I inherited my hands from my nan. Long and slim with hard but feminine nails, we called them “piano fingers”, though neither of us ever learned to play. While I went on to use mine for writing, my maternal grandmother dedicated hers to knitting. Decades before the Sewing Bee or Tom Daley’s Instagram, Barbara would go to the local wool shop for designs and supplies – everything, right down to tiny buttons. As her first born granddaughters, my elder sister and I were the natural beneficiaries of this skill, willing mannequins covered in glitter glue and nostalgia.
When I look back at photos of myself until around the age of six, I realise I’m usually in knitwear. This commitment to wool was not limited by season or location: in my early years, whenever I was photographed on a beach, I was wearing a cardigan as the waves splash at my feet, like an influencer promoting swimwear for people with hypothermia.
Before my parents had a car, my mum, sister and I would regularly drive to the seaside with my grandparents while my dad was at work. In the summer of 1989, when I was four years old, we made the more than 200-mile journey to Bournemouth from Lincolnshire. There is one photo from the trip that I always remember. I am wearing a classic British beach outfit: shorts, a blouse, sunglasses, and, of course, a cardigan. Its thick, sky-blue knit fastened across my chest, the cardie is colour coordinated down to a packet of cheese and onion crisps.
Surrounded by a striped windbreaker and a red bucket and spade, I am sitting on a foldable chair secured in the holes my grandpa made in the sand. At that point, I didn’t yet have a wheelchair and made do with an NHS-grade buggy; cumbersome and immobile on beaches (though I later learned wheelchairs were little better). The metal folding chair, with a generic cartoon figure on the back, regularly accompanied me on these trips. Blond pigtails and a nonchalant leg tilt, my eyes hidden by heart-shaped glasses, I have the air of a queen looking over her kingdom, dressed in her favourite robe.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last summer before school, when the grinds of life would begin. A few weeks after this photo was taken, I would start reception class; the sand castles swapped for spellings. Over three decades later, I can’t help but envy the girl on the sand. Those fleeting days when clothes were knitted by our nans, potential stretched out before us with the tide, and all there was to think about was the next bag of crisps.