The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Read online

  The Pattern in the Carpet

  A Personal History with Jigsaws

  Margaret Drabble

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2009

  * * *

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Drabble

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York, 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books,

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drabble, Margaret, date.

  The pattern in the carpet : a personal history with

  jigsaws / Margaret Drabble.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-547-24144-9

  1. Jigsaw puzzles—History. 2. Jigsaw puzzles—Psychological aspects.

  3. Drabble, Margaret, date. I. Title.

  GV1507.J5D73 2009

  793.73 —dc22 2009012214

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  For Phyllis Bloor

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  ix

  The Pattern in the Carpet

  1

  Notes on Quotations

  339

  Acknowledgements

  344

  Bibliography

  347

  * * *

  FOREWORD

  This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw puzzle, although that is what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. I have always been more interested in content than in form, and I have never been a tidy writer. My short stories would sprawl into novels, and one of my novels spread into a trilogy. This book started off as a small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiralled off in other directions, and now I am not sure what it is.

  I first thought of writing about jigsaws in the autumn of 2005, when my young friend Danny Hahn asked me to nominate an icon for a website. This government-sponsored project was collecting English icons to compose a 'Portrait of England', at a time when Englishness was the subject of much discussion. At random I chose the jigsaw, and if you click on 'Drabble' and 'jigsaw' and 'icon' you can find what I said. I knew little about jigsaws at this point, but soon discovered that they were indeed an English invention as well as a peculiarly English pastime. I then conceived the idea of writing a longer article on the subject, perhaps even a short book. This, I thought, would keep me busy for a while.

  I had recently finished a novel, which I intended to be my last, in which I believed myself to have achieved a state of calm and equilibrium. I was pleased with The Sea Lady and at peace with the world. It had been well understood by those whose judgement I most value, and I had said what I wanted to say. I liked the idea of writing something that would take me away from fiction into a primary world of facts and pictures, and I envisaged a brightly coloured illustrated book, glinting temptingly from the shelves of gallery and museum shops amongst the greetings cards, mugs and calendars portraying images from Van Gogh and Monet. It would make a pleasing Christmas present, packed with gems of esoteric information that I would gather, magpie-like, from libraries and toy museums and conversations with strangers. I would become a jigsaw expert. It would fill my time pleasantly, inoffensively. I didn't think anyone had done it before. I would write a harmless little book that, unlike two of my later novels, would not upset or annoy anybody.

  It didn't work out like that.

  Not long after I conceived of this project, my husband Michael Holroyd was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer and we entered a regime of radiotherapy and chemotherapy all too familiar to many of our age. He endured two major operations of hitherto unimagined horror, and our way of life changed. He dealt with this with his usual appearance of detachment and stoicism, but as the months went by I felt myself sinking deep into the paranoia and depression from which I thought I had at last, with the help of the sea lady, emerged. I was at the mercy of ill thoughts. Some of my usual resources for outwitting them, such as taking long solitary walks in the country, were not easily available. I couldn't concentrate much on reading, and television bored me, though DVDs, rented from a film club recommended by my sister Helen, were a help. We were more or less housebound, as we were told to avoid public places because Michael's immune system was weak, and I was afraid of poisoning him, for he was restricted to an unlikely diet consisting largely of white fish, white bread and mashed potato. I have always been a nervous cook, unduly conscious of dietary prohibitions and the plain dislikes of others, and the responsibility of providing food for someone in such a delicate state was a torment.

  The jigsaw project came to my rescue. I bought myself a black lacquer table for my study, where I could pass a painless hour or two, assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained pattern, and thus regain an illusion of control. But as I sat there, in the large, dark, high-ceilinged London room, in the pool of lamplight, I found my thoughts returning to the evenings I used to spend with my aunt when I was a child. Then I started to think of her old age, and the jigsaws we did together when she was in her eighties. Conscious of my own ageing, I began to wonder whether I might weave these memories into a book, as I explored the nature of childhood.

  This was dangerous terrain, and I should have been more wary about entering it, but my resistance was low. I told myself that there was nothing dangerous in my relationship with my aunt, and that my thoughts about her could offend nobody, but this was stupid of me. Any small thing may cause offence. My sister Susan, more widely known as the writer A. S. Byatt, said in an interview somewhere that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular teaset that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. She felt I had appropriated something that was not mine. And if a teapot may offend, so may an aunt or a jigsaw. Writers are territorial, and they resent intruders.

  I fictionalized my family background in a novel titled The Peppered Moth, which is in part about genetic inheritance. I scrupulously excluded any mention of my two sisters and my brother, and I suspect that, wisely, none of them read it, but I was made conscious of having trespassed. This made me very unhappy. I vowed then that I would not write about family matters again (a constraint which, for a writer of my age, constitutes a considerable loss) but as I sat at my dark table I began to think I could legitimately embark on a more limited project that would include memories of my aunt's house. These are on the whole happy memories, much happier than the material that became The Peppered Moth. I wanted to rescue them. Thinking about them cheered me up and recovered time past.

  But my new plan posed difficulties. I could not truthfully present myself as an only child (as some writers of memoirs have misleadingly done) and I have had to fall back on a communal childhood 'we', which in the following text usually refers to my older sister Susan and my younger sister Helen. My brother Richard is considerably younger than me, and his childhood memories of my aunt are of a later period, although he did spend many holidays with her.

  This book became my occupational therapy, and helped to pass the anxious months. I enjoyed reading about card games, board games and
children's books, and all the ways in which human beings have ingeniously staved off boredom and death and despised one another for doing so. I enjoyed thinking about the nature of childhood and the history of education and play. For an hour or two a day, making a small discovery or an unexpected connection, I could escape from myself into a better place.

  I don't mean in these pages to claim a special relationship with my aunt. My father once said to me, teasingly, 'Are you such a dutiful niece and daughter because you married into a Jewish family?' And I think that the Swifts may have played a part in my relationship with Auntie Phyl. I was captivated by the family of my first husband, Clive Swift. He was the first member of his generation to marry out, but despite this I was made welcome. I loved the Swifts' strong sense of mutual support and their demonstrative, affectionate generosity. They were a powerful antidote to the predominantly dour and depressive Yorkshire Drabbles and Staffordshire Bloors. It was a happy day that introduced me to Clive and the Swifts.

  In The Peppered Moth I wrote brutally about my mother's depression, and I never wish to enter that terrain again. It is too near, too ready to engulf me as it engulfed her. Some readers have written to me, taking me to task for being hard on my mother, but more have written to thank me for expressing their complex feelings about their own mothers. I had hoped that writing about her would make me feel better about her. But it didn't. It made me feel worse.

  Both my parents were depressive, though they dealt with this in different ways. My father took to gardening and walking with his dog, my mother to Radio 4 and long laments. He was largely silent, though Helen reminds me that he used to hum a lot. My mother could not stop talking. Her telephone calls, during which she complained about him bitterly for hour after hour, seemed never-ending. The last decades of their marriage were not happy, but when they were on speaking terms they would do the Times crossword together.

  Doing jigsaws and writing about them has been one of my strategies to defeat melancholy and avoid laments. Boswell regretted that his friend Samuel Johnson did not play draughts after leaving college, 'for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often'. Jigsaws have offered me and many others an innocent soothing relief, and this is where this book began and where it ends.

  Margaret Drabble, 2008

  I

  As she went to bed that night, she said that she wished we had been able to finish the jigsaw. 'It's a pity,' she said, as she gave up. 'It's a pity.' It was the last evening of the last summer. We had tried to finish it. We sat up late, past midnight, struggling with patches of tree and fern and grass and sky. In the morning, we would have to drive away and leave it incomplete on its table, for others to finish another day. It was unsatisfactory. She knew she would never come back. She knew it was her last summer with us. It was Thursday, 7 August 1997, and she was eighty-eight. She was getting older, and I was getting older, and the journey back to her home was across country and very long. Next year, even if she were still alive, it would be too much for both of us. Neither of us mentioned this. There were many things we never mentioned. But she knew, and she knew I knew.

  My aunt had been spending a week in West Somerset with us each summer for fifteen years. Her first visit was to a house I was renting from friends in Nettlecombe, not far beyond Taunton, and she drove herself all the way across England to us from the East Midlands in her Morris Minor. She didn't attempt the journey in one day; she stopped off for a night, with her bad little white dog, in a bed and breakfast, then drove on in the morning, arriving long before I expected her. She was a very determined old woman. That year, we finished our jigsaw.

  In 1989, I bought a house at Porlock Weir, which was even further west. She had parted with her car and was no longer driving, so I used to go to collect her and her little white dog for her annual holiday. I drove north from London up the A1 to her house and then on south and west to Somerset in the day. I didn't want to stay the night with her; the house I had so loved as a child had become uninhabitable for anyone fastidious enough not to love dogs more than people. In later years, I learned to break my journey by overnighting discreetly in the neighbourhood at my favourite wayside inn, a roadhouse of which I have many good memories. She may have been surprised by how fresh and early I arrived to collect her, but if she was, she never let on. Maybe she knew I'd been lurking in the Ram Jam.

  My earliest memories of jigsaws date back to Auntie Phyl. Auntie Phyl, as she was known to all our family and to my friends, was my mother's younger and only sister. In the village where she lived for the second half of her life, she was known as 'Miss Bloor', a form of address that honoured her status as schoolteacher. Homerton-trained in Cambridge, she taught small children, and she liked small children, and my sisters and I enjoyed going to stay with her during the war in her independent, semi-detached house in Dixon Crescent, Doncaster. She had been teaching in Woodfield Primary School from 1930, and would probably have remained in Doncaster, but when my grandfather fell ill just after the war she moved, as unmarried daughters did, to live with my disagreeable grandmother in Long Bennington, a village between Grantham and Newark on what was then the Great North Road, where she accepted a post in the village school. My grandfather died shortly after, in December 1947, but she stayed on to look after Grandma. After Grandma's death she remained in Long Bennington for the rest of her active life. She is remembered in the village. 'If you had a loose tooth, Miss Bloor would pull it out for you.'

  My grandmother was bad-tempered but her home, a small redbrick pantiled Georgian farmhouse called Bryn, was wonderful to a suburban city child, and Auntie Phyl was an excellent aunt. (Bryn means 'hill' in Welsh, and Long Bennington is one of the longest and flattest villages in England; the farm a few hundred yards along the road is slightly more appropriately called Valley Farm.) She taught us to peg rugs, and to sew, and to do French knitting, and to make lavender bags, and to thread bead necklaces, and to bake rock cakes and coconut fingers, and to play patience. She let us run wild in the field at the back of the house during the day, and in the evenings she played card and board games with us, or sat with us, hour after hour, as we did jigsaws on the gate-leg table in the front room. Bryn, as she grew older, became so cluttered with objects from the distant past and from more recent car boot sales that it was hard to find a clear surface, but for a jigsaw she could make room. The dark cubbyhole under the back stairs was stuffed with all manner of junk and treasures, including dozens of old jigsaws, piled up in their battered cardboard boxes. I inherited some of them, and brought them to Somerset, but they are all gone now, to their own car boot sales.

  For two or three decades, while I was an undergraduate, and then as a young mother trying to work in all the spare hours I could find, I was too busy for puzzles and games and pastimes. There wasn't space, there wasn't time, and in the evenings I was too tired. We sometimes played cards on family holidays, but I thought I had put childish games behind me for ever. I don't recall that I did any jigsaws during those middle years, but maybe my memory betrays me here, for it has recently been pointed out to me by Danny Hahn that I mention jigsaws very specifically, in my novel The Millstone, which was published in 1965, and written while I was expecting my third child, Joe. Danny claims that he first read this novel in the Australian Outback by candlelight in 2007, which is odd, because that is where son Joe claims to have read it too, two decades earlier in 1987. Maybe the Australian Outback is full of old copies ofThe Millstone.

  It is true that there is an extended reference in the novel to this motif, as narrator Rosamund takes to jigsaws in the later stages of pregnancy, and describes them as therapeutic:

  One can, if one tries, buy extremely complicated jigsaw puzzles with a thousand interlocking pieces, and pictures by old masters, or of ships at sea, and heaven knows what: also puzzles in the shape of maps of Europe, square puzzles, circular puzzles, star-shaped puzzles, reversible puzzles, anything one can imagine in the way of puzzles ... when I
went to bed I would dream not of George, nor of babies locked away from me where I couldn't feed them, nor even of childbirth, but of pieces of blue sky edged with bits of tree, or small blue irregular shapes composing the cloak of the Virgin Mary.

  There is also, I note, some attempt to contrast the 'jigsaw puzzle mind' of the narrator, who is writing a doctoral thesis, with the carefree, creative pretensions of her friend Lydia, who is trying to write a novel. I must have been wondering which of these characters I wanted to be.

  Many jigsaw puzzlers reveal a degree of anxiety about their hobby, fearing it reveals a neurosis that might expose them to hostile analysis. Do they do puzzles because they are lonely, like the orphaned heroine of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, who dutifully works on pictures of aeroplanes given to her by an equally lonely and much older family friend? Or because they are dyslexic or autistic and no good at fireside conversation? Or because they are timid, uncreative and imitative, satisfied with reconstructing the ready-made, like would-be artists who prefer to paint by numbers? Or because they know that jigsaws are designed to waste time, and that the killing of time is, as Daniel Defoe said, the worst of murders?

  I had completely forgotten that I had written about the subject until Danny reminded me. It must be an old obsession.

  According to their chronicler Anna Funder, the 'puzzle women' at Nuremberg who work on the shredded security files of the East German Stasi claim that they took on this task because they have always enjoyed doing jigsaws. They say they still go home to do jigsaws in their spare time, after a grim day's work piecing together thousands of scraps of torn paper detailing ruined lives. This, one could claim, is obsessional behaviour, but it is a useful obsession, harnessed to a higher purpose.

  Maybe I did purchase the odd jigsaw when I was in my twenties and thirties, but I think that I took to them seriously when Auntie Phyl began her annual Somerset visits, when I was in my forties and she in her seventies. Together we rediscovered the jigsaw.