A letter from a reader

At 67, I had spent forty years holding my own shawl on with one hand

I have rung the same two handbells on a Tuesday night for eleven years, and in all that time nobody has asked my opinion on anything except whether the heating is on. I am not a writer, and what another woman puts round her shoulders is her own affair.

But three different women asked me about my shawl at handbell practice in Lymm last Tuesday, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

There are nine of us and a retired dentist, and we practise in the old Methodist schoolroom, which was built in a year when nobody had thought of heating anything. I ring the F and the G, one in each hand. That is the whole job. Both arms up, both arms down, and you cannot stop to see to anything until the carol is over.

So you will see my problem. You cannot get your arms up in a coat, and a cardigan is no match for that room. For years I have gone in a shawl. I own seven of them. Nice things, some of them. One is from Harrogate and one was my mother’s.

And every single one does the same thing. It slides. Left shoulder first, always. You hitch it up, it stays for about as long as it takes to turn round, and off it goes again. I have been to weddings, funerals and forty years of carol services with one hand on my own shoulder, like somebody about to swear an oath. At last year’s carol service mine went down to my elbow in the second verse of Silent Night, with both my hands full, and I rang the rest of it with the thing hanging off me like a wet towel.

Maggie, you have hitched that thing up eleven times since the soup.

That was my sister June, at my own table one Sunday in September. She had been counting. She was right, and I knew she was right. I had not set out to be a woman who eats her dinner with one hand. I just thought that was what wearing a shawl was.

Nobody decides to spend her life with one hand on her shoulder. It happens one pretty shawl at a time, until there is a drawer of them and a saucer of kilt pins, and a brooch that has put a hole in the good one.

How it happens

When you are young you do not give your shoulders a thought. Then somewhere along the way you start wanting a little something round them indoors. Church halls. The table by the door in a restaurant. Your daughter’s conservatory.

And the choice you get is not much of a choice.

On one side, the warm and sensible things, the coats and the thick cardigans, which mean sleeves and buttons, and which go on and come off all evening and end up on the back of your chair. On the other side, the pretty wraps, which look lovely for the first four minutes and have no way whatsoever of staying where you put them.

So you do what I did. You buy the pretty one, and you keep one hand free for it.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect a lot of us have.

I thought the trouble was me. Sloping shoulders, June calls it. I thought wearing a shawl was simply a thing some women could do and I could not, like whistling.

It turns out that was never true.

It was that I had never had one meant to be tied. A proper triangle, with two long ends that taper down to a point, so that you cross them over at the front, knot them once and stop thinking about it.

No pin, no clasp, no buttons. Just a knot, which my mother could have shown me. It took me forty years and a sister with a good memory for numbers to work that out.

Then June carried the roasting tin through

A few weeks after the soup, Geoff and I went over to June’s for lunch. She came through from the kitchen with the roasting tin in both hands, and on her shoulders was a soft grey shawl, knotted at the front. She put the tin down, looked at me and said, Go on then. Count.

I counted, all through lunch. It was nought.

She said it was from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now, and that they do sixteen of them. Plain colours, stripes, and some that are half and half. They had a sale on.

I chose the Ivory, and I know what you are thinking. White, at my age, with a labrador. But I have spent most of my life in navy, and it is a lovely clean winter white, and I thought if I was going to stop hiding behind my own hand I might as well be seen doing it. It is one size, 185 by 75 centimetres of it, so there was nothing to measure and nobody to ask. I ordered it that evening.

It is soft and warm, with a soft knitted feel, and lighter than I expected. It will fold up and go in my bag. You put it round your shoulders, cross the two ends at the front, tie them, and that is the lot. There are no fastenings to do up. I have worn it over a jumper, over a dress and over my navy coat to walk the dog, and on a milder day you can leave it loose.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a shawl somebody thought about.

What happened at practice

Last Tuesday it was bitter in that schoolroom. You could see your breath until somebody got the tea going. I tied the Ivory on in the porch, picked up my F and my G, and we started on Hark the Herald.

Both arms up, both arms down, for an hour and ten minutes. I kept waiting for it to go. Somewhere around the second run of In the Bleak Midwinter I realised I had stopped waiting.

Three women asked me about it before I had got my coat on. The first was Margaret, who has the A and the B next to me, and who leaned over at the tea break and asked what on earth it was held on with. I said, a knot. The second was a younger woman who had come along to see if she fancied joining, and who asked where it was from before she had asked a single thing about the bells.

The third was Beryl. Beryl has conducted us for nineteen years, and in all that time she has said one thing to me, which is, You were late. At the end of the night she put down her pencil, looked at me over her glasses and said, You came in on time all evening, Maggie. What have you done? I pointed at the knot. Hm, said Beryl. From Beryl, that is a full peal.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was what my hands did. They stayed where they were. On the Sunday I carried the tea tray through with both of them and did not think about it until I had put it down.

Geoff noticed before I did. He said, You have stopped doing that thing with your shoulder. In all our years married, that is the first remark he has ever passed about anything I have had on.

Three things I have learned since

One. Tie it, then leave it alone. One simple knot at the front is all it asks for. Forty years of habit will send your hand up to your shoulder anyway. Give it a week.

Two. It goes over things. Over a coat, a jumper or a dress, knotted at the front or draped loose. I had thought of a shawl as something for indoors, and I have been out in mine with the dog most mornings since.

Three. Pick your colour and do not fret about the size. There are sixteen in the collection, from plain black, grey, brown, burgundy, beige and camel to the stripes and the half-and-half ones. Every one is the same generous one size. June went for grey and has already told me she should have had two.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Ivory is £24.95. It was £50.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a brooch to hold a shawl on, and it did not.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on at the moment before Christmas.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman from Thelwall had written, “I tied mine on after breakfast and it was exactly where I had put it at teatime.”

Then I went back and ordered the burgundy for Christmas dinner, because even I will admit that white and gravy are a risk.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in that schoolroom, with a cup of tea going cold and the bells laid out on the table, this is what I would say.

If you have a drawer of lovely things that will not stay on, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a shawl will change your life. It will not. But there is something in having both your hands back after all these years, and I would rather you had that this winter than another Christmas with one hand on your shoulder.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the popular colours are the ones that go first. And the Christmas orders have already started, so I would not leave it until December.

Geoff asked me on Sunday why I keep glancing at my left shoulder. I told him I am waiting for it to need me. It has not, yet.

Maggie