The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  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.

  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 holidaymakers 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 1597, 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.
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br />   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.