Fiona O’Connor

Where I went to school little girls learned to sew. In 1968 the school inspectorate praised the girls of Belgrove National School in Dublin, ‘for the neatness of their handwriting, and, above all, for their needlework’. We sat for hours, two by two, in rows of wooden desks sewing squares of white calico. Starting from 1st class we learned ‘hemming, seaming, stitching’, according to our needlework syllabus book, which was written for Irish schoolgirls in the mid-eighteen hundreds. ‘1) LayRead more

Mira Robertson

A piece of clothing that haunts you? The coat was olive green, knee length, and made of hairy wool that gave it a somewhat shaggy appearance. To my current-day eye, stylish and unique, yet back then, the source of humiliation and an object of passionate loathing. 1965. I was eleven and in my first year at boarding school. How, I raged, could she (my mother) have sent me off with such a horror when a camelhair coat was de rigueurRead more