Interwoven

A fictional short story originally written for an Australian country living magazine competition with a 1500 word limit and the pre-selected theme 'threads'.

Parramatta, 1894

“There you go, poppet.”

It wasn’t a fancy present but it could not have been more apt. Amelia took off the lid of the small, plain wooden box and gasped. Inside were half a dozen large, brand new spools of thread in a variety of colours and weights, three long needles of differing sizes, and a small pair of sewing scissors in the shape of a stork.

“John, that can’t have been cheap,” she said.

“Pfft, less than you deserve,” he said as he kissed the top of her head. John always was the hopeless romantic. “I made the box with leftovers from the mill, Mr Harper said I could take what I wanted.” They had been celebrating John’s new job at the Coates and Harper mill nearby on George Street. They leased a small, stuffy terrace and had been struggling to pay the rent, but with the increase in work and pay they could now afford to put some savings together if they were careful.

Over the years, the box and its contents proved invaluable. Amelia stitched and mended her way through many clothes and blankets, saving money for better uses. She never baulked from buying the best thread �" it was something worth spending money on as one spool of thread could lengthen the life of so many items, or could create new items as old clothes were reused for quilts and bags.

Over time, John and Amelia scrimped and saved, and built a comfortable life for themselves and their son.

Sydney, 1927

James always used his mother’s sewing kit when making the ledgers. The thickest buff coloured linen thread was the best he could find anywhere. His mother had never been wealthy but she cared for quality and it showed in this kit; you couldn’t get thread like it today.

Using the thread was reserved for his once-every-two-year ritual of making the membership ledgers for the Union Club. They deserved only the best; when he was asked to make books for other firms, they received the lesser quality, modern thread from the little haberdashery shop on Church Street. How he hated going in there. All of the threads were tossed haphazardly into large tubs forcing potential customers to ferret around for the right colour. So unorganised.

He laid out his tools and materials in a neat row on the table in front of him and carefully, methodically, began constructing the book. Oatmeal paper sheets were sharply folded, signatures joined with taut, even stitches, golden lettering meticulously imprinted on the cover. It took an absurdly long time but everything had to be perfect.

On the first ten pages he ruled even columns, accurately centred to within a hairsbreadth, and titled with neat, copperplate handwriting. He knew the remaining pages would be equally as neat �" as the treasurer of the club, it would fall to him to fill in the book.

The ledger completed, he carefully wrapped it in brown paper, donned his homburg hat and polished the toes of his shoes on the back of his trousers before leaving the house. He wore his membership of the Union Club like a badge of honour, displaying to the world how he had risen from his humble beginnings to break into the world of inter-locking families and to be regarded with respect.

Tamworth, 1960

It just felt so apt. The box and the contents tied Margaret to her ancestors and this was her symbolic gesture to her unborn child of passing on that family history. It helped her to feel closer to her family, a reminder of them as she had moved away with her husband to Tamworth when he took up a job at the Britten’s Brewery as the foreman.

She looked at the lemon yellow and creamy white quilt laid out on her lap, just the right size for the cot. Its delicate stitching twirled its way across the fabric, almost completed. She had selected three different colours of thread from the box, a once vivid red, royal blue and forest green, making the quilt as much about the stitching as it was about the fabric itself.

Each generation had added something to the box that her grandfather had made; her grandmother kept it stocked it with thread, her father added hinges to the lid and kept his bone folder for making books inside. She considered what her contribution could be, perhaps painting a design on it or adding a crochet hook or perhaps the thimble she had been using to sew the blanket.

Her thoughts drifted back to her baby, as they so often did these days, as it not more than a month away from arriving. The baby often seemed to get the hiccups, her stomach twitching rhythmically. She stood, awkwardly, delicately folded the blanket and carried it into the baby’s room. Placing it across the railing of the cot, she gazed out the window at the hills behind the town and let her mind wander in thoughts of baby clothes and room decorations.

Tamworth, 2016

“What’s this?” Lisa pulled out an old wooden box from the back of the cupboard in her grandmother’s spare bedroom and sat down on the mattress of the iron-framed bed, stripped of its usual faded green coverlet.

The box was roughly the size of an iPad but deeper, the sides painted in 1960s style orange, brown and white in a pattern of round flowers with the top left as the natural wood. She flipped open the hinged lid to find a dozen reels of thread, most almost empty and quite faded, and some random odds and ends, including a pair of sewing scissors in the shape of a stork, a worn thimble with a slightly golden tinge, and a flat, cream coloured piece of… plastic?... rounded at one end and slightly pointed on the other. She turned it over in her fingers and supposed that it might have been a ruler of some kind.

“Looks like an old sewing kit,” said her mother as she packed books into a box labelled ‘Vinnies’. “Take it if you want it. Gran hadn’t sewn anything for years and I doubt anyone else will want it.”

The funeral had been three weeks before and Lisa had ducked back down to Tamworth for the weekend to help her mother pack up the house in Denne Street. Her uncle was being no help, pressuring them to sell the house and move on. Lisa had had little to do with her grandmother in recent years but regretted the mood nearing apathy that her passing had revealed in her family. People were sad, true enough, but it seemed no one had shown much of an interest in the old lady for some time.

The box lay tossed into the foot-well of her battered old hatchback as she pulled out of the drive of the red brick cottage later that afternoon. With it was a decently sized dictionary and some old framed family photos that she intended to keep as mementos, and a matching glass plate and vase set that would do well at her stall. She did not give them a second thought until several weeks later, back home in her rustic Queenslander overlooking cane fields with Mount Warning in the distance, as she packed them into her van with her other stock.

The streets of Bangalow are dotted with antique shops and that was what Lisa hoped to cash in on at the markets, as she set up her collapsible tables nearby to the food stalls. She slapped a yellow sticker marked ‘Vintage sewing kit, $10’ onto the front of the box, that one adjective eliminating the need to provide her buyers with any other provenance. It sat next to a pair of silver plated candlesticks, bought cheaply at a thrift shop, and a collection of old embroidered bags, a decent garage sale find.

The threads found a new owner in the shape of a young hipster wearing jeggings and a long, loose bottle-green top. The relationship lasted a matter of moments, as the threads and contents of the box were tipped into a nearby bin, to be replaced by the girl’s iPad and thrown into her backpack.

The connective thread of previous generations had been snapped.