Tess Evans - Book of Lost Threads

I would expect that no more than half a dozen, preferably from the next consignment, would be used in this manner.

Hoping this finds you well as it leaves me.

Yours faithfully,

Lily Pargetter (Mrs)

Nonplussed, Lusala took the parcel and letter to his boss, a dour little man in a black waistcoat.

‘Excuse me, Mr Kennedy. Who is the quartermaster?’ Lusala asked, handing him the letter and the parcel, which he had clumsily rewrapped. A knitted object fell onto the desk. Kennedy picked it up and stared at it.

‘What on earth is this?’

‘It’s a tea cosy. You know, to keep teapots warm.’

‘And why is it on my desk?’

At Lusala’s request he read the letter.

‘Some batty old dame. Throw them in the waste basket. Unless you need one.’ He sniggered. ‘I’m a coffee drinker myself.’

The young man obediently disposed of the parcel in the waste bin where it lay, exuding reproach. He retrieved a blue and yellow cosy for himself and felt slightly better. When Kennedy went to lunch, Lusala could stand it no longer and mounted a rescue, stuffing the bundle into his desk drawer, where it continued to brood for a week. Lusala was a business student, but he had imagination, and could clearly see an old lady knitting somewhere in a strange land. He saw her earnestly composing her letter, and imagined her smile as she dropped her parcel in the letterbox. He thought of his grandmother. And he stole some letterhead.

Dear Mrs Pargetter,

Thank you for your extreme kindness in knitting tea cosies for the poor of the world. The Secretary General has asked me to thank you on his behalf. They are most welcome.

Yours sincerely,

Lusala Ngilu

Quartermaster

United Nations Organization

Before his eighteen-month internship was over, Lusala wrote one more letter of thanks, folded it into a United Nations Christmas card and then passed the baton to his successor, Ahmed Hussein, who passed it in turn to Cecile Piquet. As each new intern arrived, they would be briefed on the tea cosies.

‘It’s like a rite of passage-even a good luck ritual,’ Andrew Nicholls told his successor, Chang Kyong-sil. ‘Apparently it started way back when the current Kenyan Ambassador to the UN was a mail clerk. We always sign the letter Lusala Ngilu, Quartermaster. It’s part of the continuity. This Mrs Pargetter must be about a hundred and eighty by now. Some of us even wonder if she’s the same one who started it all.’

‘What happens to the tea cosies?’ Chang Kyong-sil was a practical young woman.

‘That’s the challenge. Apparently most of the first lot went to countries that drink tea, although some were distributed around the UN complex. The second “Lusala” sewed up the holes and sent them to a hill tribe in China for hats. They’ve been used to incubate eggs. And so on. My solution was to use them for the safe packing of medical supplies.’

Chang looked thoughtful. ‘And no-one thinks this is strange?’

‘Strange, yes. But comforting, somehow. It’s a bit of old-fashioned kindness in a world where kindness is not valued nearly enough.’

Two months later, Chang wrote her letter and carefully signed the name Lusala Ngilu in a fair copy of the original. As she despatched the cosies, metamorphosed now into foot warmers, she felt a quiet sense of achievement. The following year, around the time Mrs Pargetter was making scones for Moss and Finn, Ana Sejka became the next Lusala, and listened with special interest to Chang’s briefing.

‘This Mrs Pargetter is Australian,’ she murmured. ‘I wonder where Opportunity is, exactly.’

OPPORTUNITY WEEKES WAS BORN ON the Californian goldfields. His father, Jeremiah, was an itinerant preacher with smouldering eyes, a beard that rivalled Abraham’s and a voice that could waken the dead. His mother, formerly Miss Clementine Witherspoon, was the eighth daughter of a Kansas crop farmer whom God had previously afflicted with seven plain daughters to marry off as best he could. The charming blonde Clementine was his only hope of a prosperous old age, and Farmer Witherspoon was understandably devastated when his lovely youngest daughter ran away at the age of seventeen to marry Jeremiah.

Perhaps it was the curse the farmer sent after them, or maybe it was his daughter’s rebellious nature, but after Jeremiah’s mesmeric eyes lost their power over her, Clementine ran away again, this time to join the eclectic band of young women in Miss Kitty’s brothel. There she worked, watched and listened until she felt her education was sufficient to strike out on her own.

Before she left her husband she bore a child, whom Jeremiah insisted they name Opportunity, in gratitude to God’s gifts to all of us . Jeremiah was of a faith that believed that once a person is ‘saved’, they become worthy not only of heavenly reward but also of worldly treasures. He could not make this point strongly enough to his congregation, and they obligingly cooperated with God’s plan by contributing generously to his ministry. Jeremiah and Clementine both had a head for business.

When California became infected with news of gold in the faraway colony of Victoria, the preacher decided to take his son to a new land where the stain of his mother’s occupation would never more blight his young life. Being of a dramatic disposition, he wrote to Clementine before he left, informing her that he was removing his spotless lamb from the foul odour of his mother’s scarlet sins. There was also mention of the Whore of Babylon and the bold opinion that Jesus should never have stopped the mob from stoning the adulteress. He concluded: I remain Your Obedient Servant, Jeremiah C. Weekes . He felt a good deal better for this, and left for the colony with a light heart and a mission to convert the wicked and sustain the faithful who sought their fortune in the rich soil of the Victorian goldfields.

Young Opportunity was eleven by then, and not the appealing waif he once had been. Ungainly, his fast-growing limbs clumsy and graceless, he slouched and sulked while his father attempted to preach to men who, unlike his compatriots, could not or would not abandon themselves to the Spirit. If they came to his meetings at all, they came to stare stonily, to jeer or to laugh. Some would even pretend to feel the Spirit and stagger about gabbling in tongues, providing the small crowd with much merriment. Jeremiah hated these exhibitionists, but at least after such diversions a few people would good-naturedly make a small offering at collection time.

However, it was not enough to support him and his boy. They spent their days working on a small claim, and the evenings passed with Jeremiah teaching an increasingly resistant Opportunity his letters and numbers.

As more families and women came and businesses were established, the canvas town reached a critical mass, and serious building began. The streets of fine shops and dwellings, the ornate town hall and the several beautiful churches for which the town is now admired all owe their existence to the gold fever. The thriving settlement was named Cradletown in honour of the wooden cradle used by miners to separate the gold from the dross. When the Cradletown Methodist church was built, Jeremiah, weary of life on the goldfields, managed to secure the position of minister. Every Sunday his rich voice thundered wonderfully, exciting fear and trembling in the hearts of the wicked and thrilling misgivings in the hearts of the faithful.

Opportunity worked soberly as a sales assistant in McPherson’s Drapery and Women’s Apparel, his bony wrists protruding from white cuffs that in turn protruded from a blue pinstriped jacket. He sold linen handkerchiefs, lace collars and cuffs, jabots and shawls, gloves and hatpins. (Mrs McPherson herself sold the hats.) Drapery would seem to be a dull job for a young man, but it had its compensations, and his time passed pleasantly enough as young and not so young women came to buy their fripperies and flirt with him in a genteel sort of way.