Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

by Victoria Finlay

There were stories, I thought, and I wanted to know them.

I had not known grief could be so physical.

I had written in the past about the colours of mourning – black in Britain, white in Hong Kong, yellow in Brittany, mauve for ‘half’ mourning as you begin to emerge from the first hard frost of grief.* But now I understood mourning clothes for the first time. I needed an armband, a ribbon, any kind of sign that would be understood by strangers and friends to say I couldn’t be relied on, that I was to be treated carefully, that I was not, for a while, in this world.

So this is, on occasion, a ghost story. Or a book written while grieving, and emerging from grieving, which is also a ghost story in its own way.

Then her daughters in the villages below would take cloths they had made from the trees, and use them as canvases to paint everything they saw in the sun’s light: the fruits and the ferns and the spider webs, the bones of river fish, the paths of ants, all the motifs on the barkcloth designs today.

Cotton has this lightness, this quality of being drawn into fine threads, that is like its magic. Yet it was once picked by slaves. It started the Industrial Revolution. It employed vast numbers of young children. The way most of it is made today spews huge quantities of chemicals into the earth and into the water table. I bounce the cotton on my palm and see that it’s not even formed. It’s difficult to think that in the history of this cloudy, soft, light material there can have been so much suffering.

He was a very old man, thin and small, with thick gnarled hands like the branches of trees. I sat beside him for a while. He was older than my father and much less mentally alert; but it made me feel, for a moment, close to my parents.

I was empty, exposed, I was so light I was adrift, I was lint in the air.

I had never known the bowels were a nesting place for grief. But that night I began to learn that grief makes many places in the body heavy.

And having been kept in the dark for nearly two centuries, they were still bright and lovely.

I’d say a quiet prayer and shake them softly and lovingly into the sacred river.

And yet, when a light is shone on it in a certain way, we can see a sequence of tableaux that tell their own stories of action and danger, goodness and darkness, punishment and riches, prisoners and scams. And maybe, as those stories are revealed, we can see how the tawny brown of natural sacking could even once have been described (in a certain light and with a certain focus of attention) as golden.

But in biblical times, putting sackcloth close to your body was also a cultural indication to other people that you were mourning. And the discomfort of a scratchy textile against the skin is a simple kind of pain. It’s physical, comprehensible. For some people, it would have been a useful distraction from the seemingly insoluble, certainly scarcely bearable, emotional journey they were taking in their grief.

‘Do you know about St Thomas More’s hair shirt?’ he asked us, generously ignoring my phone camera. We didn’t, so he took us to see it in the side chapel. Just a square was visible behind the glass, perhaps thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres, deeply folded across the diagonal. The rest had been squashed into a box behind the frame. From a distance it looked like chain mail, but closer up it was like the tough, thin, metallic mesh of a landing net I once saw when I was researching an article about a circus; or the scratchy pile of a bouclé sisal carpet. The thing I found most surprising was the colour. Not black. Nor even brown, nor white, which apparently it might once have been. Instead it was a soft, slippery, silvery grey. Like graphite. And like graphite, in that flattering light, it shone. I didn’t take a photograph.

As the plane door opens to let in a warm gust of autumn air it seems strange that all this light has existed while we’ve been in our darkness.

‘They thought it was pure, but it wasn’t. Not really.’

Perhaps it is the August sunlight that somehow makes the delicate birds and dragonflies and butterflies laced into these handmade meshes seem as if they’re about to set off flying. Or perhaps it is that in these past two years I have sat in the strange silence of grief long enough to learn to love more subtle things. Whatever it is, today everything seems to be alive.

However, I’ve come to understand that under some circumstances a mourning period is liberating. You don’t have to act in normal ways while your heart is grieving. You can wear black and later grey or mauve and people will understand that you are in a liminal place, and can’t be fully counted on. There’s freedom in mourning time too.

Presence and absence. Like lace.

I hadn’t known that if I had lived a century and a half ago then today would be my last day of formal mourning.

I’d expected something more ethereal, like lace or ghosts.

I hadn’t expected to love the silk moth so much.

The boy who loved machines was undeterred, although he gave up his vocation as a monk soon after.

And whatever the name, it felt like something heavy at the end of a book that otherwise felt full of lightness.

Something that was born of nihilism and despair but also of clarity and lightness and the sense of being on the edge of a new future, of championing the skill of seeing things differently.

Meanwhile, the Germans called it Glanzstoff, from an old word meaning splendour. We get our word gloss from Glanz. And glamour. And gleam. And we also get the verb ‘to glance’, as in to catch a flash of light.

I will be haunted – I am still haunted –

It feels as if I have a realm, a place I belong. It is as if I am a ghost.

But once, when I was a teenager and sad about something, she told me that when she was sixteen, she looked into the mirror and said to herself: ‘This is a face that nobody in the world loves. And I am not going to let that be my story.’

I stay. If she’s still around, I want my mother not to feel alone. I want her to know, at the very end, that her face is loved.

Later I will cry and cry in great hollow howls. Later I will understand what it is to keen, to feel a crazed, dark sound emerging from the deep, hard, rock fields inside my body.

Later I will learn that grief is so physical it makes you walk differently. Later I will begin to grieve, and it will last for many years. But I still have a few hours before that has to begin.

I curl onto her bed for the last time and sleep. She’s small, but even in death she seems strong. I wake up a while later. I want to stay longer. But I know it’s time. I kiss my mother’s forehead. I walk to the door. I turn and look back. Pale light is coming in through the window. It falls on her face. She is not grey. She is beautiful. There is no difference between body and air. Light as lint. Light as cotton fibre.