Patched style

Patched style

This dressing gown was hand stitched by Natalia Mary Levett, known as Molly, during the long, dark and lonely days of 1942 while she looked after her first child.

Her sons John and Christopher Pearson describe her making the dressing gown: “She said she begged, borrowed and stole the materials from curtains, jumble sales and old clothes except the patch of white parachute silk which came from a German fighter pilot who had jumped from his burning aircraft and landed on her father’s farm. She defiantly, deliberately and triumphally sewed it so that she would always sit on it! The brass buttons - RAF, RAMC and the Fire Brigade - may well have been obtained while she was based in Luton.

Molly was born 25th December 1914, her childhood was spent on her father’s hop farm in Bodiam, East Sussex and she went to school in Hastings. On leaving school she trained at the Rachel Macmillan Training College in Deptford in September 1933 to be a nursery schoolteacher and spent six years there, first as a student and latterly as Head of the College’s Nursery School.

With the coming of war in 1939, she moved to Luton to become Head of a new nursery school and met her husband to be, Dr Noel Pearson, a local doctor.  They were married in April 1942 and went to live in Shaftesbury, Dorset. Noel Pearson was called up for service in the RAMC and spent three years in India before being de-mobbed and on his return, they both settled permanently in Marnhull, North Dorset.  She died on 25th June 2014 aged 99 in Charminster, Dorchester.