How my Nanny Violet hand-knitted my love of colour

From very young, I experienced and identified colour in a very specific way. The days of the week for example had a specific colour and shape. Tuesday was a navy rectangle, Wednesday a bright yellow square, Thursday a fir-green triangle and Friday a tomato-red diamond.

Interestingly, the weekend didn’t have a colour or shape. Saturdays in the 1980s were a Multicoloured Swap-Shop of kids TV, brightly lit shopping centres and Cilla on Blind Date. Perhaps it was already colourful enough.

While it’s not that unusual for the mind to attribute physical objects to abstract concepts, I think it probably shows that colour was my way of making sense of the world early doors.

Later on, I was obsessed with the colour schemes of bedrooms, fabrics, soft furnishings and stationery. The way that I navigated the Argos catalogue (Generation X’s Pinterest board and internet) gives a hint of this. My first stop was never toys or games, It was always the bathroom section, because what nine year old doesn’t want to pore over ‘towel bales’ in shades of peach or lavender?

Then I’d spend ages deciding between graphic red and white or an earthy brown, rustic theme for my imaginary kitchen, before moving onto soft furnishings and then finally checking in on Barbie and Sindy.

But my main outlet, where I could really let my love of colour go wild, was in the wool section of our local haberdashery. My Nanny Violet (how apt) was a creative, super-speedy and highly-skilled knitting and crochet expert (always pronounced crowsha by East End Vi).  Every year, she’d knit and crochet a selection of dresses and jumpers for me in whichever colours I chose.

We’d visit the wool aisle and my mood-board was quite specific. It was David Hockney in 1970s California, 1980s Miami beach chic and the diners, holiday resorts and cars of 1950s Americana. Mint green, turquoise, sky blue, sugar pink and custard yellow.

I’d love to pretend that I was so colour literate and artistically precocious aged seven that I had been really busy in the local library, curating these references myself. However, the only thing informing this aesthetic, was the pre-teen fashion shoots which appeared in the Kays catalogues (my sole reference point when it came to fashion and style in 1983), which went BIG on this theme.

Furthermore, not one of these colours suited me (they’re straight out of the spring colour season, a club of which I’m not a member). It took me another 30 years to work out that light and bright didn’t really work for me. But at the time, none of that mattered, I just needed to get turquoise and pink into my wardrobe because the catalogue styling team had decreed it from on high.

When I look back, I realise that Nanny Violet wasn’t the most demonstrative or physically affectionate of my grandparents, but her love language to me was crochet and knitting and letting me run riot in the haberdashery department. I felt that deeply and still do. My over-arching memory of being in her company is watching Australian daytime soaps together in the school holidays, in the glow of the electric fire, with the soporific sound of chattering knitting needles bringing these sorbet coloured confections to life.

It is one of the loveliest and most peaceful memories of my childhood and almost certainly where my love for colour found its first home.