Apricots at Midnight

After I put up the picture of Timmy on a Quilt a couple of weeks ago, dovegreyreader asked if I had read a book by Adele Geras in which all the stories were based on patches from a quilt. I had not! But now I have -- thanks to the great kindness of Adele herself, who posted me a signed copy. I started it as soon as I got home last night and have just now finished it. It's a childrens' book, of course, but they are often the best ones. First published in 1977 and still in print (well done, Adele) it is a sheer delight. The little girl who tells the story -- we never get to hear her name -- is visiting her Aunt Pinny, who was born in London in 1904. Her mother  was a private dressmaker whose house was full of wonderful snippets of beautiful fabrics with magical names, and Pinny, aged five, started to make her own quilt which grew as she grew. So all the snippets in the quilt have stories attached to them, and every night when her young niece comes to stay, Aunt Pinny tells her the story attached to one of the snippets. Through the various stories we come to know of Pinny's life, growing up in a rather impoverished but genteel household in London in the early years of the twentieth century. One scrap is from the skirt of a puppet she helped to make one rainy afternoon when her mother was delayed and did not pick her up from school, another from a wonderfully exotic patterned fabric designed by Mr Poffle, a temporary lodger. A very pretty patch with pink roses has a mysterious history -- the house where Pinny is given it, by a rather strange lady she meets one foggy day, proves to have been demolished some years earlier. A scrap from a beautiful lace dress, worn by Pinny to a picnic by the river, is there to remind her of how she almost drowned -- the lace dress has an odd and unhappy history, and its previous owner had also almost drowned. Impossible, really, to do justice to the richness and vitality of these stories. They reminded me of my own childhood -- when I was 5 my own mother was once delayed and couldn't pick me up from school, and I really felt for Pinny in this most awful of situations -- and of stories told to me by my mother and my own aunt, who was also born in 1904. Both of them were theatre designers, so I also grew up in a house full of scraps of beautiful fabrics. I wish I'd known of this book when my daughter was the right age -- she would have loved it. So, many thanks to Adele for such a lovely present.