into the distance, great beasts, each in their own pool of light, a mass of complex oily iron in perpetual noisy motion – lifting, falling, sliding, striking, knocking, crashing, vibrating. How could anyone possibly work in this hellish metallic chaos?
The weavers seemed oblivious, moving unhurriedly between their looms, pausing to watch the material slowly emerge from the incessant motion of the shuttle beam, or stooping over a stilled machine. I quickly realised that they were skilled lip-readers and could hold long conversations in spite of the noise. But much of the time their eyes were focused intently on the cloth.
That first evening, John mocked me for falling asleep on the sofa and had to wake me for supper. As I prepared for bed I wondered what I would have been doing in Geneva. Getting dressed for a party, perhaps, or having hot chocolate and pastries in a café? For the moment I was too tired for regrets. Ears ringing, eyes burning, legs aching, my head full of new information, I wondered how I would get up and do the same again tomorrow.
The following day I was relieved to discover that we were spending it in the relative peace of the winding mill. Here, the silk skeins shimmered and danced as they rotated on their spindles releasing threads to be doubled, twisted and wound onto bobbins, and from bobbins onto pirns that would go into the shuttles. I learned the difference between the warp – the lengthways threads held taut between two rollers at either side of the loom – and the weft, the cross-threads woven into the warp from the shuttle.
Gwen no longer seemed so formidable. I was quickly learning to respect her skill and deftness, and her encyclopaedic knowledge of silk in all aspects of its complex manufacture. But she was still an enigma. Why would an educated woman like her choose to come and live in Westbury, to work in a mill?
I would find out soon enough.
Another outstanding property of silk is its resilience, which can be demonstrated by crushing a silk handkerchief in one hand and a cotton handkerchief in the other. When released, the silk version will spring or jump upwards, the cotton one will stay crushed for some time. It is this property, along with its strength, toughness, elasticity and resistance to fire and mildew that makes silk so valuable for the manufacture of parachutes.
From The History of Silk, by Harold Verner
Long afterwards, John liked to embarrass me by claiming, sometimes publicly, that eight generations of weaving history had been rescued by his little sister’s sex appeal.
It’s true that Verners survived the catastrophe of war because of our contracts to weave parachute silk. While other mills folded or were converted into armament or uniform factories, we made it through, and came out the other side. But the invitation that arrived for John just a few months after I started work at the mill was really the start of it all. ‘It’s from my old school chum,’ he said, ripping open the heavy bond envelope with its impressively embossed crest. He proudly placed the gilt-edged card next to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece in the drawing room.
Mr John Verner and partner. New Year’s Eve, 1938. Black tie. Dinner
