Woven Lives: Oral History & Creative Writing

In February 2026 students from the University of Sussex listened to oral histories of Ditchling village gathered through the Sussex Retold project. They also visited the It Takes a Village exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft. Both the show, and the interviews, were used to create poetry and prose. Their creative writing contributes to ongoing efforts to reimagine the cultural history of Ditchling, weaving in new perspectives and voices.
Evie Davis wrote a poem entitled ‘Warp – Southdown, Weft – Pyrenees’, which dialogues with an Ethel Mairet textile sample that combined threads from different places. The poem has two stanzas, which are presented as if they were vertical and horizontal threads, loosely woven together. The poem was also inspired by an oral history with weaver Jenny KilBride, in which she spoke of ‘truth to materials’: of not forcing or bending threads into a required shape.

Detail from Evie Davis, ‘Warp – Southdown, Weft – Pyrenees’, 2026

Weaving was also a theme visually and verbally explored by Isabella Mecca, who wrote a poem that picked up the use of yellow thread in Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen’s 1951 Festival of Britain curtain for the Royal Festival Hall. The poem also responded to the oral history with textile artist Omeima Mudawi-Rowlings, in which she considers how the weavers’ travels across India, Asia, and Europe influenced their work.

Isabella Mecca, ‘Yellow Thread’, 2026

Ditchling’s connections to the wider world were also explored by Ellie Fawbert, who responded to Anthony Kalume’s interview, in which he challenged the ‘Eurocentric way of looking at Arts and Crafts’. She reflected on how her British and Korean heritage shaped her interactions with the museum exhibits. Her short story, ‘Lesser Dragons’, was prompted by an encounter with a wyvern finial on display in the museum, which reminded her of Korean ‘Chuidu (취두)’, a ‘dragon-esque decorative roof tile which symbolises protection and prosperity.’ The story features an argument between the wyvern and a dragon called Imugi Chuidu, who cannot understand why there cannot be two guardians of the village: ‘I too am from this village. It has been my home for the last thirteen hundred years. I am proud to serve as its guardian also […] We both love this place, do we not?’
Dialoguing with the interviews through creative writing prompted reflection on what aspects of Ditchling makers’ ethos resonated today. Lauren Ralph Beales wrote a story that responded to an interview with goldsmith, Anton Pruden, grandson of Dunstan Pruden, a member of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. The story describes an unnamed character’s decision to make an engagement ring: ‘Softening the shiny sheet with burning heat, it bent and curved to make the two ends meet.’ The piece concludes with a verse that echoes the Guild’s commitment to things well made: ‘Let good work be the heart of life.’
Emily-Rose Chantrill-Cheyette wrote ‘A Village Dance: A Play for Puppets’, which engaged with an oral history with Lucie Broadbent Smith, great niece of Hilary and Joanna Bourne. The interview drew attention to the museum’s collection of posters for village events, and also reminisced about a puppet made by Guild member Hilary Pepler. His book on Mimes was also a provocation for exploring silent forms of communication: ‘action, unaided by spoken word’.
Oral histories can be a way of challenging the silences that emerge from power imbalances: they question whose lives archives remember, and whose lives are forgotten. Quincy Coulter Young wrote a poem entitled ‘A Place for Puppets’, which offered the perspective of a Ditchling barman:

You won’t see me in museums,

No portraits fair or framed;

Just lines and spaces in the foam,

My talent, never named.

Space was also made for stories of non-human lives. Florrie Petit wrote about Ditchling plants. Starting in the churchyard close to the museum, she noticed the ‘lichens’ that ‘lay on the graves of those who had lived before’, ‘honouring […] ancestors by decorating them in splotches of gold and rust.’ The movement of plants are meshed with craft practices: ‘Pale green and grey, like sea foam, they curl and curve from the bark to the sky, like thin scraps of strong paper carefully weaved and knitted together – fungus and algae intertwined.’ Later, planting and weaving are further connected, in a reflection on the Joanna Bourne Dye Garden, and on Head Gardener Liz Pope’s oral history: ‘Her aims are to create “a rainbow of dye plants”’, which would ‘celebrate the colourful tapestry of craftspeople who lived and worked in Ditchling.’
What emerges from the project is a sense of the multiplicity of lives at Ditchling; people with different experiences and perspectives on making of all kinds. Lydia Sealey, in her poem ‘Along the Narrow Road to Ditchling’, drew on an interview with textile conservator Zenzie Tinker to think about Amy Sawyer’s turn to embroidery when damage to her arm meant she could no longer use paints: ‘Whose hands clutched thread and thimble, / Her fingers once lean and nimble’. The poem combines Sawyer’s story with visions of the Guild meeting ‘in the glow of fading candlelight’, sparked by Ewan Clayton’s oral history, and also with allusions to Doris Hall’s book Growing up in Ditchling.

Timothy Woodbridge’s poem, ‘Ditchling: a Woven Village’, also emphasised the plurality of perspectives on the place, combining fragments of interviews with Lucie Broadbent-Smith, Zenzie Tinker, Janet Cragg, Liz Hankins, Anthony Kalume, and Ewan Clayton. Drawing an analogy to Mairet’s textiles, the poem overlaid voices from both past and present. A reference to the work of Amy Sawyer reflects the form of the poem as a whole:

I do patchwork, that’s what I do.
I keep all my bits of fabric
and then combine them into something else.

The patchwork metaphor also speaks beautifully of what creative writing can do with oral history: taking up fragments of memory and making them into something new.
The writings created after the trip rewove, ‘Threads of a life full of learning and experimentation’. These words by Ren Slade were part of an evocative response to an interview with John Vernon Lord; the piece showed how, in Ditchling, art and craft, place and community, human and non-human lives are inseparable: ‘Spirals, landscapes of green, portraits of neighbours, silver carvings of soldiers long before you existed, thistle berries growing strong, hawthorn sprinkled everywhere.’

Summary by Dr Hope Wolf. Quotations are from writing created as part of the Sussex Modernism course at the University of Sussex.