St Michael, my mother and me

There’s a red jumper in my wardrobe. It’s the shade of a bright and freshly painted pillar box, approximately a modern size eight (not that numbers mean anything) and made from soft wool, with ribbed detailing and a neat little ‘St Michael by Marks and Spencers’ label tucked in the neckline; slightly itchy, but I can’t ever bring myself to snip it out. 

It’s relatively thin, good for layering and works equally well as a lowkey festive jumper as it does a preppy, year-round office garment. It’s also at least 50 years old, and binds my mother and I in a way that crosses the 30 years and 200 miles between us as effortlessly as unwinding a spool of wool.

My whole life, I’ve been a (somewhat accidental) second-hand clothing aficionado. It started young, with hand-me-downs from cousins and Saturday mornings spent grubbing around the floor of charity shops. Suddenly, it blossomed into an enduring love for repurposing clothes, an appreciation of heritage and a way of life we now call slow living. 

At university, I was fortunate to live within walking distance of a Barnardo’s that dealt with the garments other branches couldn’t shift. I’d make a fortnightly pilgrimage, armed with sturdy reusable supermarket bags, past the kebab shops and hairdressers to spend my loan among its hallowed railings. 

Not all pre-loved clothing is created equal, though. No matter how many Lacoste and Tommy Hilfiger cast-offs I scooped up from the Barnardo’s hangers, none of them compared to the humble St Michael jumper at the back of my wardrobe.

My memory of acquiring it is hazy. Mum kept a veritable treasure trove of knitwear in the drawers of my parents’ bed, neatly folded squares of bobbly cosiness. A time capsule from the Eighties just waiting in suspension in the darkness beneath the mattress, this glorious collection of gaudiness held a fascination for me. It felt almost like an unspoken milestone when I finally got to try some of them on. 

What I do remember clearly is the feeling this milestone elicited; it was as if I had somehow levelled up, somehow unlocked a new closeness with her that went beyond our shared DNA. The red jumper found its way into my wardrobe shortly after, and never left. It has travelled to all the places I’ve lived since, a reminder in scarlet wool of where I’d come from, and the women who came before me.

My mother as a young woman was a nurse, delighting in the company of elderly patients with their eccentricities and quirks; setting her up in fantastic stead for, later, becoming my father’s full-time carer. She often worked in Christian retirement homes, full of righteous old dears wearing knee-length pleated skirts in shades of dirt grey and rust brown, who genuinely believed with their whole hearts that women ought not to wear trousers, and if they must have careers, those careers should be the sort that knock an ‘e’ off. 

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this jumper, originating from the wardrobe of one such resident of one such retirement home and handed down kindly to her cheery young nurse, was just about the least alluring item of clothing you could ever imagine. 

When we say ‘vintage’, we often refer implicitly to the exotic stylings of days gone by. Admittedly, I myself have a mainly vintage wardrobe packed full of jazzy shirts, sultry dresses and sturdy streetwear denim. But this entirely unremarkable jumper holds a special place in my heart, despite being the equivalent of the dowdy girl at the school disco.

I don’t know the story of the woman who gifted it to my mum, but I can hazard a guess. There’s a pipeline for chapel women, without much wriggle room or elasticity, much like the little red jumper itself. My mother, breaking with tradition and following her own unconventional path, took this and spread her wings; one day she’d be in the demure confines of Marks and Spencer wool, the next, hanging out in London in a pair of leather trousers. 

The older I get, the more I love and respect this sartorial dichotomy, this expression of femininity transcending familial and social barriers, this rapid push and pull of modest and worldly. 

Vintage as a culture is often seen as a celebration of days gone by and I’m absolutely on board with that. But, I sometimes think there’s an important discussion to be had around exactly what we’re celebrating. The craftsmanship of vintage pieces is often exceptional but the prescriptive modesty culture from which such sturdy garments sometimes derive is something I can’t enthusiastically applaud in quite the same way. 

I adore the fact that I own something so timeless and classically fashionable, something so versatile and long-lived, and every time I wriggle into its cosy confines I think of my mother, svelte and young and kooky with her big Eighties glasses – not even Mum, not yet; the brunette in the scarlet sweater is just Lynda, her whole life ahead of her – and then of the faceless, nameless woman who handed it down to her in the twilight years of her own life. 

The thread that runs through us, these three women in one red jumper, is choice – it’s all I want for any woman, really, and when I slip into this little jumper, juxtaposing its dowdy shape with its harlot scarlet hue, I never want to take it for granted.