Motherload

The Bernina 730 While my mother lay dying of a brain tumour last summer, in a secluded Norfolk nursing home, hidden away in a suburb of Norwich, I would drive blindly up and down the M11 each week to be with her. On each trip, I would return down the motorway with things hopelessly ransacked from a home no longer occupied, cold and still. I brought her jewellery back for safekeeping, and some of her scarves to tuck in a bottom drawer. Later I brought thick blue wineglasses from Teheran, tea towels, handkerchieves, her pots and pans, even the cutlery I had grown up using, nearly five decades earlier, much to my children's annoyance. On one of these return trips, I don't remember when, I brought her Bernina sewing machine back to our home in London. For some months, the machine sat, squat in a pristine cream box, on top of her previous machine, which was in its own worn but sturdy green case, a clamp for its slide-on sewing table attached to the inside of the case, a...