The Fabric of Life

Memory is a strange thing. It plays tricks on you, evades you when you need it and comes to you unbidden intruding as daydreams or flashbacks (depending on how chilled out or otherwise you are).

As the seasons defy their properties and get all mixed up, Spring Cleaning has come early to our household. An imminent period of travelling for five months comes ever closer, and meanwhile, domestic 'To Do' lists grow as much as the unseasonal flowerings outside.

'Tidying the Cellar, for example, is on the list. It's where we keep our washing machine, freezer, DIY and cleaning stuff, along with other assorted non-essential but uncategorisable 'clobber'. We have downsized considerably in recent years so sorting, tidying and chucking should be straightforward.

Stooped and fighting my way through golf clubs, paint pots and the hoover to an area at the back of the cellar we call 'The Cage' with its slatted and wooden frame, I come across two bags of fabric, full of off-cuts and patchwork scraps accumulated over the years, firstly by my Granny Bruce, and then by me.

The first piece, a stretchy dark blue fabric, is one which I immediately recognised as the material I'd used to make a teeny pair of blue dungarees for my then four month old baby Archie. Archie was born on the 11 th September 1983 and is now a strapping, fit and handsome lad of 23 – by co-incidence exactly the age I was when he was born! Luckily for Arch he was too young to object to his mother's inadequacies on the baby clothes front!

The next piece is a larger-sized scrap of chintz – dusky pink roses on a white background resembling the patterns of Weims or traditional Staffordshire pottery. This was the sofa my granny, Margot Bruce had on her furniture – a three-piece suite she possessed before, with age, the need for a velvety pair of pink Parker-Knowle armchairs took over.

The third sample was one of mine again, an opaque black floaty number with bright abstract sploshes of colour, perhaps once a wild flower meadow or coral reef. In any event, I remembered having a floaty shirt which I wore proudly in my early to mid teens, along with another scrap from a sequin-fish T-Shirt purchased from the original and recently re-launched famous BIBA in Kensington.

Less salubrious is the piece of stretchy orange towelling. Introduced at the age of about 13 to 'Domestic Science and Seamstressing skills' (from which I never fully recovered), the blaze of orange was used to construct a towelling orange poncho with white fringe. Clearly misguided in my fashion sense, no-one thought to tell me that an overweight pre-pubescent girl is not flattered by such garments; its disgustingness only outweighed by the felt and vivid green mini netball skirt I attempted to fashion the following term. I was not destined to adorn the cover of ladies glamour mags – either for wearing or for making.

So, long-lost dresses, ponchos and netball skirts, forgotten armchairs and dress-making talents I never had. And what now of these scraps? I don't think my boys would appreciate a bagful of scraggy fabric. In any event, the contents wouldn't hold the memories. Hey ho, nothing for it but the rubbish bin. History consigned to the dustbin!