In The Old Style

Moss Stitch Cardigan in Paloma - Debbie Bliss

My mother wasn’t just a Latin and Irish teacher in her heyday: for many years she was also vice principal and acting principal of a Dublin second level school for girls, which ran like clockwork despite the fact that they were down a woman through the head nun’s illness.  The order wouldn’t formalize the situation and give the job of principal to a non-nun, but because a job needed to be done, my mother filled the gap and neither sought nor expected acknowledgment or payment for a monumental workload. 

This included an annual manual drawing up of a timetable to cater to 600 pupils, a teaching staff of umpteen hues of training, entitlement, seniority or sanity; and also had to take in myriad subject choices, room changes, departmental requirements and last minute fallings out of line from every category.  Her main tools were her own ingenuity, pencils, erasers and a ruler…  She absolutely never wasted paper, so throughout the year, she’d scavenge out-of-date diaries or office ledgers from anywhere she could, and somewhere around May the pencil draft listing of names and class numbers would kick off, running right through the summer holidays, and culminating in a series of enormous handwritten-in-ink charts at the beginning of August.  At the eleventh hour, someone invariably changed job, moved to another school or dropped out and her joy at the discovery of Tippex left a permanent mark in my memory!  

No more than waste of paper, she doesn’t go in much for lavish emotional displays:  she just has a knack of always being there when she's really needed. She knows how she likes to dress too, and I made this Paloma cardigan for her 85th birthday.   It's a bit big, and she handed it back with a few other general corrections, but she wears it a lot, the other bridge players like it, so on balance she'd probably give it a B+