The Pattern in the Carpet Read online

  Long Bennington is not far from Laxton, a village in Nottinghamshire that boasts the only surviving open-field system of medieval strip farming in England. Children of my generation used to spend a good deal of time in history lessons colouring in maps showing strip farming, though I don’t think we really understood what it was. In my fifties I was seized with a desire to see the Laxton system and try to read its meaning for myself. I suggested to Auntie Phyl that I could drive her there on my next visit – we could make it the destination for our pub lunch, I said. Unwisely, I mentioned the field system. She was not taken with the idea. ‘I don’t fancy wandering round fields to get at my lunch,’ she said. I gave in instantly, for I was fond of the Wheatsheaf and the Staunton Arms, our regulars, but from time to time I am still visited by the picture of myself and Auntie Phyl, straying through cornfields or along strips of swedes or potatoes on our way to our scampi and chips.

  Sillitoe’s Grandfather Burton was one of the last of the blacksmiths. In the Nottinghamshire village of Scarrington there is a pile of horseshoes, which Auntie Phyl used to take us to see as children when we were staying at Bryn. It is a fine phallic monument, seventeen feet high, weighing about ten tons, and it is said to have been built by blacksmith George Flinders, the village’s last farrier, between 1945 and 1965. It is still there. What was once work is now labelled heritage. A bid was made to purchase this tower and transport it to America, but it was saved for the village by Nottinghamshire County Council. The village is very neat and trim now, with some grand houses and expensive new buildings amongst the old. I suppose it is a dormitory village for Nottingham. It doesn’t look as ‘real’ as Long Bennington, but it is very pretty.

  I don’t know whether my grandparents had any sense of returning to a countryside in which they had never lived. They, too, must have had uncles or great-uncles or grandfathers who had been blacksmiths or ploughmen or farm labourers. Maybe the old way of life called to them. But it is more likely that they thought they were making a fresh start, and moving up in the world into the era of the genteel, 1930s, middle-class, Hovis tearoom.

  As a child, I never thought much of these matters, though I was aware of the difference between the professional aspirations of my parents and those of the household at Bryn. I have no personal memory of my Drabble grandparents, as they both died when I was too small to notice. Auntie Phyl was not particularly interested in social history and local history, but her friend Joyce Bainbridge was, and still is. Joyce’s house and garden in Long Bennington have an unbroken history. The village has spread around them, with many new houses built in the last twenty years, but the house where Joyce lives is unchanged, and its carefully tended cottage garden is a garden of earthly delights. She grows flowers and vegetables through the seasons – crocuses, daffodils, tulips, dahlias, begonias, scarlet runners, courgettes, carrots, broad beans, beetroots, potatoes, tomatoes. The flowers blossom colourfully and clamber amidst a miniature landscape of stone animals, birds and figurines.

  People give Joyce garden ornaments, and there they cluster in their magic village, which like Bosch’s painting has its own random scale, with giant rabbits, large shoes, tiny manikins, middling-sized elves, little cottages, drinking birds, stone bird-baths. And there stand old agricultural implements that her husband Eddie salvaged, collected and treasured. Eddie had worked as a ploughman for the local farmer and he knew these objects and their history well. They are authentic. Eddie, like John Clare, appreciated and loved the landscape that he worked. He was saddened when the Lincolnshire potato went out of fashion. He regretted the dominion of the continental supermarket potato. He gave me some fossils that had been turned up by the plough, and he told me that village people called them ‘the devil’s toenails’. I put them in a novel once, these coiled and wrinkled twists of stone, and I keep them in my study.

  III

  My rediscovery of jigsaws belongs largely to the years after my parents’ death, to the last decade of Auntie Phyl’s life, when she was the senior surviving member of the family. It was, in a way, a second childhood, though she never lost any of her wits. She was all her life, at heart and in part, a child, with an ability to enjoy childhood things. This is a rare gift, and it was important to us.

  Watching the news on television with her one evening, when she was in her eighties, we were exposed to one of those regularly recurring items about poor conditions and abuse in homes for the elderly. I was distressed by the sight of old people dumped in recliner chairs, and by interviews with defensive staff, and I worried that it would distress her, but it was too late to switch off without drawing more attention to the subject. So we sat through it. Auntie Phyl listened in silence, but all she said when it was over was, ‘I’d always rather work with children, I don’t know why people take on jobs like that.’ She still saw herself as a worker, not as a victim, as the helper, not the helped. She never identified with the old.

  The death of my parents in the early 1980s left me with many unanswerable questions, which I have tried to work through in my own way, and now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture. I may never fully know why my mother was so unhappy and so angry, or whether there was any way in which I could have made her life (and therefore mine) less painful. But I cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together, although I know it is a doomed pursuit and has in the past made me profoundly unhappy. Maybe through the story of Auntie Phyl I see some hope of another chapter, a less despairing coda, a more gracious farewell.

  When campaigning for the NHS funding of child psychotherapists, I have presented myself to the world as a ‘depressed child’. But I was not continuously depressed. Sometimes I was quite happy. I had periods of intense misery, but maybe they were no worse than those of many children. I claim no singular status. My mother was seriously depressed for much of her later life, and her depression oppressed and infected me, or so I have come to believe. She was fond of the very word, which she applied to herself with some pride. ‘I suffer from endogenous depression,’ she would tell people, whether they wanted to know or not.

  Many writers have suffered from childhood depression. Harriet Martineau and Edith Wharton, women from very different social backgrounds, both appear to have had a keen sense of unallocated guilt when very young, which both managed to outgrow through lives of exceptional activity and productivity. My mother succumbed, in part, I believe, because she felt action was not available to her. As, in many ways, it was not.

  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 OCH1. 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.