The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  Yes, that is fair enough.

  According to William James in The Principles of Psychology, 'the hoarding instinct prevails widely among animals as well as among men.' He quotes a description of the hoard of a Californian wood rat, made in the stove of an empty house, of which the outside was composed of spikes,

  all laid with symmetry, so as to present the points of the nails outward ... Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two dozen knives, forks and spoons ... several large plugs of tobacco ... an old purse containing some silver, matches and tobacco; nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several large augers ... The outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of the pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works in still another.

  James suggests that rats are like misers, and that they don't have a plan. They collect for the sake of collecting. But that wood rat's collection sounds very deliberate to me and demonstrated a fairly sophisticated degree of classification.

  Howard Hardiman is a collector who collects stray jigsaw pieces, found in the street. He has strict rules about his collection, rules that provide what Oulipo would call 'constraints'. He is a sign-language interpreter by profession, which implies that he is interested in signs. He doesn't actually do jigsaw puzzles; he just collects pieces. 'They have to be on their own, rather than several pieces at once.' So far he has collected about twenty-five to thirty pieces. One day he may be going to turn them into a work of art. This is clearly a metaphysical, perhaps even a metaphysicaltopographical project, or perhaps, as he puts it, just 'a little bit of madness'. While brooding on his strange habit, I encountered a soggy spread of jigsaw pieces on the edge of a muddy car park in Taunton. I don't know what he would have made of that. Would any of these pieces have been eligible? I don't think they would. And they were very wet.

  Raymond Queneau, one of the founder members of Oulipo, spoke at a meeting in 1961 of 'rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape'. Baudrillard, in his 1968 essay quoted above, told us that 'the organisation of the collection is itself a substitute for time'.

  Auntie Phyl and I collected car numbers on car number plates. This was the game: you had to begin at the beginning, with a single 1, and then note a single 2, and then a single 3, and so on, in strict sequence. We too had rules. You were not allowed to hoard or bank a spotted number, even for a couple of minutes. We used to report on progress during our weekly Sunday-morning telephone conversations, when we had finished with the exploits of Jimmy White or the early flowering of the aconites. It gave us something to talk about. I think I went through two or three rounds of this game, giving up each time round about 294 or 295. I don't think I have ever reached 300.

  And the strange thing was that she was always ahead of me. Although in later years she led a fairly local village life, enlivened by shopping trips on the bus to Newark or Grantham, she spotted more car numbers than I did. I, in the thick of the thickest of London traffic, surrounded by number plates, always busy and always on the move, lagged behind. This was not because I was not concentrating. I was. It was because she lived on the Great North Road. Even with a bypass, it provided a good vantage point from which to see the world go by.

  Once, years ago, on a lecture tour of Mississippi and Alabama, I was put up for a night or two in a motel just outside Hattiesburg near the University of Southern Mississippi. It was on one of those American strips, lined on both sides by gas stations and Tex-Mex diners and Baskin Robbins and small superstores. As I remember it, the motel had a wooden veranda on which were lined up some wooden rocking chairs. Sitting on one of these chairs, rocking myself gently and watching the polluting traffic pass noisily by, I was at peace. It is a surprisingly pleasant memory. I think the motel reminded me of Bryn. It is one of the best recollections I have of all those book tours and lecture tours, where time was divided between frenzied anxiety at airports and imprisoned restlessness in hotel rooms waiting for the next interview. Sitting in the slipstream, rocking, watching the world go by.

  XIII

  Auntie Phyl was trained as a teacher at Homerton College in an era when the pedagogical concept of learning through play was well established. Learning through terror or by rote was well out of fashion by the time Auntie Phyl taught us to sew and encouraged us to do jigsaws and sat down with us to play Belisha and to learn, subliminally, our road safety signs. When my children were little, in the 1960s, 'learning by doing' and Galt toys (products of a long-established manufacturer of educational supplies) were in fashion, and their children benefited from toys made by the Early Learning Centre, which began trading in the 1970s. The progressive ideas of Pestalozzi and Montessori and Rudolph Steiner have long infiltrated the mainstream. But it is nevertheless claimed that games manufactured and marketed for and dedicated to children are of surprisingly recent origin.

  Jigsaw puzzles have led me to explore concepts of childhood that had not much interested me when I was bringing up my own family. As a 1960s mother, I had consulted the reassuringly liberal Dr Spock, and worried about the 'separation theory' of John Bowlby, and espoused the principles of comprehensive state education, but I had never been particularly interested in childhood as a subject, nor had I been much drawn to write about children in my fiction. I didn't consciously share T. S. Eliot's view of childhood as a rotting corpse best left buried; I just hadn't bothered to think about it much, in the abstract. Flashbacks and formative memories had featured in my novels, but I'd never tried to re-create a sustained childhood sequence – no imitations of The Mill on the Floss, or David Copperfield, or The Shrimp and the Anemone. I'd succeeded in forgetting much of my childhood, and was surprised by the powers of recall of some of my friends and colleagues. My novels began and ended in mid-career. I was interested in the contemporary world and enjoyed tracking events as they happened, or as they were about to happen. (I guessed right about several topics, including the privatization of public utilities.) Age has given me a different timespan and a different agenda. The Sea Lady is largely a retrospective narrative, looking back over five decades of social change and scientific discovery. I wouldn't have been able to write that kind of novel when I was in my twenties, and I wouldn't have wanted to.

  Early images of children at play have, over the last fifty years, been intensively analysed. The French social historian Philippe Ariès, in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) – first published in 1960 as L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous L'Ancien Régime – initiated a growing interest in what had been a surprisingly neglected subject and inspired a host of scholars in various disciplines. I had left university and completed my formal education just before this important book was published, and when I look back to what I absorbed at school and college about children and educational theory, I recognize that most of it came from commentaries on Blake (whom I revered) and Wordsworth (whose work I learned to enjoy somewhat later). I also knew a fair amount about schooling in the days of Jane Austen and George Eliot, and must have registered, without any particular interest or sense of recognition, the presence of an early jigsaw in Austen's Mansfield Park, just as my eyes had moved unseeingly over the Royal Game of the Goose in Goldsmith.

  Ariès, in his fourth chapter, 'A Modest Contribution to the History of Games and Pastimes', briefly outlines the history of games and the changing attitudes to childhood and children's amusements. He argues that adult games and children's games were much less sharply differentiated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than in later periods, and he harks back, somewhat in the spirit of Goldsmith or Clare, to 'an old community of games', when music, festivals, carnivals, maypoles, snowballs and skating united old and young, peasants and gentry. The names of traditional games, such as hot cockles, sweet knight, Blind Man's Buff, the love-pot, the knife-in-the-water-jug, and the little man who doesn't laugh (main chaude, chevalier gentil, colin-maillard, le pot d'amour, le couteau dans le pot à eau, le petit bonhomme sans rire), are listed by him with relish a
nd regret. John Clare, in his poetry, provides a similar compendium of traditional, eighteenth-century, English-village games, some of which must have been played for many centuries: ducks and drakes, dancing the maze, town of Troy, pitch and toss, duck neath water, taw and hollows, lost love letter, hunt the slipper, crookhorn, nine men's morris ... Perhaps inevitably, these phrases are imbued with an overwhelming sense of loss: of childhood itself, of a bucolic past, of a lost harmony. Clare mourned the death of the commons as well as the loss of love, and in 'Remembrances' he mourned his own boyhood:

  Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay

  I thought them all eternal when by Langley bush I lay

  I thought them joys eternal when I used to sit and play

  On its banks at clink and bandy chock and taw and ducking stone

  Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own

  Like a ruin of the past all alone.

  When I used to lye and sing by old eastwells boiling spring

  When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a swing

  And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a thing...

  In the work of Philippe Ariès we find a similar, prevailing sense of loss and falling from grace, though it occurs at the other end of the social spectrum from that experienced by Clare. Later historians have associated his backward glance with his political affiliations with Vichy France and Action Française for Ariès was a romantic royalist. He gives much space to the well-documented infancy and education of Louis XIII – indeed, this seems to have been the starting point of his intellectual journey. Louis graduated from dolls, toy soldiers, clockwork pigeons, crambo, playing charades, cutting paper with scissors, hide-and-seek, and other childish diversions, to the manly pursuits of hunting, riding, fencing, archery, tennis, hockey and bowls. Ariès notes that at this period games of chance using dice were played by both adults and children alike (Louis XIII, Louis XIV and his mother, Richelieu and Mazarin were all keen gamblers), and that these games attracted no censure except from those sections of the clergy who disapproved indiscriminately of all amusements. (Little Louis XIII was applauded for winning a turquoise in a raffle.) The notion that dice games were in themselves wicked had not yet been widely disseminated.

  Incessant moralizing about 'good' games and 'bad' games came later, but it crept in inescapably and in some ways imperceptibly. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, writing in 1938 ostensibly in praise of 'homo ludens' (as his book of 1944 was to be titled), understandably condemned the 'puerilism' of the culture of boys' clubs and badges, marching, rallies and boy scouts that were shortly to lead to the closing of the University of Leiden and his detention by the Nazis, but in passing he also condemns playing bridge as a 'sterile' activity. Underlying this casual criticism lay the view that play should be educational or culturally rewarding, and that an immense expenditure of intellectual effort on playing card games for pleasure or money was disproportionate. John Locke, one of the most influential of all educational theorists, thought the timeless sport of knucklebones (or 'dibstones', as they were known to him) a time-waster, and wished that all the practice that children put into it could be applied to something more useful: in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he wrote: 'I have seen little Girls exercise whole Hours together, and take an abundance of pains to be expert at Dibstones, as they call it: Whilst I have been looking on, I have thought that it wanted only some good Contrivance to make them employ all that Industry about something that might be more useful to them.'

  Knucklebones, or fivestones, or dibstones, were still played in Alison Uttley's childhood, and in mine. The game is probably prehistoric, and its materials are free for all. But Locke is right: it has no information content, and apart from improving manual dexterity and co-ordination it cannot be described as educational. Marbles, usually associated with boys rather than girls, are not very educational either, and are moreover surrounded by an aura ofJust William anarchy. Coveted, quarrelled over, embattled, scarred and confiscated, marbles are individual, capricious and subversive. Teachers and policemen disapprove of marbles, because they constitute an alternative economy, a different set of values. Teachers prefer games that teach.

  Ariès does not mention the goose game specifically, either in praise or blame, but we know that French children as well as adults played it. A lost painting by Jean-Siméon Chardin, first exhibited in 1743 and surviving in an engraving, shows three young people, one of them still a child, grouped round a goose track laid out on a card table, solemnly intent on the next move. The engraving is accompanied by the obligatory sanctimonious little verse, at once trite and cynical, which claims that the game represents the risks and perils of adult life ( Que de risques à craindre et d'Eceuils à franchir), but Chardin's art, as so often, escapes the subsequent superimposed interpretation. He painted children, not homilies.

  (In the National Gallery, a luminously beautiful and affectionate painting by Chardin titled The Young Schoolmistress, showing an older girl teaching a younger child to read, is accompanied by an offensive tag that was attached to Lépicié's 1740 engraving. It says: 'If this charming child takes on so well the serious air and imposing manner of a schoolmistress, may one not think that pretence and artfulness come to the fair sex no later than birth?' This misinterpretation of childhood is deeply, revealingly shocking. We don't have a word for the attitude it represents. The comment is sexist, but it is also contemptuous of children.)

  Games designed specifically for children are of recent origin, and the invention of the jigsaw puzzle proves to have been much more closely connected with education than with play. I would never have guessed this, and it comes as a surprise to most people to whom I've spoken. But, as historians such as Ariès like to insist, childhood was not invented until long after the Renaissance. Infant mortality rates were so high in earlier centuries that less attention and affection were invested in young children than in our childcentred and medically reliable era – or so one plausible theory goes. Even Simon Schama, who persuasively queries the theory in his account of Dutch family life in The Embarrassment of Riches, appears to accept that there may be some truth in it.

  XIV

  The most famous early illustration of children at play is Brueghel's Children's Games (Kinderspieler) of 1560, which has of course been made into a jigsaw, and which appears in most discussions on the evolution of the concept of childhood. It shows a scene of various and, in places, extremely vigorous outdoor activity in a very public space in front of a town hall, with children playing Blind Man's Buff and doing headstands and inflating bladders, playing at leapfrog and tug of war and king of the castle, climbing trees and building sandcastles and whipping tops and rolling hoops and riding on barrels and playing shop and blowing bubbles. The most peaceful and sedentary activity portrayed is a game of knucklebones, and the only artistic pursuit appears to be the playing of a flute. Scholars claim to have identified more than ninety different games in this painting, and to have counted 246 children, of whom 168 are male and 78 female.

  Its iconography has been submitted to much controversial analysis. Is it a satire on human folly, and are the children miniature adults representing adult follies? Is an alchemical reading possible? Is the blue of the cloaks used in the 'blinding' and 'hiding' games the colour of deception or of truth? Are the naked swimming children emblems of false trust, and the boy on stilts of false pride? Is the game of Blind Man's Buff a tope for the blind choice of marriage? Why is nobody flying a kite? Are these children to be seen as ugly, gnomelike, miniature peasants, full of original sin, or are they innocents at play? Does Brueghel intend them to look like squat, diminutive, imitation adults, in their trousers and clumsy shoes and aprons, or is he deliberately distancing himself from the Renaissance tradition that portrays infants as naked, airborne putti?

  The painting may be seen as an encyclopaedia or compendium of games, a successor to the famous list by Rabelais, in Chapter XXII of Gargantua. Published some thi
rty years earlier than the Brueghel was painted, this enumerated 217 Gargantuan games (a list to which Rabelais's English translator Thomas Urquhart generously added various English examples), including lottery, nivinivinack, the squares, the lurch, the madge-owlet, the gunshot crack and bo-peep. (Rabelais, Urquhart, John Clare and Ariès all relish such evocative words.) Many of these games were played with cards (chartes), dice (dez), and chequers and chessboards (renfort de tabliers), to the accompaniment of 'wenches thereabouts, with little small banquets, intermixed with collations and reer-suppers'. This large-scale panoramic sense of play is well illustrated by Brueghel, although it is to be noted that none of his children is eating or drinking. They are too busy for that. Maybe there is a moral significance to the absence of food. And, then again, maybe not.

  My own feelings about this work, which I have come to know much better through its jigsaw format, changed very considerably during the course of my study. At first, I saw it as a satirical view, not of adult folly, but of childish cruelty, for some of the children did seem to be engaged in actively tormenting one another. There is a game of what seems to be hair-pulling, and another that shows a boy being stretched over a log as though about to be sawn in half by his captors. The small cowled boy whipping his top, and the hooded figures playing Blind Man's Buff, powerfully suggest flagellation and the activities of the Inquisition, with which Brueghel and his contemporaries were all too familiar. Moreover, my jigsaw had an odour of hell. It smelled very odd. I could not for some time locate the source of this unpleasant stink in my study, and kept wondering whether there was a dead mouse under the armchair, or dog shit on the carpet. But no, it was the pervasive smell of the cardboard, recycled from God knows what source, that filled my workroom. Was this odour in itself a commentary, a message from Brueghel and the dark and troubled times he lived through?