Her Hair was a Folded Flower

My sister, brother and I were born in the fifties and our mum, Kathleen (RIP) wore her long hair in the wartime style of the Victory Roll. She was very adept at fashioning this hairstyle in a few minutes with a couple of kirby hairgrips. Being born a Dooley, she had an Irish/Celtic romantic sensibility. We didn’t get lullabies at bedtime but she could recite whole poems like Hiawatha and also loved the Irish lyric poets like W. B. Yeats.

My counterpane square pays tribute to her, the poem quoted is from Yeats’ ‘The Cap and Bells’ and although melancholic it’s very beautiful. The sewing is a Dresden applique circle of petals of fabric ‘folded’ to resemble a flower centre and like my Mum’s hairstyle, the words of the poem describe the sleeping beauty’s hair in the picture as resembling ‘a folded flower’… There is no reason to be counting sheep to aid sleep – but I’ve added them anyway.

By Patricia Thoburn