Necessary as Blood

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Umbra Sumus-“We are shadows.”

– Inscription on the sundial of the Huguenot church, now the Jamme Masjid mosque, on Brick Lane

That Sunday began like any ordinary Sunday, except that Naz, Sandra’s husband, had gone in to work for a few hours at his law office, an unusual breach of family protocol for him.

Having pushed aside her initial irritation, Sandra had decided to use the time for one of her own projects, and after breakfast and chores she and Charlotte had gone up to her studio on the top floor of the house.

After two hours’ work, Sandra stepped back, frowning, from the swatches of fabric she had pinned to the muslin stretched over the work frame in her studio. The carefully shaped pieces of material overlapped, forming a kaleidoscope of images, so that at first the whole appeared abstract, but on closer inspection, shapes appeared: streets, buildings, people, birds, other animals, flowers-all representing in some way the history and culture of Sandra’s particular part of London, the East End, in and around Brick Lane.

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