Many socks in Persephone books are not knitted with love but with a cheerless sense of duty. To be fair, the need to keep supplying socks for others people's feet must, at times, have felt like a never-ending spiral of knitting in the round. In a marvellous phrase in her childhood memoir, The Other Day, Dorothy Whipple recalls her aunt's 'grim companion' knitting 'iron-grey socks on murderous steel needles'.