If anyone reading this has ever tried to open a Singer bentwood case but doesn’t have the key…pay close attention… I squirted some oil into the lock and while I waited for it to settle, I went off to find the one tool that I would need to open the case. Without a key, these cases are literally impossible to open. The cases are held onto the machine-bases by very simple, but surprisingly effective locks. I cleaned off the dust and then set about opening the case. It was locked up tightly inside the curved ‘Bentwood’ case, cocooned by wood and shrouded in the dust of a decade. So I decided to haul it out of that godforsaken hole in the ground, and restore it to a level where it was once again a functional piece of machinery.Ĭarrying it as carefully as I could, I hauled gran’s Singer…because that’s what it is…out of the basement. Tough, simple, elegant, stubborn and impossible to destroy.īe there as it may, I knew that it wasn’t going to last long rotting downstairs in the basement. And it was the one machine that represented her character and told her life-story better than anything else. That machine was gran’s mainstay and anchor and rock for 50 years, or over half her life. With all of my father’s stories ringing around in my ears, I began to wonder what would happen? Now that she was gone, we had nothing left to remind us of gran, except her sewing-machine. The machine weighs 31lb, 4oz…about 15kg…and it wasn’t easy for an seven-year-old boy to haul that thing around!).
She would let nobody else touch it (except me, because I used to set it up for her every morning. She carried it EVERYWHERE with her and it was her baby. With her gone, and my father and I constantly discussing antiques and heirlooms and him telling me all the stuff that his family used to own, but which they don’t anymore, because they were thrown out, but which today would be worth a pretty penny…my mind was drawn towards gran’s sewing-machine. My grandmother died on the 28th of November, 2011, at the impressive age of 97. When gran moved to the nursing-home, her sewing-machine was put downstairs in the basement, where it has sat for the past 10 years. Unless they’ve seen it, or studied it, or treated it…they really don’t. Unless they’ve seen it firsthand and had to deal with it for years on end, don’t believe anyone who tells you that “I understand” when you talk about Alzheimers…because they don’t. Alzheimer’s is a horrible, crippling illness. Her Alzheimer’s Disease had become too much of a liability and a risk to house her safely at home.
She was always a bit set in her ways, and while she was more receptive to other modern technologies (at the age of 85, she knew how to use Microsoft Word, type, and print on a computer), she was absolutely dead-set that the only machine she would ever use for sewing was her own.Īround 2000-2003 (I forget exactly when), my grandmother had to move into a nursing-home. I remember when my father purchased her a modern machine, she barely touched it, and went back to using her Singer. Gran and her sewing-machine were inseparable. She repaired clothes for friends, she took in alterations from her church-group, and she repaired the many rips and tears in clothing that will come from it being worn by two lively grandsons…one of them was me. She brought the machine with her, and continued to use it almost every single day, up until about 2003. She used that machine for every single one of the thirty years that she ran her shop, and when my grandfather died in May, 1983, she closed the shop, retired, and immigrated to Australia. When my grandmother opened her shop, she was gifted a beautiful, and brand-new sewing-machine. She shared the premises with a women’s beauty-salon, and consequently, it was called the ‘ Kam Seng Beauty Parlour‘ ( Kam Seng is Cantonese. In 1953, she opened her own dressmaking and tailoring shop, in the Malaysian town of Batu Pahat. When the War ended, she occupied herself in looking after her husband’s three children by his first marriage. She married my grandfather during the Second World War in 1943. She had a mere five years’-worth of education at an English-language school in what was then Singapore Town, from 1921-1926. She was a first-generation Chinese-Singaporean, her parents having migrated to Singapore from southern China.
My grandmother was born on the 7th of May, 1914, in Singapore. This is a little outside the normal realm of what I post on this blog, but I figured it might make interesting reading.