Emma’s Tapestry is an imaginative re-telling of a period in my maternal great-grandparents’ lives.
Emma’s TapestryAll my life, I have known I had a missing relative. That my great-grandfather Ernest disappeared out of my grandmother’s life one day and no one knew what had happened to him. All we knew, or thought we knew, was that he had been a merchant with an interest in textiles, and he had travelled to Australia one day and never returned. One day in 2018, I was in my living room with my mother, who was visiting. I was living in a former textile worker’s house at the time. She was seated below my great-grandmother Emma’s tapestry, which she had had framed and given to me a few years before, and we were talking about migration. I looked up at the tapestry and said to my mother, ‘Wouldn’
