Swatch books of the heart and soul

This is a picture of my cousin, Shayleen, and I in Johannesburg circa 1978. I am wearing a fantastic minstrel's outfit that she has made me out of paper. Although we grew up on different continents and still live at least a continent away from each other, my life is full of her beautiful creations - patchwork quilts, beaded cushions, sparkly lurex ball gowns, bright African print skirts, felted slippers and a soft, green velvet bag that has travelled the world with me.

Shayleen is now in Sydney en route for Bulungula, Transki, South Africa, where she is sewing shwe shwe designs with local women and helping them to earn a living. My memories of her have got me thinking how textile memories are like an immense swatch book of the heart and soul.

Above the picture of Shayleen is a picture of a nineteenth century swatch book. Swatch books developed as a way for textile manufacturers to market their fabrics by collecting samples together and mailing them to subscribers. I've also included a picture of fabrics from my personal swatch book, these include childhood furnishing fabrics, pyjamas I had wonderful sex in, summer dresses I loved and a pair of capri pants which I lived an unforgettable spring.

But most of the fabrics that really matter to me have disappeared and exist only in my mind - a thin cool blue cotton nightie that I ripped on a nail running around the back of our house and which another cousin mended with iron-on red hearts...the smooth pale cream flannel of my mothers’ dress...the smell of my father's cordorouy jacket ... the refuge of an ancient picnic blanket that held the warmth of the sun long after it had faded.... fabrics hold smells and touch in a way that only music can rival for the power and sensuality of the memories they evoke.

And I want my imaginary swatch book to keep on growing and extend way back in time to capture the fabric lives of people far away – like my South African grandmother sewing her wedding trousseau, along with the other office girls, rattling into town on the tram from the seaside bluff where she lived, and my London grandmother spraying fox furs silver in Oxford Street. I am busy imaging the textile lives of their mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles - and building them into a swatch book without end.

Map of patterns - why do dictators hate patterns?

It's been a good week for my map of patterns...a generous mum at my son's school gave me one of her veils or 'niqabs' (destined for the Middle East part of my map or maybe just Thornton Heath), my friend Deborah came back from Serbia and brought me some crochet...a beautiful kanga cloth arrived in the post from Kenya and I spent a wonderful evening with old family friends Sipareth and Nepal Sam hearing their stories about cloth in Cambodia.

Sipareth and Nepal came from Cambodia in the late 1970's, fleeing with their young son from the regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. When the regime came to power in the 1975, they declared the return back to Year Zero - basically to a peasant society with no money, eduction, industry or western influence: colour and pattern were strictly forbidden.

Banished from Phnom Phnen to the countryside to work as a peasant, Sipareth described to me how she took her clothes into the fields to dye them black with the bitter berries of the 'macloouer' tree, stamping them underfoot in the mud and leaving them to bake in the sun. Once dry, she would repeat the process over and over again, until her clothes were as black as could be and there was no danger of standing out from the other peasant labourers or being picked out in a crowd.

In 1978, Sipareth and Nepal fled to a refugee camp in the Thai border, where their son Nemonique was born. When I went to see them last week in Croydon, they were preparing for a big family wedding in France, and Sipareth was putting together beautiful silks and woven costumes for all the family. She explained to me the difference between the different kinds of ikat patterns and silks and let me have some precious samples. I left that evening, re-assured that - in this case - colour and pattern had triumphed over evil, but only in the end and at a most terrible price.

Map of Patterns - dangerous colours and secret messages

The red-shirted protesters in Thailand have got me thinking about the colours of protest - red shirts, brown shirts, black shirts...

Back in February I met a weaver from Burma called Hnin, who told me about a most dangerous colour. In Burmese it is called 'Pin-ne' and means literally 'red tree.’ In Burma, where it has been the chosen colour of defiance for decades - even more than the monks’ saffron robes, wearing this colour is enough to get you arrested or even imprisoned. On my map I have made Burma using a piece of cloth dyed with madder, which roughly approximate to the pinky- brown hues of Pin-ne.

I don’t have a picture of Hnin, but I do have a picture of the wonderful dolls she makes depicting all the different tribal people of Burma.

I have a distant memory of a similar story about the subversive use of colour, told to me years ago. This time it was Mussolini’s Turin, where the staunch communist housewives of the city, chose the same day to do all their red washing, thus bedecking the balconies and windows of the narrow city streets with the colours of the communist resistance. For this reason on my map Italy is red – but there are many other wonderful textile stories I am waiting to tell about Italy...

While I was staying in Great Barrington, Western Massachusetts – the same place where I met Hnin, I learned about the Underground Railroad – a series of hidden paths through woods and fields that helped slaves escape from the South to the relative safety of the North during the first half of the 19th century. “Agents”, “conductors”, and “station masters” provided shelter, food, money, directions, means of transportation, and changes of clothes for the slaves: slaves were hidden in secret spaces in homes, in secret compartments in wagons and in the hulls of boats; they hid by day, travelling under the darkness of night, swam rivers, crossed frozen rivers on foot and on horseback, walked tremendous distances, slept in barns, in fields, in woods, and were hunted down by slave and bounty hunters with their tracking hounds.

Historians and scholars have estimated that between 40,000 and 100,000 slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad. This number never presented a serious threat to the institution of slavery, but the escape stories filled slave owners with dread and fear.

A section of the Underground Railroad passed through Great Barrington, up through the Housitonic river valley to Stockbridge, then Pittsfield and onto Vermont and Canada and I was intrigued when I discovered that local house slaves helped their fleeing fellow slaves by encoding vital messages about which route to take, where to find food and water and when to beware danger, within the household quilts they made as part of their daily household work.

After all, it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write and it seems entirely feasible to me that the slaves would choose to store and share this most valuable knowledge, within the patterns of everyday objects, like quilts. Quilts slung over a fence or windowsill, seemingly to air, passed on the necessary information to other knowing slaves. As quilts hung out to air was a common sight on a plantation, neither the plantation owner nor the overseer would notice anything suspicious – they were hidden in plain view.

One of the most common codes was the ‘Flying Geese’ – a signal to follow the direction of the flying geese as they migrated north in the spring. As most slaves escaped during the spring, along the way, the flying geese could be used as a guide to find water, food and places to rest. The quilt maker had flexibility with this pattern as it could be used in any quilt. It could also be used as a compass where several patterns are used together.

On my map I’ve chosen to use the ‘North Star’ to cover part of North America. This code was a signal with two messages: one to prepare to escape and the other to follow the North Star to freedom in Canada. North was the direction of traffic on the Underground Railroad. This signal was often used in conjunction with the song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, which contains a reference to the Big Dipper constellation - two of the Big Dipper’s points lead to the North Star.