Filey – Mrs Hunter’s Pattern: Week 8 – 20 June

I’ve started volunteering at the local museum on Saturday afternoons. It’s a lot of fun to spend a few hours welcoming visitors, getting them oriented and sending them off to explore the collections with a guidebook, and sometimes chatting with them when they get back. It’s not so very far removed from my old life as a local government archivist, but now I’ve moved into middle management I spend more time interacting with a computer screen than face-to-face with the public. (You’d think this would be perfect for misanthropic me—I’m a little surprised myself—but it turns out I actually quite like people. Maybe it helps that they’ve usually just given me money.)

St Fergus’ from across the river

The museum’s surprisingly big, and is sort of a cross between the Tardis and Ghormenghast Castle, all winding stairs and corridors, unexpected galleries and annexes, and absolutely crammed with stuff. There’s a working lighthouse light from Noss Head, a smithy and a cooperage, a kippering kiln that could smoke up to 8,000 herring (once Wick had fifty such kilns in operation; not for nothing was it known as “Herringopolis”, though personally I prefer its other soubriquet, “the Sodom of the North”). There’s the old schoolroom from the abandoned island community of Stroma just north of John O’Groats, and a replica of the Johnston photographic studio where all the marvellous glass plate negatives that make up the Johnston Collection were taken. There’s even—*coughs modestly*—a gallery where modern copies of ganseys from Caithness and elsewhere are displayed.

Yellow Flag Iris

Speaking of ganseys, behold! The first sleeve is completed, even unto its entirety, and all that remaineth is to grit my teeth, pick up the stitches around the armhole of the other sleeve and Get It Done. And looking at it in it’s nearly-finished state, all those cables (and their flanking purl stitches) really do act like pleats, drawing the fabric in so that it looks very compact; I keep fighting the urge to water it, in hopes it will expand like a parched flower. But it’s bigger than looks, and washing and blocking should teach it who’s boss.

Hawthorn bough

It’s people and their stories that make volunteering in the museum so interesting. I was talking to one lady who said that her mother remembered when she was a little girl in Wick in the Second World War. One time a German plane came low over Bridge Street. She was too young to do anything but stare, even when it opened fire, until a man knocked her down into a doorway and threw himself over her. She remembered the feel of his tin helmet on her head, when he hastily shoved it on to protect her. Incredible. Another time I was talking to a couple of ladies. One was interested in exploring lighthouses, but the access road to one she wanted to visit was marked Private. “That’s down by the cemetery,” the other said. “You can always say you’re visiting it if anyone asks”. And when the other still demurred, she said: “Tell you what, you can look like you’ve got business there. Take a shovel.”