Knitting for the cause.

This story was sent to me by regular post, and while I typed it in, the words are exactly as the authour wrote them. No editing of any kind was done. Any spelling mistakes, are mine.

Nick.

When the second world war began in 1939, I was ten years old. Not old enough to be as worried and very concerned as where the adults in the community. Who, of the men, might be "called up" and have to leave their families and go off to Europe to fight in the war. But I was old enough to have some appreciation of the horrors of war. Of course we had no such communication media as modern televeision. We did not even have an electric radio. Coverage of the war for us was mostly done by the print media, newspapers and magazines. A newspaper was delivered daily to our mailbox.

Even as children, though, we where encouraged to make what ever contribution we could to the war effort. For my part, it was knitting.

One of the functions of the Red Cross was to supply knitted garments to the servicemen overseas. In our area, the Red Cross supplied wool to anyone who could knit, so most farm women, members of the womens institute and otehr social groups where supplied with all the knitting wool they wished to have to knit items for the servicemen.

In our school, the teacher also began a knitting program among the students, with wool supplied by the Red Cross. Because of our commitment to helping in the war effort, we children where allowed to knit during school hours whenever we had spare time.

Being a knitter from quite a young age, I began knitting in earnest and was soon producing a good quantity of items. We where supplied with navy wool to knit for sailors, khakli for the soldiers and air force blue for the airmen. The knitting needles and pattersn for socks, mitts, scarves and helmets where also supplied by the Red Cross.

I knitted during school hours and I knitted at home. As I recall, I knitted a total of 35 items, the very large sweaters of course, taking a few weeks to complete. But I loved to knit and i felt I was really doing something worth while.

The wool came in large skeins so it had to be wound into balls before starting to knit. We girls always recruited the boys who did not knit, into helping with this part of the project. They held out their arms to hold the skeins of wool while we wound the wool into balls. Someone from the Red Cross arrived at the school with the woolen skeins for us and to pick up the items which we had finished knitting.

We where even taught the proper way to wind a ball of wool on our thumb so that the ball of wool would sit flat (and not roll away)and the wool would exit the ball and not tangle, rather than the wool unwinding from the outside of the ball. It is a technique I use to this day whenever I purchase a skein of wool instead of a ball of wool.

Recently, while searching through my several books of knitting patterns, for a particular reason, I cam across the instruction booklets handed out to me by the Red Cross those many years ago. Why I had kept them I do not know, but there they where. Treasures.

Jean Marshall.