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

  Now we explore the unknown world through watching television programmes or feature films made in exotic locations, but in my childhood we learned at school through geography lessons, and unofficially through games or jigsaws, or through holiday slide shows of varying degrees of sophistication projected by holiday-makers keen to share their experiences with a captive family audience. In the late 1950s and 60s, even Auntie Phyl took colour slides. She could never remember what they were of, but we enjoyed watching her jumbled images of Denmark and Norway, East Germany and Scotland, Ireland and the Shetlands. Home entertainment has been connected with the virtual journey for a very long time. A correspondent in Alberta writes that she spent many winter evenings 'in my hometown in Saskatchewan doing jigsaws and they were for me, along with my books, windows on the world'.

  I had never heard of the mother of all modern table track games until I set off on this jigsaw journey. I now know more about it than I need to. The earliest track board game, the most ancient of tracks, is called the Royal Game of the Goose, and it dates from the Renaissance. Its invention is sometimes attributed to Francesco de Medici, one of the later and more decadent Medici, who was Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1574 to 1587, and who presented a copy of the game to Philip II of Spain. It was mentioned by Pietro Carrera in Il Gioco degli scacchi in 1617 in connection with Francesco, whose mother Eleanora of Toledo was Spanish. Francesco cultivated the Spanish alliance by gifts, and this game was amongst them.

  Francesco de Medici was a discriminating patron of alchemy, craftsmanship and the decorative arts, was better renowned for these pursuits than for high statesmanship. He was passionately interested in chemistry and cosmography, as well as being a skilled and innovative jeweller 'adept at making vases from molten rock crystal and precious metals', according to historian Christopher Hibbert. By the time he came to power in Florence, the Medici family was in vigorous and scandalous decline, and Francesco's eccentric trajectory was exploited in England some thirty years after his death by John Webster and Thomas Middleton, in whose Jacobean tragedies he appears as a murderous, lecherous villain.

  Francesco was famous for his melancholy, and for keeping goldfish and Swedish reindeer as well as mistresses. Wealthy and beleaguered, he invented many curious devices for killing time. Most of the Medici of this period played cards and chess, and gambled for high stakes. (Chess was a game more favoured in Spain and Italy than in England, a point stressed by Jacobean dramatists, several of whom used chess as a theatrical device to reveal court intrigue. The English tended to regard chess as Machiavellian.) The Medici were also given to more inventive and extravagant entertainments, such as water ballets on the river Arno and sixty-five-course feasts, parades and pageants, literary experiments, and the commissioning of villas, palaces, gardens and murals. In his dark and secret studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, designed by Vasari, Francesco created an arcane cabinet of mythological and alchemical paintings, surveyed by portraits of his father Cosimo and his Spanish mother Eleanora. He was the prince of dark staircases and ornate display. But the board game he is said to have originated was cheap and easy to reproduce, thus becoming part of the daily lives of ordinary people who could never have afforded any of the precious stones, thickly clustered paintings, or curious scientific objects that crowded his cabinet.

  The Gioco dell'Oca, or Le Jeu de l'Oie, is a very simple game, much simpler than chess, and it soon caught on throughout Europe. It reached England by the end of the sixteenth century, for there is a reference to it in the Stationers' Register on 16 June !597, where John Wolfe entered 'the newe and most pleasant game of the Goose'. Shakespeare might have played it, as might Queen Elizabeth who, like most kings, queens and princes, was fond of a game of cards. Shakespeare never mentions it, which is a pity. Nor does Robert Burton, in his list of winter aids to ward off melancholy. He includes 'cards, tables and dice, shovelboard, chess-play, the philosopher's game, small trunks, shuttlecock, billiards, music, masks, singing, dancing, Yule-games, frolics, jests, riddles, catches, purposes, questions and commands, merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, cheaters, witches, fairies, goblins, friars', but he omits the goose game.

  Nine men's morris, which Shakespeare does mention, was a more ancient and primitive board game, an elaborate form of noughts and crosses that could be played indoors with pegs or pins, or outdoors on a pitch carved out in the turf. It seems to have become a well-known village game by his day, as Titania's reference in A Midsummer Night's Dream reveals, but some form of it had once been played at court, where it was known as 'merells'. Games, as historian Philip Ariès was to tell us, had a tendency to slide down the social scale. John Clare, who called it 'peg morris' or 'ninepeg morris', certainly knew it as an outdoor game, 'nicked upon the green'. I don't think this game is played anywhere in Britain now, though there may be some 'heritage' reconstructions of it in heritage-conscious villages, but it has been revived as a board game by the National Trust. I bought it at the National Trust shop at Heddon Mouth in Devon, and gave it to my grandson Stanley at a lunch party in Hackney in June 2008; he and his uncle Adam attempted to play it, but found the instructions confusing. Stanley, an enterprising boy, looked it up on the internet, where he found a better explanation of the rules, and uncle and nephew proceeded to do battle. I don't know who won. They are both by nature persistent.

  The Royal Game of the Goose is a game of luck, like Snakes and Ladders. Unlike many later board games, it has no moral or intellectual content, although some later variants have tried to introduce one. The players begin at a given starting point, throw dice for the number of moves, and work their way gradually with a token round a spiral track of sixty-three places towards the centre of the board, advancing, missing a turn or going back if they land on certain spaces – a bridge, an inn, a dungeon, a well, a maze. Space 58 is particularly unlucky; sometimes it portrays a death's head, sometimes a cooked or dead goose, or some other symbol of ill luck, and it always sends the player right back to the beginning. There are so many versions of this type of board game now that it is hard to imagine a world before it was invented. How did people get through time without it?

  Irving Finkel, the colourful curator of the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum, is an expert on the games of the ancient world. All games, he claims, fit into groups – race games, all-in-a-row games, hunt games, position games, counting games and war games. The Royal Game of Ur dates back to 2600 BC, whilst chess, a 'war game of pure skill' of Indian origin, appeared about 500 BC. Pachisi, also an Indian game, mutated into Ludo in modern times, and the goose game, another derivative, is also a race game.

  The human capacity for and fear of boredom must have an evolutionary significance. Animals in nature do not seem to get bored, even when (like gorged lions) they have plenty of time for boredom. Domestic animals have caught the habit from us, and caged animals clearly and visibly suffer from it. So do horses in small wet fields. It has been experimentally demonstrated that laboratory rats, given stimulating activities such as a treadmill, retain their joie de vivre much longer than those deprived of these entertainments, and also retain a capacity for neurogenesis. Jigsaws and treadmills renew the brain cells. Activity is good for you, lethargy is bad for you. So the human intolerance of very long periods of lethargy is in itself an evolutionary stimulus towards invention, creativity, discovery. Playing games to pass the time is connected with intellectual development, just as funerary rites are connected with an apprehension of mortality. Palaeolithic children may not have played board games, but they must have played in the dirt with pebbles and shells.

  I read about the Royal Game of the Goose, unwittingly, long before I thought to ask what it was, and what its provenance. It is mentioned in Oliver Goldsmith's pastoral lament, The Deserted Village (1770), a poem with which any student of English Literature of my age must be familiar, and which I have certainly read several times over the past fifty years. Indeed, I had often
thought of this poem in connection with the changing life of Long Bennington, the only English village I have known throughout my life. In my middle years I became very interested, for reasons that are not yet clear to me, in the subject of the pastoral as a literary and (to a lesser extent) as an artistic form, and spent a good deal of time reading the poetry of Thomson, Crabbe and John Clare, as well as following the discussions and revisionist analyses of writers such as Raymond Williams, John Berger, John Barrell and, more recently, Matthew Johnson. ( John Barrell's analysis of George Morland's painting The Alehouse Door, in The dark side of the landscape, is a masterpiece of sympathetic and revelatory interpretation.) My liking for wild and empty romantic landscape was easy enough to explain, and its literary sources obvious, for the Brontës were dear to many English, middle-class schoolgirls who loved Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and desolate moorland with an erotic and ideological passion. My interest in the pastoral was more unaccountable, and is in some way connected with my feelings for Bryn and with the flat fields and mild beasts around it.

  The fate of Long Bennington does not much resemble that of Goldsmith's 'Sweet Auburn, Loveliest Village of the Plain'. Auburn is taken to be in part a description of Lissoy, the village of the Irish Midlands where Goldsmith was reared. Both Long Bennington and Lissoy are Midlands villages, but Long Bennington has grown and prospered rather than dwindled and declined. Its several public houses have done good business in the past five decades, despite the bypass. For years Auntie Phyl enjoyed her bargain pensioner's lunch at the Wheatsheaf, where the child of the house would often join her to chat to her on her banquette as she ate her fish and chips or gammon, egg and chips. Her gift for entertaining children did not fade with age.

  Nevertheless, despite Long Bennington's successful adaptation to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one can glimpse in its living present the traces of a pastoral way of life that has been a long time dying. These traces link us to Goldsmith's sense of a not-quite-lost Golden Age, a Golden Age that lives on in our bones and flickers through the imagery of our collective memory, a Golden Age in which we are not utterly alienated from the earth.

  Long Bennington retains its authenticity. It is not yet a facsimile, a virtual village. Although housing developments built from the 1960s onwards have considerably increased the size of its population, the community still has a strongly agricultural feel to it. Local businesses deal in animal feeds, agricultural engineering and ironwork, and not all the children at the village school want to be footballers or firemen or policemen. Some still want to farm, or to drive a tractor, or to become a vet.

  The elm tree is gone, and the Teas-with-Hovis sign has gone. In Goldsmith's depopulated Auburn, the thorn tree survived, but the signpost near it that 'caught the passing eye' and directed the traveller to the ale house had vanished.

  Here is Goldsmith's description (lines 226–36) of what was once the alehouse of Auburn:

  Imagination fondly stoops to trace

  The parlour splendours of that festive place;

  The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,

  The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,

  The chest, contrived a double debt to pay,

  A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,

  The pictures placed for ornament and use,

  The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose,

  The hearth, except when winter chill'd the day,

  With aspen boughs, and flowers, and fennel gay;–

  While broken tea-cups, wisely kept for show,

  Ranged o'er the chimney, glisten'd in a row.

  I used to read this passage, taking in the generalized sense of regret and loss, without having any notion of what the 'royal game of goose' was, and without stopping to enquire. Nor did I recognize 'the twelve good rules', which have nothing to do with the goose game, as I (and others) have ignorantly assumed; the phrase appears to refer to a list of rules of conduct fancifully ascribed to King Charles I, which were produced as popular broadside sheets illustrated with woodcuts and hung on the walls of inns, alehouses and taverns. The rules included advice not to pick quarrels, not to make comparisons or keep bad company, not to lay wagers, and not to make long meals.

  Bryn did not display the twelve good rules, but it had those very teacups described by Goldsmith, kept for show on the mahogany sideboard in the dining room and imprisoned within a glassfronted china cabinet in the parlour. (We didn't call it the parlour; we called it the front room.) The cabinet also contained a selection of Coronation cups and mugs, as well as some alabaster eggs and small glass animals of more recent date, many of them Christmas presents and souvenirs. Some very miscellaneous, old, painted plates and tiles were suspended on brackets from the walls or hung from a picture rail. On twin oblong plaques, two bulbous green ceramic monks in habits drank ale from tankards, suggesting alehouse conviviality. A decorative round plate with a green-and-gilt edge portrayed a rose-crowned woman in a flimsy pink-and-white garment perched on a thorny precipice. A blue-and-white tile framed in gilded wood displayed a couple of ragged black 'piccaninny' children, a boy and a girl, sitting on the branch of a tree above a river in a Deep Southern landscape, kissing one another; their features are exaggerated and caricatured in a manner that would now be considered profoundly offensive, and the work of art is signed with the initials ABB. I never liked this image, which even as a small child I found crude, ugly and disturbing. These piccaninnies, unlike Epaminondas, were unacceptable.

  Was this tile a Bloor piece, by a Bloor potter? It is too embarrassing to show to an expert, too strange an heirloom to discard. It remains hidden in a spare bedroom. The vogue for such artwork now seems inexplicable.

  The Bloors, as I have noted, were potters. A Robert Bloor had once owned the Old Derby China Works, in the early nineteenth century, though the quality of its products is said by some to have deteriorated under his management.

  Grandma Bloor collected brass and copper ornaments, and the mantelpiece in the public dining room was crowded with small brass and copper knick-knacks of varying value and charm – a fine, smoothly sculpted hare, two Oriental oxen pulling a cart, many little bowls and ashtrays, some figurines, assorted candlesticks, a miniature set of fire-irons, a tiny kettle. I don't think there were any horse brasses. These objects were a talking point with guests, who liked to remark that they must take a lot of cleaning. Her collection was very useful to her grandchildren, who always knew what to buy her for Christmas. I used to enjoy hunting around in junk shops for bits and pieces for her. I was told, perhaps wrongly, that one can distinguish copper from brass by the colour of their glow and lustre; copper is yellow-gold, whereas brass has a more reddish, metallic, fiery tint. I prefer the yellow copper. I don't think any of us knew anything about the quality of these pieces, though my father thought the ox cart might be valuable.

  Bryn, like Auburn's alehouse and Alison Uttley's farmhouse, had a varnished grandfather clock that had once clicked behind the door. I think I can remember the weights of its pendulum, which hung down obscenely like dirty sausages. Grandpa Bloor used to wind it up, once a week, but after his death it stood silent.

  Bryn also housed some cracked and crazed old oil paintings – a portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman in a red jacket and a cap, a Scottish landscape with pine trees and a torrent, which had a small tear in the canvas. Auntie Phyl gave these away for nothing to an itinerant antique dealer, because he assured her they were 'worthless'. I think she felt slightly shifty about this, as well she might have done. I don't know where those paintings came from, or how old they were, and I don't know where they went. They looked pretty damn old to me, even when I was quite grown up. Maybe they'd been hanging there since the house was built. Maybe Oliver Goldsmith himself had seen them on his travels. Maybe Samuel Johnson had passed by Bryn, and called in, and supped or taken tea before those very paintings, in the summer of 1773, on his way to Scotland and the Western Isles.

  In fact, Dr Johnson mu
st have been driven through Long Bennington and therefore past Bryn, although the house wasn't called that then. Everybody who went along the high road to and from Scotland passed by Bryn. Dr Johnson passed by in a post-chaise with his friend and travelling companion, the lawyer Robert Chambers, on his way to meet Boswell in Edinburgh. (Chambers was on his way to Bengal, via a lengthy detour to bid farewell to his family in his home town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.) Boswell records that Johnson enjoyed his journey: 'I choose to mention that he travelled in post-chaises, of which the rapid movement was one of his most favourite amusements.' Elsewhere, Johnson is recorded as 'doating' on a coach, and declaring that life had not 'many better things than being driven rapidly along'. His friend Mrs Piozzi remembered that he 'loved indeed the very act of travelling, and I cannot tell how far one might have taken him in a carriage before he would have wished for refreshment. He was therefore, in some respects, an admirable companion on the road, as he piqued himself upon feeling no inconvenience, and on despising no accommodations.'

  He enjoyed a captive audience in a carriage. His captives were not always so content. A drive through Scotland that pleased Johnson ('we were satisfied with the company of each other, as well riding in the chaise as sitting at an inn') was described by Boswell as 'tedious' and 'drowsy'.

  Johnson's view of the Great North Road is well known: 'The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.' But he relished both the notion and the act of movement.

  At one point I began to hope that my grandfather's grandfather clock might be nearly as old as the house (which would have made it both more valuable and more authentic) but I discovered an invoice indicating that my grandfather had bought it on 2 October 1905, at Arthur Cook's in Leeds, for £35 s. So it had started its life with the Bloor family in a terraced house in Mexborough, before it moved to its more appropriate rural setting in the corner of the dining room in Bryn.