Thimbles

by David Wiseman

A twentieth-century girl is magically transported through time to join the 1819 demonstration which ended in tragedy for Manchester mill workers seeking the right to vote.

Genres: Time Travel, Historical Fiction, Fantasy

134 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1982

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is there a name for the phenomenon where you've read a book by the same author and loved it, and then read a subsequent book which failed to live up to your high expectations.. and you're not sure you're able to judge the second book fairly as a result? "Second-book following a favourite by same author"-bias?

I feel the same way about this book as I do Penelope Lively's A Stitch in Time: excellent author, interesting concept, boring subject (both feature embroidered samplers from young girls in days gone by - not exactly the liveliest pasttime) and slow pacing.

The first David Wiseman book I ever read, Adam's Common, became a new favourite - it was an absolute delight! In it, we have tall girl, Bostonian Peggy Donovan, newly moved to an ugly industrial English town and fighting to save the only beautiful area from development. All I knew going into that one was that the Common was maybe haunted, and there was a mystery about it. What I didn't expect was a dual-time story, where the other timeline (in which we discover why the Common was named for Adam) was far, far more exciting than the main one! (Seriously, check that book out!). An unexpected roller coaster of action, that one.

Unfortunately, Thimbles just isn't that exciting. There are three timelines, not two, and the past ones are again much more exciting than protagonist Cathy's.

In Cathy's time (early 80s?), her father is starting problems for the establishment at the local factory in a bid to unionize the workers. The story starts out strongly - eleven year old Cathy is angry at her father for spoiling her birthday and a cancelled class trip to Paris, and cannot understand why her father is preoccupied with worker safety and rights. Her self-centeredness seems totally appropriate to her age, and I felt the story was shaping up very nicely when she was sent away to her Grandmother's in Cornwall as factory lock-outs, angry unemployed men, and television news reporters wreak havoc on the family's lives.

Once she arrives, her story slows considerably, in order to allow her time to spend in an deceased great aunt's trusseau and to experience timeslip by wearing, spoiler-that-isn't-a-spoiler, the inherited thimbles of different owners on her finger. Cathy gets the flu, the weather in Cornwall is stormy and unfit for visiting the beach, and so forth. I think Wiseman put a lot of effort into developing the characters of her grandparents, but there was just too much 'stalling' in the main timeline for my liking. Here was the most aggravating part for me, where Cathy has managed to meet up with recurrent holiday friend Mandy:

'Let's go to the old camp,' she said, and set off along a path which led away from the cottage. In a previous year, instead of going to the sands, they had wandered in the neighbourhood of the cottage and had discovered a strange, stone-littered mound, planted round its rim with gnarled, wind-swept, stunted trees. It was an ancient Iron Age hill fort, Pops had said when they told him where they had been. Ever since, they had visited it at least once each holiday, and had picknicked there.
'Yes, let's,' said Mandy. 'It's spooky. I like it.'
It was spooky, they both felt, or pretended to feel. They told each other their imaginings, stories to curdle the blood, and sometimes ended by being frightened of their own pretence. It had an atmosphere of age, of belonging to a long-dead past, a long-dead people.
They always hoped, in their wanderings over the hill, to come upon something, some physical thing, and old axe-head or something that had belonged to these distant folk, but all they ever found was a rusting, empty sardine tin, remnant of someone else's picnic.
'It's spooky, can't you feel it?' said Mandy when they reached the rampart which circled the summit.
'Yes,' said Cathy, but she couldn't feel it, she only think it. She had to make herself recognize the oldness of the place. Not like her feeling this morning or yesterday, with the thimbles. Then, when she had fitted them to her finger, there had been no denying the reality of the time past. It had been there with her and she had been part of it. Now, here on the hill fort, she did not belong. She could imagine what it might have been like and, with an effort, she could people this place with men and women and children. But it was an imagination she could control.
The other was different. Over that she had no control. It governed her.
'Come on, Cathy,' Mandy called from the far rim of the rampart. 'I've found something.' Her voice held triumph and excitement. 'Come on,' she repeated impatiently.
Cathy tore herself back to the present, away from the vision of a girl which had swept across her mind - not the girl of the miniature, with her dark ringlets and the serious eyes, but another, open-mouthed, full of laughter, with fair curly hair tumbling about her rosy cheeks. She had held something in her hand and, for a moment, Cathy thought she knew what it was, had seen it, had held it herself.
'Look,' said Mandy. 'What do you think it is? It's old, you can tell that.'
Cathy looked at the object in Mandy's hand. It was like a cup, but without a handle, made of stone she thought at first, but then decided it was not of stone but of baked clay.
'What is it? Do you know?' asked Mandy, proud of her discovery.
Cathy had no idea what it might be. She tried to hide her lack of interest from Mandy.
'I don't know, but Pops might be able to tell us.'
'It's old anyway,' said Mandy, disappointed at Cathy's tone.
Cathy was sorry she'd not hidden her feelings. She could not understand herself. Usually she would have been as excited as Mandy at finding something on the fort.
'Where did you find it?' she asked. 'There might be other things.'
There was nothing else of interest, though, and Mandy took her find away with her without getting Pop's opinion.

I felt as let down as Mandy, because the Iron Age hill fort was much more interesting than what was happening in the past (at this point, anyway).

So here's where the massive spoilers come in, though I suppose the summary already alludes to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 Manchester, where mill workers and others organized a peaceful demonstration to demand Universal Suffrage and parliamentary representation for Manchester, as well as worker's rights. I learned so much about this tragic event from this book, and if you are interested in the history here, this book is extremely relevant and emotive. I highly recommend it for these purposes.

The trouble is that all of the flashbacks/timeslip deal with the run up to the massacre, and so there's not a lot of action happening anywhere. This is why I was so critical of Cathy's timeline - her getting the flu and being house bound helped to keep her in the vicinity of the thimbles but was extraordinarily dull.

And now for spoiler tags: In one of the timelines, that of the golden thimble, we have wealthy young Sophia (whose cocky, violent-natured elder brother joins the infamous Manchester Yeomanry), bored out of her mind and trying to complete an embroidered sampler before her twelfth birthday (all three girls share the birthdate of 16 August, same as the massacre). Sophia witnesses the undeserved slaughter of the demonstraters and drops her sampler in disgust at her brother's triumphant return with a souvenir of the massacre for her. This is meant to explain why the sampler was never completed. I felt it made little sense, because her mother was insisting that she sew, even on her birthday, in order to finish the sampler which stated it was completed before her twelfth birthday. There was only the year, 1819, left to add. If the sight of the congealing blood in the street had caused her to vomit all over her basket of embroidery silks, then I would understand why that stupid sampler was put away and forgotten. Or if it has become tear-stained and given to the domestic staff to help clean (unsuccessfully) and then it was laid aside, forgotten.. that would have also made sense to me. I just didn't get enough of a connection, emotional or physical, in Sophia's timeline.

Kate's, on the other hand, is far more interesting, as her family is marching in the demonstration, and she had sewn the red velvet "Libertas" cap for the top of the pole (this signifcance is explained, and I enjoyed learning about it). I cared about the characters in this family, I felt the correlation to Cathy's own family, and I worried about how they'd each fare in the coming massacre. This part was very engaging, though again, we have another young girl embroidering, laboriously. It's just not the exciting sort of activity to drive a lot of action.

In the end, it was alright - GREAT if you care about Manchester history, suffrage in the U.K. and if you need reminding that, as the Author's Note (afterword) says, "The rights we enjoy as citizens - the right to vote (or the right to organize in trade unions) - do not come to a people without effort.".

I will take this opportunity to promote my public Goodreads Group, "A Book & a Related Gift" (https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...), because I have a suggestion for a set of used books and some associated physical accompaniments:

Gift Bundle:
Octagon Magic
A Stitch in Time
Thimbles
& a pair of golden stork embroidery scissors (from Octagon Magic), linen and a frame for a sampler, and embroidery floss, for a young reader interested in needlework. (See my post on that here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ). All three of these books are out of print, but can be easily found on Abebooks, Thriftbooks, etc.

[Jennifer Galloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like this book. It is about a girl who is forced to go and spend the summer with her Grandfather and Grandmother. While there they are going through some a trunk that had been left to her grandmother by her great Aunt. In the trunk Cathy finds two thimbles a gold one and tattered old one. However she soon finds these are no ordinary thimbles, each one takes her back in time to Kate or Sophia two girls from a 1819 demonstration of the Manchester Mill workers. Through the thimbles she learns about each girls excitement and despair of this fateful day.