Shot silk

 Do you know what I mean by the phrase "shot silk"?

I imagine most of you do. Friends who read here are mostly makers, and many of you have home sewing on the go as a matter of course. But for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, shot silk is fabric (silk, obviously) made with warp thread of one colour and weft thread of a different colour. There's a very good description and photo here.

It came to mind because of a book I'm reading, The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks.

I've had it here a little while, but only begun it recently because I was reading something else. So I'm not very far into it yet — only on page 9, to be precise. 

But already James Rebanks is presenting himself vividly to the imagination. To give you a flavour, here's an extract from his introduction to the book (entitled Hefted, a reference to the bonding of sheep with the geography of their home). He writes about his schooldays:

 There was an abyss of understanding between that teacher and us. The kids who gave a damn had departed the year before to our local grammar school, leaving the 'losers' to fester away the next three years in a place no one wanted to be. The result was something akin to a guerrilla war between largely disillusioned teachers and some of the most bored and aggressive kids imaginable. We played a 'game' as a class where the object was to smash the greatest value of school equipment in one lesson and pass it off as an 'accident'.  

  I was good at that kind of thing.  

  The floor was littered with broken microscopes, biological specimens, crippled stools and torn books. A long dead frog pickled in formaldehyde lay sprawled on the floor doing breaststroke. The gas taps were burning like an oil rig and a window was cracked. The teacher stared at us with tears streaming down her face — destroyed — as a lab technician tried to restore order.

Gosh.

I pause in my reading to look at the photograph of the author on the back cover of the book.

I look closer.

Gosh again.

I was interested to read this because I come from a family of Yorkshire farmers. This . . . is not what I was imagining.

Reading on past the initial accounts of James's schooldays, I come to his description of a day gathering sheep on the fells. It begins in the still dark early morning with him going outside to unchain his dogs.

Gosh again. I revisit that face. I stop to think.

I'll try again tonight.

Eating my lunch today, I was still pondering that life, that face, the calmly related accounts — coloured by neither triumph nor sorrow — of his schoolboy insubordination. 

What particularly interested me was something quite outside the book: the person who lent it to me — my friend Steph, source of many good books. Her son Ian finds them for her.

Steph, who worked as a health visitor before her retirement (and a very good one, I should think) is the widow of a Methodist minister, Alan. He died in 2013, having been a minister two years longer than the whole of my life. Open, gentle, enthusiastic, a man without guile, a Christian of humility and kindness. And Steph, compassionate, warm, intelligent, his perfect companion as they made their pilgrimage through life side by side. 

That was the warp thread.

But as I thought about them, about the years they spent living in Nigeria and in Shetland — not the most comfortable and domesticated of environments — and about how they took to darkest Hastings with ease, it occurred to me there was a weft thread of an entirely different colour. There was, in the soul of both of them, a wilderness spirit of daring and adventure, characterised by courage and freedom.

I thought some more about this as I ate my coleslaw and pickled beetroot and smoked fish. I searched back through my memory to other ministers I had known, and considered them.

When ministers are portrayed in film and TV drama, they are usually either vague, wispy, affable personages of gentle birth and upbringing, easily shocked, or self-satisfied portly idiots. More recently a third strand has emerged, of priests who are secretly tortured souls, their external lives devoted to Helping Other People, their inner world anguished and chronically desperate.

I drank some orange juice and thought about it some more.

And the more I turned it over in my mind, the more it seemed to me I was looking at shot silk. A warp thread of calm, self-deprecating (well — in some cases), unassuming men and women, quiet and hard-working. The strong framework laid down of the Kindly and costly quiet discipline of Christ's gospel. But shot through with this contrasting weft thread of fiery soul, their own wild and idiosyncratic humanity, finding here no abiding city, open to almost anything, inhabiting a striking and vivid inner world. 

Not as feral and uncompromising, I think, as the face on the back of that book, but certainly capable of understanding and accepting the tensions and potency and sheer voltage written there. 

There's thunder and lightning in them there hills; and, somewhat to my surprise, I see that nobody is better placed to recognise and embrace it than a minister's widow.

How very interesting.