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

  The childhood of Alison Uttley was different from that of my aunt's in Mexborough, and mine in Pontefract and Sheffield, but it had some similar features. Unlike us, she was a true country child, born in an isolated and ancient farmhouse near Cromford in Derbyshire, and she wrote about her childhood years and her family with acute recall, passionate intensity, some partiality and not a little censorship. (Her brother is edited out of most of her recollections, although he was close to her in age, and she usually presents herself as an only child.) Bryn was old, but Castle Top Farm was ancient, with foundations dating back many centuries, and a supply of four-poster beds, seventeenth-century oak chests, eighteenth-century hangings and gilded wallpapers, Victorian china, knick-knacks and whatnots, and a great kitchen full of polished pewter and brass, and a copper warming-pan. 'Everything shone, everything held a tiny red flame in its heart, but the shiniest, most important thing was the grandfather clock which ticked solemnly in its corner, where it had stood for two hundred years...' From the village school, Uttley went to Bakewell Grammar School (a trajectory not too dissimilar from that of the Bloors and Drabbles) and then on to read physics at Manchester, to study at a teachers' training college in Cambridge, and to teach in London.

  There was much in her life with which Auntie Phyl would have identified – her educational rites of passage, her love of animals, her interest in crafts, her understanding of children's games, her liking for miniature objects, her succession of Scottie dogs – but the biography revealed a personality very far removed from the homely sweetness and reassuring goodness of Little Grey Rabbit. Manipulative, appropriative, self-centred, possessive, she ruined the lives of her husband and her son, and drove both of them to suicide. She also quarrelled fiercely with her illustrator Margaret Tempest about copyright. She deeply resented any suggestion that Margaret Tempest had played an important part in creating the characters of Little Grey Rabbit, Hare, Squirrel, Moldywarp and Fuzzypeg, just as she hated any suggestion that her inspiration owed anything to Beatrix Potter. And she loathed her Beaconsfield neighbour Enid Blyton, because her books sold better.

  In old age, her house became more and more cluttered, just like Bryn, with little figurines on every surface, and she got fatter and fatter, just like the Bloors. She dressed eccentrically, with a ribbon in her hair.

  Auntie Phyl may well have found in her life a fearsome, mocking echo, and a travesty of the innocence of the books we had all enjoyed so much. Auntie Phyl, in her seventies, took at one point to wearing her hair in a plait tied with a ribbon. My mother ridiculed this regression, and I think she abandoned it, though whether this was in deference to her older sister I do not know.

  As a Christmas present, Auntie Phyl preferred Snookered by Donald Trelford, which one of the family gave her – I can't remember who, but I know it wasn't me. This was a most successful gift. She loved watching snooker on television. I don't know what Alison Uttley would have made of that. I never learned to follow the snooker, but I enjoyed hearing Auntie Phyl describe how she had had to sit up till midnight to watch Jimmy White. This seemed a good hold on happiness, and I wish I had acquired it.

  VIII

  I have found rereading Alison Uttley's autobiographical works, as an adult, unsettling, as Auntie Phyl and I both found her biography. Uttley takes the reader back, past the dead cow in the ditch, into the dark wood of the suicides, and she fills these places with whispers and eyes and monsters. When she was little, she endowed inanimate objects with life; animals and trees spoke to her, as did jugs and plates and knives and buttons and pebbles and stones and fragments of quartz and mica, and what they said was not always pleasant. The buttons talked in 'tiny metallic sounds' from 'pursed-up button mouths', which does not sound agreeable, and the enormous 'fat green body' of the heavy pincushion that sat on the kitchen dresser, bristling with hatpins and broken darning needles like an aged porcupine, is not a wholly friendly object.

  All children, according to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, have this capacity (or this misapprehension), and the animated object is a commonplace motif in stories for children. The Adventures of a Pincushion by Mary Jane Kilner, published in the 1780s, is a striking early example, with an undercurrent of violence, for the poor, downwardly mobile narrator ends very sadly. Uttley had this talent of animation to an exceptional extent, carrying the memory of it, as well as the power to revive it, throughout her life. She also believed she had a gift for predictive dreaming, and her accounts of her experiences of this are uncomfortably plausible. She found it easy to put herself into a trance.

  The ability to 'receive' rather than to 'invent' has been claimed by other celebrated writers for children. P. L. Travers was another disturbing and difficult character with a penchant for the occult and a tendency to wish to dominate her illustrator. She was an admirer of Gurdjieff, whom she met in the 1920s, and of Jung and Ouspensky. She said, enigmatically, that she 'never for one moment' believed that she had invented Mary Poppins, who came to her while she was recovering from an illness; perhaps, she said, Mary Poppins invented her, 'and that is why I find it so difficult to write autobiographical notes'. Enid Blyton claimed that, while composing, she would shut her eyes for a few minutes, with her portable typewriter on her knees, and make her mind go blank, whereupon real children would appear and stand before her, and take on movement, and talk, and laugh, as though they were on a cinema screen. All she had to do was to watch and listen, and then to transcribe their words and actions. Uttley, Travers and Blyton had strong visual memories and imaginations, and all three seemed to have had something of the medium about them. They received and transcribed stories and messages from some source of childhood experience that is closed to most adults.

  Why do I find these accounts uncomfortable? Is it merely a natural scepticism that protests? Not quite. For, as an adult, Uttley continued (like Conan Doyle) to believe in fairies, and that is enough to make most people feel uncomfortable. The mixing of the power of childhood animism with a self-deluding sense of arrested development suggests that something went wrong with her progress towards what we call maturity. A touch of J. M. Barrie crept into her patchwork-quilt recollections. The animism threatened to tip over into fanciful embroidery, the acute recall into whimsy. The elves invaded. The revered historic rural objects – the pincushion, the button box, the grandfather clock, the spinning top, the fivestones – became copies of themselves, endlessly celebrated, endlessly reproduced, like a picture on a calendar or a biscuit tin, their authenticity debased by repetition. She reworked her material too often. Maybe her talent was arrested at a certain point and then devoured itself. She was imprisoned in what poet and critic Susan Stewart calls in her book On Longing 'the childhood of the self'. The memories sickened and became nauseating, though they never (except in her books for very young children) became sentimental or sweet. She was too clever for that.

  IX

  Alison Uttley was indisputably an authentic country child, so it is strange that her version of the pastoral seems, at times, so unconvincing. The question of authenticity and artificiality has attached itself to the pastoral since the form was invented over two thousand years ago; indeed, the form is itself a question, forever playing the real against the unreal, the brutal against the idyllic, the true country against the town's idea of the country.

  These queries are raised even by the work of John Clare, who was indisputably an authentic countryman. Clare at one point proposed the title The Midsummer Cushion for a volume of his poetry, although it was never adopted. It was, he hoped, an attractive title, and referred to an old custom among villagers in summer time of sticking 'a piece of greensward full of field flowers and place it as an ornament in their cottages, which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions'. Such a pretty custom might well have been recorded with approval by Alison Uttley as a cottage survival. But Clare's upper-class patron Eliza Emmerson needed to have the phrase explained to her, and although she at first liked it, she began to have doubts about it, and the volume wa
s eventually, and less quaintly, published as The Rural Muse.The real was becoming unreal even during its own lifespan.

  There was a pronounced, nostalgic, Georgian strain in Uttley's writing. (She was an admirer and later a friend of Walter de la Mare, one of the best-known writers of the group that flourished during the reign of George V; it included John Drinkwater, John Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie, Edmund Blunden and W H. Davies.) Some critics have dismissed the whole Georgian pastoral movement as one of infantile regression and a denial of the onward march of urban life and industry. (In fact, in her London youth, somewhat improbably, Uttley had been influenced and befriended by Ramsay MacDonald and his wife Margaret, but with age her views became more conservative, though not necessarily, as we have seen, more orthodox.) The Georgian poets connected the countryside with childhood, and their work prompted in some quarters a suspicion that being interested in childhood, or writing for and about children, is in itself childish. T. S. Eliot, writing in The Dial in 1927 on a book by Blunden about the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, produces what is intended to be a devastating condemnation of the concept of Vaughan's 'angel infancy'.

  Eliot writes:

  It does not occur to Mr Blunden that the love of one's childhood, a passion which he appears to share with Lamb and Vaughan, is anything but a token of greatness. We all know the mood; and we can, if we choose to relax to that extent, indulge in the luxury of the reminiscence of childhood; but if we are at all mature or conscious, we refuse to indulge this weakness to the point of writing or poetizing about it. We know that it is something to be buried and done with, though its corpse will from time to time find its way up to the surface.

  Eliot continues in this vein for some paragraphs, accusing Blunden of attempting to re-create Vaughan in his own image as 'a mild pastoral poet – that is to say, a poet who, enjoying fresh air and green hillsides, occupies himself in plastering nature with his own fancies'. Blunden's praise for Vaughan's religious sense of 'solar, personal, flower-whispering, rainbow-browed, ubiquitous, magnanimous Love' understandably gets short shrift in Eliot's critique, but Vaughan himself, now considered one of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, does not emerge with much more credit; the emotion in his poetry is described by Eliot as 'vague, adolescent, fitful, and retrogressive'. These are harsh words. That word 'retrogressive' is particularly damaging, coming as it does from the Modernist who did so much to reinstate the Metaphysical poets. One would have thought that Eliot would have responded more warmly to Vaughan's religious verse, and his description of childhood as a corpse is, to say the least, startling. I don't know what Wordsworth and Freud would have made of that.

  Eliot had no children, though he had godchildren, and it is said he could entertain them when he needed to. He wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in part for them. He is also said to have liked practical jokes, but I choose to consider that a sign of arrested development.

  X

  Liking children and 'being good with children' are gifts that seem to be somewhat randomly distributed. I do not know whether there is any literature on the subject of the child-friendly personality. I suppose there must be, but I have not been able to find a word for it. (The word 'normotic', coined by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, was suggested to me as a possibility by a friend, but, as she says, this seems to pathologize the very normality I am trying to describe.)

  Certainly not all parents possess these gifts naturally. We were lucky in Auntie Phyl. You could argue that being a good aunt was for her, as it was for Jane Austen, a strategic move, one that earned value in the family, but I trust there was more to it than that and, as she chose to be an infants' teacher, I think there must have been. (Not that there was much career choice, for women of her generation.) I have occasionally wondered whether she really enjoyed playing simple, childish games like Belisha with her little nieces and her nephew. At the time, I assumed she loved these diversions as much as we did. It did not occur to me that she was faking it for our sake until I had children of my own and found myself less than enthusiastic about playing endless games of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders and Snap with them. Then I began to wonder whether she had not, after all, been more possessed of great patience and generosity than of great childishness. I hope she enjoyed Belisha. I know she enjoyed the jigsaws.

  I am suspiciously loyal to the pleasure and purpose of jigsaws, which seem to me to belong to a higher category of activity than card games.

  When my father was near death, in a hospital in Amsterdam, I found myself asking him whether he had enjoyed our seaside family holidays at Filey on the Yorkshire coast. They had been happy times for me, on the whole, and I needed to know whether he had been happy too. I was worried, then, so near the end, that he had been pretending, all those years ago. But he smiled, and he said, as though I should not have doubted, 'Oh Maggie, I loved Filey.' That meant a great deal to me. I was glad I had dared to ask.

  My father worked very hard all his adult life and had little time for play, except during those long official summer vacations. Gardening, in his retirement, was his refuge from himself, from the dullness of time, and from my mother in the house. My father dreaded boredom. He admitted this openly, as few dare to do. Admitting to a fear of boredom is usually considered a sign of weakness. Some make a point of boasting that they are never bored. 'Oh, I've always known how to occupy myself, I've never known a day's boredom in my life!' are lines often spoken by those bores who do not fear boring others.

  Elizabeth Bowen's novel, The Last September, set in Ireland between the wars, describes a life of idleness under threat, of tennis, flower arranging, teas, dances, wasting lives. Discontented Hugo arrests his wife's gossip with the words, 'life is too short for all this,' but what he is thinking is that life is too long. The young are allowed to complain about the slowness of time; it is sadder when the old do so.

  My mother did not much like 'amusements'. I cannot blame her for that, for as an adult I did not like them very much myself. After my father's death, she said to me one day, 'I don't know what I'm expected to do with my time. I can't read all day, can I?' Auntie Phyl alleged that she gave up reading towards the end of her life, but I'm not sure that was true. My mother was in the middle of James Clavell's Shōgun when she died. It was open on her bedside table. This was lowbrow reading, for her, and I was surprised to see it there. The night before, on 3 April 1984, she had managed to see the last episode of The Jewel in the Crown. I have always been pleased that she got to the end of the story. She died unexpectedly in the early morning of 4 April, and she was not alone in the house, because her daily housekeeper and good friend Mrs Cattermole had arranged to spend the night with her. I don't think this was because my mother was feeling ill – I think they'd decided to watch telly together, as a little treat, with their supper on a tray. This knowledge was a comfort. She had a much better death than her sister. Although a self-confessed hypochondriac all her life, she died without a murmur.

  Some adults have a natural and uninhibited capacity for play. The detective fiction I used to read as a moody fourteen-year-old during the long dull school holidays featured house parties that frequently involved games like charades. As I never knew anyone who gave such house parties, I attempted to despise them as the diversions of the upper classes and the idle rich, but in fact they could not be dismissed on a class basis. H. G. Wells, who was neither upper class nor idle, threw himself boyishly into floor games, war games, hide-and-seek and charades. He liked organizing house parties full of boisterous fun. His literary heir, J. B. Priestley, wrote with a similar gusto about riotous, lower-middle-class assemblies, and was a gifted entertainer of grandchildren. Some families never grow out of play. I watch them with wonder, excluded, unwilling and unable to join in. I would like to be able to play games, but I can't.

  But, I sometimes ask myself, was there not something a bit odd about Wells? That's rather a T. S. Eliot kind of thought. Was there not something not quite grown up about Wells? He remained
boyishly irresponsible both in his private and public life, reacting petulantly to criticisms, quarrelling over trifles, never quite accepting adult liabilities. Was this a necessary part of his capacity for play?

  I have realized that, at Bryn, I felt both protected and included. I felt able to be a child, and to enjoy childish things. They were ordinary and undemanding. We sat round a little, low, oblong table in the front room (we didn't call them coffee tables in those days, although as we grew older we were allowed mugs of milky Nescafé) and we played cards, or a board game called Millionaire, or we cut wool, or pegged rugs from scraps of old clothes. (Alison Uttley, of course, had pegged rugs.) Or we sat up at the gateleg table, doing a jigsaw. I don't think we could hear the passing lorries from the front room – it was from the apple-loft bedroom upstairs that we heard the incessant, pouring sound of the slipstream – but we were aware of the proximity of the Roman road, leading north to Scotland, south to London. I can't remember how old or young I was when I began to plan my own travels, to long to see the sights, to desire to conquer territory and to tick off cities. But Bryn, from the beginning of my life, was a calm fixed point in a restlessly ambitious world. It wasn't a backwater, but it was safe.

  XI

  The romance of the road, as I recently discovered, was the inspiration for the first known English table or board game, which pre-dates Belisha by nearly two hundred years. The connection between dreams of travel and sedentary evenings spent round a lamp-lit table is an old one. You sit secure at home in your family circle or in the parlour of the inn, but at the same time you may toss your dice or spin your teetotum, and you may move freely through unknown lands. Manufacturers from early days knew how to attract what they called 'tarry-at-home' or 'parlour' travellers.