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

Auntie Phyl was free, or had freed herself, from this congenital burden, and her company was therefore less burdensome. She was not an imaginative woman, in the conventional sense of the world, but she dreamed a great deal, and she liked to recount her dreams. It was during her last summer visit to Somerset, the year of the unfinished jigsaw, that she told me one morning over breakfast that she had had a very vivid dream. She had dreamed that she was going to die that night, in her bedroom at Porlock Weir, overlooking the sea. And, she said, the dream was not at all frightening. On the contrary, it was reassuring. Because, she said, she knew that it was all going to be all right. She had her little suitcase with her, ready packed, so there was nothing to worry about. It would be quite safe to die here in the night, with me in my room just along the corridor, and her suitcase by her bed.

  Would, in so many ways, that she had done so. She would have been spared her last two years in a care home, years that were not good. I did not foresee all of this when she told me over breakfast of her dream, but I guessed that her dream was saying that she would prefer not to die alone, and in a strange place. She would have liked to finish the jigsaw, and then to die safely under my roof.

  Her health eventually deteriorated, although she struggled bravely to remain independent, with the help of some admirable neighbours. She then moved into a care home in Newark, which, as care homes go, was acceptable, but she did not take well to institutional life. Most of her nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were attentive, and a kind and dog-loving friend took Daisy once or twice a week to sit on her bed. But she said that if she could get up, she would go out into the road and let a bus roll over her. At times she was delirious, I think due to heavy medication rather than senile dementia. Her medical report diagnosed 'florid paranoia'. She thought she could hear voices calling 'Phyllis! Phyllis!' (She probably could; Phyllis was a name of the period, and there was more than one old woman called Phyllis in the home.) She disliked being called 'Phyllis' by the nurses, although they insisted, against any evidence, that she really preferred it. She had always been 'Miss Bloor' to strangers and acquaintances. She was still 'Miss Bloor' to her friend Joyce, who had known her nearly all her life.

  She celebrated her ninetieth birthday in the home, with a large family gathering, and she nursed the latest baby on her lap, coaxing a smile from it. The baby, too small to see that Auntie Phyl was very old and alarming of aspect, responded to her eyes, her smile and her clucking noises.

  Auntie Phyl kept her eye on the birthday cake and reported to us, very angrily, on the phone the next day that pieces of her cake had been distributed, without her consent, to other inmates. This was clearly common practice, for how was one ninety-year-old to get through so much complimentary confectionery? But she was right. They should have asked for her approval.

  She died on 20 May 2001, after a long last struggle, during which visits became distressing both to her and to her visitors. She died as I was walking round the National Botanical Garden of Wales, which seemed appropriate, in view of all the gardens and stately homes we had over the years toured together. It has been claimed that her last word was 'Daisy!' and certain it is that Daisy was one of her last visitors.

  The funeral service was held at the crematorium in Grantham. We were a small congregation for, as Joyce said, she had reached a good age and most of her contemporaries in the village were dead. We sang 'The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended', and the Reverend Tony Pick of the Grantham and Vale of Belvoir Methodist Circuit gave the address. He had never met Auntie Phyl, whose church and chapel attendances were confined to bring and buy sales. (The car boot sale has largely replaced religion in rural England.) Nevertheless, Reverend Pick spoke well of Auntie Phyl's life as a schoolteacher, and he spoke well of Joyce, who had first got to know Auntie Phyl when she was the lollipop lady policing the school crossing over what had then been the Great North Road. The minister had done his homework.

  He also gave a reading that brought tears to my eyes. Unlike Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death', it cannot claim to be great literature, but as an elegy it worked well. It comes from the thoughts of Bishop C. H. Brent, and here is his version of the ship of death.

  What is dying? I am standing on the sea shore. A ship sails and spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says 'She is gone.' Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her ... The diminished size and loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at that moment when someone at my side says 'She is gone', there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, 'There she comes'...

  And so I saw the great beached hulk of Auntie Phyl's body, stranded on her hard, high, care-home bed, launching off from its moorings, free again, sailing into another world.

  After the service, we all repaired to the Marriott Hotel for funeral baked meats and a glass or two of wine, and then Joyce took us to see my grandfather's grave in Long Bennington churchyard, which she has tended and we have neglected all these long years. Auntie Phyl has a memorial plaque there now, thanks to Joyce and not to us. Auntie Phyl had been worried that her life would be left without record and voiced this anxiety not infrequently, which may be one of the reasons why I am writing this. 'If you're cremated, there's nothing to show you ever lived,' she used to say. We used to talk about names inscribed in the crematorium Book of Remembrance, about the planting of memorial roses. But these ruses did not satisfy her.

  The day after the funeral, my son Adam, his two children and I went to Sherwood Forest to see the Major Oak. This is another of the many outings on which Auntie Phyl used to take us when we were children. The mysterious phrase 'Major Oak' had thrilled me when I was little, because I did not know what it meant. This aged tree is said to have been a hiding place for Robin Hood, but I don't think I found that aspect of it particularly interesting. It was more its girth and seniority that appealed to me. There it was, there it is, ancient, hollow, perhaps a thousand years old, with its great spreading boughs propped up by many sticks and stakes, but growing still, with leaves of green. It has been cordoned off now, and children can no longer play inside it, as we did. But it stands.

  IV

  We worked at many jigsaws at Bryn, but we also played card games and board games, games that we never played at home in sombre, silent, bookish Sheffield, where we lived in a suburb called Nether Edge and were always being told to shut up. My father worked at his briefs in the evening on the dining-room table, for the house was too small for a study, and we children had to be quiet. (Insomniac in middle age, I invented a mantra that went, 'Shut up and go to sleep, shut up and go to sleep,' which I repeated to myself, and which I think echoed my mother's admonitory voice. For a while, this directive worked quite well, although I have recently replaced it with something more calming.)

  One of our favourites at Bryn was an improbable card game called Belisha, created, as I now see, with the aim of promoting road safety. The little pictures in the top right-hand corner denoted sets of traffic signals, and the large pictures illustrating each individual card portrayed stages on a car journey from Oban in Scotland to London. The aim was to collect sequences of signals, as one collects suits in other card games. I salvaged the pack of cards when Auntie Phyl was in the Oaks care home in Newark, and Bryn was in the process of being sold. For a long time, superstitiously, I did not like to check to see whether it was complete, but it is. It has no missing pieces and, mysteriously, it even has one extra card. Guards at Buckingham Palace: Stop at Red Traffic Lights is in duplicate, I assume unintentionally. (It's not designated as a joker, as there is a special card labelled Joker, portraying a Scotsman wearing tartan and a beret, driving an open-topped, tartan-painted car with the number plate OUCH. I loved that.) This game was published by Castell Brothers Ltd, of Pepys Stationery, Covent Garden and Glasgow, and
the road signs featured are Traffic Lights, Crossroads, Bends, Level Crossings, Road Narrows, Steep Hill, Slow Major Road Ahead, Halt at Major Road Ahead, School, Please Cross Here, and the Belisha beacon itself. These signs signal, for my generation, nostalgia.

  (I used to think 'road narrows' was a double noun, like the narrows of a strait or a river, but looking at it again I see that it is probably a short sentence of warning, consisting of a noun and a verb.)

  Our well-thumbed pack is undated. Belisha beacons were introduced in 1934 by the Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and I think our set must date from the 1940s. (The beacons are Hore-Belisha's most lasting memorial; strange that a long and not wholly successful political career should have entered the dictionary in this context.) The pictures on the cards are mostly of well-known beauty spots, and I found them enticing. I longed to visit all these places. An interest in topography and travel guides (amateur and intermittent but persistent) and a love of aimless touring were born as I hoarded my pictures of Loch Lomond, Loch Awe, Carlisle and Catterick. The place names are engraved in my memory, and I have by now checked off most of these beauty spots, though I remain baffled by one labelled 'Clock-a-Druid, Paisley', which shows a giant potato or a small asteroid standing in a bright green field, dwarfing a row of trees and a trio of tiny sightseers – a woman in a red dress, accompanied at a slightly eerie distance by a small child and a man pointing with a walking stick. It has some of the unsettling magic of a Magritte.

  I could not and cannot think what this large object was meant to be. There are 'druid stones' and Neolithic carvings in this part of Scotland, and ancient monuments with folk names like 'The Auld Wives' Lift', 'The Witch's Stone', 'Rob Roy's Bonnet' and 'King Cole's Grave', but none of them for which I can find records looks anything like the asteroid. Was it a fantasy of the artist? Is it (or was it) a local name for the famous Cochno Stone, discovered in 1888?

  I looked up the Cochno Stone, which I am told is one of the largest and most impressive ancient petroglyphs of Scotland, and almost certainly of astrological significance. But it doesn't in any way resemble the picture on my Clock-a-Druid card. The Cochno Stone is large, and flattish, and covered with cup-and-ring markings, and now it lies under three feet of earth, deposited on it by the Department of the Environment to keep the vandals away. So I couldn't go to see it even if I tried. Like the caves of Lascaux, it may never be seen again by human eyes.

  The caves of Lascaux with their prehistoric cave paintings have also been sealed, but they have been reproduced in replica. They have become part of the simulated world.

  I've never been to Paisley. It is a treat in store. An unsolved mystery perhaps awaits me there.

  But the most significant of all the cards in the Belisha pack, for us, were those that illustrated staging posts on the Great North Road itself. This was the legendary route of the legions, and on it stood Ferrybridge, Wetherby, Doncaster, Grantham, Newark, Stamford, Biggleswade, Sandy, and Mill Hill. We felt a particular and personal attachment to this road, because Bryn was situated right upon it, hence its positional role as a tea garden and bed and breakfast stopover. Long Bennington has now been bypassed, but in those days the road flowed right through the whole length of the village. There was a very wide grass verge separating the road from the pavement, but we could see and feel the traffic pouring unceasingly northwards towards Scotland, and southwards towards London.

  It seemed important to us to be there, in that very place, on this major route. Lorries, cars and coaches swished past rhythmically, endlessly. All night long they journeyed, and I would lie in bed listening to the swish and the boom, the swish and the boom, as they came and they went, as they came and they went. I loved that sound. (Is it the sound of what is called a slipstream? It is a word I have never used before.) It was like a cradle, endlessly rocking: it was like a lullaby, it was like a river pouring past, it was like the incessant movement of the Earth. You were a child in bed, trying to sleep, but the road was awake and alive with travellers, and therefore you were not alone, and life had not come to a grim halt. The blood coursed through the body, and the traffic along the road. Your heart would not seize up and stop if you fell asleep. It would beat on until the morning.

  You can still hear the roar of the road, very faintly, in the Ram Jam Inn, through the double glazing, and that is one of the reasons why I like to stay there. As I lie there listening to the trucks of night, I think that the gates of memory will open, and I will be able to step back into childhood and discover what has been lost from that early world.

  Not everybody found the sound so soothing; in Bryn's visitors' book one family's remark stood out. Instead of the anodyne formula of 'A Home from Home', or 'See you Next Year', one couple had irritably noted, 'How can you stand the din?'

  The bypass put an end to all that.

  George, in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, pays tribute to the spirit of the AI as an affirmation of the existence of God:

  And yet I tell you that, now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of rainbows or newborn babes, nor in the extremities of pain or joy, but more probably ambushed by some quite trivial moment – say the exchange of signals between two long-distance lorry drivers in the black sleet of a god-awful night on the old A1 – then, in that dip-flash, dip-flash of headlights in the rain that seems to affirm some common ground that is not animal and not long-distance lorry-driving – then I tell you I know...

  I don't think Auntie Phyl ever saw any Stoppard, and I do not think she had any interest in God, but she might have recognized this sentiment.

  As children, we were issued the strictest of warnings about this major road, for it was a fearsome force. We must never, ever try to cross it alone. We must never even walk on its grass verge. We must never go to the village shop opposite without an accompanying adult. Crossing to the shop was like crossing a perilous torrent. I can't remember now whether there were many proper crossings in the village where lorries had to stop for pedestrians; I suppose there must have been. I remember well Joyce's crossing, which she policed for the school in her smart yellow fluorescent uniform, but there must have been others. We were far too docile to try anything risky, but I think we were impressed by the danger on the doorstep. It made life more exciting.

  The romance of the Great North Road had appealed to Auntie Phyl since her girlhood, years before her parents moved to live by it. She had written an essay on it at Mexborough School, which she treasured and which I have piously preserved. (It was Joyce who told me to look for it when the house was being emptied: 'Miss Bloor set great store by that essay,' she told me, and I found it in the little wooden chest in the hall.) In this twenty-two-page document, still tethered by its original rusting paper clip, Phyllis Bloor of VIC summons up the Roman days of Ermine Street (the Romans were interested in straight lines, not beautiful scenery), of toll roads (according to my aunt, initially manned by hermits and 'false hermits'), and of mail coaches, tarmac, motor cars and bicycle clubs. She describes the market gardens of Biggleswade, the fate of the young University of Stamford (which was 'strangled out' in 1463 by threats from Oxford and Cambridge), Cromwell's victory at the battle of Gonerby Hill, and the travels of Nicholas Nickleby. It is a well-researched narrative, enlivened by strong personal feeling. She abandons the story at Ferrybridge (where one of her aunts lived) with the words: 'The Great North Road proceeds into Scotland to Edinburgh but we will not trace its course now.'

  Auntie Phyl was not as clever as my mother, but she was not as stupid as my mother liked to suggest.

  It is 450 miles from Edinburgh to London, and Long Bennington is strategically placed en route, just under two-thirds of the way south. (Grantham is 111 miles from London, a symmetrical signpost that I always note with respect as I pass.) One summer afternoon, in my grandmother Clara's dour reign, a car pulled into the drive, and a woman knocked on the door, requesting not tea and bread and butter, or accommodation for the night, but asking whether she could use the toilet. Her excuse wa
s that they'd come all the way from Scotch Corner. 'Well, you should have stopped earlier,' said Grandma, and sent her on her way. I can't remember whether I witnessed this incident, or whether Grandma told me about it. I often think of it when driving long distances.

  Bryn, as I now know, was one of the few houses in the village to boast two flush toilets. It had these long before it had electricity, which was not installed until 1946; before that, we used to go to bed by torch and Kelly lamp. One of these toilets was outdoors, whitewashed and full of spiders; the other was indoors, in the communal bathroom, which served family and guests alike. This bathroom, like the bathrooms of many old houses, had two doors, an arrangement that was disquieting, and which may be the source of the recurrent dream in which I am interrupted by an intruder while in the act of lowering myself onto a lavatory seat.

  The drinking water at Bryn came from a well, and was pumped into large white chipped blue-rimmed enamel jugs. It was soft, tasteless water, unlike the water in Sheffield, which had a mineral limestone tang. I did not like it; this was one of the few aspects of Bryn that I did not like. But I liked the pump, and I enjoyed filling the jugs. The building was AA registered on a 'Farmhouse Agreement Form' at some point in the 1930s, and it was licensed to sell liquor and tobacco, though I don't think it ever did so in my day. What it did sell was hand embroidery, which consisted largely of piles of tablecloths and cushion covers embroidered with floral motifs by my grandmother and aunt. They despised crinoline ladies, which appeared on many embroidery transfers at that time; I never knew why they held them in contempt. Secretly I rather liked them, but I knew better than to say so. They despised cross-stitch, too. Again, I could not guess their reasons. Perhaps they thought it a childish stitch, fit only for samplers.

  I used to get very bored, in the covered market in Newark, waiting while my aunt interminably inspected those thin, papery, grey-and-blue transfers, looking for attractive designs to iron onto tablecloths.