The Pattern in the Carpet Read online

  Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and, most recently, The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

  Also by Margaret Drabble

  FICTION

  A Summer Bird-Cage

  The Garrick Year

  The Millstone

  Jerusalem the Golden

  The Waterfall

  The Needle’s Eye

  The Realms of Gold

  The Ice Age

  The Middle Ground

  The Radiant Way

  A Natural Curiosity

  The Gates of Ivory

  The Witch of Exmoor

  The Peppered Moth

  The Seven Sisters

  The Red Queen

  The Sea Lady

  The Pure Gold Baby

  The Dark Flood Rises

  SHORT STORIES

  A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories

  NON-FICTION

  Wordsworth (Literature in Perspective series)

  Arnold Bennett: A Biography

  For Queen and Country

  A Writer’s Britain

  The Oxford Companion to English Literature (editor)

  Angus Wilson: A Biography

  The Canons edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

  canongate.co.uk

  Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 2009

  The right of Margaret Drabble to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 786899 971 2

  eISBN 978 1 78689 972 9

  Designed and typeset in Bembo by Lindsay Nash

  For Phyllis Bloor

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  The Pattern in the Carpet

  Notes on Quotations

  Bibliography

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Horse Shoe Pile at Scarrington. Author’s own.

  Plate from a promotional Teas-with-Hovis tea service. Author’s own.

  Seventeenth-century playing card. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Henry Winstanley’s card of Zagathay. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Cards from Belisha. Author’s own.

  Tea garden at Bryn, 1930s. Author’s own.

  The staff of Long Bennington School, 1950s. Author’s own.

  The Royal Game of the Goose. Musee de la Revolution Francaise, Vizille, France/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  The Mansion of Bliss game. ©V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Thomas and John Quicke. Author’s own.

  Dissected map of Europe. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 22/01/2009 (Maps 188.v.12).

  Thomas Malkin. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 22/01/2009 (YC.1998.b.346).

  Box lid of the dissected map of Africa. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 22/01/2009 (Maps 188.v.14).

  Mary Delany’s Chinese lantern. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Kimbolton Cabinet. ©V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Plaque detail from the Kimbolton Cabinet. ©V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Micromosaic snuffbox. © Araldo de Luca/Corbis.

  Victorian Christmas card. ©V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Dissected puzzle showing the Coronation of Queen Victoria. Author’s own.

  R. Atkinson Fox’s Sunrise. Author’s own.

  Brueghel’s Kinderspieler. Author’s own.

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people helped me, some wittingly and some unwittingly, with this book. Some talked or wrote to me about jigsaws and some recommended further reading.

  Amongst my correspondents I thank Peter Barber, Xavier Bray, Anthony Brown, Linda Cameron, William Chislett, Beverley Cook, Alan Dein, Sebastian Edwards, Irving Finkel, Juliet Gardener, Pat Garrett, Daniel Hahn, Howard Hardiman, Roland Huntford, Toph Marshall, Simon Mason, Julian Mitchell, Charles Saumarez Smith, Jill Shefrin, Donald Sinden, Gillian Sutherland and Colin Thubron. Nicholas Tucker was helpful and encouraging in more ways than one. Michael Berry found rare books for me, and Michael Codron submitted to an interview about his jigsaw addiction, an interest to which I was alerted by Michael Frayn.

  Julia Hoffbrand of the Museum of London showed me some very early dissected maps and puzzles, and directed me to Alan Dein’s BBC Radio 4 programme about the Jackson Pollock Convergence jigsaw.

  Treasured jigsaws were given to me by Julia Blackburn, Sindamani Bridglal, Carmen Callil, Donald and Shirley Gee, Julian Mitchell, Richard Rowson, Augusta Skidelsky, and various Swift children and grandchildren. Helen Langdon and Susan Haskins talked to me about aspects of art history, and Kenneth Uprichard of the British Museum about mosaic restoration. Hilary Dickinson, Judith Landry and Julian Mitchell listened to me patiently and came up with comments over a wide and random spectrum of interests. Ronald and Natasha Harwood described to me the pleasure of crosswords, and Valda Ondaatje the pleasure of playing bridge. Jeremy Rosenblatt and Ian Blatchford spotted news items and metaphors, and David Millett explained jigsaws and fretsaws.

  Kevin Copley opened my eyes to a whole new area of speculation when he mentioned mosaics, and Tom Holland sent me off on a search for a jigsaw of the Alexander mosaic at Naples, which I never found. Alan Sillitoe talked to me about his fondness for maps, and Doris Lessing about the therapeutic uses of jigsaws. Mia Beaumont and Bernadine Bishop also offered very useful comments in this area. Simon Mason alerted me to Georges Perec’s novel, Life: A User’s Manual, which was the starting point for many further quests.

  Joyce Bainbridge, who, with her late husband Eddie, was a lifelong friend of my aunt Phyllis Bloor, has been immensely helpful with this book. She has many memories of my grandparents’ house, Bryn, and of Long Bennington, the village where they lived. She is a custodian of village history and our visits to her keep the past alive. She has treasured photographs and stories that would otherwise have been lost or forgotten.

  I thank all my family for their support. My daughter Becky has shown a keen interest in doing jigsaws with me, and some of her friends have helped to assemble impossible puzzles in my absence. I would never have finished the Jackson Pollock without them. (Paula Smith has a particularly good eye.) Michael Holro
yd, who has no personal interest whatsoever in this curious pastime, has watched over me tolerantly, and taken some bizarrely revealing photographs of my works in progress.

  I also thank my editor Toby Mundy, for publishing this eccentric book and for sending it off in new directions during various stages of its composition, and Caroline Knight, for her encouragement and help with the text. My thanks also to my agents, Michael Sissons and the late Pat Kavanagh, who looked after me, supported me and encouraged me over many years.

  An essay called ‘A Day Out in Kew’, which incorporates and enlarges on an episode in my research for this book, appears in Jane Austen Sings the Blues (ed. Nora Stovel, University of Alberta, 2009), which is a Festschrift in honour of Austen scholar Bruce Stovel.

  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.