Weddings 2

Two short (and equally shocking in their own way) stories about the before and after the wedding.

'The Wedding of Zeina' ( from the novel 'Aisha') by Ahdaf Soueif

Set in Egypt, Aisha's nurse Zeina, recounts how she was brutally 'tested' at the age of 15 before her wedding night by both male and female members of her family.

'Child's Play' by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Six weeks after her wedding,feeling that her marriage is already in trouble,18 year old Shirley returns home for a visit to her parents.Abandoned by her husband, indulged by her father and envied by her mother Shirley, young,spoilt,disillusioned;thinking that marriage would be 'candlelit dinners,friends dropping by,using all the presents,setting the table as perfectly as she did her face' is also brutally treated, in this case psychologically by family members.

Both stories from 'The Secret Self;Short Stories by Women selected by Hermione Lee,pub J.M.Dent & Sons 1985

Quilts 1

Saw the exhibition 'Quilts' on Friday at the V & A, in advance of which I read

'A Widow's Quilt' by Sylvia Townsend Warner from 'The Oxford Book of English Short Stories'.

This is the dark tale of Charlotte who decides to make a black and white widow's quilt, 'narrow,you see,for a single bed', inspired by a visit to the quilt room in the American Museum in Dorset.

On the journey back to London, 'in a dreamlike frenzy ', Charlotte plans the construction of her own widow's quilt: the choice of fabrics of 'that lustreless soot-black,dead rook black'; remnants of the black out curtains used in the war, a shawl bought in Avignon,velvet, taffetta, sateen shaping the design of a 'trebbled ring of black velvet hexagons massively enclosing the primal hexagon of white wedding dress brocade. Extending to the four corners....., long black diagonals, the space between interspersed with star-spangled black hexagons not too close together.....; a border of a funeral wreath of black hexagons conjoined'.

She sets to work,soothed yet purposeful,referring to it as a magpie quilt,when her husband,who is still very much alive, returns home to find her busily stitching on Christmas Eve.

This is a poignant yet ironic story in which the elements come together like the quilt to tell the emotional account of a marriage and a life all down in black and white for all to see if you care to look.