The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  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 of Just 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 child-centred 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 thirty 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?

  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 remin
d 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-English-speaking, 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 sequ
el, 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 well-furnished 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.