‘If I learn to read and then to write – because I know one thing leads to another . . .

            ‘If I learn to read and then to write – because I know one thing leads to another – then I will be able to write a letter to the outside world . . .’ (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995, by Kate Atkinson)

I expect Ms. Atkinson had that sort of childhood too.  Aren’t all childhoods a mix of rough and tumble and bitter-sweet? Ginger cordial; bitter lemonade; strawberries denied any sugar. And I regret none of mine, not now. I only wish I’d paid more attention to certain things. Botany for one. What to do with flowers once you’ve murdered them; pulled them apart?  I can recount the parts, but I’m squeamish at the dissection. I can dissect sentences (just about), but I hear flowers screaming at me, so I stop. I do not pull at the petals. I do not!

One birthday I received a flower press; I can’t remember if I’d asked for one, but one arrived nonetheless – I was having that sort of childhood, late Victorian, or the Victorians Go On Forever – they do, don’t they? No one dare get rid of them although they might try: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, all that China and crockery, that silver plated cutlery, those cute paintings of little girls with golden curls like my mother’s. Like mine if I wash it and brush it and pull it back with clips and ribbons. I’ve decided not to invest too much in that vision, because in any case, Mum got there before me.

But I’m avoiding the flower press. I expect it came from the charity shop, but it might not have. Mum had a way with craft: how to do it, where to get it, no whys or wherefores, you just did, you made things. It was as natural as breathing. No cut and pasting other people’s sentences, no lifting other people’s ideas, no cribbing for the answer, which happens everywhere, even at The Most Famous University. And this has been a sore lesson in life: that most don’t want to make something for themselves if they can find someone else to make it for them. So they copy down the answer -- the fashionable one, the one guaranteed to please – delivered by the pale and young lecturer, sleepless, and only just arrived with limited expertise. Now paid a meagre amount to feed a room full of demanding chicks, mouths wide open, waiting to be fed their row of neatly cut, evenly shred worms. Yum-yum. It is all spat out.

I wouldn’t do it. What are you making of your own, I ask them, for your life, for posterity? Being bad at something is a kind of creation. Do you know how bad I was at French knitting? Abysmal. It all fell apart, unravelled, fell through the gaps into the abysm -- I could never keep the thread going -- too entranced by those four little knobbly posts standing in the middle. Too busy naming them, my jolly little sailors. That’s how I thought of them, and so I told them stories. I made something of my own even while I made a mess with the twine. Cat’s cradle, I could do that better because it was more of a game. I loved the shapes, the dancing lines, the way the whole world of wool moved with the flick of a finger, a lift up and down, around.

            Craft was as natural as breathing.  Mum knew all the little shops in the arcade, and I expect she had an account in the wool shop, which might just as easily have stocked flower-presses, which are now coming back into fashion. Have you noticed? All the old crafts. Something useful to do with your nervy fingers. I was fascinated by its silver screws and wooden box, a perfectly formed petal torture chamber. I couldn’t bear to use it, so instead I spent hours opening and closing the screws, turning them around and around. Those delicate silver butterflies descending and ascending on silver threads looking very smug, never squeaking, not once. Silent executioners, perfectly aligned cruelty. I looked down at the bluebells whose heads I was to lay out inside this craftily layered mausoleum. Thick paper elevated onto a wooden platform; thick paper mounted on a silver pulley of glinting screws. I had just read A Tale of Two Cities and I thought of the guillotine going down upon the neck of French men and women – shivering, pale prisoners -- those who had betrayed the royal cause for the sake of revolution, now facing the cruel executioner.

My flower press was going to suffocate my stringy royal-blue beauties, although they were already whimpering by the time I lifted their tired heads towards those wicked screws. Already screaming blue murder. Eyes glazed, the light going out.

For my students. Make something for yourself, in your own voice.