At Home with the Narcissist Crafter

                                                               The bakers were on tenterhooks...

‘Right. It's time. Terry - put his blindfold on again...'

The following example of my mother's narcissism has stuck with me all these years - decades - because I was powerless. There could be no remedy. Nothing I could have done better. Nobody to reassure me. 

It may seem trivial - possibly comic - but it was nevertheless symptomatic of Eirwen's condition as a whole. 

So, here we go - Terry has put my blindfold on again, as instructed...

It was Eirwen's big moment. 'Come into the bedroom, Iestyn,' she called, a leer in her voice. 

'Right...keep your head still and shoulders down, tidy...' 

Eirwen slipped something over my upper body, then took off my blindfold. 'Stand up straight! Now, out you go again into the sitting room so everyone can see what I've made this year.’

This was the ceremony of the Christmas sweater. As ever, knit incognito. I was forbidden to look at what Eirwen was knitting all during Advent; and made to wear the blindfold during fittings. 

In 1971, when I was six, Eirwen knitted the first ever (what she called) ‘virtually internationally beloved’ Christmas sweater. 

Acrylic. I was allergic to wool. 

The design was Noddy’s toadstool house. It was followed by Ivor the Engine, the Welsh flag, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, a ukulele, Smarties. Sobering down as I got older: drafts boards, Jenga bricks, until – 1983 - plain navy blue. 

‘There’s nothing lacking with plain blue, Iestyn - sarcastic,' Eirwen snapped. 'If you don’t want the sweater for your college smart, just say and I’ll give it to Sue in Hemel Hempstead.’  

Incidentally, when Eirwen was doing her number on Sue - an atypical Narcissist number of convincing Sue she was...well, let's hear it from source:

'I've just been on the phone to Hemel Hempstead,' Eirwen announced.

Yes, we knew. We had heard. The neighbours three doors down on either side could have heard... 

'Sue from there says how she thinks I'm one of the most interesting people she's ever met.' 

That.

I've silently corrected the quote. Eirwen actually said (Freudian much?) 'Sue from there says how I'm one of the most interesting people I've ever met.' 

Be that as it may, pulling her Narcissist's number on Sue: while I was on holiday with the Sunday School, Eirwen gave all my books away to Sue's daughter, Fiona. My Charlotte's Web, A Bear Called Paddington, Tales of Arabel's Raven, Winnie the Pooh...

'You were not ever reading them, Iestyn. Don't tell me you were. I haven't seen you with any of them around this flat for I don't know how long. And have a thought for others. Poor Fiona had the same type of asthma medication as you've been having, and while your second teeth have been coming through that not very nice yellow colour, Fiona's have all come through as black stumps. Would you like that? No. So she's now got your old unwanted books to cheer her up.'

'Everybody, here it is...'

I stepped out into our sitting for the Christmas Eve sweater reveal. There waiting to coo and applaud (or else), would be my Nan Ak and/or Nan Silcox, Welsh Lill, Big Lil, Little Lill, Wrong Way Round the Balcony Lill, Mrs Lingwood and Connie 'Practically Bedridden' Presland.

They would invariably have been discussing illnesses. 

‘Surely, now, Terry, this water’s not had enough time to be boiled?’ I remember one year Nan Ak insisting. ‘We heard you have to do that in London because of foreigners.’

‘We don’t siphon it direct out of the river, mam.’

Nan Ak had asked for the water to take her tablets. 'Warding off seizures, blood clots and heart attacks, aren’t they, Dai?’ Dai was my grandfather. 

‘I expect so, Nancy,' he said. 

‘Ah, perhaps you mean myocardial infarction?’ Eirwen was hamstringing her vowels. ‘Which is what we in the know call a heart attack.' She was a medical secretary. 'Which, either way, would mean you've been acting completely contrary to the needs of all your valves. And I wonder if you might do well to remember how palliative care is for those that wallow in their own hypochondria?’ She sat in her rocking chair, bopping one leg over the other, mule slapping at her heel. Nancy was puzzling out the hypochondria comment - insult or no? 

‘Oh, don’t mind me,' Eirwen reassured her. 'My current spate of temping at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital happens to be as the most senior medical secretary. Of course, they've asked me to stay on full time. I was even invited to their staff Christmas party.'

Where she had 'witnessed' a cheese and cocktail onions porcupine centrepiece, donated by a radiologist from Sunderland. 

'And I thought: well!' 

Eirwen had tried to recreate the centrepiece. The papier-mâché balloon left to dry in the airing cupboard was eaten by mice. 

Till then, the mice had been in the habit of waiting for Whiskey, our cat, to go out hunting on the Albert Embankment, and would trill out from the built-in cupboard to sit in the surround of the gas fire to watch Eirwen knitting. ‘Aw now, they’re all sweet and tiny, runny aroundy.’ 

The mice weren't all sweet and tiny after Eirwen found her balloon papier-mâché reduced to a clump of gnawings, She bundled Whiskey into their cupboard and shut the door. 

It may be only a family legend that she later followed a Reader's Digest "Top Tip" and used the mouse bones as mulch for her Bizzie Lizzies. 

Eirwen would stand beside me in my sweater each Christmas Eve looking like Da Vinci with the just finished Mona Lisa; God beside Adam; the feted Gregg's product developer beside the sausage, cheese and bean melt. 

Jane Austen collated family and friends' opinions on Mansfield Park - 

'W.B.L. – Highly pleased with Fanny Price - & a warm admirer of the Portsmouth Scene. – Angry with Edmund for not being in love with her, & hating Mrs. Norris for teasing her'...

As did Eirwen for the sweaters. 

'Connie 'Practically Bedridden' Presland said, almost in tears, "You've done it again, Irene!". Welsh Lill said she could almost hear the ukulele being plucked. Mrs Lingwood said my pearl stitches in the toadstool house roof were out of this world...' 

In a plastic sack in the bottom of Eirwen's wardrobe are pairs of photographs. In the first of the pair, taken each Christmas Eve, I’m wearing that year’s sweater. In the second, taken in April, I’m again wearing the sweater and holding its matching birthday cake.  

Eirwen went by bus to Victoria to have these cakes made. 'Special. The bakers have come to be on tenterhooks as to what design I might think up in any particular year.' 

The year I was eight Eirwen would so over-shout me into tilting the cake to capture its best angle for her photograph, I dropped Ivor the Engine.  

She dislodged the handle from my toy broom and thrashed me. 

At a little after 8pm on May 27th 1984, she began ringing around her six sisters-in-law, the front desk of the Waterloo Action Centre, Inner Brother Iris from the White Eagle Lodge, the Wool Ply Advisory Bureau and ITV news.

I may possibly have invented those last two.

‘I just thought I would inform you,' Eirwen said, in a hollow voice, 'that after twenty odd years of it, I’ve tonight decided it’s once and for all been a fair whack.'

For the very last time Eirwen was casting off, double looping, and laying down her number nines. 

Which I fully expected her to have mounted in something semi-precious to go over the mantelpiece.  

'Yes, I know it will have come as quite a shock to you. But I am, yes, forthwith formally retiring from my knitting.’  

A knitting narcissist's take if ever there was one on Dame Nellie Melba's retirement speech from the stage of Covent Garden. 

'A fond farewell to all my greatnesses...'

I doubt Dame Nellie ever went onstage as Mimi wearing a four-ply, crocheted slip stitched in the neck, raglan sleeved Jaws poster.

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