I
TURNHOUT
Lace Children of the North
Lace is the flower of Belgium; the white blossom that springs from the teeming plains of the Flanders, from the agricultural districts, and from the mournful Campine of the North. During the long and solitary winters, when work in the fields is impossible, thousands of women and girls and little children turn to their lace cushions, and dreary rooms are enlivened by the music of the flying bobbins. If the lace is Needle Point, and lacks the accompanying click-clack of the shifting fuseaux, it nevertheless gives purpose and value to the otherwise almost unsupportable winter days. However, despite the time that must be subtracted for weeding, for gathering the all-important potato crop, and for other farm duties, summer with its bright light and long day, is the true lace season; it is only then that some of the finest varieties can be executed. Coarser pieces must be substituted for the dull, eye-straining days.
To be sure, some lace-making is still carried on in certain cities, but very little. This delicate métier can not successfully combat the influences of the social and industrial groupings of the larger centers; the living wage, the shorter hours, the distractions of cinéma and café. The cities remain the logical centers for the normal and training-schools, for assembling, and display, and sale; but the age-old patience of the lace-maker is born of a certain ignorance and isolation. This does not mean that the industry may not persist still on the fringes of some of the larger cities, or flourish in nearby villages—it does; and in three conspicuous instances, until the war, it remained the dominating activity of a city. Bruges, Ypres, and Turnhout, could truly be called “lace cities.” Now there are but two; for Ypres, the pearl of Flanders, is gone.
Turnhout, a town of 24,000 inhabitants, in the Northern Campine district, is not only a “lace city,” counting 6,000 workers, but if one considers its long list of excellent lace-schools, the fine varieties made there, and the quality of the workmanship, it appears sufficiently important to challenge the leadership of Bruges. However, Turnhout stands practically alone in the north, while Bruges is the center of western Flanders, one of the largest lace contributing areas in Belgium, and promises, therefore, to hold for a long time her title of first lace-city.
It is strange to think of Turnhout as a remote town, since it is scarcely two hours by motor from Antwerp; but the first glimpse of the intervening sand wastes of the Campine region awakens at once a sensation of loneliness, of isolation. I made the journey in late November, reaching Turnhout about noon of a low gray day, just as hundreds of golden-haired children—no mists could dull the bright gold of their hair—were clattering along the stone sidewalks in their wooden shoes, on their way home from school. As always, I marveled at the way they could leap and run without losing their sabots. They were “lace children,” nearly all of them part of the little army of 1,800 in the lace-schools, and because of the intelligent work of the soup-kitchens and dining-rooms for debilitated children during the four years of war, were probably, many of them, in better physical condition than they had been at its beginning. The women of the Brussels Lace Committee had succeeded, too, in augmenting their food ration from time to time. Their chief visible need was for stockings and shoes—and I knew from the teachers later that they sadly lacked underclothes. Mothers can patch and repatch, and add in various ways to outer garments; but after a certain number of washings, undergarments simply disappear.
I went first to the convent of the Abbé Berraly which, during the war, encouraged by the advice and support of the Lace Committee, has developed into the model school of Belgium. It is situated in a crowded part of the town, but its own fine brick buildings cluster about a spacious courtyard and vegetable gardens. In summer the children work much out of doors, tho when they are inside their class-rooms it seems still impossible for the teachers to break with the tradition of the closed window.
I began my visit in a little room at the right of the entrance hall, where six older girls were still at work, tho the 500 other pupils had gone for their lunch. Dozens of rubbed carbon copies of lace patterns were pinned to the walls along with executed samples of the lace they represented. This was a piqué class-room; the young women seated at high, narrow tables, were carefully at work on pieces of glossy green cardboard on which the lace design had been drawn and which they were pricking with pins, or covering with tiny holes, that indicate the position of the pins that must hold the thread as it is twisted or looped or braided, by the worker. The cardboard piqué is in a sense both the beginning and the end of the lace course; the beginning, since no pupil can start his lace without the piqué, or interpreted pattern, and the end, since it is the most difficult of all the processes in the technique of the lace. The piqueuse must understand the design and its practical execution, must interpret the picture to the worker in terms of pin-pricks marking the progress of her thread. A good piqueuse knows immediately, on looking at a drawing, whether it is a true lace design, or must be adapted, and also in which kind of lace it can be best exprest. As she shifts a pin-prick less than a hair’s width to the left or to the right she varies appreciably the resulting mesh or flower. She has considerable liberty in deciding which particular stitches will be most effective to fill in the jours, or open-work spaces indicated in the pattern.