The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  It seemed important to us to be there, in that very place, on this major route. Lorries, cars and coaches swished past rhythmically, endlessly. All night long they journeyed, and I would lie in bed listening to the swish and the boom, the swish and the boom, as they came and they went, as they came and they went. I loved that sound. (Is it the sound of what is called a slipstream? It is a word I have never used before.) It was like a cradle, endlessly rocking: it was like a lullaby, it was like a river pouring past, it was like the incessant movement of the Earth. You were a child in bed, trying to sleep, but the road was awake and alive with travellers, and therefore you were not alone, and life had not come to a grim halt. The blood coursed through the body, and the traffic along the road. Your heart would not seize up and stop if you fell asleep. It would beat on until the morning.

  You can still hear the roar of the road, very faintly, in the Ram Jam Inn, through the double glazing, and that is one of the reasons why I like to stay there. As I lie there listening to the trucks of night, I think that the gates of memory will open, and I will be able to step back into childhood and discover what has been lost from that early world.

  Not everybody found the sound so soothing; in Bryn’s visitors’ book one family’s remark stood out. Instead of the anodyne formula of ‘A Home from Home’, or ‘See you Next Year’, one couple had irritably noted, ‘How can you stand the din?’

  The bypass put an end to all that.

  George, in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, pays tribute to the spirit of the A1 as an affirmation of the existence of God:

  And yet I tell you that, now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of rainbows or newborn babes, nor in the extremities of pain or joy, but more probably ambushed by some quite trivial moment – say the exchange of signals between two long-distance lorry drivers in the black sleet of a god-awful night on the old A1 – then, in that dip-flash, dip-flash of headlights in the rain that seems to affirm some common ground that is not animal and not long-distance lorry-driving – then I tell you I know…

  I don’t think Auntie Phyl ever saw any Stoppard, and I do not think she had any interest in God, but she might have recognized this sentiment.

  As children, we were issued the strictest of warnings about this major road, for it was a fearsome force. We must never, ever try to cross it alone. We must never even walk on its grass verge. We must never go to the village shop opposite without an accompanying adult. Crossing to the shop was like crossing a perilous torrent. I can’t remember now whether there were many proper crossings in the village where lorries had to stop for pedestrians; I suppose there must have been. I remember well Joyce’s crossing, which she policed for the school in her smart yellow fluorescent uniform, but there must have been others. We were far too docile to try anything risky, but I think we were impressed by the danger on the doorstep. It made life more exciting.

  The romance of the Great North Road had appealed to Auntie Phyl since her girlhood, years before her parents moved to live by it. She had written an essay on it at Mexborough School, which she treasured and which I have piously preserved. (It was Joyce who told me to look for it when the house was being emptied: ‘Miss Bloor set great store by that essay,’ she told me, and I found it in the little wooden chest in the hall.) In this twenty-two-page document, still tethered by its original rusting paper clip, Phyllis Bloor of VIC summons up the Roman days of Ermine Street (the Romans were interested in straight lines, not beautiful scenery), of toll roads (according to my aunt, initially manned by hermits and ‘false hermits’), and of mail coaches, tarmac, motor cars and bicycle clubs. She describes the market gardens of Biggleswade, the fate of the young University of Stamford (which was ‘strangled out’ in 1463 by threats from Oxford and Cambridge), Cromwell’s victory at the battle of Gonerby Hill, and the travels of Nicholas Nickleby. It is a well-researched narrative, enlivened by strong personal feeling. She abandons the story at Ferrybridge (where one of her aunts lived) with the words: ‘The Great North Road proceeds into Scotland to Edinburgh but we will not trace its course now.’

  Auntie Phyl was not as clever as my mother, but she was not as stupid as my mother liked to suggest.

  It is 450 miles from Edinburgh to London, and Long Bennington is strategically placed en route, just under two-thirds of the way south. (Grantham is 111 miles from London, a symmetrical signpost that I always note with respect as I pass.) One summer afternoon, in my grandmother Clara’s dour reign, a car pulled into the drive, and a woman knocked on the door, requesting not tea and bread and butter, or accommodation for the night, but asking whether she could use the toilet. Her excuse was that they’d come all the way from Scotch Corner. ‘Well, you should have stopped earlier,’ said Grandma, and sent her on her way. I can’t remember whether I witnessed this incident, or whether Grandma told me about it. I often think of it when driving long distances.

  Bryn, as I now know, was one of the few houses in the village to boast two flush toilets. It had these long before it had electricity, which was not installed until 1946; before that, we used to go to bed by torch and Kelly lamp. One of these toilets was outdoors, whitewashed and full of spiders; the other was indoors, in the communal bathroom, which served family and guests alike. This bathroom, like the bathrooms of many old houses, had two doors, an arrangement that was disquieting, and which may be the source of the recurrent dream in which I am interrupted by an intruder while in the act of lowering myself onto a lavatory seat.

  The drinking water at Bryn came from a well, and was pumped into large white chipped blue-rimmed enamel jugs. It was soft, tasteless water, unlike the water in Sheffield, which had a mineral limestone tang. I did not like it; this was one of the few aspects of Bryn that I did not like. But I liked the pump, and I enjoyed filling the jugs. The building was AA registered on a ‘Farmhouse Agreement Form’ at some point in the 1930s, and it was licensed to sell liquor and tobacco, though I don’t think it ever did so in my day. What it did sell was hand embroidery, which consisted largely of piles of tablecloths and cushion covers embroidered with floral motifs by my grandmother and aunt. They despised crinoline ladies, which appeared on many embroidery transfers at that time; I never knew why they held them in contempt. Secretly I rather liked them, but I knew better than to say so. They despised cross-stitch, too. Again, I could not guess their reasons. Perhaps they thought it a childish stitch, fit only for samplers.

  I used to get very bored, in the covered market in Newark, waiting while my aunt interminably inspected those thin, papery, grey-and-blue transfers, looking for attractive designs to iron onto tablecloths.

  V

  The sources of the aesthetic preferences of the Bloor and Drabble families intrigue me. They were formed in industrial South Yorkshire, a region not best known for its natural beauty or its artistic discrimination. The images of high art would have reached them through calendar art, jigsaw art, biscuit tin art, tea caddy art. The Brontës, intellectually isolated in their small moorland parish, were well acquainted with high art through periodicals, prints, engravings and Bewick’s woodcuts, but I do not think my ancestors had access to this kind of material. The Brontës lived in a bleak and unspoiled landscape, which they perceived and dignified as romantic, whereas the Bloors and the Drabbles lived in a debased and despoiled landscape, amidst the decor and mass-produced artefacts of the machine age, which were directed at a popular taste without much education or aspiration. Some of these artefacts are, to us, attractive and have now become collectors’ items. Many of them were in themselves freely adapted reproductions of earlier works by Romney, Reynolds, Landseer, Lancret, George Morland, and other popular and easily sentimentalized artists. Some of these artefacts are now reproduced, a century and a half later, as newly manufactured specimens of Victoriana, to be sold in shops with names like Past Times. But they are not art. They are nostalgic kitsch.

  The Bloors, it is true, were sightseers, interested in natural wonders – waterfalls, rocks, boulders, mountains, minerals, cave
s – and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in stately homes, with their artificially contrived waterfalls, rocks, boulders, mountains, minerals and caves. But it would never have occurred to them or to anyone they knew to buy a painting. They might perhaps think to embroider a painting; one of the great-aunts embroidered in fine unfading silks a bluebell wood, which hung in its pale wooden frame on a wall at Bryn. And Grandma Bloor once won a watercolour of a harbour scene at a whist drive. But they did not think that the world of art galleries or paintings had anything to do with them.

  Hanging in the kitchen at Bryn was a large framed reproduction of a work by the children’s illustrator, Margaret Tarrant. It showed an elf instructing a circle of small woodland animals – a mouse, a blackbird, a squirrel, perhaps a frog. I think there was a blackboard involved in this Goody Two-Shoes scene, on which the elf was inscribing a lesson. It belonged to Auntie Phyl, not Grandma, and I took it to be a tribute to her profession as an infants’ teacher. I liked this work of art, and I used to enjoy discussing with Auntie Phyl the relative merits of Margaret Tempest, creator of Little Grey Rabbit as we knew her, and Margaret Tarrant, who specialized in wild flowers and fairies. We liked them both. I remember trying to get my mother to agree with me that The Woodland Class was a fine work of art, but she would not. She knew what she didn’t like, and she didn’t like elves. I suspected she was in the right, as she usually was. I recognized that in her eyes elves were as bad as crinolines or horse brasses. But I was quite tenacious and stood up for Margaret Tarrant. I liked that painting, and I wasn’t going to say I didn’t. And my mother wasn’t going to say that she did.

  Auntie Phyl’s taste in clothes and furnishings was of its time, and stayed in that time. Furniture didn’t require choice; chairs, tables, beds, wardrobes were inherited and lasted for generations, so you never had to buy new ones. She had some cheerful crockery that I now know to have been Art Deco, and she favoured 1920s chinoiserie, likings that went back to her college days. I also associate her with Chinese lanterns (Physalis alkekengi, known to some but not to us as winter cherry), which grew in Bryn’s garden and stood gathered in a vase in her sitting room. (I could never persuade these charming plants to grow for me, though I did succeed with Bryn’s Solomon’s seal.) But it was generally considered that the artistic taste of my parents was superior to hers. So I was shocked and impressed when she took against a new armchair that my father had bought. I remember it fairly clearly: it was a large Parker Knoll upholstered in strawberry crushed velvet and had some fancy golden fringing attached to its parts. He was very proud of it, and it was comfortable, as Parker Knoll chairs are. (I have invested in several, including an electronically operated recliner more suitable to a care home than a study. Small children love going for rides in it.) My father’s new chair was uncharacteristically showy, even opulent. Auntie Phyl confided to me one day, ‘I don’t really like it.’ She was scornful about it, her face wearing a look of Bloor disapproval. I was intrigued by this declaration of independence, all the more because I secretly agreed with her. It was a bit vulgar, that chair. Not like my father.

  VI

  Crafts were familiar to the Bloors and the Drabbles. These ‘half-arts’ (Halbkünste), as Goethe called them, were part of their daily lives, and they occupied a halfway territory between idle diversion and domestic economy. They filled the winter evenings.

  In later years, Auntie Phyl took to sewing a kind of ready-made trim called ‘rickrack’ round the edges of pillowcases. She sold these pillowcases to bed-and-breakfast guests. They were a popular line. I used to possess many of these value-added pillowcases, but the last ones are now beginning to unravel.

  A Teas-with-Hovis sign hung for many years on the tall elm tree that stood in the front garden, advertising Bryn to passing travellers. I don’t recall that Hovis was ever served. The bread we and the guests ate was always square and white and certainly not home-made. I think it came from the village bakery just down the road. My grandparents owned a Teas-with-Hovis teaset with square plates that portrayed a tea garden not unlike Bryn itself. I do not know where they acquired it; maybe it came with the house, or maybe a travelling salesman presented it to them as a promotional gift. The tea house in the picture is red-brick, like Bryn, and has a red-tiled roof, like Bryn, and it has a Teas-with-Hovis sign hanging from a tree, like Bryn, but it is not as good-looking a house as Bryn and, unlike Bryn, it is not thickly covered in romantic Virginia creeper. The painted house is a modern house, of the 1920s or 30s, and looks as though it stands in suburbia, near somewhere like Bournemouth. Bryn was clearly superior and senior, and the painted house on the plates was paying homage to Bryn. Or that was how I saw it.

  Years later, the elm tree at Bryn caught Dutch elm disease and was chopped down, and thus this well-known landmark on the Great North Road vanished for ever. Most of the Hovis plates are chipped, but some have survived time and the dishwasher.

  The Bryn menu featured ‘Tea – Bread and Butter – Jam – Cakes, All Home-Made’ for a shilling, ‘Tea and Cakes’ for eight-pence, boiled eggs at fourpence each, and poached eggs at fivepence. You could also have Fruit and Cream (I think this would have been tinned fruit and tinned cream) and Coffee and Biscuits, combinations that are not priced on the handwritten card that I retain. The card is adorned by a prancing elf that Auntie Phyl had made out of coloured gummed paper. She probably learned how to make gummed elves at Homerton.

  One of Auntie Phyl’s specialities was whipped evaporated milk. I don’t think the guests were ever lucky enough to be offered this, but my sisters and I loved it. You whisked a tin of evaporated milk in a large jug or bowl with a rotary hand whisk until it became stiff and frothy. On jelly, it was delicious. The combination of textures was out of this world.When, a few years after the war, I first knowingly sampled fresh double cream, I did not like it at all. I think many war babies had the same initial recoil from its mild and tasteless fatty blandness. We favoured harsher, more metallic, more synthetic, more warlike flavours.

  Hovis in 2006 listed its ingredients as wheat flour, water, wheat-germ, yeast, salt, wheat protein, vinegar, vegetable fat, soya flour, barley fibre, emulsifier E472e and flour treatment agent 300. I don’t know what its ingredients were in 1946. Maybe they were even less authentic, more artificial, more ersatz. I think it is in part coincidental that the word Hovis came to represent a nationwide sense of nostalgia, through the famous Hovis advertisement by Ridley Scott, which featured a boy pushing a bike loaded with loaves up what purports to be a cobbled Northern street to the strains of Dvořák adapted for a brass band. (The street, I am told, is in fact in Dorset.) This TV commercial was first shown in 1973, and had no connection with my Bryn and Hovis associations, or with my concept of being Northern, which did not include the cliché of the brass band. To me, Hovis was genteel.

  The brass-band notion of the North used to puzzle me. I never knowingly saw such a band when I was a child, and I was surprised when director Richard Marquand, when making a BBC television documentary about me in the 1960s, saw fit to include a misleading sequence showing me watching a Salvation Army band on a street corner in Sheffield. I may have protested against appearing in this context, but he overruled me. He wanted to film the Salvation Army, whether it had any connection with his subject or not. He didn’t mind faking it, just as Ridley Scott was to do. Richard was a film-maker; he was using me to practise his art, and he had his eye on the big time. He made it, with a Second World War thriller called The Eye of the Needle, and went on to make The Return of the Jedi. Richard was a good friend of mine and the most handsome undergraduate in Cambridge, on whom King’s College and E. M. Forster smiled in vain. He died of a stroke in 1987. He was only forty-nine.

  Clive Swift knew a lot more about brass bands than either Richard or me, and he co-wrote a very good play about one called All Together Now, which was performed with great aplomb at the Leicester Haymarket in 1979. It ought to be revived, but I suppose it’s hard to find a cast of actors all of whom can act and
play brass instruments, as the script required. Clive used to be good on the trombone and still plays it from time to time.

  VII

  When I was at Bryn as a child, I felt proud to be part of the traditional life of the road. Wayfarers came and had their tea and bread and butter, or they stayed the night and had their bacon and eggs and toast in the morning, and then on they went, south towards Stamford, north towards Ferrybridge. Sometimes they came back another year; sometimes they disappeared without trace. I felt that Bryn had a connection with all the hundreds of roadhouses and inns and staging posts, known and unknown, along the hundreds of miles of the Great North Road. The combination of a sense of old-fashioned security and continuity with the promise of incessant change and movement was profoundly reassuring to me. The life of the road has been the source of innumerable stories, legends, dreams, novels, poems and movies, and my heart warmed to Princess Anne who, when asked in an interview long ago what she would like to be if she wasn’t a princess, replied, ‘A long-distance lorry driver.’ What an elegant answer! America created the road movie, but surely the Great North Road or the Great West Road inspired Princess Anne.

  My aunt stopped doing teas, but she went on doing bed and breakfast for a long while after Grandma’s death. There was less trade after the village bypass was built in 1965, but some travellers remembered their old stopping place and turned off the A1 to stay the night. It remained very traditional, though there were small innovations, and at some point in the 1950s guests began to be offered a very small glass of tinned Del Monte orange juice with their tea or coffee. My aunt had to get to school to teach in the mornings, so occasionally she would instruct trusted guests who wished to linger to lock the door after them when they left. One summer, when our children were very young, Clive and I took over the business for a week or two while she was on holiday, and I felt grown up as I cooked the breakfasts, although I was frightened of breaking the yolks of the fried eggs. Eggs were still precious, to be treated with respect, and one could not present a paying guest with a broken yolk. (Clive claims he was a dab hand at frying eggs, a skill he learned at prep school.) We were allowed to pocket the 12s 6d per person per night that was then the going rate. Auntie Phyl had said we could keep any money that we made.