Names for the Sea, page 28
But now I’m braver, and today I’m going there to meet the Goddess of Icelandic Knitting. Her website makes me want to knit full-time until I can do cabling and intarsia and Japanese shaping and speak in the language of knitting patterns. The day’s so warm that I walk across town with my coat open. The space around Tjörnin is full of terns, flickering snow-white against blue sky. Daffodils rustle under the low trees in the gardens of the old wooden houses, and tourists are beginning to shamble around the city centre. I bump into one of last term’s students and stop for a chat, which means that for once I’m almost running late. I hurry down a side street and come out across the road from the old herring-processing plant, white in the sun and tall behind the rat-race of cars, navy sea and grass-green mountain sunbathing behind it. The new opera house, the one Iceland can’t afford to finish and can’t afford not to finish, is taking on its final shape, glass fish-scales glinting on its stepped sides. I cross the car park, and notice that I got here without thinking about it, that not only did I not look up directions on the internet nor carry a map, but neither did I look for street names and lefts and rights, didn’t have to imagine a bird’s eye on my progress.
I go in. The space is so big, so white that the doorway seems to contract behind me, and the café to one side is like Playmobil, its tables waiting to be rearranged by giant hands. I go over to the bar and ask for Ragga. Round here, says the woman who was sipping coffee and laughing with the waiter. Follow me, it’s time I got back to work anyway. We cross the concrete floor, scarred as if the giants have dragged something heavier than Playmobil across it, and round the corner, in front of a glass wall overlooking the harbour where a trawler is coming home, is Ragga. There she is, says the woman, have a good talk. (I didn’t apologise for speaking English, I think, I just walked in here as if I had every right and expected people to speak to me in my own language.) Wool has entwined Ragga’s laptop and there are knitting books open among the spreadsheets on her desk. Children’s jumpers lounge on the chairs and across the bookcase. Ragga is writing, and while she finishes her paragraph I read the itinerary for one of the tours that she’s running this summer. I want to go on it, and I want to go to the Loops Nordic Knit Art festival at the Nordic House, which starts the day after we fly home.
We settle on sofas in the café with hot chocolate. Clouds are hurrying over the sea outside and the light has changed, muted as if someone’s flicked a switch.
I tell Ragga about the way the students knit in class, the way I’ve noticed people knitting on buses and in meetings and in the slow moments of political protest. (Why is that worrying me, asks Anthony. Les tricoteuses, I reply, and then wish I hadn’t when we have to spend the next twenty minutes explaining to Max.) The way even knitting addicts don’t knit in public at home.
‘It’s completely normal!’ says Ragga. ‘Why wouldn’t you knit? You’re waiting for a bus or something, use the time. I first heard about this, the way people in Europe and America don’t knit, when I read about this KIP, Knit in Public Day. It started in the US. I read a blog by a woman who said she took a sock with her and knitted on the bus and I thought so what? Everyone knits on the bus, what else would you do? But she says she’s some kind of rebellious knitting icon because she knits waiting in line.’
I lick cream off my spoon. ‘It’s not exactly rebellion. It’s not as if knitting’s indecent. It’s just not done. I don’t know why.’
‘I wonder how that came to be, how societies came to this. We never stopped. Everyone here has some sort of relationship to knitting, everyone learns how to do it in elementary school. But it seems in the English-speaking world most knitters start after thirty or something. It’s just so weird.’
When did the English stop knitting? Women in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels are forever knitting and sewing, always have their ‘work’ about them, although Austen and Brontë are both pretty scathing about it, and even Elizabeth Gaskell remarks what a shame it is that rich women are so bored they have to invent unnecessary labour while poor women work so hard outside the home that they don’t have time to mend their children’s clothes. Most of my friends think my crocheting habit is bizarre.
‘What about during the financial boom?’ I ask. ‘Did people knit just as much?’
‘Maybe not quite so much. I think it was around 2007, 2008, suddenly there were knitting cafés starting up, and then it escalated as the economy faltered. I published a knitting book in December 2008 and that was the beginning of a flood of new knitting books here. I’d been living in Sweden and I moved back in 2008 and started a group in the yarn store – you know, on Laugavegur? – and then there were groups popping up everywhere, hundreds of them, meeting two or three times a month, and now I’m sure you’ll find one in every little town on the island. Before, back in the old days, say 2006, 2005, there was this tradition of the sewing circles, but they weren’t really about sewing or any kind of crafting, just gossip and coffee and cake, just to get out of your home and leave the dishes and the kids behind, but now they’re really going strong and people are really making things. I don’t think many women now would go out without something to do. This has just become part of women’s culture in Iceland.’
‘Women’s culture,’ I say.
‘Well, there are men who knit, of course. And sew. My uncle, for example, he’s had a sewing circle for twenty years with his male friends and they do sew. They’ve done it all these years.’
I tell her about an exhibition about lighthouse-keepers that I saw at the Maritime Museum in Falmouth. Lighthouse-keepers knitted, impossibly complicated Fair Isle, the kind of thing you might do if you found yourself in solitary confinement for a couple of months with only knitting needles and yarn.
‘Of course,’ says Ragga. ‘That makes sense. My great-grandfather knitted. He was a fisherman, and when the sea was too rough to go out, he and my great-grandmother just sat and knitted, socks and sweaters, until the storm passed. My grandfather remembered going to sleep and hearing the click, click of the needles. There’s a lot of knitting on that side of the family. My grandmother died in Hofsós, and we’ve kept her house just as it was. I was there in February to record my DVD about knitting, and it was so much fun just to be in her house again. We’ll return there this summer, looking at knitting and the locale, following the wool from sheep to sweater on one farm.’
I long to watch this, suddenly, although my parents keep sheep and my mother not only knits but used to wash, card and spin the wool she picked off hedges and barbed-wire fences. I know perfectly well where wool comes from, and anyway I don’t like to wear it.
‘How old is the Icelandic sweater?’ I ask, partly to see if Ragga is selling false consciousness.
‘It’s not very old,’ she says immediately. ‘It’s really become the symbol of Icelandic knitting. We often talk about the three pillars of Icelandic knitting heritage: the sweater, the shawls, and the rose-pattern shoe-inserts. The inserts are a very special part of Icelandic knitting. They are very intricate little designs, complex motifs in interesting colours. In those days people wore sheepskin shoes, and they put these soles into them. It was a craft of women, in the days when people were wearing only grey and brown, homespun colours, everything very dull, and then there were these bright decorations hidden inside their shoes. They were for warmth, really, they had a function. And then there are the shawls.’
I have one of ‘the shawls’. I’m wearing it as I write this, on a clear January day in Cornwall. On a similar day in Iceland, a little later in the year, I had a meeting with Katrin, who was writing her MA dissertation on American feminist biker narratives. Katrin is one of those women whose appearance reminds you that Titian wasn’t necessarily exaggerating, and she is rushing to finish her dissertation before the birth of her third child, as well as working full-time. Sometimes, she confides, she takes her motorbike out in the early hours of the morning, just for a break, just for an hour away from the kids and the work and the studying and the dishes. Even when you’re pregnant? I ask, remembering how hard it got to balance a pedal bike in the last few weeks. She shrugs. Sure, I’m still a person. Anyway, she says, look, I have something for you. She opens her shoulder-bag, which is bulging but light, and hands me a lapful of knitted wool, creamy as porridge and dense and springy as summer turf. I begin to unfurl it, can’t tell what it is. I made it a while ago, she says, and it’s been waiting in my cupboard for the right person. When you were talking about how cold your house in England gets in winter, I thought you were the person. See, you can wrap it like this, your arms and hands are still free to write but it’ll keep you really warm. She helps me drape it, a cloud of wool in my vinyl and concrete office, and I recognise one of those rare objects perfectly designed for a simple purpose. The shawl is stiff enough to hang away from my body, heavy enough for the points to stay crossed over my chest, light enough that I don’t feel it on my arms as I type. There, says Katrin, I knew it was for you. It’s lovely, I tell her, but I can’t accept this, all those hours of work you put in. Of course you can, she says, it’s been waiting for you for months.
I stroke the shawl while we talk about feminism and biking – not a combination to which I have previously given thought. As it warms in the radiator’s heat, the smell of sheep blooms around me. Tell me, I ask Katrin, tell me how you made it? Oh, it’s very easy, she says. They’re very traditional, everyone knows how to make them. You just start at the point and increase until it’s big enough. Some people like to make fancy borders with lace stitches and colours, but I wanted to keep this one plain.
‘I have one,’ I tell Ragga. ‘But I still don’t really understand how they’re made. It’s as tall as I am, knitting needles don’t come that big.’
‘You start in the middle, at the back, and increase every other row, and at the edges so it grows both ways. It’s a good project for a beginner. In its simplest form, it’s just garter stitch. You can decorate it how you like and you can use any kind of yarn, and you end up with something really functional that you actually wear a lot. I use this pattern a lot when I’m converting people – I mean – oh, you know what I mean.’
Yes, I do.
‘I think this was also an artistic outlet for women in the old days, because you know people knitted all the time, walking between farms or to get the cows—’
‘They did that in Scotland as well,’ I interrupt.
‘There are stories of people who fell down the cliffs while knitting, and one about a girl who fell into a lava kettle and didn’t even drop a stitch.’
Lava kettles are underground bubbles, often taller than a person, formed when the lava was molten and bubbling and now solidified into hollow spheres of smooth rock. People fall into them because the tops are too thin to bear a person’s weight, and then can’t get out because the hole is out of reach and the convex sides are too smooth to climb. There is no way of finding someone lost underground in a lava field.
‘Did she knit her way out?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ says Ragga. ‘Probably. Of course, they weren’t knitting for fun then. Knitted goods were one of our main exports, all made by hand on the farms. I read that one year in the 1800s, there were 30,000 pairs of socks exported. And the population was only about 70,000. Now, of course, you can just go to Europris or Rúmfatalagerinn and buy acrylic made in China, so knitting is for enjoyment, and a way for us to reconnect to our history. You get interested in how did my grandmother do it and how did her grandmother do it, and we’re part of the old Iceland again.’
‘Healing the nation?’ I ask. ‘Knitting Iceland back together?’
Broken bones knit.
‘Yeah. Something like that. And it’s just fascinating. It’s good for people’s self-esteem, especially now people don’t make things much, they sit in front of a screen all day. Lots of knitters say they’re not creative but they are, even if they follow a pattern they choose the yarn and the colour, make it new and different from anyone else’s sock or sweater. And then there’s the second step, the activity, and that’s a kind of physical mantra, monotonous, repetitive, or of course with a more challenging pattern it can be quite complicated mathematics or like chess: you’re thinking ahead three, four, five moves. And then you get the results, and that’s where you find your self-confidence.’
‘If it works,’ I point out, remembering all the times it didn’t.
‘Well, that can be an exercise in how you view the world too. You learn how to do it better next time.’
Ragga’s right. I sometimes think it would be a good writing exercise to get people to knit something complicated and then unravel it, again and again until that yarn is in its best possible form.
‘And another big project we’re working on is developing our own yarn. We’re working with a mill in Belgium at the moment, and our goal is to develop a blend of Icelandic wool and cashmere and alpaca. We’ll have the first batch out in November, and then the plan is to move the production to Iceland, but we can’t do that yet because there aren’t any small mills in this country, just this huge factory, Ístex, which ruins everything. That’s why Icelandic wool is so harsh. It’s not like that at all if you process it differently.’
‘I’d wondered about that,’ I say, although on reflection I haven’t wondered enough, have found it merely logical that Icelandic wool would be coarse and wiry to the touch. Because Icelanders are tough, perhaps, too hardy to notice the rasp of wool on skin, or because it somehow stands to reason that Icelandic sheep would have coarser wool than their Scottish cousins.
‘It’s because there’s only one, national, factory and they just blend all the wool from all the farms so it’s all the same. And they wash it at too high a temperature, use too much salt, card it really badly. You can get much better results with the same wool, but we’re having to go abroad to do it. I’ll show you a sample. It’s never been done before, and some people say it’s wrong, to blend our pure Icelandic wool from Icelandic farms with foreign alpaca. But we’re respecting what’s good about the Icelandic wool, it’s so warm and light, and adding alpaca to make it softer and even better. So we’ll have to see how that’s seen here, but we’re not competing with Ístex, we’re not competing on price. We’re just saying that our Icelandic wool is a resource we have here and we’re not using its potential–’
She breaks off. There is shouting outside and people at the bar exclaiming and pulling each other towards the door.
‘Wow! Foreign rain. Do you see that? We don’t get that in Iceland, that’s European rain. Must be the volcano or something.’
My grandfather would have said it was raining stair-rods, the kind of rain that falls in lines rather than drops. There are bubbles in the puddles in the car park and the sound of small stones against the windows. Two women run in with water streaming down their faces. I am amused by the idea of ‘foreign rain’, but of course she’s right; the rain in Iceland is usually persistent but fine.
‘Anyway, so it’s all starting now, the tours and the yarn and the webshop. It’s going well.’
‘It’s an interesting time to start a business,’ I suggest.
The waiter is giving the women towels.
Ragga laughs. ‘Some would say, yes.’
I count back and realise that she gave up her job in the most acute phase of the crisis, the weeks when the news was worse and worse from one hour to the next.
‘I’ve been asking lots of people about the effect of the kreppa,’ I tell her. ‘Most of them say it hasn’t actually had a huge effect on their lives.’
‘Well, it’s limiting. Cheese is horribly expensive and you don’t buy ham unless you really need it. We can’t afford to travel any more. But I don’t think – I mean, provided you have a job, most people are just eating differently and travelling less. I don’t know anyone that bought Range Rovers or took huge foreign currency loans for a house, not personally. But of course for some people it’s horrible, everything is ruined. It’s all comparative, anyway. When I moved back from Sweden, things were weird. Everyone was like, wanting to work in banks, and changing their kitchens all the time, and wanting to live in these new buildings and flying to Europe for the weekend. And a lot of people think it’s not bad that these excesses were stopped. Even though it’s traumatic and we’re hurt and we didn’t really want to believe it was happening. It was really shocking to realise that this country, this Iceland which we thought was the best in the world, was really full of corruption. The whole atmosphere was just so strange, there was something about people’s attitude, the relentless adoration of the money people, it was surreal, it wasn’t my home. We never knew where the money was coming from. We thought the bankers must be so brilliant that the rest of us were too stupid to understand. And of course you don’t ask many questions when the money is everywhere. Our money used to come from the fish in the sea but there were no more fish and suddenly there’s this new way of doing it. It seized our society, we were in a weird collective state of mind. I have a friend, an Icelander living in Sweden, who felt so bad about it, because she wasn’t keeping up with her peers at home, she was renting a small apartment in Stockholm. Her friends here were buying Range Rovers and moving into these huge new houses and putting in new kitchens and automatic lighting and everything, and she wouldn’t let them visit her she was so ashamed. Such a waste of energy, all that shame. It was horrible.’
‘So you’re starting a new business for a new country?’
‘People might say it’s crazy to start a new business in Iceland in 2009, but if you’re going to do it, this is the right kind of business. There’s a global movement towards buying something sustainable, traceable, buying quality. And internet shopping is going up. I think these are long-term trends, not passing crazes. So I have very little money at the moment, but I’m optimistic about the future.’
We’ve finished our drinks. Ragga walks me back to her desk and lets me fondle the prototypes for her new yarns and turn her jumpers inside out to admire the colour-work. I pick up a schedule of this summer’s tours and wonder how much Anthony would object if I came back to Iceland for a week or two once we’re settled in Cornwall. Maybe I’ll have another go at knitting. Maybe I’ll buy some more wool and take it home to make an Icelandic shawl.
