Money was not plentiful in my childhood, and my mother has always been a lady of clear opinion and settled tastes. So it came about that, rather infrequently, she would see a toy that she really liked, and ask: ‘Would you like to have that?’ Conundrum. Yes but no. A toy – yes please. That one – not really. I had a doll called Alice she had chosen for me, that I really loved. I thought Alice was beautiful. I had one called Emma that I never liked: her face irritated me, and she had fat arms and legs and indeterminate hands. But given the option of adopting Emma or doing without, I took her on board.
On one remarkable occasion though, my mother came across a display of Old Cottage dolls (if you click the link, mine resembled the one on the bottom right of the page but her dress was plainer and her hair brown), and she liked all of them. So she said I could choose one. She made a few attempts to nudge me in the direction of ones she particularly liked; but on this occasion I chose the one I wanted. I believe the Old Cottage Dolls were named, and I think the one I chose was called Clara. I changed her name to Lucy: and, oddly, Clara and Lucy must mean pretty much the same thing, don’t they? Clear and Lucid.
Well, this doll – I no longer have her; my mother safeguarded her faithfully until a few years ago when she was given into my clutches once more and I promptly sent her off to a charity shop or deserving child or something – anyway, this doll was all that I thought beautiful. She had a simple blue gingham dress, very minimally trimmed with lace, much plainer than her companions. The dress had a long full skirt. Under it she wore white long-johns with just a slender edge of lace. On her head she had a straw poke bonnet. Her hair was brown and her face sweet and serious and gentle.
Some of the others were much fancier. This was the one I wanted.
When I came into my teenage years, Laura Ashley was just beginning her wonderful shop on the Welsh borders, making dresses that were like those worn by ordinary Victorian countrywomen: modest high necks, quiet, soft colours, tiny flower prints, long sleeves, ankle-length skirts.
I got my first after-school job when I was fifteen. The first thing I did was to save until I had enough to go on the train to Kensington and buy a Laura Ashley dress: grey with a tiny flower print in deep blue. I bought a white shawl to wear over it. Working evenings and weekends when school was out, I earned enough to buy a Laura Ashley skirt too: dark brown with a tiny black flower print.
When the church youth fellowship went camping in Yorkshire for the weekend, our leader objected strenuously to my manner of dress: you will never manage to climb rocks in those longs skirts, she said. But I did. Similarly my mother worried about me out and about on my bicycle, in ‘those long skirts’.
My dress was not at all dainty. I wore men’s desert boots on my feet (big feet – trouble getting ladies’ sizes). But in those long dresses in quiet shades of grey and brown, I felt peaceful, I felt at home.
Later, I got hold of hand-me-downs from my great-grandmother (wrap-round war-time crêpe dresses in quiet colours and tiny flower prints) and my mother (full-skirted cotton dresses from the 1950s that came to about mid-calf. I took out the flouncy net underskirts: I wanted something simple and plain). I think I must have looked a bit strange in the hand-me-downs, because one time when I was away from home my mother and sister raided my room and sent them to the jumble sale.
I collected more long skirts, and a long brown woolen cloak.
When I grew up, what I wanted was either to be a Poor Clare or get married. I got married, had a family, thought long and hard about joining a Hutterite colony, and didn’t on two counts. One, they forbade speaking in tongues and all exercise of the charismata: and I dare not quench the Spirit like that. Two, they seemed keen to whisk us off to America so I could sever all links with my family and friends here: but I feel that those ties of love and kinship are God-given responsibilities. But for two pins I would have signed up. I love the Hutterites. The colony is still there, but there’s nothing like an Anabaptist community for a really good schism, and something’s happened so they aren’t Hutterite any more. They tie their scarves a different way and make them out of fabric without polka-dots.
If you do a Google image search on ‘A Beautiful Woman’, you won’t see any Hutterites or Amish. You get tall slender ladies with long hair and skimpy clothing showing lots of flesh. But that isn’t beautiful to me. I like another kind of beautiful. Serious and sturdy, that clear, challenging, unafraid look in the eye: that walk that the Plain women have, a quiet thoughtful tread.
Beautiful, to me, involves flat shoes and aprons, long hair scooped back under a head-covering, full cotton skirts and simple jackets and vests, white cotton blouses that keep modesty. Though for me personally, I do like just a touch of make-up to keep the uncooked-pastry-imminent-death look at bay, and a pair of hand-crafted earrings just because.
I guess it’s just another kind of beautiful.
As I lay in bed thinking last night, in that time when I watch the clouds and the stars before I fall asleep, I was puzzling about all this. Oh, glory – I’ve started wearing a head-covering again, and people do look at me funny. ‘Hello,’ said one gentle sister in a concerned voice at the end of church today: ‘Are you all right?’ She thinks I’ve got cancer, doesn’t she? She thinks my hair’s fallen out. How embarrassing; how ungrateful of me, when it hasn’t and I’ve got hair to rival a fair-sized haystack coiled away under there.
Anyway, I was turning it over in my mind, and thinking about what Quaker Jane said about why she covers her head: which is that God wants her to.
She says that it wasn’t about submission to her husband, it was just that God called her to do this, so she did; and when she did, her relationship to her husband changed. Improved, I hasten to add.
Now I am not a fan of submission teaching. I do not believe in second-class citizens and men who behave like lords while women wait on them as servants. Nooooo, that’s not me. I’m not exactly feminist either. I believe in raising my own children and in women (usually) being the angel of the home; I believe that (usually) women best fit the domestic sphere and men best fit the public sphere. But with George Herbert I also believe that ‘With customes we doe well but laws undoe us’ (There may be an ‘e’ or 2 too many in that, but it should give you the 17th century flavour OK). I believe in strong women and in the equality of all beings. I believe a family is like a circle in which each must consider and be considered, each must contribute and each should be supported; no-one’s needs are secondary or subordinate, each one matters equally from the oldest to the youngest, though what is appropriate for each will be different.
So I was puzzling about this head-covering thing, and wondering why it makes me feel so peaceful and quiet inside.
And I thought about Quaker Jane saying that she found when she began to cover her head that she started to trust her husband; that she didn’t have to have her own way all the time.
I began to think about in Waitrose supermarket, where they give you a little green plastic disk about the size of a penny after you pay for your groceries. At the back of the store are 3 persex boxes with a slot in the top, each one for a local charity: and you can choose which cause to vote for the shop to sponsor, and put your green disk in there. They support the one with the most disks.
I thought of trust as being like a green disk that God has given me; and I can choose for myself what to do with it. I can keep it, and say: ‘I will trust only myself; I will make the decisions, I will rely entirely on my own resources’. Or I can surrender it. I can say to my husband: ‘Here you are. You have my trust’. I began to have an inkling that wearing the head-covering would lead me into that kind of surrender, that kind of trust.
Then this morning at church (it’s the feast of Our Lady) we thought about how Mary surrendered her chances to God. She lived a surrendered life. She gave him her green token, and said: ‘Here You are – You choose’. And we thought about Mary as pre-figuring the Church; that she was to carry and give birth to Christ, be the one physically to bring Him into the world, and we were to do the same, by the power of a surrendered life.
If I think of the head-covering as the sign, not of female submission, but of a life surrendered to God, a life that loves enough to trust and say: ‘Here – you choose,’ then the quietness and peace I feel when I wear it begins to make sense. It feels like having God’s hand resting light on my head. It is another kind of beautiful.
But I still feel embarrassed thinking those people are looking at me with pity and concern, wondering about the chemotherapy treatment I haven’t actually had.
