The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  When we were little, visitors would occasionally and unpredictably give us a sixpence. This was very exciting. There was a little low wooden gate separating the kitchen from the narrow hallway and the guests’ dining room. It was painted a thick glossy globby milk-chocolate brown, and it was just the height of a small child. I used to hang around behind this gate, peering over it and hoping for a tip. I don’t think my parents would have approved of this, but Grandma and Auntie Phyl didn’t mind.

  I remain a little nervous about frying eggs, and watch with apprehension as chefs in breakfast buffets in hotels nonchalantly crack them and sizzle them and occasionally discard those that go wrong.We weren’t allowed to be so casual during the war or in the years of austerity after the war. Dried eggs were not pleasant (although dried mashed potato was delicious) and a fresh egg was a treasure. I remember being enthralled, as a small child, by a riddle about an egg that appeared in one of Alison Uttley’s story books. I thought it was in one of the Sam Pig or Tim Rabbit series, but I can’t find it there, though I came to know it by heart.

  In marble walls as white as milk,

  Lined with a skin as soft as silk,

  Within a fountain crystal clear,

  A golden apple doth appear.

  No doors there are to this stronghold,

  Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

  I loved this rhyme and thought for many years that Alison Uttley had written it herself, but I now discover that it is what is called ‘traditional’ or ‘anonymous’. I still think it enchanting and am full of admiration for the way it manages to transform the unpleasant, mucous texture of egg white into something pure, clear and wondrous. And when did I last pause to look at that ‘skin as soft as silk’? Maybe it was thicker and stronger in the old days, before battery farming, when hens were better fed.

  One of the pleasures of visiting Bryn was the opportunity to reread my way through the store of children’s books that Auntie Phyl owned. I could not read them often enough. She had sets of Alison Uttley and Helen Bannerman, some Enid Blyton and many annuals – but no Noddy, and no Beatrix Potter, or none that I can remember. Little Grey Rabbit, Sam Pig, Little Black Sambo, Little Black Quasha, Epaminondas – these were my friends at Bryn, and some of them as I now see were charged with a racist innuendo that at the time escaped me completely.

  Epaminondas is a little black boy, a character created in 1911 by American author Sara Cone Bryant, but the version we had was an English adaptation by Constance Egan, illustrated by A. E. Kennedy (who also illustrated Uttley’s Sam Pig) and published by Collins. The story I loved best was ‘Epaminondas and His Mammy’s Umbrella’, which turns on the little boy’s over-literal interpretation of his mother’s instructions to go to find the umbrella she had left beside the grandfather clock at his grandmother’s house. He finds it, but fails to bring it home, as his mother had not explicitly told him to do so. She greets his mistake with, ‘Sakes alive! Epaminondas, you ain’t got the sense you was born with,’ a reproach that I seem to have internalized, as I often say it to myself when I do something particularly stupid. But it is a reproach that does not destroy, uttered in what I hear as a benign voice. The Mammy of Epaminondas is a fat and kindly figure who loves her foolish little boy, and who knows he means well.

  One of the most Epaminondas-like things I did was to come home from school in Sheffield one day wearing odd shoes, one of my own, and one that belonged to the girl with the next peg in the cloakroom. I was about nine years old at the time. My mother and the mother of the other girl (I can remember her name but dare not write it down) were extraordinarily angry about this. I could not see why, for the two pairs of brown Clarks lace-ups were almost identical and to me interchangeable. Who cared? My mother cared, and the other mother cared, and their wrath was annihilating. I think the Mammy of Epaminondas would have been more forgiving.

  A. E. Kennedy’s illustrations now look grotesque, but the story still seems harmlessly engaging, and the Mammy still smiles.

  For some reason we despised Larry the Lamb from Toytown, as we despised crinoline ladies, but, again, I don’t know why. Maybe we despised Larry, or failed to find him amusing, because he, like me, had a stammer. ‘Mr M-m-m-mayor…,’ he used to bleat. But I don’t think I took that personally when I was a child, any more than I noticed the black racial stereotypes.

  It could be that Auntie Phyl noticed Larry’s stammer for me, for she was personally and professionally sensitive to the way children were treated. I remember she told us off for teaching our very little brother, when he was aged two or three, to parrot:‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace…’ The way he pronounced these words was so sweet, and we loved to hear him say them, and we got him to repeat them again and again as we sheltered from the rain in the beach hut on our summer holiday at Minehead. But Auntie Phyl was quite right, it wasn’t at all the thing. We were nasty teenage sisters, and we should have known better.

  At Christmas one year Auntie Phyl was given a new biography of Alison Uttley, with which at the time she professed herself pleased, but when she had read it she told me that she had not really enjoyed it. It was too sad and not what she had expected. Not having read it myself, I did not know what had disappointed her and was not particularly interested in why she had disliked it. Now, many years later, trying to track down the causes of her disturbance, I find I cannot even be sure which biography she read, for there are two candidates. The first, by Elizabeth Saintsbury, published in 1980, seems chronologically the most probable, but it is hard to see what aspect of it could have upset her. It cannot have been solely the perfunctory nature of the author’s narrative and research. The first three-quarters of this work are largely a paraphrase of Uttley’s own many diffuse and scattered autobiographical writings, drawing most heavily on her classic childhood memoir The Country Child (1931), and it adds little to what was already known. But there are darker elements suggesting that the ending of the story was sadder than the author could say, and Auntie Phyl may have found it threatening.

  It now seems to me much more probable that she must have read Denis Judd’s fuller and franker account, published in 1986, though I am slightly surprised that she had tackled it in her late seventies, when her eyesight was beginning to deteriorate. This biography would indeed have shocked her, as it shocked me.

  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 ruine
d 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 was 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 don
e 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.