Weaving Memories
Derville Murphy’s latest novel was inspired by a tablecloth carried by an ancestor from Eastern Europe. Here she tells its story.
Shortly after I was married, my lovely, late, mother-in-law, Peggy was sorting through her hotpress and gave her daughters and me various bits of antique linen she had collected over the years: pillowslips, cloths and antimacassars in crisp white linen with beautiful fine point embroidery. But there was one tablecloth that no one wanted. Unlike the other pieces this was the colour of parchment, off-white, with clumsy geometric patterns sewn in uneven stitches in blue and white thread. It looked like it had been embroidered by different people.
Peggy told me the cloth came from Eastern Europe from her sister-in-law whose family had fled to Ireland ahead of the Russian occupation, and subsequent German invasion during World War II. There was something touchingly sad about the cloth. It was intriguing that someone facing such a perilous journey would have chosen this item to bring with them. If a piece of fabric could have an innocence, then this one certainly did. I was moved by the simplicity of the design and the fact it was so obviously handmade.
Peggy, seeing I really liked it, gave it to me. Afterwards, I wondered who had made the cloth all those years ago. I looked up the V & A Museum website, and there I discovered several, similar cloths made in Eastern Europe during the mid- 19th Century.
For every subsequent family celebration, I used the cloth with a set of China I was given when I got married. “Have you not thrown out that ‘ould thing,” my teenage daughters said disparagingly. And I told them how one hundred and fifty years ago, women would have sat together under light from oil lamps, or candles, and sewn this cloth, probably for some young girl’s trousseau - and during the sewing, there would be the usual telling of stories, of gossip, and family tales. From then on, my daughters looked at the cloth with renewed respect.
Now I think back over the last twenty years of my family and friends who ate and drank around my table, their laughter and tears, and the stories they told, making new memories to add to our rambling family history.
Then out of the blue some years ago, I learned that my mother-in-law’s father was originally Jewish. He died when she was a small child, and she never knew. It was a family secret, unspoken for so long that it was simply forgotten, discovered almost accidentally at a family gathering when one of my in-laws asked a cousin why they had different names – Wilson and Wingard. He replied, “Oh, didn’t you know, our grandfathers were Jewish, but yours changed his name”. The knowledge haunted me - my daughters should understand their heritage, know their history, and how this collective ‘forgetting’ had come to pass.
So, I started to research my husband’s ancestors to discover that they originally came from Kornyn, southwest of Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. I had no idea of the tragedy that was subsequently to unfold in the area with the present-day Russian invasion.
I tried to imagine what life was like then for the Wingards. I discovered a story similar to that of thousands of other Jews forced to uproot their lives and flee from bigotry and persecution. Cazreil, my husband’s great-grandfather had fled during the early 1850s from Kornyn, which was part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, an area of the Russian Empire where Jews were forced to live. Possibly he moved to the other side of Europe to avoid conscription into Tsar Nicholas’ army, which was then engaged in the Crimean War, or simply to escape from the proscriptive laws limiting what Jews could and could not do.
Eventually he settled in London, where he worked as a tailor. His son, Percival, moved to Dublin and in 1913 married a Dublin woman, Margaret Morgan, It was he who changed the family name to Wilson. In a continuation of the family tradition, he eventually became a successful ladies’ tailor trading as Percival M. Wilson with premises on 86, Grafton Street.
However, the story behind their flight from persecution was not always quite so upbeat. There were many highs and lows along their journey. As happened in London in 1902, when due to illness, or simply old age my husband’s great-greatgrandmother was forced to stay in the workhouse in Tower Hamlets where she died at the age of 91.
But it was the family’s early years which fascinated me. My journey had uncovered a rich tapestry of Jewish life in mid-19th Century Europe, and this inspired me to write A Perfect Copy, an historical mystery set between Russia, Vienna and London. Writing novels set in the past and present has certain challenges for an author. One of these is how to move seamlessly from the past to the present so that it is not a jarring experience for the reader. Some writers use diaries, or family letters. In the case of A Perfect Copy my main device was a family portrait of a mysterious, glamorous ancestor. But I also needed other props to bring the past and its secrets alive. The main one had to be the tablecloth which I refer to in the opening scene set in Kornyn, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement.
Now that the family research and the novel are finished, the cloth will have a new story to tell, to my daughters and their children, and their children too. It will become a physical link between their past and present. Each time they see it they will remember their Jewish heritage, and hopefully, their past will never again need to be forgotten.
I now also have a clearer understanding of the deep significance of the cloth to the woman who carried it so carefully across war-torn Europe all those years ago. At a time when group photographs were few and far between, objects like the cloth represented precious memories of a family’s time spent together. Over the last weeks as I watched Ukraine’s tragedy unfold, I have asked myself if I had to flee for my life, what would I bring? And I wonder what precious things the brave women of Ukraine are bringing with them today, as they abandon their homes, leave life as they know it, and head off with their children into an unknown and highly uncertain future.