The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  I decided not, and in time (for it took me a long time to complete this easy puzzle) the smell diminished, and I found that I was learning to like the children, or at least some of the children, more and more. Their unsupervised but contained freedom, their involvement with one another, the intensity of their concentration on their pursuits, their fertility of invention began to remind me of the playground of the school at East Hardwick, where we had played games as laborious, as delightful, as timeless as these. I no longer saw the children as images of futility and cruelty. I saw them as images of friendship and of hope.

  I missed the little children when I finished the puzzle. They had become my companions. I could feel their little hands in mine. I did not like putting them back in their dark box. I delayed for days, gazing at them as they played on the black lacquer table.

  Putting a jigsaw away can be a sad moment. Some people glue their finished jigsaws to a background and mount them on the wall, but this seems a curious perversion of what is intended to be an ephemeral activity. Some, more creatively, turn them into collages. In one of her many lives, my friend Gus Skidelsky taught mathematics for years to prisoners in Lewes Gaol and was able to alleviate the loneliness and boredom of one isolated, non-Englishspeaking, French inmate by responding to his request for 'un puzzle'. At first she didn't know what kind of 'puzzle' he was suggesting, but when she worked out that he meant a jigsaw, she took him one from her store. (She is an expert at games and puzzles.) It had taken her many hours to complete, but he did it very quickly, over the weekend (well, he wasn't as busy as she was, was he?) and then he glued it together to show to her, somewhat to her surprise. Why had he done that?

  She kept him supplied with puzzles from Age Concern and Oxfam, until he was moved on to the next gaol.

  Prisoners and royals and convalescents are fond of jigsaws.

  I didn't glue the Kinderspieler together, but Michael took its photograph, so I have a memento. A photograph of a jigsaw of an oil painting is an odd treasure, but I am fond of it. I now think that I have come to associate this painting with my first school. I find it strange that I have no unhappy memories of East Hardwick, apart from the maypole episode, which involved transport to another school. I see us all in the playground, little moon-faced, country children, perhaps wearing home-knitted pixie hoods in winter, as children in those days did. The Girls and Boys outdoor toilets in the yard consisted of a row of wooden seats over a row of buckets, but I don't think I minded this, which is odd, as I was brought up to be fastidious and frightened of lavatories. My mother was very fastidious, and I suspect that she was fierce about toilet training, but the overriding sense of security and good intentions at school must have negated fear of the unhygienic buckets.

  No photographs record this era to jog the memory, for no film was available in wartime. I remember once trying to emulate the bigger children by doing a somersault over an iron railing. I lost my grip and fell hard on my head. But this is not an unpleasant recollection. It hurt, but not very much, and nobody was cross with me. It was at the next school, at the Sheffield school with the defective, infantile jigsaw, that I lost much of my physical confidence.

  The Brueghel children are confident, egalitarian, experimental, and the large space in which they play is their kingdom. I no longer see them as cruel brats or neglected ragamuffins. They are well dressed, well shod, well tended, yet happily free from supervision.

  I was aided in this growing appreciation of Children's Games by reading two commentaries with a sharply contrasted outlook. One writer insisted on seeing every image in terms of its emblematic meaning, and found a message of folly and vanity in every image and every act. When she insisted, in an analysis of Pieter de Hooch's The Linen Chest, that the two women putting neatly folded linen into a cupboard were a symbol of miserliness, I parted company from her altogether. No, no, they were women putting away the washing, not women hoarding worldly goods, and the little child playing in the background was not an abused or neglected or naughty child, but a child in a happy and orderly household contentedly playing with a ball and a stick. And the chequered tiles and the painted basketwork are of a ravishing beauty, such a celebration of pattern! How could this painting be a satire on hoarding? It isn't even a satire on the embarrassment of riches, though of course we know what Simon Schama means by the phrase. But this painting is a salutation, not a condemnation.

  I have always liked black-and-white chequered tiles. One of the pictures in our Sheffield home was a de Hooch reproduction showing an alleyway in Delft, with a mother and a daughter and a broom and some red-and-white brickwork. This didn't have black-and-white chequered flooring, but it might have done, and in my memory it did. Maybe this painting trained me to admire de Hooch's tiled interiors, for they sank deep into my psyche. (I used to tell myself that this liking was connected with my Dutch ancestry, but this ancestry proved, as I have said, to be a myth.) In the Somerset house, I inherited a corridor of black-and-white lino floor tiles, which gives me much pleasure. I sit and gaze at them with pride, even though they are not as spotlessly polished as they would have been in Holland. Perhaps a photograph of me admiring these tiles could be taken to represent worldly greed, the pride of ownership and domestic complacency. I plead guilty.

  I have bid in an auction only once in my life, for an oil painting of an interior with a corridor of black-and-white tiles. I had never heard of the artist, and I can remember nothing about this work but the pattern of the tiles. I dropped out of the bidding, cautiously, when it reached £1,000. I have often regretted this failure of nerve. I could have hung it at the end of my own corridor.

  The critic who led me towards a more sympathetic attention to Brueghel's children is the writer Edward Snow, who appears to have devoted some of his life to translating Rilke and some to writing about Shakespeare. Not, then, a professional art historian either, or an iconographer, or an iconologist, though far more scholarly in these fields than me. In his book Inside Brueghel, Snow responds to the children's activities with a warm attention, pointing to a happy face here, an absorbed concentration there. To him, the little swimmers in the upper-left passage of the painting are naked and natural and happy in the water, not emblems of the precariousness of life. Even the hair-pullers are condoned by him. If you look more closely, he urges, the child at the centre of the group doesn't look victimized. He looks as though he is sharing in the fun. I'm not so sure about this, myself, but I admire his latitude.

  ('Fun', wrote Huizinga, is an English word, for which most languages have no equivalent.)

  So I learned to love my Brueghel, and to read it differently. Its bad smell diminished. But it retained another disconcerting aspect. The jigsaw of this masterpiece is printed in reverse, left to right. Many jigsaws are misleading in this way, and every time I see this painting in reproduction in a book I have to do a quick mental reorientation. (I have never seen the original.) This adjustment is at once stimulating and curiously unnerving. It must be affecting the neurons, and maybe usefully.

  Brueghel's painting shows several objects (a hobby-horse, dolls, whipping tops, hoops) that have been designed specifically for children, but much of the activity consists of improvisation, mimic games and body games, which needed no capital investment or special materials. (The most touching toy is a red brick tethered to a table leg, in the lower-left corner; is this brick somebody's imaginary pet?) Perhaps, as a war baby, I came to identify with the lack of purpose-made and lavish toys on display. We didn't have many elaborate toys, and we didn't miss them because nobody else had them either.

  I can't remember any of the toys I had before the age of five, though I can remember very clearly the books with which I learned to read – The Radiant Way, Tot and the Cat – and the books I was allowed to take out of East Hardwick library, which included a wonderful volume titled The Curious Lobster, by an American author named Richard W. Hatch. This instilled in me a passionate longing to see what was called 'the Ocean' and to explore the marine world. I
didn't realize that the story was set in America, near Boston, and I suppose I thought the English coastline might also be provided with bears and bandicoots, and its waters with giant clams and sculpins, just as I thought Epaminondas inhabited some part of rural England as yet unvisited by me. I recall my joy when I found that this volume had a sequel, The Curious Lobster's Island, through which I could prolong my delight. I was a precocious reader.

  One of my very early childish possessions was a red-glass mouse with white-glass whiskers, which my father brought back from Italy when he was demobbed from the RAF. (I think that's how the story went.) He brought glass toys for all of us, and I could not believe that I was allowed to have the mouse for my own. My father said its curly tail made the letter M for Margaret, so it must be mine. My older sister was not pleased, as it was much the most attractive of the objects. I think I felt a little frightened and guilty and could not believe my luck. I suspected it boded ill, and I was right, but I loved my mouse. I cannot remember the tears with which I must have greeted the demise of this delicate little creature. But I remember its transparent ruby glass and the sense of privilege it gave me.

  My mother made a virtue of necessity, and taught us that it was not desirable to have expensive and fragile toys. (She did audibly sigh, though, over the poor-quality paper of wartime books, and the lack of illustrations. I did not know what she was talking about. Tot and the Cat, with its grey cover and black-and-white drawings, was good enough for me.) Large dolls, like big prams, were in her view common, and only foolish people saved up for them. Her moralizing about such matters (which I have tended to share, though I did once long ago recklessly buy one of my sons a Johnny Seven Gun) has a very long history. The Dutch iconographers would have approved of our middle-class condemnation of fragile, frivolous, clockwork gadgets and frilly dolls. The clockwork pigeon from Italy and the baubles from Nuremberg that were presented to the three-year-old Louis XIII would not have been considered admirable or edifying gifts by my mother.

  The trade in expensive novelties for royal or aristocratic children was not new when Brueghel painted his Kinderspieler in 1560. Two years earlier, in 1558, Duke Albrecht had commissioned for his daughter what is widely regarded as the first doll's house, or 'baby house', as such objects came to be known in England. This was a little cabinet full of diminutive treasures, made by the master craftsmen of Nuremberg, and it helped to create a vogue for wellfurnished miniature rooms and houses. But these elaborate objects, and their middle-class replicas, were scorned by serious pedagogues. John Locke and, a little later, Maria Edgeworth disapproved of frivolous toys such as doll's houses, rocking horses and squeaky pigs, whilst Rousseau disapproved of fancy apparatus like 'armillary spheres' for the teaching of cosmography to children. He thought their confused circles and strange figures might suggest witchcraft.

  In the section on 'Play-Games' in Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke austerely advises that 'A smooth pebble, a piece of paper, the mother's bunch of keys, or any thing they cannot hurt themselves with, serves as much to divert little children, as those more chargeable and curious toys from the shops, which are presently out of order and broken.' He recommends that children be encouraged to make or invent their own amusements, and continues:

  Play-things which are above their skill to make, as tops, gigs, battledores, and the like, which are to be used with labour, should indeed be procured them. These 'tis convenient they should have, not for variety, but exercise; but these too should be given them as bare as might be. If they had a top, the scourge-stick and leather-strap should be left to their own making and fitting. If they sit gaping to have such things dropped in their mouths, they should go without them.

  No mention yet of the kind of educational game that was to evolve in England half a century later, to the benefit of the publishing industry and the putative delight of children, but clearly the ideological grounds for such inventions were being prepared. 'Good contrivances' would soon be devised and would pour into the market place.

  XV

  Royal children have always presented a special case, and their playthings have been well documented. In 1644, Cardinal Mazarin commissioned sets of playing cards to instruct the infant King Louis XIV of France who had ascended the throne at the age of four years and five months. These are works of art and wit, and one may hope that the little king enjoyed them, despite their instructive purpose, as we at Bryn ignorantly enjoyed Belisha and Millionaire.

  Playing cards were not in themselves new; they probably date back to the twelfth century in China and Korea, and to the fourteenth century in Europe. We know that cards were played, perhaps too often and for excessively high stakes, at the court of Edward IV in England. But the idea of cards as an educational tool for the young was a seventeenth-century novelty. The four series commissioned by Mazarin were devised by Jean Desmarests (1596–1676) of the Académie Française, and designed by the Florentine artist and engraver Stefano Della Bella. They portrayed mythological stories, the kings and the queens of France, and images representing different parts of the world. The monarchs, as evocatively described by historian Catherine Perry Hargrave, were 'separated into groups, with dreadful but amusing finality, by a single adjective in the upper right-hand corner – pious, clever, cruel, unfortunate, celebrated, saintly, good, wise, brave, happy and capricious'. That is how history is crystallized. Thus, Blanche of Castille is 'saincte', and Eleanor of Acquitaine is 'capricieuse'. Le Jeu de Géographie is a set of cards that shows figures emblematic of their region or nation, in national dress, accompanied by a brief description. America, the Queen of Clubs, is represented by a bare-bosomed woman in a small chariot drawn by two unlikely creatures that look like a cross between an armadillo and a tiger.

  Desmarests, in an explanatory booklet addressed to the queen regent, specifically stated his educational purpose:

  Ce sont des Jeux en apparence que je présente à votre Majesté mais en effet c'est un livre, et une estude pour les Jeunes Princes, aussi sérieuse pour le moins que divertissante.

  [These may look like toys that I present to your Majesty, but in fact they are a book for the young princes to study, and they are as serious as they are amusing.]

  These French cards were not, I have discovered, the first history and geography cards. Henry Peacham, in his celebrated book on courtesy, The Complete Gentleman, written in 1622 for the ten-year-old William Howard, launches into a poetic hymn of praise to geography in his chapter 'Of Cosmography', which he describes as 'an imitation of the face, by draught and picture, of the whole earth and all the principal and known parts thereof ... a science at once feeding the eye and mind with such incredible variety and profitable pleasure that even the greatest kings and philosophers ... have bestowed the best part of their time in the contemplation hereof.'

  This chapter concludes with an exhortation to the young scholar to exercise his pen in drawing and imitating cards and maps:

  I have seen French cards to play withal, the suits changed into maps of several countries in the four parts of the world, and exactly coloured for their numbers, the figures 1, 2, 3, 9, 10 and so forth set over their heads; for the kings, queens, and knaves, the portraits of their kings and queens in several country habits; for the knave, their peasants and slaves; which ingenious device cannot but be a great furtherance to a young capacity and some comfort to the unfortunate gamester when that he hath lost in money he shall have dealt him in land or wit.

  Thus are the minds of gamblers ingeniously tricked into improvement.

  (In The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Anthony Patch prefaces his desperate, alcohol-soaked career with a lonely, fourteen-year-old passion for stamp collecting, which his despised grandfather 'fatuously' considered was teaching him geography. Despite his grandfather's endorsement, Anthony loved his 'new stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets' and would lie awake 'musing untiringly on their variety and many-coloured splendour'. He never forgot his stamps; they returned to haunt hi
m.)

  Peacham's recommendations show that French playing cards were being imported in the 1620s, and England soon began to make her own. As it happened, there were fifty-two English and Welsh counties, a number that divided conveniently into four suits of thirteen cards, each card furnished with useful information about the county it represented – its principal towns, rivers and products. In one of these sets, Lincolnshire (the Eight of Clubs) clearly shows Grantham and Newark and the straight stretch of the Roman road of Ermine Street, where Bryn now stands.

  One early set of geography cards cast its net far wider than the counties of England. The eccentric engineer and engraver Henry Winstanley (1644–1703) designed and published in 1665 a pack that shows continents and their inhabitants, with colourful descriptions on each card. The British Museum has a full set, only recently completed, buried in its depths. I have discovered that ancient playing cards and early jigsaws have a tendency to sink to the dusty depths of institutions, or to make their way uncatalogued to distant warehouses.

  In Winstanley's set, spades represent Africa, diamonds Asia, clubs America, and hearts Europe. Each card shows a male and female character in ethnic dress or undress, accompanied by weaponry or other indicators of nationality or culture; the text, with very inconsistent spelling, describes the products, habits and religion of each place. Plantations in Mexico are credited to Madrid and plantations in New England to London. The country of Morocco (the Queen of Spades) is 'often ruined by the wild Arabians and their Civil Wars'; the natives of 'Guinys' (the Seven of Spades) are 'Rude and Barbarous thieves and most idolators'; the Romans (the Knave of Hearts) are 'all Romanists', whereas in Amsterdam (the Four of Hearts) 'Here is toleration of all sects in Religion'. The Swedes, we are told, are 'clothed in Furr' and, moreover, Lutheran. One of the finest cards is the Two of Diamonds, which represents Samarchand and the Zagathans: