WHAT I TREASURE Grandad’s pea green jumper By Emily Chilvers

My grandad Roy was a very well-dressed man, from a generation never to be seen in anything other than a smart shirt and trousers – even if he was gardening. And he’d often be wearing a nice jumper to complete the look. Right up until he died, whenever I would see him in one, I’d say, “What colour are you wearing today, Grandad?” and he’d look down at his jumper and give it a name. Not just ‘red’ or ‘yellow’, but something descriptive like ‘mustard’ or ‘panther black’. My favourite was ‘pea green’, as it summed him up so well, always found in the garden tending to his plants and enjoying the spring and summer months the most, when everything was green and in full bloom. I owe my love of the garden, for colour and my creativity to him. He spent his life in the building trade, becoming the foreman of a construction company and, as children, we’d spend weekends with him building things in the shed or painting. That’s where all the names for colours came from, as his box of watercolours with their superb names would be laid out on the table.

When I went off to university to study ceramics, I thought to turn all his jumper colours into glazes that I could use on my pots. I rang him to explain my idea and asked if I could go round and take a picture of his jumpers for reference. As my nan always recounts the story, never failing to laugh as she does, he came off the phone and said, “I don’t know what on earth she’s doing,

Bet, but she’s going to turn me into a pot!” When I arrived, he’d hung all his jumpers up along the picture rail in colour order and there he stood at the end in my favourite pea green one. I’ll always treasure the photo that I captured of him with his cheeky grin wearing the jumper that I now treasure since he died. It’s a symbol of so many things about

“He’d hung all his jumpers up and stood at the end in my favourite pea green one”

him and it still has the faint smell of his cigar. The funny thing is that it’s not even really the colour of a pea, but it never mattered: it will always be pea green to me.

I never got round to making all the jumper colours into glazes, but I managed to make the most important one – pea green – to glaze the vases I made for our wedding – we got married on his birthday. For us, for one day only, the phrase being ‘something borrowed, something blue’ became ‘something green’, something pea green in loving memory of my wonderful grandad.

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