My first memory of a loom was as a seven year old. I had been taken to visit this school my parents had so often spoken about and for which I had been carefully prepared. I had endured Mrs Martin's violin lessons every Saturday morning and could play after a fashion. She used to call me Tishee after a racehorse who used to stand with its legs crossed. But I could sing . . and I belonged to a family dynasty of choristers. So after a bout of auditions, to which both my mother and father accompanied me, I found myself entering the headmaster's house. And there in an immaculate room with a floor to ceiling window I saw my first Scandinavian furniture and what I now know to be a vertical rug and tapestry loom.
I had never seen anything so mysterious and beautiful. I realise now as I examine this memory it was not just this loom and the partially completed textile on its frame but the effect of the room it occupied and its aspect, the way the garden beyond the vast window invited itself into the interior space.
Biddy, as we boys called the headmaster's wife, was the most interesting woman I had ever met. I realise now how much she became my first model of womanhood. A graceful figure, bobbed hair, always simply dressed in a vivid coloured shirt of blue or red and a grey skirt, always walking purposefully, and when she spoke to you she acknowledged you as a real person, wholly, never as just a boy, but someone she gave her whole self to address. As I grew older she entered my dreams and even now her voice, that I came later to know as Varsity and Beneden bred, I can hear now. And she was a weaver.
Every afternoon she shut the door of her workroom with its large window and was not available, even to her beautiful children.
It was a year before I dared to talk to her about her loom. I remember her surprise. How lovely you should ask she said. Come after Evensong and I'll introduce you. And I went . .
It was May and she was wearing a grey smock that fell over slacks. She smelt like a forest in high summer, resinous. She wore sandals and a gentle smile. You may touch she said, and so I did, and as I did she quietly named the parts - the beater, the leashes, the warp, the reed. It was though I already knew these things but in another time and place. I was just renewing my acquaintance.
So, little by little, I would find myself sitting in the corner of Biddy's garden studio in the long summer afternoon's when my disappointing prowess on the cricket field allowed me freedom. I sat and watched and wondered. I imagined a day when I would have a room and a loom and wife like Biddy with whom I could talk about all those things I so wanted to share but had no one to share them with. This was before adoration became confused with ***, such a wonderful time in a boy's life.
As I sit at my loom in my studio high above a city street and my hands touch the yarn, pull the beater against the fell of this sample for my first rug, place my stockinged foot on the outside treadle, I can almost sense the scent of Biddy Allen, feel her graceful presence, hear her Oxford voice and spirited laugh. For me she will always be a defining presence of the feminine and her long fingers on her loom conjure the essence of the making of beautiful things.
