Open Writing

It was a year of great royal celebrations, the Silver Jubilee of 1977, and we were visiting Britain from Australia. We had six weeks and wanted to see as much as possible.

However, two of those precious weeks were taken up in the University of Birmingham with a vast gathering of engineers from all over the world, my husband being one of them. About a dozen or so people had been invited to accompany various engineers as guests, and I was lucky enough to be invited.

My husband had not experienced the living quarters of an English university before and thought it was all going to be great fun. It was so overcrowded that it was like the tower of Babel. And we were shown to the top of the tower where the windows encouraged the wind to howl in from all sides at once.

The two single beds were made of iron and wire with two-inch horsehair mattresses, and the person directing operations asked us why we had not brought our own blankets. The bathroom was miles away and too sordid to talk about.

This was a British place of learning, and if my wild colonial husband thought the days of Dickens were all a romantic fantasy, he was about to learn that the British never relinquish the past.

And then we went down to supper, served in such a wonderfully ancient and historically famous hall. The food was magnificent, the conversation scintillating, if a little difficult to follow owing to the enormous noise and multitude of accents. The alcohol flowed copiously and a great time was had by all.

Next day I found that three of us lady ‘partners’ had become friends by way of a familiar face. One of us German, from Berlin, another Russian, from Moscow, and myself British, from Australia. None of us spoke each other’s language, but we were all in our early forties, about the same size and colouring and felt a sort of subterranean sisterhood. We managed a kind of wordless communication of understanding.

In 1977 tensions in Europe were still very strong. People from different countries rarely met and with the war still painfully alive in the memory of most, people were suspicious of each other. Our three engineer husbands, together with all the others from around the world, were closeted in the university, seriously trying to solve the world’s many problems.

Meanwhile we were shown art galleries and a little but exceptionally beautiful exhibition of craftwork. I was attracted to a hand-crocheted Welsh shawl made by a man. It was thick but soft, creamy lamb’s wool with a design of large English roses. I just loved it. My two companions admired it for its beauty but agreed by unmistakable gesticulations that I would look like the side of a house in it, never be able to wear it, and it was far too old for me.

I did not buy it. Nevertheless I found myself looking in the direction of the little shop as we returned to the bus. The shawl was displayed in the window, and somebody else was looking at it.

‘How dare she look as if she might buy my shawl?’ I thought.

I leapt out of the bus and darted across the road to the little shop where the shawl lay in the window unattended. I picked it up and took it to the counter, where the woman I had seen from the bus popped up. “I knew you’d be back,” she said, smiling. So she had tricked me, but I just didn’t care. I blinded her with my Australian Visa card and closed my ears to the price.

The international ladies had been watching from the bus with lots of gesticulated comment, so I put the shawl round my shoulders and paraded up and down for them.

A Mexican lady asked me how much it had cost, in her American accent. I said I didn’t know in my English one and everyone fell about laughing.

The bus driver said, “Now, ladies, we must move on to Coventry Cathedral.”

It is not possible to describe the magnificence and the meaning of the building and the works of art. It would take a lifetime. However, the new cathedral is built next door to and in the same grounds as the old cathedral which was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during WW2.

We stepped straight from one to the other. We were all deeply moved. We had seen how Coventry had been completely razed to the ground, left desolate and naked. The old town had been replaced by dozens of human filing cabinets punching their way up into the sky, housing thousands of people, mostly immigrants from Jamaica.

The three of us walked in the shell of the old cathedral holding hands, the German, the Russian and the British. We stood at the foot of the old altar in the ruins where the fire had been so hot it had melted the cross. There it stood in its melted state, more poignant than ever. Behind the altar, more recently, words had been carved: ‘Father, forgive them.’ We clung together and wept.

A short while ago I caught a cold and sat around feeling old and sorry for myself. Just for something to do I rummaged in a drawer to find a plastic container and pulled out the shawl from where it had rested for twenty-seven years. I had never worn it.

You would never believe how cosy it is.