The Forgotten Seamstress by Liz Trenow Page A

Miss? I can’t imagine why you want to go to all this trouble and expense to record the ramblings of a crazy old woman.
    ‘Your story is important for my research, you know. To help us understand the historical context of mental health care.’
    Historical context, is that what it is? I call it the story of a sad little life, but if you insist. Now, where did I get to?
    ‘You’d just had a night to remember with the prince.’
    She laughs, with a hoarse, asthmatic chuckle.
    All the years and all the drugs and treatments have so addled me brain it’s sometimes hard to recall me own name, but nothing blots out the memories of that night. Call me a silly old fool, but I believed him then, and have no reason to doubt what he told me, even all these years later.
    A long pause, and then: ‘What was it you believed?’
    The answer comes in a dying phrase so soft it is almost inaudible.
    That he loved me, dearie, like he said.
    Even the squeak of the cassette rolling in its spindles cannot conceal the profound silence that follows. Then the voice starts again, a little cracked at first but becoming stronger, more defiant.
    Oh yes, I can see that look in your eyes. Just like the rest of them, the trick-cyclists and the nurses and the therapists; they all think it’s some madwoman’s crazy fantasy. I don’t blame you. If we was sat in different chairs and you was doing the telling I’d probably be thinking the same. Even Nora, who knows the truth because she was there, says I was duped by a boy whose only thoughts were for himself and his own desires. ‘Look at how he turned out,’ she would say. ‘Let down the country and sided with the enemy.’
    All I can say is that perhaps for the first time in my short life I felt loved, genuinely loved, for myself. And it’s hard to let go of that feeling, even when you find out it was all a sham.
    He was true to his word, at least for a while. He wrote to me a few times – the envelopes were addressed in a different hand of course: he must have asked a mate to do it for him. He talked about his sea voyage and being bored at Sandringham in Norfolk which sounded a long way away. In the spring of 1912, it must have been, there was a letter from Paris where he was learning French.
    I found out from dining hall gossip that he had spent a few days at the palace in September, but there was so much going on upstairs I reasoned that he hadn’t been able to find an excuse to call for me. Then the news was that he had ‘gone up’ to Oxford – which I later found out was not a town on top of a hill, but a university – and the letters stopped. Nora had got friendly with the chambermaids and spent her time off with a different crowd which left me lonely so I just hung about between our bedroom and the sewing room, nursing my broken heart.
    Months went by, and then a whole year. Miss G never returned to work, and the week I turned seventeen I was promoted to the position of chief needlewoman, which was a very big event in my life, let me tell you. I’d always been a nothing, but now I was a somebody, a
chief
somebody. But it made it even harder with Nora; she didn’t like the fact that I had been raised up over her and I’d have felt the same if the boot had been on the other foot. She was so distracted with her new friends that her work became shoddy and slapdash, and once or twice I had to pull her up, which went down like a lead balloon, and after that she spoke to me even less.
    While all this was going on, I was very, very lonely. I even thought about running away. But what could I do outside? I’d end up a street walker, more than likely. And though you might doubt it from what I’ve told you, I wasn’t that kind of girl.
    One day I was hunting in the sewing cupboard for a piece of bias binding in a particular colour when down the bottom, under a pile of uniform fabrics, I found a box of scraps. There was wools and cottons, satins and velvets, even silk brocades with little