The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  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 glass-fronted 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 must 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 £3 5s. 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.

  The mahogany sideboard, the second most expensive single item in the sale list, had cost £5 10s. The most expensive was a brass bedstead, which was bought for £8 10s, and on which my grandmother died.

  I don’t know when my grandparents acquired the warming-pan that I rescued from Bryn, and which I keep in my study in London. I don’t know whether it was ever used. I remember the cream-and-brown stone hot-water bottles, as does everyone of my age, but not the warming-pan. It may have been bought in Leeds in 1905, along with the brass bedstead, although it isn’t listed in the inventory. But that would not in itself have confirmed it as an item of inauthentic retro-chic.

  Can a horse brass ever be authentic? A warming-pan may be, but I’m not sure whether a horse brass can. Antique, yes, though not many are; authentic, no.

  Samu
el Johnson loved an inn as well as a post-chaise, and he claimed that good inns contributed greatly to human happiness. But he is very unlikely to have supped in Bryn, for it was not then a public house. He might well have stopped at the George in Stamford, or at the Angel in Grantham, or at the White Hart in Newark, and seen a group of fellow travellers or locals playing cards or the goose game. The Great North Road is lined with famous coaching inns with long pedigrees. The upper dining room of the Angel in Grantham, with its three fine, deep oriel windows, is one of the most handsome public dining rooms in England. King John and Richard III both knew this inn, so why not Dr Johnson?

  There is no evidence that Johnson ever played the goose game. As we have seen, Boswell regretted that his friend did not play draughts after leaving college, ‘for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often…there is a composure and gravity in draughts… which insensibly tranquillises the mind.’

  That’s what I feel about jigsaws.

  XII

  Once you start looking for a motif like the Royal Game of the Goose, you find that it pops up in unexpected places. It has now been forgotten in England, but it had its day of fashion here. In the mid-eighteenth century in England, the Duchess of Norfolk planted an outsize goose game of hornbeam in the grounds of her vast mansion at Worksop, which Horace Walpole saw on his visit in 1758. Unfortunately the manor, its five hundred apartments, and all its paintings and objets de vertu were destroyed by fire three years later in 1761, and we hear no more of the hornbeams. A generation later, Byron knew about the goose game and refers to it in Don Juan: ‘For good society is but a game/The royal game of goose, as I may say.’ And the game lives on in the popular culture of Europe. French and Italian children still play it, as we play Snakes and Ladders. It surfaced recently in Spain and Italy as a game show. A human form of it, claiming to be more ancient than the board game, is played in the square in Mirano, near Padua.

  In France, the game flourished from its first introduction. Many pretty, fragile and delicately coloured versions of it survive in the Print Room of the British Museum, with variants embracing journeys through the street vendors of Paris (a penalty is exacted for a stay at the vintner’s), the myths of Greece, Roman history (a penalty for landing on the space representing the Emperor Commodus), the military campaigns of Napoleon, and even the lives of famous actors and actresses. Most of these spin-offs have vanished, but the classic board game is well remembered in France, and cheap and cheerful plastic mass-produced versions of it are still on sale in French toyshops. I bought one in Nice in 2005. Its images are of an old-world, bucolic, farmyard prettiness.

  I had assumed that it was on the way out in Italy, its birthplace, as my attempts to buy it there in the spring of 2007 were unsuccessful. But my requests for it in newsagents and toyshops were met not with blank indifference but with a smile of happy, nostalgic recognition, the same kind of smile that often greets a query about jigsaws in England. Oh yes, of course they knew the Gioco dell’Oca, they didn’t happen to have it in stock, but of course they knew it. And finally I found it, in the autumn, in a newsagent’s in Sorrento, where the proprietor who sold it to me told me it was ‘un gioco classico’. The board I bought is made by Clementoni, one of the most famous of contemporary jigsaw manufacturers, and the counters are in the form of little wooden geese. They are pleasanter to handle than the French plastic pieces. The scene portrayed is in the Italian Alps, with a mountainous backdrop, a chalet-style farmhouse, an old-fashioned well, cows, a goat, a pig, a rabbit, a tortoise, a butterfly and other designators of rustic life, and the game is described as suitable for players aged from five to ninety-nine. The description doesn’t conceal the fact that it is a game of chance, but magnificently insists that the journey along the spiral track also symbolizes ‘una vicenda, un’avventura, lo scorrere del tempo, la vita stessa’. (An event, an adventure, the flowing of time, life itself.) We need to justify our diversions.

  Why the goose game survived on the continent and not in England is a mystery. Why did we go for Snakes and Ladders and Ludo instead? It was clearly well known in Zembla, that northern realm created by the arch-cryptographer and games-player Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, where his royal narrator alludes to a version ‘played with little airplanes of painted tin’.

  Games and manias come and go – board games, card games, collecting crazes. One year the playgrounds and streets are full of mini-scooters, or hula hoops, or yo-yos, or Frisbees, or skateboards, or roller skates, or children wearing bouncy antlers or springy tiaras on their heads, and the next year these objects vanish, or go underground for a while. Pokémon succeeds cigarette cards, and tamagotchi pets succeed Pokémon, while sudoku and kakuro chase the crossword. Some seemingly classic pursuits veer towards extinction or linger on with a small cult of practitioners. Diabolo, a juggling game played with two sticks and a spinning top, and once considered wickedly addictive, is rarely mentioned now, but it was once immensely popular. It is said to have been imported from China to England in the 1790s, round about the same time as the emergence of the jigsaw, and it caught on throughout Europe. Unlike gambling, it wasn’t a social evil, but it was a real time-waster and, unlike the hula hoop two hundred years later, it could not be convincingly claimed that its aim was to provide bodily exercise. Dexterity, perhaps, like fivestones, but not good health.

  One of the most bizarre tributes to the Royal Game of the Goose appears in a little-read novel by Jules Verne titled Le Testament d’un excentrique, published in 1899. I came across this very recently, but as a child I read and re-read Verne’s more popular stories. I loved Journey to the Centre of the Earth, to which I owe an enduring interest in volcanoes and a character in my novel The Realms of Gold. I treasure a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, given to me by my parents for Christmas 1948, which I reread with intense pleasure and renewed admiration as part of the research for my most recent novel, The Sea Lady. The edition is an attractive Rainbow Classic, published in Cleveland, Ohio, by the World Publishing Company, and edited by May Lamberton Becker, who, I now find, was a distinguished Anglophile American scholar and journalist. (There was a room dedicated to her memory in the National Book League at 7 Albemarle Street; it was opened in 1960 by none other than T. S. Eliot.) My copy has good illustrations by a German-born and widely travelled artist, Kurt Wiese. As a nine-year-old, I liked best the pictures of the narwhal and the submarine forest. As an adult, I was pleased and astonished to find the narrator and his manservant Conseil portrayed in handsome (though not full-frontal) nakedness.

  Verne has long been the darling of armchair parlour travellers. He had an interest in scientific discovery and experiment, and an extravagant love of all forms of locomotion and communication, coupled with a childlike eagerness for geological ‘wonders’. The travel industry is greatly indebted to his novels. He preceded mass tourism and globalization, but he was a prophet of both.

  I used to feel slightly embarrassed by my juvenile liking for Verne’s work, and was both surprised and relieved to discover that he is one of the heroes of Oulipo, that 1960s games-playing and cryptogram-loving movement of the French avant-garde. (Oulipo stands for ‘Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’.) Verne is a frequent point of reference for Oulipian Georges Perec, author of the classic jigsaw novel, La Vie: Mode d’Emploi, of which we shall read more later. Raymond Roussel, the rich man’s Proust, considered Verne one of the greatest of French novelists. His bold and adventurous imagination, his passion for puzzles, challenges, wagers and scientific marvels, appealed to a ludic and fantastic strain in French artists and writers, who took him more seriously than we have taken his English counterpart and literary descendant, H. G. Wells. Long after his death, his fictions continue to create new forms.

  In May 2006, an astonishing piece of public art, in the form of a vast mechanical elephant five storeys high, appeared in the streets of London. The elephant walked through Trafalgar Square and along the Hayma
rket, seeking a giant wooden maiden. The spectacle was based on Verne’s travel-quest story, The Sultan’s Elephant, and children and adults gathered from far and wide to see it, summoned by word of mouth, mobile phones and glimpses on the television news. Both of my sons saw it, independently, as did two of my grandchildren, who reported to me that the elephant was ‘bigger than a house’. I have a photograph of nine-year-old Stanley Swift, sitting on a bollard just inside the crowd barrier, holding up a copy of the specially printed Elephant Echo, with its headline FOUR MAGIC DAYS IN MAY. His seven-year-old sister Constance Swift, who was with another group, was one of the children who climbed up onto the arm of the giant girl to be scooped up by her and swung into the air.

  I like the thought of these members of my family, unknown to each other, being drawn together in a huge crowd in central London by a magical elephant. And Jules Verne would have liked this evidence of the durability and adaptability of his fantasies, living on into another medium, another millennium.

  Le Testament d’un excentrique has not been revived or much reprinted, but it is not without interest, particularly to one trying to distract herself by puzzles and travel games. In this novel, translated as The Will of an Eccentric, Verne converts the traditional goose game into ‘the Noble Game of the United States of America’. Like its more famous predecessor, Around the World in Eighty Days, published a quarter of a century earlier, this is a race game, involving wagers made in a gentleman’s club, large sums of money, and an eccentric millionaire. (Wagers in gentleman’s clubs are a staple ingredient in the fiction of adventure writers such as Verne and John Buchan; as a Yorkshire schoolgirl, I didn’t know what a gentleman’s club was, but I liked the conceit.)