The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  I thought about this challenge, and have continued to think about it. As he spoke, little brightly coloured particles of memory began to scatter and glitter and connect in the back of my brain. Tesserae, tesserae. Click, click, click. Mosaics, patterns, kaleidoscopes, tapestries, pictures. Dispersion, cohesion, mastic, gum, glue. Mimesis, mimicry. Children in antiquity, playing with pebbles and bones and teeth on a cave floor. Tragic children, dying early in their droves, before they had had much chance of any fun. Greek knucklebones, Greek fivestones. Roman pavements, Roman masonry, Roman spolia, architectural salvage. Hadrian's Villa and the Doves of Pliny, Florentine table tops, pietre dure, opus sectile, inlay, marquetry, intarsia. Monte Oliveto, Urbino, Gubbio. Disconnected moments of epiphany, moments of recognition. Reconstructions, reassemblings, replications. Collections, cabinets of curiosities. Simulacra, copies, reproductions. Calendar art, conversion art, paper flowers, elves made of gummed paper. The half-arts, die Halbkünste, the compositae.

  The jigsaw model of experience and of the universe.

  The model in which the scattered pieces from the first dispersal are reunited at the end of time.

  XXIV

  I first went to London with Auntie Phyl. She took me and my sister Susan to see the sights. I had never been further south than Bryn. I was about eleven, I think, with a centre parting and little brown plaited pigtails, and a hopeful smile and Clark's shoes and wrinkled knee socks and a nice cloth coat with a nipped waist and buttons and lapels. We stayed for a few days in Bloomsbury, in the Kenilworth Hotel (or was it the Ivanhoe?), and I found every moment of our sojourn extraordinarily stimulating and exciting. London was wonderful to me. There were moments of terror, like the moment at breakfast when the waiter asked me, 'Black or white?' and had to repeat his question several times. I had no idea what he was talking about, as he hovered threateningly over my cup of coffee with a heavy silver-plated jug of hot milk. And Auntie Phyl had to tell me that in a hotel I didn't need to make my own bed. I had never stayed in a hotel before. I found it hard to believe that somebody else would make my bed for me. At home, we always made our own.

  London, the greatest city in the world, was known to me through books, and through the Monopoly board, and as the destination of the parlour travellers in Belisha. I knew of Mayfair and of Marble Arch. Auntie Phyl had been whetting our imagination for years, with tales of the zoo, and Kew in lilac time, and St Paul's cathedral, and Trafalgar Square, and the British Museum, and Madame Tussaud's, and the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the underground, and the Lyons Corner Houses. All these things we now saw and sampled. We fed the pigeons and went to the zoo. Auntie Phyl was tireless in those days, and thought nothing of climbing the Monument, or the stairs up to the Whispering Gallery. We had our supper in the Corner House on the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, where, if I remember rightly, there was a live orchestra playing for us. She and I usually ordered the same dish, which was called omelette aux fines herbes. I thought this the height of sophistication. The speckling of green on the neatly folded yellow flap, all reposing like a quiet oval fish on an oval silver salver – this was a luxury, yet a luxury that did not make us feel uncomfortable or outclassed.

  I do not think that Auntie Phyl referred to the Corner House waitresses as 'nippies', as others knowingly did, for I do not recall hearing the word at that age, and I remember being slightly surprised by it when I first came across it. I suspect she might have disliked its familiarity and its condescension. Like me, she was a little nervous with waiters, waitresses and other figures of authority, whom she considered to be more than her equals. Like me, she much preferred public transport to taxis. Like me, she was not a good employer and did not enjoy bossing people about or giving instructions. In her later years she came to rely heavily on Joyce, as cleaner, carer, confidante, neighbour and friend, and on Joyce's husband Eddie as handyman, mechanic, gardener, neighbour and friend, but she relied on their good nature rather than on any contractual relationship. I used to worry that neither of them ever got paid.

  Joyce had looked after my grandmother at Bryn in her last illness, and after Grandma's death she inherited the care of Auntie Phyl. I remember Auntie Phyl saying to me once, after some slight tiff, 'I'd better keep on the right side of Joyce. I'd be sunk without Joyce.' I often think of that phrase, and see Auntie Phyl sinking, heavily, helplessly, beneath the waters.

  But when she was in her thirties, she was tireless. She was overawed by upmarket restaurants and fancy department stores, but she relished the adventure of staying in a hotel, or taking a journey across Europe, or catching a liner to Scandinavia, or a tourist coach to East Germany. In her own way, she was enterprising. One year, astonishingly, she drove to Istanbul. (She shared the driving with my father, and, unlike my mother, she did drive.)

  Our week in London was a treat. I wish I could remember more of it. We liked the little zoo-born polar bear, Brumas. That year at Christmas we bought each other little white Brumas replicas, made of soap. Auntie Phyl allowed us to indulge these childish longings without making us feel silly. Both my parents often made me feel silly. They wanted us to grow up. They didn't really like children. They didn't dislike them, but they found them tiring and tiresome. My mother said she liked babies, but she was impatient with noisy, dirty, independent, uncontrollable youngsters. Their company bored her. Neither of my parents had been very happy as children, and, unlike Auntie Phyl, both had longed to escape from South Yorkshire. My mother saw childhood as a state to be endured, a time of hard work and study, of pleasure deferred. We were praised for high marks and passing exams, but nothing else we did seemed to be of value. A disappointing university grade (an Upper Second instead of the expected First) was mourned like a death in the family.

  When I tried to have some fun as an adolescent, I would be told, 'Wait until you get to Cambridge, you can do that when you get to Cambridge...' It never seemed to occur to them that any of their children might not get into Cambridge. I distrusted this attitude. I had the sense to know that the competition for places was fierce, but they seemed to expect I would be offered one as of right. The pressure to follow in their footsteps was unquestioned and intense, so intense that none of us actively rebelled against it. It seemed to be the only way to get away. Cambridge had liberated them, and in turn it was expected to liberate us.

  Auntie Phyl never imposed such expectations on us, because nobody had expected much of her. She let us enjoy ourselves.

  I can't remember whether Auntie Phyl took us into the National Gallery, but I have a photograph of us amongst the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

  I loved the underground, and the famous map of it, from which we could work out how to get to anywhere from anywhere. (The maze-loving Georges Perec, of course, saluted this map.) It all seemed too good to be true. The names of the stations enraptured me – Regent Street, Chalk Farm, Swiss Cottage, Russell Square, Earl's Court. The map was so clearly marked, its routes so logical, so reassuringly easy to follow. We always knew where we were when we were underground on the underground. We could not get lost. It made visitors feel at home, in control of a vast strange city, which was our own and not our own. It was an immense romance.

  I don't think we can have done Hampton Court on this visit, for how could there have been time? But I do remember taking Auntie Phyl there, many years later, when she was staying with me in London while recuperating from her cataract operation in Moorfields Eye Hospital. We had a lovely day out, wandering in the gardens, sitting in the sun in an outdoor café taking tea and cake, and talking to another couple of elderly idlers at the next table. She did appreciate an outing.

  Hampton Court, like East Hardwick, is a bright and sunny place in my memory. It is festive and light-hearted, a palace built for pleasure. Sometimes, when I am in very low spirits and beset by troubles, I think that I might cheer up if I were to take a trip to Hampton Court. And in the blazing hot summer of 2006, in so many ways a bad year for Michael and me, I did just that. I went
for a day out to the Hampton Court Flower Show, where my son Joe was presenting show gardens for the BBC programme Gardeners' World. He sent a car to collect me from the Lion Gate. I watched him, proudly, as he spoke to camera, and I wished that my father could have seen him. A keen gardener himself, my father would have been so surprised and pleased to find he had a gardening grandson. Auntie Phyl and Joyce often saw Joe on telly, and Joyce and her friends in Long Bennington continue to follow his career with interest. But my father died too early to know of Joe's metamorphosis.

  Joe refused to have much truck with higher education or university. He probably thought there'd been too much of that kind of thing in the family. He did his A-levels, in his own relaxed and laid-back fashion, and then he found his own way. He seemed to know what he was doing. His father and I didn't interfere. We were and remain full of admiration for his independence.

  XXV

  I like being a tourist and seeing the sights. So I shouldn't have reacted in that defensively hoity-toity manner when Kevin asked me whether I was up in London for the day. But I'm glad I did, for otherwise I might not have started to think about mosaics, and the mystery of patterns and composites. I might not have seen that they, too, are part of the plan.

  I made a date with Kevin, who agreed to take me on a tour of London in his cab, starting from the City of London, to look for mosaics and other jigsaw analogies. We met at Farringdon Station, and he chose our route. He showed me the new buildings and the old, the complex infill and patterning of Roman London, and the succeeding waves of two thousand years of overbuild and underpass. We gazed at Minster Court in Mincing Lane, and at the sparkling isometric diamonds of the windows of the Gherkin, and at the rugged brick remains of the Temple of Mithras, and at Tivoli Corner at the Bank of England. We drove over Holborn Viaduct, beneath which the shops of the printmakers, mapmakers and puzzle producers of Holborn Hill have long been buried. He described to me the legendary Knowledge that London taxi drivers are obliged to acquire. London is a jigsaw, and he knows better than to most of us how the pieces fit together.

  Unlike many taxi drivers, he approved of the bold new architecture of the last twenty years and pointed out the high-rise buildings of the City that he liked best. But he also took me to St Ethelburga's in Bishopsgate, a medieval church that was blown up by a massive IRA terrorist bomb blast in 1993. The tower and the west front of the building had collapsed, and the church was so badly damaged that it was thought it would have to be demolished, but much of the original material has been salvaged and reused. The church may now be impressively photographed, if you are clever enough, with a view of the diamonds of the Gherkin soaring up like a spacecraft behind its modest façade.

  The restoration of St Ethelburga's, Kevin suggested to me, had been a kind of giant stone jigsaw. (Kevin should have written a chapter of this book.) At his prompting I discovered how frequently the word 'jigsaw puzzle' is used about restoration projects. Angkor Wat, the Dead Sea scrolls, the stained-glass windows of Lincoln cathedral, the shredded Stasi files of East Germany, the three seventeenth-century Chinese vases that were broken by a careless member of the public in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge when he tripped over a shoelace – all these and many more similar undertakings have been described as 'jigsaws'. The Fitzwilliam snatched advantage from adversity by creating a 'Reconstruct your own Fitzwilliam vases' twenty-piece jigsaw-puzzle postcard, retailing at a modest £1 from its seductive online shop.

  XXVI

  Fashions in restoration change. I was shocked to read that all the heads of the figures of that vast, struggling mountain of antique marble known as the Farnese bull are fake, and a lot of the limbs, too, and that all the animals except the dog and the bull are late additions. There it stands in the National Museum in Naples, this monument to successive waves of antique, Renaissance and eighteenth-century taste, surrounded by pious admirers, but much of it is guesswork. It is now widely considered by art historians to be remarkable only for its size, and for the miraculous preservation of the sculpted rope tied to the bull's horns. The giant legs of the neighbouring figure of Herakles, also salvaged, like the bull, from the Baths of Caracalla, are very controversial. They have been lost and found and restored and re-restored. We don't do so much of that now, or not with such classic masterpieces. It's a long time since anyone tried to stick a head on the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or arms on the Venus of Milo. Only pranksters and surrealists and postmodernists and Oulipeans play around like that these days.

  It's said that it was Louis XVIII of France, whose brother lost his head, who put an end to the idea of providing the Venus of Milo with new arms. I don't know whether that's true or not.

  With lesser works, and with more recently or chance-destroyed churches like St Ethelburga's, we still strive for the authentic. We try to put the pieces back in place. A craftsman working on a panel of the 1894–5 Tiffany Ascension window of the Calvary Methodist Church in Pittsburgh complained that it 'was like doing several jigsaw puzzles piled on top of each other and mixed up at that'. The restorers had to undo the work of previous restorers, who had incorrectly put back some of the 8,268 pieces of glass, like a delinquent mother-in-law driven mad at Christmas.

  In the past, fidelity to a historical template was less highly prized than it is now. The large round Bishop's Eye window in the south transept at Lincoln, with its flowing stone tracery, is filled with a composite of fragments of medieval painted glass that makes no attempt to reproduce the original design, thought to have been of the Last Judgement. The cathedral was seriously damaged by Parliamentary troops at the time of the Civil War, and much of the coloured glass was destroyed or dispersed. In the late eighteenth century the surviving fragments were reassembled and rearranged in the frame of the stone rose with no regard to subject or content, achieving what scholars critically describe as a 'haphazard array' that is 'pleasing to the eye but devoid of content'. The north transept rose window retains most of its medieval glass in situ, but the south rose is an eighteenth-century folly in a Gothic frame. Meaningless, but nevertheless glorious.

  Auntie Phyl took us from Bryn to see Lincoln cathedral. We liked the Lincoln imp in the angel choir. She had a gift for capturing a child's attention by pointing out such things. The rose windows were too big for me, too bright, too high, too far away, and I had no interest in their iconography, authentic or jumbled, but I could see the imp and the angels. We liked to talk about such memories. 'Do you remember when we went to see the Lincoln imp?' 'Do you remember the horseshoes at Scarrington?' So we built up our picture of the past.

  In Somerset, I took Auntie Phyl and Daisy to Cleeve Abbey, a beautiful group of Cistercian monastic buildings standing not far from Nettlecombe, and an easy outing from Porlock. I have come to know it well. I went round it on one occasion with a friend who had once been a Cistercian nun, and she explained its architectural and religious significance to me, stone by stone, in great detail, all of which I have now forgotten. (This friend was going to write a memoir called Stark Mad in White Linen, but she never got beyond this inspired title, and she is dead now.) Auntie Phyl and I just liked the look of Cleeve and its happy situation. I like the gatehouse and the ruins and the stonework and the well-kept greensward and the little river and the moat full of green tresses and yellow flowers – primroses, irises, monkey flowers, marsh marigolds, as the seasons changed. In the Middle Ages the abbey was rightly known as Vallis Florida, the Valley of Flowers.

  Cleeve has a famous decorated tiled pavement, dating from the thirteenth century, now protected from the elements by English Heritage and a new tent-like structure. The pattern of the pavement is simple. Yellow, ochre, terracotta and brown tiles, bearing heraldic devices of chevrons, lions, fleur-de-lis and double-headed eagles, are arranged diagonally, divided by darker bands of plain tiles. Part of the arrangement is complete and lies in situ, but at one end of the exposed rectangle bits and pieces of broken tile, as in the Lincoln windows, have been jumbled up and laid together randomly.
For Cleeve Abbey, like Lincoln, has been through many changes, and after the Dissolution it became a gentleman's residence, and then a farm, with the cloister serving as a farmyard, the dormitory as a barn, and cattle lodged in the monastic buildings. Thomas Hardy would have read its history well.

  One of the most precious objects I salvaged from Bryn is a square tile. I think it may once have been used as a teapot stand. It is decorated with a symmetrical, six-petalled, white flower, the sort of boldly simple daisy one used to draw at school when learning how to use a pair of compasses. The white petals, separated by light-green-grey bells, are set into a dark-blue background, a blue of an intense and luminous richness, and the flower is surrounded by a dark-brown border with a simple, light-brown, fronded, curving motif. The tile itself is thick, and heavy, and always cool to the touch, as though it remembers a cloister or a church or a grotto, although it was never set in any floor or wall. On its underside (which is perforated with small holes) it tells me that it was made by the Campbell Tile Company in Stoke-upon-Trent, so perhaps it represents a link with the Bloor potters. I think there were several of these spare tiles at Bryn. The weight of it is a comfort to the hand, and its simple symmetry is a pleasure to the eye.

  At school in York, I received no education in the visual arts at all, or none that I can remember. We learned nothing of paintings, and next to nothing of architecture, although we were so well placed to study it. We went to York Minster for special occasions, but it remained to me a vast and impressive but incomprehensible mass of stones. The school was a Quaker school, which may explain why this branch of our education was so conspicuously neglected. There was a principle involved here, of plain living and high thinking. We attended Quaker Meeting twice weekly, on Wednesdays and Sundays, in a plain Meeting House. We dressed plainly. Visual ornament was not encouraged. There were some books on art in the school library, and I remember browsing through the paintings of Delacroix with an intense and presumably erotic emotion, but when I was discovered at this private occupation it was suggested to me that these works were 'morbid'. I suppose 'morbid' is a fair word for The Massacre at Chios and the Head of the Girl in a Cemetery, but it was discouraging.