On the first Saturday in September, Aunt Dilys spread four balls of wool across the kitchen table. Jonah was 11 years old, and he had asked her twice to teach him to knit. She agreed at once, though she set one firm condition before they started.⏎
"We always start with a tension square, before anything else," she told him.⏎
"No square means no jumper, and that rule has never changed," she added. Jonah thought it sounded like a rule she had invented on the spot.⏎
Every pattern in her folder began the same way, in small print near the top. The pattern asked for 22 stitches and thirty rows in a square of 10 centimetres. Dilys handed him two needles, 4 mm across, and showed him how to hold them.⏎
"Tight hands make tight wool, and then the jumper doesn't fit anybody," she said. Jonah cast on 26 stitches, four more than the pattern wanted, because edges pull inwards.⏎
Jonah's first row took nine minutes, his second took six, and his third took four. By the fourth row he had stopped staring at his own left-hand fingers. They kept a notebook on the table, a thin one with a green cover. Every time he finished ten rows he wrote the number down (and the time beside it). His aunt wrote nothing; she watched him closely and drank her tea slowly. The notebook told the story in three columns: rows, minutes and dates.⏎
By the end of that first afternoon it showed forty rows and two hours. Jonah called that slow, but Dilys called it a fair beginning. The square came off the needles on Tuesday, and then the measuring began. Dilys pinned it flat on a folded towel and laid her ruler across the middle.⏎
"Count the stitches between those two pins and tell me what you've got," she said. Jonah counted 19, then counted again and got the very same answer twice.⏎
Jonah looked up and said, "Nineteen stitches isn't 22, so something is wrong here!"⏎
"It only means each stitch is too wide, so we'll try smaller needles," she said. They went down to 3 mm and started the whole square over again.⏎
The second try gave twenty-one stitches, which was closer, and the third gave 22. Then October arrived, and with it the real work of the whole jumper. The jumper needed a back, a front and two sleeves in the same grey wool. It came in eight balls of 50 grams each (400 grams of hard-wearing wool). His aunt weighed every ball on her kitchen scales before they started anything. She did not trust labels and wrote each weight into Jonah's notebook herself. The argument began on a wet Thursday evening in front of the television.⏎
Jonah had taken his knitting into the front room to watch a film about deep-sea fish. He came back with 60 new rows and a pleased look on his face. Dilys glanced over and asked, "You knitted that in front of the television, didn't you?" Jonah put down the wool and stared at her.⏎
"How can you tell that from over there?" "Because it is wider than the rest, and your hands go soft when your eyes wander," she said.⏎
Was his aunt right about the television, or was she simply teasing him? Jonah did not believe her, so they tested it, which is the sensible way. On Saturday he knitted 60 rows at the kitchen table with the radio on low. On Sunday he knitted the same number on the sofa, with the television going.⏎
Then they measured both pieces with the same ruler and the same two pins. The table piece came to 10 centimetres across 22 stitches, exactly as promised. The sofa piece came to 11 centimetres across the very same stitch count. One centimetre sounds like nothing at all, and Jonah said so straight away.⏎
"Over a whole sleeve it's not nothing, so multiply it and look," she said. He pushed the notebook across and said, "That would hang way down past my fingers!" They agreed a rule and wrote it inside the notebook's cover in careful capitals.⏎
The words filled two whole lines: TELEVISION IS FOR PLAIN ROWS ONLY. Anything that had to match another piece got done at the kitchen table. Why should one small square of wool matter so much to a whole jumper? Because every stitch after it copies the square, and mistakes copy just as well. Wool has a memory; it keeps the shape your hands give it. Dilys had one answer for every question: measure the thing and see.⏎
By the end of October the back was finished at 148 rows of plain knitting. The notebook showed twelve hours by then, spread across five weeks of evenings. November went slower, partly because of school and partly because of the sleeves. Sleeves have to grow wider as they go, which means counting all the time. He added two stitches every eighth row from forty-four at the sleeve's cuff upwards. He got the counting wrong twice and pulled the work back both times. Jonah held up the loose wool and asked, "Does everyone do that, or only beginners?" His aunt laughed and said, "Everyone does, and I've pulled a whole sleeve back once!"⏎
December was mostly sewing, which Jonah had not expected to enjoy at all. His aunt showed him how to join the shoulders with small even stitches. She showed him how to press each seam under a warm damp tea-towel. Nobody sees that part of the work; everybody notices it when it is missing. They finished on 13 December at twenty past four in the afternoon. The running total came to 41 hours, gathered over fourteen weeks. The wool left over weighed 25 grams, which his aunt kept for mending later. Jonah pulled the hand-made jumper over his head and stood still in the middle.⏎
Dilys walked round him twice, tugging the jumper's shoulder and saying nothing. The sleeves ended exactly where Jonah's wrists began on both arms. Jonah turned to the mirror and said, "It fits me properly, which I didn't expect!"⏎
"Of course it fits, because we didn't skip the square," his aunt said. She wrote the date on the last page and drew a line under it. Then she put two new balls of thin blue wool on the kitchen table.⏎
Jonah asked whether the same needles would do for this different wool. The answer was yes for the needles and no for the old square. This wool was thinner, so the whole test had to be done again. He groaned once and then cast on 26 stitches, which is what you do.