This Golden Fleece: interview with Esther Rutter

I recently reviewed This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter – otherwise known as my friend Phoebe – and I really enjoyed reading it. Since she’s a good friend of mine, I did a quick interview with her – asking her a bit about the book and about knitting. The Guardian liked the book, btw, so you should give it a go.

1. What was the genesis of This Golden Fleece?

I’d been a knitter since childhood, but the book started with a present from my Mum – four balls of woollen yarn from Shetland, which she gave me in 2016. At that time, I’d just switched jobs from working in literary heritage and education to being in university administration, and moved to the Fife countryside for my husband’s job, where I was doing a lot of knitting in the dark winter evenings. As an avid reader, I was on the look-out for a history of knitting in Britain, but couldn’t find one in print. So I thought: why not give up this job I really didn’t like and write it myself? Having studied English at Oxford and been a ‘secret writer’ for years meant that I thought I had the research and writing skills to give it a go – and my husband agreed that we would be able to manage on his salary alone for a year, so I handed in my notice and off I went.

I was extremely lucky in that, having given up my job at Christmas, in January I won a Twitter competition called Tweet Your Pitch, where a panel of agents and publishers spend a day reading book pitches on Twitter. From this I secured an agent, who advised me to develop a chapter-by-chapter plan for the book, and write the first two chapters – by early March 2017, so that she could take these to London Book Fair to put them under the nose of interested editors. Fortunately a few publishers were interested in the book, and after a very exciting auction, I signed with Granta.

2. How did you first become interested in knitting and wool?

It was a bit of a circuitous route… I was 5 when my father’s business went bankrupt, we lost our home, and moved from our modern semi-detached house to a tied farm cottage. The best thing about this was that we were now right next door to a working farm, and the farmer – a Mr Walford Arnold Griffiths – was happy to let me and my brothers ‘help’ out with the sheep. So his love of all things sheepy was a strong influence on me, as was my mother’s skill with fibre crafts. She was – and still is – a very accomplished spinner and weaver, and as young children we would pick up all the little grubby bits of wool from around the farm, wash them, and bring them to her to spin. The magic of this transformation never failed to amaze us! But it was my best friend’s mum who taught me knitting: mum’s spinning wheel and weaving loom were a bit too much for my little hands to manage, and so it was Suzanne – who made a lot of my best friend’s clothes – who first placed a pair of knitting needles in my hands. She also taught me to crochet – which I didn’t get on with.  But her daughter is a fantastic crocheter, so I think she’s pleased that we have both continued to develop the craft skills she taught us when we were children.

3. What was the most unusual knitted object you saw on your travels?

Definitely the funeral stockings I found in St Fagans museum in Wales. Very few of these have survived, but they were extremely common and used widely until the middle of the twentieth century. Although this was the first and only time I have seen a pair, I had read about funeral stockings in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), his fictional history of a Welsh family and their farm. Funeral stockings were knitted specifically for a person’s laying out, and, alongside a shroud and funeral cap, were laid aside for use after death. The red and cream pair I saw belonged to a woman called Eliza Lewis, and may well have formed part of her wedding trousseau; they were certainly knitted many years before her death, as it was only because she became ill with dropsy in later life that she was not buried in them.

4. Which knitting project are you proudest of?

I think I am most proud of having completed a gansey, a traditional fisherman’s style jumper. To knit it I had to buy specialist steel needles as it was so large and heavy – it weighs over a kilo and used almost kilometres of yarn – and took me pretty much an entire year to finish. But I was very aware of the tradition in which I was working, where generations of women from fishing communities had made these intricate and elaborately patterned garments, often knitting in almost complete darkness, and I was in complete awe of what they were able to make by feel alone.

5. Which celebrity knitters (past and present) might surprise us?

I think a lot of people know that Virginia Woolf was a knitter, but I was surprised to find that both Lytton Strachey and Adrian Stephen also plied their pins! Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh,– there seems to have hardly been a female star of the silver screen who didn’t wield her needles. And today Meryl Streep, Anjelica Houston, Uma Thurman and even Ryan Gosling all appear to be enthusiastic knitters.

6. What do you think the future of knitting is likely to be?

Hand-knitting is having something of a renaissance; as with the organic and ‘Slow Food’ movements, provenance and sustainability are really important concerns for the international knitting community. Many people are turning away from synthetic fibres because of the microplastics that leech from them, and wool, silk, cotton, linen and other natural fibres are growing in popularity. Racism and white bias is also a big issue in the craft world, and popular fibre website Ravelry has recently taken an important stand in refusing to allow material which promotes the racist politics of Donald Trump. So, like the original Luddites and les tricoteuses, knitters and knitting will continue to be an important and visible force for change in our world.