By Sharon Tyers
My mother was a sock linker in a hosiery factory in Leicester for forty years. Sometimes she called herself an overlocker. As a child I had no idea what that meant and all I knew about socks was that she brought home the rejects from the factory floor, the ones that didn’t pass muster, for me to wear. As a result, when I was writing her story, there were many challenges along the way.
Firstly, the hosiery industry in Leicester doesn’t exist anymore but when I was growing up it was proud to say it was "a city that clothed the world." How was I to capture those times when the factories had disappeared from sight? Secondly, by the time I decided to write my mother’s story she was incapacitated and bedridden in the final throes of vascular dementia and had no voice – she could not share her memories with me. Thirdly, the moral dilemma as to whether I had the right to write about my mother’s life caused me much unrest and sleepless nights.
My first decision was to return to the city of my birth, which I left in 1979 at the age of nineteen, and retrace my steps, but that too was beset with problems. Leicester Market, a favourite haunt, where mum would drag me from stall to stall filling her shopping bag with unwashed potatoes, wet lettuces and muddy carrots, was being dug up. Huge, faceless, white boards hid its faded glory and bulldozers drowned out the shouts of the few remaining stall holders. Mum’s factory, where she started work on her fourteenth birthday in 1946, had been converted into student accommodation and was ironically called The Hosiery Factory. The chimney was still there, though, and I stood outside and imagined it smoking when mum arrived and disappeared through the enormous gates to spend the next forty years of her life. Her life may not have been glamorous but I would swear as I stood there, I could hear the giggles she shared with the other women.
Indeed, on Facebook, when I posted a picture of The Leicester Seamstress, who stands on the corner of Hotel Street, over 700 local people came forward to share their love of what she represented – the ordinary hard-working hosiery operator. I knew then I had to continue to write about not only my mother’s life but their recollections too.
So, I kept walking through the past, from Newarke where the Midland Red bus used to drop us off, through the Magazine arch and up into St Martin’s, where we never knew we were walking over the bones of Richard III who would be found thirty years later. Most importantly, I needed to stand in Fox Lane, that shortcut we took between Marks and Lewis’s where the strongman in a thin vest lifted weights for the entertainment of the shoppers and the accordion player squeezed out Lady of Spain.
These may not be the most sophisticated research methods employed by writers but I was there, you see, and I’ve realised the pictures are still in my head even if they are not still on the streets of Leicester. I completed my book in June of this year and called it The Wrong Socks.
Sharon Tyers taught English for many years at The Blue Coat School in Liverpool and now lives in North Wales where her first book, Linen and Rooks, is set. An essay, The Lost Dens of Leicester, was published by Little Toller/The Clearing in August 2025, again about her Leicester childhood. She is currently writing After the Fair, the untold story of Susan Henchard, from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She gives talks in libraries and bookshops and campaigns for better oratory skills in schools. She misses Leicester. Her website is here.
