The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  I have always felt a little judgemental about bridge myself, but that is largely because I never learned to play, and I suspect I could never get to grips with it even if I had tried. In one of my late novels, The Seven Sisters, I describe a group of friends who meet through reading Virgil in Latin in a reading group; they go on a trip in the footsteps of Aeneas, which is quite a highbrow form of tourism (a Jules Verne or a Martin Randall art-tour outing, not a Thomson's Holiday) and, as they travel, their Virgil tutor offers to instruct them in the art of bridge. They take to this, very happily, for after all, they say to themselves, they are on holiday, and their tutor's presence sanctions the diversion. I was quite pleased with this unexpected little moment in the plot, which came to me out of the blue as I was contemplating the ways that we find to amuse ourselves as we grow older. It seemed liberating. And I was pleased when a friend at dinner told me that she had enjoyed my novel, and had been relieved to find that I and my characters hadn't been superior or condescending about bridge. She revealed herself as a keen bridge player and described the pleasure she gained, when travelling abroad, in coming across people with the same interest. She could find a new small temporary world of friends anywhere in the world, she said. I was impressed by this testimony and resolved never to think or speak ill of bridge or bridge players again.

  Maybe, when I have finished this book (which, like Penelope's tapestry, could go on for ever), I shall set myself the task of driving the Belisha route, from Oban to London, stopping off at every one of the beauty spots and towns and villages illustrated in the pack of cards. It would be a pointless and glorious undertaking, somewhat in the Bartlebooth mode, but much more fun.

  XXX

  Our capacity for disapproving of and moralizing about one another's amusements, as of one another's artistic tastes, is almost limitless. Class prejudice and religious intolerance lie behind most of these attitudes, and most of us are guilty. Huizinga disapproved of bridge, and Plutarch of fishing, which he considered 'a filthy, base illiberal employment'. John Northbrooke's 1579 treatise against dicing condemned it as 'the mother of lies, of perjuries, of theft, of debate, of injuries, of manslaughter, the verie invention of the Divels of hell'.

  Some people disapprove of jigsaws, some of knitting, some of chess, and many more of dancing and lotteries. (Chess is forbidden in some states under Islamic law.) Willard Fiske's Chess in Iceland (1905) is a treasure house of commentary on social attitudes to games and gaming; he quotes as a classic example of the partisan spirit Mauritio Bardinelli's 1604 dismissal of cards (suitable only for stablehands and cobblers), chess and dice in favour of backgammon. Backgammon, he claims, is 'a perfect diversion, adapted to every lofty intellect ... it is not a sport which strains the mental powers, but is cheerful, varied, diverting'. This resembles Boswell's view that Johnson should have played draughts for the sake of his spirits. Bardinelli also applauds the fact that backgammon is played sitting down.

  David Hume, too, endorsed backgammon as a relief to the spirits and a cure for mental exhaustion. Worn out as a young man by venturing too far into the terrible wastes and forlorn solitude of abstract thought, and dreading the storms of controversy he had aroused amongst 'metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians', he learned to take comfort in human society and the conversible world: 'I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends.' He became well known as a man who enjoyed a good dinner (Gibbon described him, with friendly admiration, as one of the fattest of Epicurus' hogs) and, more remarkably, he appears to have learned how to cook himself, writing on 16 October 1769 in his fifty-ninth year to his friend Gilbert Elliot that his temporary lodgings in Edinburgh were

  very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life ... I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe à la Reine, copy'd with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me. I also make Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it eight days after, and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself Apprentice to my Lass to learn it ... All my Friends encourage me in this Ambition; as thinking it would redound very much to my Honour.

  Hume, one of the greatest philosophers of history, did not overrate the life of the mind. He believed that other pleasures, if pursued with equal passion, were of equal value. He played billiards, and enjoyed a game of whist of an evening with the old lady who lived on the floor below him. This is from his one of Essays, 'The Sceptic':

  The inference upon the whole is, that it is not from the value or worth of the object, which any person pursues, that we can determine his enjoyment; but merely from the passion with which he pursues it, and the success which he meets with in his pursuit. Objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the passion. If that be strong, and steady, and successful, the person is happy. It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as compleat enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the splendour of his eloquence.

  Dr Johnson disagreed with this position, arguing, according to Boswell, that 'A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal consciousness with a philosopher.' But Hume knew how unhappy philosophy could make a man, and he spoke and wrote of what he knew.

  Herbert Spencer is famous for claiming that 'A propensity to play billiards well is a sure sign of a misspent youth,' whereas Jeremy Bentham more provocatively argued that

  Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of pushpin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry.

  Whatever added to the sum and aggregate of human happiness, considered Bentham, was in itself justifiable, as quantity was more worthy of consideration than quality. This remains a challenging proposition.

  Despite studying Utilitarianism with some interest at Cambridge, under the heading of 'The English Moralists' (a miscellaneous grouping that included Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Marx), I've never been quite sure what kind of a game push-pin is, and am relieved to see frustrated dissension on this point expressed on the internet, some of it under the eloquent heading, 'What the fuck is pushpin?' It's amazing how much the student mind can glide over without stopping to query – the Royal Game of the Goose, the twelve good rules, nine men's morris, push-pin, jigsaws in Mansfield Park. I never bothered to get to grips with any of them. But it's never too late to learn. The OED defines push-pin as 'A child's game, in which each player pushes or fillips his pin with the object of crossing that of another player' and gives examples from Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell and Cowper, which leave me none the wiser. What kind of pins? Pins as in ten-pin bowling? Pins as in the pins stuck into Alison Uttley's sacred pincushion? Or pins as in spillikins?

  My husband has always thought it was a game somewhat like shove ha'penny. But I don't know what shove ha'penny is either. Is it a kind of pitch-and-toss? And what, please, is pitch-and-toss?

  The antiquarian and engraver Joseph Strutt, in his classic compendium titled The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), is as dismissive as he is unhelpful. All that he has to say is that 'Push-pin is a very silly sport, being nothing more than simply pushing one pin across another.'

  My grandchildren liked that game in the Minehead arcades when you tried to make pennies fall over a shelf, in a cascading copper waterfall. They could teeter on the brink impossibly, banking up, and then suddenly, orgasmically, they would let themselves go. I liked that game too. We used to play it in Filey when we were children. It's very silly, but it
's fun.

  Jane Austen, we are told in A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) by her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh, was good at spillikins. Nobody could throw them with as steady a hand as she, and her performances with cup and ball were marvellous. 'The one used at Chawton was an easy one, and she has been known to catch it on the point above an hundred times in succession, until her hand was weary. Sometimes she found a resource in that simple game when unable, from weakness in her eyes, to read or write long together.'

  That's what novelists do when they need a break. They play solitaire, or free cell, or do a bit of a jigsaw, or play cup and ball.

  Jane Austen was an affectionate and patient aunt. She wrote to her sister on 24 October 1808 from Southampton, as she tried to divert her nephews Edward and George from grieving for the death of their mother: 'We do not want amusement; bilbocatch ['biloboquet', i.e. cup and ball], at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the ebb and the flow of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed.' This is a sad testimony to her brave efforts to amuse the little motherless boys.

  Those who read books tend to despise those who don't. My mother disapproved very strongly of homes without books, and those for whom the word 'book' meant 'magazine'. (Though it has to be said that she herself had subscriptions to Woman and Good Housekeeping, and for me one of the first indulgences of returning from boarding school for the holidays was the pleasure of going through a thick pile of carefully saved back numbers. I particularly loved the agony column of Evelyn Home, and to my surprise have discovered that in real life she was a Quaker called Peggy Makins.) Francis Spufford, in The Child that Books Built (2002), an account of his childhood reading, states: 'I have a cultural sanction for my addiction. Books get cited over and over as the virtuous term whose wicked other half is Nintendo, or MTV, or the Web.' But those who read his story to the end will discover that he agrees with Bentham that reading is not necessarily innocent, for his addiction led him into pornography, a journey he appears to regret.

  Disapproval of card games is traditional and comes in various degrees of intensity. Mary Delany's objections were measured; she wrote: 'I am not so great an enemy to cards as to be uneasy at them, but I would not make it my business to secure company for that purpose.' Caroline Lennox, who cultivated the life of the mind, couldn't resist cards and gambling, but felt uncomfortable about it: 'I can't help when I play deep having an unpleasant feel about it, as if I did something wrong; perhaps a little vanity at not acting consistent with the rest of one's character. In short, I don't quite know, but tho' I love it I don't feel pleasant at it.' Lady Mary Coke, in contrast, had no such scruples. She played regularly, often at court, tediously and painstakingly recording in her journal each evening's losses and gains; these were usually in the region of seven or eight guineas, though sometimes they were very much higher. Jane Austen (in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 7 October 1808) records being 'tricked' into playing commerce with friends in Southampton for a three-shilling stake, but at that rate she could not play more than one pool, as she 'could not afford to lose that, twice in an evening'. (Lady Mary balanced her persistent gambling with some healthy hands-on gardening, which has not yet been considered a debauched activity.)

  Card games were endemic in aristocratic circles in the eighteenth century. How else could leisure time be passed? Innumerable group and family portraits record their subjects playing cards, and often without any hint of satire, though sometimes criticism may be intended, and art historians are always searching for it. A few rakes played for high stakes, losing thousands of pounds in an evening. Others played to alleviate boredom. The diarist John Hervey gives a chilling glimpse of life under George II, on the night of the birth in 1737 of the 'poor little ugly she-mouse' of a daughter of the Princess of Wales. Unaware of the turn of events, at Hampton Court

  the King played at commerce below stairs, the queen above at quadrille, the Princess Emily at her commerce-table, and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey at cribbage, just as usual, and separated all at ten of the clock; and, what is incredible to relate, went to bed all at eleven, without hearing one syllable of the Princess's being ill, or even of her not being in the house.

  That phrase, 'just as usual', is deadly.

  Decades later, nothing much had changed. George III's daughter Princess Elizabeth, born in 1770, and pining for a husband as she felt her beauty fade, wrote in despair in 1802 from the regular family holiday in Weymouth to her confidante Lady Harcourt:

  Read to the Queen the whole evening till cards, when I play at whist till my eyes know not hearts from diamonds and spades from clubs. And when that is over, turn over cards to amuse the King, till I literally get the rheumatism in every joint of my hand ... News there is none, but who bathes and who can't, and who won't and who will, whether warm bathing is better than cold, who likes wind and who don't, and all these very silly questions and answers which bore one to death and provoke one's understanding.

  The bad example set by some of the royals, and notably by the Prince Regent himself, was in part responsible for the evangelical revolt against loose living and high stakes. Jane Austen's disapproval of the amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park is taken as a significant marker in this shift towards propriety, for, in her high-spirited girlhood, there had been little sign of such censoriousness. But her reservations about the tone of the amusements at Mansfield Park were mild compared with the condemnations of Mrs Sherwood, the autocrat of the nursery and the author of the best-selling and much reprinted History of the Fairchild Family (3 volumes, 1818, 1842, 1847). Mrs Sherwood (born Mary Butt) denounced card games with evangelical intensity, and in her memoirs she luridly describes the small-town life of her grandparents' generation in Coventry and Lichfield as bedevilled by raucous card parties. The ladies, she said,

  always played for money, and often quarrelled so violently over their cards as actually to proceed to pulling of caps ... It was astonishing how fifty or sixty years ago this mode of spending the evenings prevailed among the ladies in towns. As the market and the church filled up in the morning, so did cards occupy almost every evening of females in a certain class.

  This doesn't sound quite like the dull royal evenings, or like the peaceful games of cribbage, piquet, speculation, quadrille and vingt-et-un enjoyed by the county families in Jane Austen's novels, though it is true that the vulgar Mrs Philips in Pride and Prejudice enjoyed 'a noisy game of lottery tickets' with her nieces, and 'a little bit of hot supper afterwards', and we see the more refined characters in Sense and Sensibility recoil from the noisiness of a game of consequences.

  Playing for money was, as Mrs Sherwood says, considered normal. Harriet Martineau, who was born into a religious Huguenot family in Norwich, and who was herself as a child of a neurotically religious persuasion, records the pleasure of winning at cards without a hint of self-reproach, although she was by nature of a disapproving temperament: she disapproved of women writers who sustained themselves with alcohol when working late, and she disapproved of Mary Wollstonecraft because she succumbed to sexual passion. But playing cards did not carry an odour of sin.

  The Wordsworths played cards at Dove Cottage, when they weren't reading Chaucer or Shakespeare to one another. But I don't think they played for money. The Coleridge children did jigsaws, but I don't know whether the Wordsworths did.

  Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, set in the 1840s and early 1850s, also records without any note of censure the continuing prevalence of cards, although Gaskell was the wife of a minister (albeit a tolerant Unitarian one). The ladies of Cranford play 'the decorous, highly respectable game of Preference' regularly, nearly every evening, with passion and commitment, gulping down their tea in order to get at the game more quickly. 'Cards were a business in those days, not a recreation.' They played for threepenny points (these would have been little silver threepenny coins), and it was customary for each player to contribute a shilling towards
the expense of each new pack of cards, placing the coin discreetly under one of the candlesticks as the green-baize tables were laid out for the game. Gaskell does not hint at any rowdiness or impropriety at these gatherings, and the gentle ladies of Cranford certainly did not indulge in the pulling of caps, though occasionally 'a few squibs and crackers' were let off at the end of the evening at careless or unlucky partners. All the ladies, we are assured, were in bed and asleep by ten.

  Elizabeth Gaskell smiled on the quiet amusements of her townswomen, who learned to fill their empty and impoverished days with harmless and mutually supportive activities – paying morning calls, knitting garters, talking about the London fashions, making candle-lighters (known to Miss Matty in Cranford and to us at Bryn as 'spills') from coloured paper, and embroidering Queen Adelaide's face in loyal wool-work.

  Auntie Phyl taught us how to make spills by making little twists from old newspapers. We used them to light the little paraffin Kelly lamps that saw us to bed before electricity reached Long Bennington. I enjoyed this thrifty and simple activity of recycling. We kept the spills in a pot on the mantelpiece.

  Elizabeth Gaskell had an affectionate temperament and an easy tolerance of eccentricities. She was fond of her old ladies, and writes about their small world with confident indulgence, while eschewing the sentimentality that often afflicted the prose of Mary Russell Mitford, her contemporary and a fellow chronicler of country ways. Mitford's Our Village, which provides a close parallel and an interesting comparison with Cranford, is a little overloaded with apple cheeks and dimpled faces and sparkling eyes and primroses and cowslips and hollyhocks and carnations and mossy dells and elves and fairies. The words 'delicious' and 'beautiful' are sprinkled too lavishly on the page, and even her admirers admitted that she enamelled too brightly. Her violets are too violet, her bluebells too blue. She was an ardent rambler and gardener, and her garden at Three Mile Cross, near Reading, was her solace for the hardships of a life that had, in fact, been thrown off course and nearly ruined by her father's gambling. Dr George Mitford (the professional title was largely honorary) was all too fond of cards. He had managed to get through a large fortune of some £70,000, which he lost on whist, piquet, speculation and greyhounds, playing for much higher stakes than the Cranford ladies, and his daughter had to write hard and fast to save him from his creditors and the King's Bench Prison. She might well have taken to speculation herself, for in 1797 at the age of ten, with a beginner's luck, she had personally selected a winning number in the Irish Lottery; she chose 2224, because the digits added up to ten, and the ticket won her £20,000. Her father got through that, as well as his own and his wife's inheritance, thus consigning his daughter to a life of scribbling. She gave up betting, and took up writing and gardening. He went on betting.