The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Page 12

  Spilsbury's novel device has been so lastingly popular, and has given rise to so many variants, that it is hard to imagine a world without it. We can only wonder whether he suspected, when he died in 1769 at the early age of thirty, that he had launched a winner. Probably not, I fear.

  The map format of the earliest puzzles reflected the fashions of the day, when maps were appearing everywhere, in prints and on fans, handkerchiefs and embroidered samplers. John Spilsbury not only invented the puzzle: according to the ODNB he also took advantage of the more frivolous fashion for printed silk kerchiefs, offering one that boasted a 'New and most accurate map of the roads of England and Wales; with distances by the milestones'. This growing love of cartography was no doubt connected with the increasing ease of travel and the spread of Empire; maps and puzzles in map form were considered patriotic as well as instructional. Despite the vastly extended range of jigsaw subject matter, a sense of the original geographical connection survives, and classic map jigsaws are still in production. (Educational kerchiefs did not confine themselves to maps; John Clare was given one with a poem by Chatterton imprinted on it.)

  When they were little, my children had a Galt jigsaw of the counties of England, and I was recently given an old plywood Victory puzzle of the same subject, called Industrial Life in England and Wales, which shows Leicestershire to be full of sheep and suitcases, Nottinghamshire of lace and oak trees, Lincolnshire of vegetables and chickens, whereas little Rutland is too small to feature any industries or products at all. It is coloured bright blue, like a lake, but as the jigsaw was made long before Rutland Water ('one of the largest man-made reservoirs in Europe') was created in the 1970s, this must have been a prophetic coincidence.

  I have a friend who claims that the only jigsaw she ever does is a map of the departments of France, the names of which she is determined eventually to commit to memory. I persuaded her to bring some pieces of it to the Pizza Express, opposite the British Library, where I inspected them over our invariable lunch of melanzana parmigiana. The pieces were non-interlocking, like those of the earliest puzzles, and although I assembled three large chunks of the smiling blue Atlantic without much difficulty, I ran into trouble with Saône and Bourgogne. Learning the names of the French departments is complicated by the fact that, like the boundaries of English counties, they keep changing; Seine and the Charente have become maritime, according to Georges Perec in Penser/Classer (1982), in order to avoid the shame of being inférieure, and 'in the same way, the "basses" or "low" Pyrénées have become "atlantiques", the "basses" Alpes have become "de Haute-Provence", and the Loire "inférieure" has become "atlantique"! Departments are sensitive.

  Map jigsaws are not always as easy to assemble as you think they will be. One Christmas, Gus Skidelsky commissioned for me a jigsaw based on an old Ordnance Survey map that centres on a house-shaped piece representing the site of our Somerset home. The bit with the sea was very difficult, as were the winding footpaths through the ancient woodlands. But I learned place names I had not known; I learned the lie of the land before our house was built. Maps and jigsaws continue to fit together well and profitably. They interlock.

  Not everybody is as enthusiastic about jigsaw maps. Jill Shefrin tells me, 'Ironically, the only jigsaw puzzles I had as a child were maps of Canada and the United States, and it is only in the last few years that I have begun to assemble jigsaw puzzles myself. I only really enjoy those which are made from interesting paintings.'

  Nicholas Tucker, however, remembers with pleasure a jigsaw map with little Rutland. I knew Nick when I was a teenage schoolgirl living in Granville Road in Sevenoaks. Nick (now honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex) is a scholar of children's literature, and although I haven't seen him in many years, I've followed his career through articles in the newspapers. While I was thinking about writing this book, I read a particularly interesting piece by him about childhood in the Independent on Sunday (9 July 2006). It appeared at a time when the press was in one of its periodic fits of moral panic about the miseries of modern childhood. Not so, wrote Nick; the old image of a past Golden Age, of a Cider-with-Rosie idyll in the Cotswolds, is largely illusory, and most children are on the whole healthier, happier, more comfortably dressed, less terrified by hellfire, better educated and closer to their parents now than they used to be.

  Prompted by this, I wrote to him about the Teas-with-Hovis activity of jigsaws, and asked whether he knew any jigsaw historians. He responded immediately and helpfully with many suggestions, and also volunteered some personal memories:

  Jigsaws played a huge part in our Granville Road childhood. They always had bits missing, so that one got almost as used to a particular space as one did to a piece. And the pictures that gradually emerged; once they came together, it was almost as if a chord of music suddenly played. There was a Red Indian in a canoe, given to me by Father Christmas at a London store, which was always particularly atmospheric. We also had old, pre-war jigsaws of Victorian-looking battleships, scenes from silent films – I can see them all now. A woman standing on a round table, all long legs, while a man swatted at a mouse. No one questioned what was going on – we simply accepted it as part of the quite often occasionally crazed world of the adult.

  My aunt and mother – both still alive – carried on doing jigsaws when almost anything else, including dominoes, had become too much for them. I suppose the obvious symbolism is making order from chaos, but with the nice fall-back position that order is always attainable in the end so long as one works hard for it.

  I find it interesting, and comforting, to discover after all these years that the Tucker family was so little worried by the missing pieces. The Tuckers were a comforting presence, down the road. They weren't anxious, or neurotic, or depressed, like us. Or so it seemed to me when I was fifteen. My mother used to mutter that the Tuckers had no stair carpets. I have no idea whether this was true or not, or how she made this discovery. It wasn't the sort of thing I would notice. But I did think that it was none of her business.

  Nick's grandfather used to make wooden jigsaws and favoured the tradition that went right back to John Spilsbury. 'One particularly useful one was the counties of Britain. I still have a vague idea of what Montgomeryshire and Flintshire looked like, and how easy it was to lose Rutland!'

  Rutland, the smallest county. The Ram Jam Inn on the Great North Road is in Rutland, or it is at the moment. Over the years, Rutland has been lost to the map of England, and restored to it. The county boundaries of this part of Middle England shift from time to time. Sometimes the poet John Clare was born in one county, sometimes in another – his natal village, Helpton, used to be in Northamptonshire, but is now in Cambridgeshire. We were told to address letters to Long Bennington to 'Nr Newark, Notts', although I think it was really in Lincs. (This was before the days of postcodes, before the days when Bryn had to have a street number, before the days when it was demoted to '80 Main Street', a number that I could never memorize.) Auntie Phyl liked Rutland and was pleased when it came back on the map. The symbol of Rutland is a horseshoe, because it is a county through which so many travellers pass. I have been happy in Rutland.

  XVIII

  My first physical encounter with a Spilsbury map was a significant moment, a jigsaw epiphany. I discovered that examples of Spilsbury's earliest works were held in the Map Room of my familiar haunt, the British Library, and I thought I would go to visit them. I do not often venture into the Map Room. I spend most of my time in Humanities Two, a pleasant place that I find conducive to study and within which I am conservative about my choice of seat, as I used to be in the old BM Reading Room. But off I boldly went, up one floor into the alarmingly unknown, to see whether I could set eyes on the famous Spilsbury maps.

  After some negotiation with various helpful members of staff, I was presented with Spilsbury's Map of Europe Divided into Kingdoms, in an edition dated 1767 (or was it 1766?), some two years before Spilsbury's early death. There had be
en some question as to whether it was available to view, or hidden away for conservation, but eventually it appeared, in its mahogany box, and to my surprised delight I was allowed to sit there at a large desk and assemble it. I didn't even have to wear gloves. (I have always hated wearing gloves, even outdoors in bitter weather. And yes, just as I was warned, my fingers have grown stiff, possibly as a result of this phobia.) I was politely asked to check whether any pieces were missing, and I was able to confirm that the pieces representing Scotland, the English Channel, the Low Countries, Sardinia, Corsica and the Gulf of Finland were indeed absent, as a note in the box that housed them confessed. I wondered how many decades ago, how many centuries ago, those pieces had vanished.

  I also had time to assemble a map of Africa in forty pieces, which arrived in a box with the handwritten inscription 'A gift of Lady Cecilia Johnston, May 27,1792'.

  There was something exhilarating, touching and anarchic about being allowed to handle and assemble the pieces of these dissected maps, with their delicate colouring of pink and green and acqua and yellow. I was not sure that I should have been given permission to touch; it seemed too much of a freedom. The sense of escape from books and words was physically and mentally liberating. Those who spend much of their lives writing and reading often yearn for a different form of activity. Some go fishing, some garden, some go on long walks, some take up watercolours or bookbinding or cabinetmaking, some work at jigsaw puzzles.

  I think one of the reasons I am drawn to these puzzles is precisely because they have no verbal content; they exercise a different area of the brain, bring different neurons and dendrites into play. Like many people, I use the word-based, verbal, left side of my brain too much, and have begun to think, in the light of recent neurological research, that one of the causes of my stammer is a defective link between the left and right hemispheres – nothing to do with childhood trauma or parental expectation. I have a bad spatial sense and suffer from embarrassingly poor powers of facial recognition (this is a recognized condition, called prosopagnosis), and I like jigsaws partly because they give me a quiet chance to look at wordless patterns. I feel this must be good for me, and it surely can't be harmful. Stroke patients are sometimes advised to do jigsaws as an aid to recovering a loss of spatial sense. (Neuropsychologists Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein did a lot of work on the cerebral cortex in this context, and it was Ornstein who advised Doris Lessing to encourage her son to do jigsaws after he suffered a stroke.) Chess might be even better for me, as it is clearly a spatial game, but it is too competitive, too demanding, too intellectual.

  Many writers (including W. H. Auden, Georges Perec, Julian Mitchell, Julian Barnes, Ronald Harwood and Jonathan Raban) have been addicted to crossword puzzles, but I have never taken to them either. The hours of freedom from words are a relief to me, though of course I acknowledge that, paradoxically, I then seem to feel the need of words to try to analyse the nature of this freedom.

  That's because writing is an illness. A chronic, incurable illness. I caught it by default when I was twenty-one, and I often wish I hadn't. It seemed to start off as therapy, but it became the illness that it set out to cure.

  Some writers admit that they find writing therapeutic, others (like Julian Barnes) strongly deny it. Angus Wilson said that he began writing fiction on the advice of his analyst in Oxford while he was recovering from a breakdown, although he was not always happy in later years to be reminded of this. The protagonist of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook suffers from writer's block and starts to write again at the suggestion of her analyst. Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar wrote out of revenge, and Wordsworth wrote some of his greatest and most enigmatic lyrics (the Lucy poems) out of what he calls 'self-defence'. Writing is a protection, a cure, an affliction. It makes you ill, and it offers to cure you. Writers need a rest from writing and from words, words, words.

  Before I return to the historic jigsaw, I offer a description of a modern, 750-piece jigsaw, purchased in 2007 from the RSC shop in Stratford-upon-Avon, that is a true challenge to the prosopagnosis sufferer. The image says it is 'based on the Flower Portrait of William Shakespeare', and it is composed of hundreds of tiny, head-and shoulder photographs of real people, forming a mosaic that represents the playwright's well-known bust. Pale and underexposed people make up his noble forehead and his collar; darker and more red-faced people his hair and his jacket. At first sight I thought this puzzle, because brightly coloured, would be easy to assemble, but it is not, because the juxtapositions are completely arbitrary, and there is no overlap from one little square to the next.

  I had assumed that the photographs would be of famous actors and actresses in Shakespearean roles, illustrating the verse on the side of the box that tells us that all the world's a stage, yet they are of 'ordinary people', of diverse ethnic origins but probably all British, in contemporary dress. It took me a while to work out that a few faces are cunningly repeated, sometimes identically, sometimes reversed – the chap in the jaunty, seafaring cap, the yellow-haired clown, the boy with his baseball hat at a funny angle, the royal-looking lady in a dark-blue hat. As I laboured away at this task, I found myself giving identifying labels to the faces, much as I have to do in real life, memorizing them as 'big white face with glasses','Mother Teresa', 'bearded cleric','evil baby','disco type', or 'nice lady in grey V-neck with pearls'. Of particular appeal was the 'generic Oxford academic', a style that I identified with my son Adam – all variations on a wry, cheerful, bespectacled, smiling face, which one may see any day attached to young men walking or cycling along the street in Oxford, but never ever in Ladbroke Grove. You could walk for a year without seeing that face in Ladbroke Grove.

  My father also suffered from prosopagnosis and frequently offended friends and neighbours by failing to recognize them. As I was walking along the beach with him one summer at Filey, a woman in a flowered bathing suit greeted him warmly and tried to engage him in conversation. It was obvious that he had no idea who she was. In the end she told him her name, and he appeared to recognize it, and chatted politely for a few moments. As he walked away he kept muttering to himself, 'The penny didn't drop, the penny didn't drop', an interesting phrase that I had never heard before, and that I connected with the penny-operated, cement-block pebble-dashed lavatories on the seafront, and the more thrilling slot machines in the amusements arcade.

  The woman had lived next door to us during the war in Pontefract, but of course I hadn't recognized her either. She didn't wear a flowered bathing suit in Pontefract.

  XIX

  There is no information or educational content in that brightly coloured, demotic, multicultural, RSC jigsaw, and its connection with the Spilsbury maps in the Map Room is almost as remote as its connection with Shakespeare. One could gain little virtue or knowledge from its assembling: it is 'just a game', a pastime. The jigsaw has come a long way from its schoolroom origins, both in appearance and in function. Its instantly recognizable, interlocking pieces, with their familiar, standardized, die-cut shapes, bear little resemblance to the pale, thin, smooth, sliding, aristocratic, wooden slices in Lady Cecilia's mahogany box, with its swelling pink imperial theme. Yet these devices have a common ancestor, a common descent.

  The innovative concept of dissection caught on rapidly, spreading throughout England and beyond, as the British Empire spread. Imitations of the early Spilsbury geography puzzles soon became familiar objects in upper-middle- and upper-class schoolrooms. John Wallis, the Darton family, James Izzard, Robert Sayer, Elizabeth Newbery and other members of the growing army of publishers of children's books began to produce a wide variety of tempting designs, and as they became more widely disseminated, they became cheaper. Scholars have recently been searching assiduously for references to these puzzles in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century correspondence, educational literature, fiction, and art, and I have trawled, less assiduously, in their wake, following their markers. I enjoyed the quest, and have made some discoveries of my own.

&
nbsp; The most widely known mention, and one that I must have read many times, is to be found near the beginning of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), where we discover Maria and Julia Bertram looking down on their poor little cousin Fanny Price because she is not acquainted with the dissected map of Europe. In the first weeks of Fanny's residence at Mansfield Park, evidence of her prodigious ignorance is brought regularly in fresh reports to Lady Bertram in the drawing room: 'Dear mamma, only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together – or my cousin cannot tell the principal rivers in Russia – or she never heard of Asia Minor – or she does not know the difference between water-colours and crayons! – How strange! – Did you ever hear of any thing so stupid?'

  It is not surprising that there were no dissected maps in Fanny's simple Portsmouth home; they were not cheap, though models could be bought more cheaply without the sea. Spilsbury's prices ranged from 9s to £1 1s, making these objects more expensive than the vast numbers of children's books that were now pouring into a rapidly expanding market. Like du Val's Le Jeu de France pour les Dames and the playing cards designed for Louis XIV a century earlier, they were playthings for the privileged, educational aids for the advantaged. The poet William Cowper, writing to his friend William Unwin in September 1780 with advice about Unwin's son's education, invokes an aristocratic precedent, in the form of Lord Spencer (the first Earl Spencer) and his son's geography lessons:

  I should recommend it to you therefore ... to allot the next two years of little John's Scholarship, to Writing and Arithmetic, together with which for Variety's sake and because it is capable of being formed into Amusement, I would mingle Geography. A Science which if not attended to betimes, is seldom made an Object of much Consideration. Lord Spencer's Son when he was 4 years of Age, knew the situation of every Kingdom, Country, City, River & remarkable Mountain in the World. For this Attainment, which I suppose his Father had never made, he was indebted to a Plaything; having been accustomed to amuse himself with those Maps which are cut into several Compartments, so as to be thrown into a Heap of confusion, that they may be put together again with an exact Coincidence of all their Angles and Bearings so as to form a perfect Whole.