Gansey Nation

Funny thing, getting old. I’m observing myself age, like a scientific experiment, monitoring the changes year by year: observing the gradual emergence of my scalp in the barber’s mirror, shining pinkly like a Japanese mountaintop fringed in cloud; not being able to see my toes past my stomach in much the same way that I can’t see Australia owing to the curvature of the Earth; and of course, wondering why no one writes music with really good tunes any more, dammit.

All these symptoms, however disappointing, are hardly unexpected. (As Philip Larkin, contender for Britain’s Least Optimistic Poet, once put it, “This is the first thing / I have understood / Time is the echo of an axe / Within a wood.”) But then there’s the whole mind thing, which is a little unsettling.

Last week I took a bath, towelled myself off and, after footling about a bit in the bedroom, started downstairs. I was vaguely aware that something wasn’t quite right—a sort of airiness around those parts of my anatomy that aren’t normally exposed to playful breezes—until, on looking down, I discovered that I had absent-mindedly neglected to get dressed.

Now, I know I’m not alone here: the great Archimedes, upon discovering the principle of displacement, had a similar bath time experience: and he gets his own Wikipedia page. All the same, when I get to the stage where I have to remember to check I’m wearing pants before leaving the bedroom, I fear a line has been crossed.

Ah, well, I have at least been making progress on the gansey (or “emergency modesty blanket” as I now like to think of it). The pattern on the first sleeve is completed and I’m well underway on the plain section to the cuff, decreasing two stitches every 7th row. This sleeve should be finished by next week’s blog.

In parish notices, the ganseys come thick and fast. This week Karen has sent me a picture of a very natty gansey based on Gladys Thompson’s Whitby patterns, with an elegantly shaped neck and a really pleasing combination of cables and diamonds and moss. (What did I say? Yorkshire ganseys—they’re the cat’s pyjamas, as Bertie Wooster would say.) Many congratulations to her.

And as for aging—well, I’m interested to read that some theoretical physicists have questioned whether time actually exists. (Though, as others have pointed out, they’re still suspiciously punctual for meals.) I like the idea that everything that has ever existed, or will exist, will endure simultaneously as long as the universe does, and that our consciousness just rides the rails of time like a runaway train. But if I have to get old, well, at least it’s better than the alternative; which is, to quote Philip “Mr Chuckles” Larkin again, “the only end of age”…

It was Margaret’s turn to have a birthday last week, so we packed up our troubles (that’s the great thing about psychological trauma, it’s portable) and went down to Inverness for the weekend: Inverness being our closest big town not in Scandinavia.

Cleistocactus straussii

We went for a stroll round the botanical gardens, where we saw some of the strangest plants from across the globe. Strangest of all—and a little disturbing—was the cactus house, which seemed to have be hosting the advance guard for an alien invasion of earth. (Indeed, I set about explaining this to an attendant, but from her glassy-eyed stare as I developed my thesis over the course of an hour I can only suppose that they’d already gotten to her.)

Then we took a scenic drive all the way round Loch Ness. It’s some 23 miles long, not as big in terms of surface water as Loch Lomond but deeper, and—fun fact ahead—contains more fresh water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined. It’s most famous of course for the elusive monster; despite keeping a close lookout, alas, we didn’t see any sign of it (in person, that is: not that I’m entirely convinced that the portraits we saw on numerous tea towels in Fort Augustus were actually drawn from life…)

Most of the tourist traffic goes down the main road along the north side of the loch, whereas the south road meanders into pine woods and the stunningly beautiful uplands and is far less busy. We stopped the car at one point to stand upon the pinnacle of creation, all the kingdoms of the world at our feet, so that if the devil had appeared to tempt us with lordship of them I shouldn’t have been altogether surprised (luckily he’s otherwise engaged just now meddling with US politics). It’s every bit as lovely as the Scottish Tourist Board would have you believe: as the poet Burns so memorably said, my heart’s in the Highlands… (Unfortunately it’s also suffering from fatty degeneration after all that tablet; but that’s a small price to pay, I feel.)

Just a minute – I thought he said he wasn’t going to do this again…

Wrenching our gaze from the choppy waters of the loch for a moment, we notice that I’ve almost finished the front of the gansey. All that remains to do to complete the body is to divide for the shoulders, knit and join them, and then do the collar. If I apply myself I should get that done this week.

Finally this week, parish notices: no less than two ganseys to share with you, each of them very impressive. First of all, Jenny has completed a version of Gladys Thompson’s Hebridean gansey: the body is I believe pretty much as Gladys describes, but Jenny’s been creative with the welt and sleeves—it’s a stunner. Secondly Julie’s designed her own jacket using gansey techniques but her own patterns, with a steeked zip front fastening. These two garments show I think the vitality of the gansey tradition: the one shows how much life there is still in traditional patterns, the other how versatile the gansey can be as a garment. Congratulations to both!

There’s quite a lot to cover this week, starting with how we approached the yoke pattern of Fergus’s gansey. But if you’d rather skip the technicalities and go straight to the regular blog—and let’s be honest, who could blame you?—then Click here.

Are we alone? Have they all gone? OK, then. (Warning: maths ahoy!)

Now, here’s the problem we ran into: the row gauge of Fergus’s gansey changes quite dramatically at the start of the yoke. Up to now what I’ve been knitting matches the body of the gansey in the original photograph pretty closely. But now there are no fewer than 200 rows from the gussets to the shoulders.

My standard row gauge is currently about 10.5 to the inch—if I recreated Fergus’s yoke pattern exactly it would be almost 20 inches long! (We’ve charted out the original pattern, so you can see what it consists of.)

Chart of photo

On the other hand, the (horizontal) stitch gauge is about the same. Go figure.

Anyway, there’s no way I can reproduce Fergus’s original pattern under these circumstances, not at that scale. So we had to compromise. Basically, what we did was this: we calculated that the central tree consisted of about 50% of the height of the pattern, and the two centre diamonds about 25% each.

Modified chart

Now, given my current row gauge we had about 100 rows to play with, give or take, so the maths are really simple. We made each centre diamond 25 rows high, and the central tree about 50 rows.

But! There’s a catch. Making the centre panels shorter vertically also necessarily made them narrower horizontally—and remember that the stitch gauge stayed about the same. So we had to play around with the pattern to get it to fit. In the end we achieved this by widening the side panel diamonds and also the moss stitch rows used to separate pattern bands (instead of having these one stitch wide, we made them 3 stitches wide, copying the pattern from the body so it would all be in keeping with the original).

It’s a compromise, of course. But hopefully the overall effect will look roughly similar, even if it’s not so fine as the original. (How on earth did she do it?)

Anyway, that’s enough of that. Time to take a deep breath and rejoin the others.

One of the reasons why I enjoy working with archives—apart from the fact that I get to sit indoors out of the rain and sometimes receive chocolates at Christmas—is the way it telescopes the past and the present, closing the distance between them until it’s as thin as a sheet of letter paper. Here’s an instance I came across last week. It’s a story from the First World War, so you’ll forgive me if the tone is rather more serious than usual.

We were recently given a collection of letters from the family of Sinclair Macdonald, the celebrated Thurso architect, relating to the war service of his son, who’d been christened John but was known as Ian.

Ian had served in the Middle East but in April 1918 he was made 2nd lieutenant and posted to the Western Front. This was at the time of the great German offensive, a last desperate attempt to win the war before America could turn the tide in the Allies’ favour. It nearly succeeded: the Germans broke through French and British lines and suddenly trench warfare was a thing of the past, all was chaos and confusion and movement as the Germans surged towards Paris and the Allies frantically tried to throw together a last-ditch defence.

On 11 April Ian Macdonald was posted as missing. He’d gone on patrol one night with another officer and wasn’t seen again. Next day there was a German attack, the British were forced to retreat and the officer he’d accompanied was found dead. But Ian had vanished in the darkness of the night.

For two weeks the family was left in uncertainty as to whether he’d been killed or captured. Two officers with the same initials had been lost on the same day, one of them killed, and no one knew if either of them was Ian. (To make matters worse no one even knew if he’d been registered with the army as Ian or John.)

It’s impossible to read the letters without experiencing something of what the family must have gone through. Two weeks! Can you imagine? There are letters of support and encouragement from family and friends, as you’d expect. Eventually the news came through: Ian was alive, a prisoner, and at last his name was posted in the paper.

Then I read a heartrending letter from a lady in Ross-shire. She’d read the news of Ian’s capture in The Scotsman. She had a son in the same regiment, but he was still posted as missing; how had Sinclair Macdonald learned that Ian was alive? How might she discover the situation of her own son? (I looked her up and found she’d already lost one son at Gallipoli, at which point I had to get up from my computer and go for a walk and think about something else for a while.)

Ian survived the war, though his health never recovered. Now, like almost everyone who lived through that dreadful war, he’s passed into history. And yet—through the words of his family and friends recorded in letters like these—they’re not quite lost to us.