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| RAG RUGS were made from old clothes or mill waste since the 19th century. They were revived in the 1930s and 1940s. The craft is now a hands-on sustainable lifestyle activity. |
Were an example of what was put in front of the hearth, and made the centre pieces the rooms that they were put in my grandparents home. The rugs were always kept clear in the often small rooms that were otherwise too full of the furniture they were required to contain. When I saw my granparents in their home I did not understand them. I was a child, born in the 1960s, in single figures and short trousers who was not given a watch to wear to know what the time was until I was 14. In my short trousers, without a watch, and not really understanding anything much about money, beyond 'keep it secure in your pocket'. I was sent seven miles on the bus into the country, from the town, to stay with my grandparents 'on holiday' for a week in July for probably four years. Whilst, without me being there, my parents got on with redecorating and rearranging the house they owned, in which my dad prided himself in how much he had bought everything that we saw, and it all matched. He wanted nothing we saw to look hand made. And with the television being on all the time that he was home, attempting to read any book, him reading his collection pulp fiction paperbacks apart, was frowned on as the peak expression of boredom.
Staying with my grandparents as a child was always some sort of respite to me from the pressures of growing up. Their home was much more settled after all the changes that homes go through as they raise chilren towards becoming adults. They did not have a fridge, but had a cooling pantry and kept milk in it fresher for longer via evaporative refridgeration. They had a small screen 1950s black and white television that they kept a pleated cover over when it was not on. There was a stillness about their home that I thought was attractive. I was going through changing schools, whereI I changed bullies, from one school the next school, until the bullying got really horrible. There, the pressure to conform into I-did-not-know-what increased more than I had words to decribe it with. I was expected to mainmain my optimism for the sake of the teachers who saw it their job to standardise the pupils by removing their mannersisms, taking away their rough edges and weak habits, for the sake of future teachers, and examiners.
My grandparents home was a place where I felt safe from the pressures of 'self improvement' and the standardisation of children to make them fit into the future. It was in one of the sheds in the yard of the farm next door to their home that I found a pushbike with no 'support wheels' either side of the rear wheels on it. I first learned to ride a bike in the yard, where there were cattle in some of the sheds. There I felt that what I had learned was an achievement, and I could be thankful in an unforced way for the person whose bike I had borrowed to learn with. There were no such 'safe spaces' as they would be called now, uncompetitive places, where I could discover new basic skills, near my parents house. There everything was much more regimented by the march of time and progress, which was mediated to me most by the change in the tone of the adverts on television, which fascinated me, and by the change in the toys that amused me.
Scale model Jumbo Jets really could keep male children quiet as they looked at the instructions for all the different parts, detachable from the plastic frames they came in. There, the concentration required to follow the instructions, and not get glue on your hands as child, was acute. The mimicry of new technology we only saw on television, like these kits, was an easy sell. Even when it was presented in the form of plastic model kits. But once the kits had been completed what was the child meant to do with them? Beyond, as clutter, keeping the object, once complete 'on display' in their own room where, otherwise, it had no other use?
For my grandparents genrations the most durable games involved packs of cards. From simple family games at home to whist drives where the ladies met that were set up in the Gertrude Morris Hall which today, well over fifty years since my grandmother would have been a stalwart there, still holds inclusive quilting afternoons and council meetings. So whatever the decor at home, local arts and crafts for whoever wants to follow on in such ancient skills is as possible now as it used to be there.
