Spinning Yarns in Southern England
I've lost count of the number of times we’ve been to Southern England in the past couple of years. Eight? Nine? Something like that. This new habit started unexpectedly. Eager to get back on the roof in summer 2022, we checked the weather charts. Europe was burning, and England was raining - we chose rain. This is an unusual choice for me - you'll know I'm something of a sunflower, but drippy is still preferable to forty-plus temps and smoky skies.
I yawned in the pre-dawn Dutch darkness as we climbed into the van, ever so thankful for the large cup of coffee in my hand, and drove out of the Netherlands and across Belgium. Three hours later, we crossed into France and wound our way through fence-lined roads toward the ferry, remnants of refugee tent cities visible on the other side of the barbed wire. Just showing up in a van at the Calais crossing for the English Channel is considered a suspicious activity, and sure enough, we were called out of line by customs.
A uniformed woman circumnavigated the van using a gigantic dental mirror to peer at the undercarriage while a man stepped up to the driver's door and gave Arthur stern orders, "Please step out of ze vehicle and open ze beck door." His voice was calm, controlled. Arthur, never one to take formalities very seriously, answered amicably. "Sure!" he said, "and you're going to see two things. I want you to guess which one is for my profession and which one is for my hobby." The agent suppressed a smile, doing his best to maintain his authoritarian composure. Arthur swung open the rear door to reveal a spinning wheel with a large spindly wheel set off to one side – an Ashford, wedged in beside his cello. The officer lost the guessing game, laughed openly, and waved us onto the ferry.
When you take away a musician’s work – shut down the theatres and lock down the audiences – something has to fill the creative void. My musician knits. This isn't new - the first year I met Arthur, he knitted me a scarf. A few years later, a sweater and then warm winter socks. Wherever we travel, he stops to talk to knitters - I never noticed there were so many! At craft fairs and country markets, airport lounges, and dinner parties. They talk stitches and style, needle size and wool source. And so, mid-pandemic, when he ran out of wool for a sweater he was knitting and couldn't find a match, he did what seemed like the obvious answer for him. He bought a spinning wheel. Be careful! Called the seller after him as he departed with his new tool, they come in flocks! She was right. Over the past few years, a small but diverse flock of spinning wheels has graced our living rooms: single and double treadle, compact, and full-size. Even an "e-spinner" - a tabletop electric model that seems like a bit of a cheat to me.
If the spinning wheels constitute a small flock, the fleeces are a large herd. I thought wool was wool, but I've learned from my perch on the couch across from the whirring wheel that Merino is soft, Romney is hardy, and Blue Texel is a bit scratchy. But, you can mix the wools to get your own blend of colour and comfort. So, you need a lot of wool. Bags of it. After you fill up your closets and your sheds, you can fill the void underneath your grand pianos with it. These days, wool seems to find us wherever we go. One day, we went for a cycle and came home with bike bags full of Alpaca. Last winter, a guy handed over the dog hair he'd saved for years, just waiting to meet a spinner.
We didn't have a plan for our English holiday except to keep to the small roads and head in the general direction of Cornwall until we ran out of time. Tucked away in the very back of the van were enough fleeces to keep the wheel spinning for the duration of the holiday. And so, we meandered our way west until somewhere in Dorset, a random turn found us knocking at the door of a wool mill.
The proprietors, David and Ruth, graciously threw open the door and waved us in. Their two small girls, clad in jodhpurs and hand-knit sweaters, glanced up from colouring books to watch us pass through reception and into the vast hall humming with a fantastic array of state-of-the-art machinery. We take in small batch orders of raw fleece, David raised his voice over the din of the machines, and send back the desired finished product. Near the back of the mill, he pointed out colour-coded bins filled with raw wool sorted by owner and type, and on the far side of the elaborate machines (think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but for wool) round cartons of carded wool for self-spinners, bags of specialized rug wool for weaving mats, and spools of two-ply and three-ply yarn waiting to be wound into skeins filled every space on the spotless concrete floor. I was fascinated by this modern twist on an age-old craft.
Arthur took his spinning wheel from the van (Ruth had a matching one), along with a fleece. Here, said David, let me show you how the carder works! He deftly fed wads of the tangled fleece into a machine, explaining the process enthusiastically as the fibre pulled and stretched its way around several spikey rollers and emerged from the other side as a sleek, ready-to-spin bag of wool, or roving. Arthur was speechless. I knew how long it would have taken him to hand-card it - most of our holiday.
The day passed easily - there was more in common than wool – Ruth played trombone, and the girls, five and three years old, were already learning to play instruments. By late afternoon, David had toured us around the working sheep farm and found us a flat spot in a small field to roll up the tent. Arthur, meanwhile, was lost to the mill. While he helped to wind and weigh wool skeins, I helped with barn chores before retiring to the roof. Sometime late in the night, I heard the ladder creak as he climbed up to join me, smelling faintly of lanolin.
I'm not an early riser. The sun had long since chased Arthur from the roof while I languished, listening to the distant bleating of hungry sheep, the tent door flapping gently in the morning breeze, wafting in the smell of the fresh coffee perking on the camp kitchen below, along with the chatter of the little girls in their British accents. Mummy, can we sit here with our breakfast? I peeked out to see them visiting Arthur behind his wheel in the field, spinning his new batch of wool. Easy-going Ruth wandered off to find some portable food, and by the time she returned, I was up and had laid out a picnic blanket in the long grass. The children balanced their cereal bowls on their laps, and we all sat around chatting amicably like old friends.
When David came by on his semi-daily farm walk, I joined him. We're mostly a breeding farm, he explained as we traipsed through several hilly fields, peering into thickets for sheep in distress – none to be found on this round. This lot is for showing at the Dorset County Show next weekend. He motioned to a group of eight or ten sheep set aside in a small field near our camp. Sheep farmers will choose their breeding stock, and we'll be there, he said. The five-year-old climbed up the gate and pointed to the one black sheep in the group. That's Marmite! She said, she's mine.
When we drove away midday, the herd of fleece in the back of our van had expanded with a couple of Jacobs, a Shetland and a white Romney. To be continued! We called out as the family stood on the steps of their antique stone farmhouse and waved us off.
A week later, somewhere deep in Dartmoor National Park, we awoke to the patter of rain and booked our Dover ferry for the evening crossing. Just outside Dorchester, we pulled into a field packed with hundreds of vehicles and dashed through a crowd of thousands at the Dorset County Show, searching for the sheep tent. We found David and Ruth each hanging over a sheep - David plucked off bits of straw from a ram while Ruth smoothed small puffs of unruly wool into place on a matching ewe to ensure a perfect show-pair. The children sat nearby on a hay bale in matching blue corduroy overalls, munching on cookies, Marmite tethered in a stall just behind them. The whole family was outfitted in Tattersall brushed cotton button-down shirts, the standard uniform of British farmers. We were greeted with familiar, contagious enthusiasm. Look at all our rosettes! The three-year-old motioned to a colourful row of ribbons hanging at the front of the tent. She jumped off the bale and gave us a quick and concise history of the winnings in the past days. I suddenly regretted our ambitious ferry booking, but it wouldn't wait - we said our goodbyes and dashed back to the van, vowing to return for the full County Show next year.
And we did.
