Difficult Knitting by Eve Machin

Difficult Knitting by Eve Machin

In Difficult Knitting Eve Machin, born in Bristol in 1915, gives a rich account of a childhood divided between two worlds: a comfortable, quintessentially English upper middle class world of servants, horses, spacious houses, public school and stiff upper lip - the world of her English father. And the world of her mother, daughter of a wealthy, sophisticated and very numerous Jewish family in Vienna, who had married against their wishes.

The marriage was catastrophic. Torn between a loving but alcoholic father, and a close but distinctly un-maternal mother, Eve's childhood is spent shuttling between England and Austria.

In England she lives the privileged, outwardly happy life of a typical schoolgirl of the time, set against the backdrop of her parents' turbulent and irreparably broken marriage. School gives her refuge, where she develops the deep love of literature and poetry that would come to expression much later in her life.

In Vienna she meets and mixes with an illustrious cast of playwrights and poets, artists and intellectuals - the last flowering of Vienna's golden age at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

With a keen eye and colourful pen Eve Machin depicts these two worlds, the one so apparently safe and secure, the other soon to be swept away in the Nazi deluge. The teenage Eve is immune: with her blonde hair and blue eyes she is seen by the young Nazis as the epitome of an 'Aryan' beauty. But the world she leaves behind when she finally returns to England to study for university is a world that she will never see again.