The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Linda Hannas (née Morris) was the London-born English wife of Torgrim Hannas, a Norwegian resistance fighter, intelligence officer, bibliophile, scholar and antiquarian book dealer who presented his library of Scandinavian linguistic literature to the British Library in 1984, the same year that his wife sold her jigsaws. (He died in 1998.) Antiquarian book dealers are collectors by trade and inclination. I was for years involved with a dealer who specialized in literary periodicals, and I learned from him the value of completing the set, the excitement of finding the missing number. I never knew whether I was deeply bored by this activity, or whether I found it, as he did, of compelling interest. On the whole, I think boredom prevailed, and to this day I don’t really like reading periodicals, but his company shed a certain glamour on them. He was a glamorous figure, despite his dusty trade.

  Ah, the brief, illicit hours I spent with this too-much-married man, faithfully and faithlessly, amidst the book stacks, in dark basements and leaking warehouses! (This sounds like a scenario from a story by Edith Wharton or Anita Brookner, but it wasn’t quite like that, for we were both in our thirties, and between us we had too many children. This is one of the reasons why our stolen basement hours were brief. We were conscientious parents and we had to get back to pick up the children from school.) For his sake, I still keep my eyes open for odd copies of The Dial, or Horizon, or Encounter, or The Nineteenth Century and After, or Granta, or delta, where one might hope to find the first publications of D. H. Lawrence or Angus Wilson or Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes or Peter Redgrove. It is too late, as my friend died years ago, and I don’t know what to do with these items when I spot them. But I keep looking. It is a habit. I was pleased to be able to recognize the first appearance of Hardy’s famous Titanic poem, ‘Convergence of the Twain’, in a periodical in my husband’s archive. I feel it ought to be worth a few bob.

  Mrs Hannas’s decision to part with her slowly acquired collection, a good twenty years before her death, must have been hard to make, and probably indicated a greater family dispersal. Even less dedicated scholars than she find it hard to part with their jigsaws. Attics and storerooms are full of old puzzles, often deplored by spouses and derided by children, taking up space, gathering dust, waiting for a query from someone like me, who wants to know why they are still there and what they represent. After dinner parties, late at night, out they come, for my admiration. I am sorry I did not meet Mrs Hannas.

  Linda Hannas’s study, which provides a checklist of more than five hundred items, is a landmark in the story of children’s games. Her commentary is excellent, her illustrations alluring, her detailed descriptions vivid, and her detective work impressive. Her account of how she managed to establish the identity of an elusive family business of early puzzle manufacturers, the Barfoots, deserves a wider readership; she tracked them down through their distinctive trademark of a swag of roses. I pursued, not very methodically, some of the museum items she lists, and often found the originals, preserved in old cardboard boxes and entwined with old string, to be dismayingly duller than their photographic reproductions, which often lend a gloss to objects that are in reality stained and defective. This made me admire her perseverance the more.

  An exhibition at the Museum of London in 1968 (then in its former home in Kensington) called Two Hundred Years of Jigsaw Puzzles displayed many of her discoveries and attracted some interest. A boom in ‘pastimes’ objects, Victoriana and heritage decor was on its way; Laura Ashley’s first shop opened in the same year in South Kensington, and shortly afterwards, in the winter of 1971–2, an exhibition of biscuit tins from 1868 to 1939 at the Victoria and Albert Museum proved popular, drawing on a similar mixture of nostalgia and curiosity. Michael J. Franklin, the biscuit tin expert, typically gives tips about prices as well as information about manufacturers and artists in his 1979 book, The Art of Decorative Packaging. The boom continued, and the first of what was to be a successful chain of shops called Past Times, providing replica heritage objects of some sophistication, opened in Oxford in 1986. These shops also, of course, sell jigsaws.

  Linda Hannas’s 1972 study was not, however, merely an essay in nostalgia and a stimulus to the collecting habit. It was of interest to professionals as well as amateurs, and soon after its publication her observations were beginning to make their way into the mainstream of essays and bibliographies. The historian J. H. Plumb in his article on ‘Children in Eighteenth-Century England’ (Past and Present, May 1975) was one of the first to cite her work at some length, and two years later Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977) mentioned dissected maps in the context of Enlightenment educational theory and practice (although he does not credit Hannas by name). Raphael Samuel, in Theatres of Memory (1994), a work that provides an excellent and surprisingly sympathetic analysis of the Laura-Ashley, old-postcard, Teas-with-Hovis, retrochic phenomenon, draws on and praises her discoveries in his discussion of playing cards featuring monarchs, and jigsaw puzzles featuring chronological tables of English history.

  Many scholars have now followed in the footsteps of Hannas, exploring the history of jigsaw puzzles and the allied terrain of children’s books, movable books, flap books, flick books, dress-the-doll books, harlequinades, peep-shows, pin-prick pictures and other ephemera. (Canadian writer Jill Shefrin, for some twenty years associated with the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in Toronto, made herself an expert in this field and contributed much new scholarship.) John Spilsbury’s name is now familiar to anybody interested in this esoteric area of knowledge. A prize awarded by the American Association of Game and Puzzle Collectors (AGPC) is named after him, and he was the answer to a question on University Challenge on 27 November 2006, when he scored a point for the team who guessed him correctly. He has a short entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where his life appears under the same heading as that of his older brother Jonathan, also an engraver.

  Both had appeared (in a group entry, along with Jonathan’s daughter Maria, a successful artist) in the original DNB, but no mention is made there of dissected maps. The new entry, in contrast, gives John full credit for his invention and cites Linda Hannas as a source. Maria Spilsbury, not surprisingly, now has a long entry of her own: she is credited with a gift for large crowd scenes, painting cottages and cottage children, pastoral and nursery scenes in crowded canvases, many of which favoured the kind of images that later became (and have remained) popular with jigsaw-puzzle manufacturers, though she has not yet, as far as I know, been awarded the accolade of jigsaw reproduction.

  Spilsbury’s novel device has been so lastingly popular, and has given rise to so many variants, that it is hard to imagine a world without it. We can only wonder whether he suspected, when he died in 1769 at the early age of thirty, that he had launched a winner. Probably not, I fear.

  The map format of the earliest puzzles reflected the fashions of the day, when maps were appearing everywhere, in prints and on fans, handkerchiefs and embroidered samplers. John Spilsbury not only invented the puzzle: according to the ODNB he also took advantage of the more frivolous fashion for printed silk kerchiefs, offering one that boasted a ‘New and most accurate map of the roads of England and Wales; with distances by the milestones’. This growing love of cartography was no doubt connected with the increasing ease of travel and the spread of Empire; maps and puzzles in map form were considered patriotic as well as instructional. Despite the vastly extended range of jigsaw subject matter, a sense of the original geographical connection survives, and classic map jigsaws are still in production. (Educational kerchiefs did not confine themselves to maps; John Clare was given one with a poem by Chatterton imprinted on it.)

  When they were little, my children had a Galt jigsaw of the counties of England, and I was recently given an old plywood Victory puzzle of the same subject, called Industrial Life in England and Wales, which shows Leicestershire to be full of sheep and suitcases, Nottinghamshire of lace and oak trees, Lincolnshire
of vegetables and chickens, whereas little Rutland is too small to feature any industries or products at all. It is coloured bright blue, like a lake, but as the jigsaw was made long before Rutland Water (‘one of the largest man-made reservoirs in Europe’) was created in the 1970s, this must have been a prophetic coincidence.

  I have a friend who claims that the only jigsaw she ever does is a map of the departments of France, the names of which she is determined eventually to commit to memory. I persuaded her to bring some pieces of it to the Pizza Express, opposite the British Library, where I inspected them over our invariable lunch of melanzana parmigiana. The pieces were non-interlocking, like those of the earliest puzzles, and although I assembled three large chunks of the smiling blue Atlantic without much difficulty, I ran into trouble with Saône and Bourgogne. Learning the names of the French departments is complicated by the fact that, like the boundaries of English counties, they keep changing; Seine and the Charente have become maritime, according to Georges Perec in Penser/Classer (1982), in order to avoid the shame of being inférieure, and ‘in the same way, the “basses” or “low” Pyrénées have become “atlantiques”, the “basses” Alpes have become “de Haute-Provence”, and the Loire “inférieure” has become “atlantique”.’ Departments are sensitive.

  Map jigsaws are not always as easy to assemble as you think they will be. One Christmas, Gus Skidelsky commissioned for me a jigsaw based on an old Ordnance Survey map that centres on a house-shaped piece representing the site of our Somerset home. The bit with the sea was very difficult, as were the winding footpaths through the ancient woodlands. But I learned place names I had not known; I learned the lie of the land before our house was built. Maps and jigsaws continue to fit together well and profitably. They interlock.

  Not everybody is as enthusiastic about jigsaw maps. Jill Shefrin tells me, ‘Ironically, the only jigsaw puzzles I had as a child were maps of Canada and the United States, and it is only in the last few years that I have begun to assemble jigsaw puzzles myself. I only really enjoy those which are made from interesting paintings.’

  Nicholas Tucker, however, remembers with pleasure a jigsaw map with little Rutland. I knew Nick when I was a teenage schoolgirl living in Granville Road in Sevenoaks. Nick (now honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex) is a scholar of children’s literature, and although I haven’t seen him in many years, I’ve followed his career through articles in the newspapers. While I was thinking about writing this book, I read a particularly interesting piece by him about childhood in the Independent on Sunday (9 July 2006). It appeared at a time when the press was in one of its periodic fits of moral panic about the miseries of modern childhood. Not so, wrote Nick; the old image of a past Golden Age, of a Cider-with-Rosie idyll in the Cotswolds, is largely illusory, and most children are on the whole healthier, happier, more comfortably dressed, less terrified by hellfire, better educated and closer to their parents now than they used to be.

  Prompted by this, I wrote to him about the Teas-with-Hovis activity of jigsaws, and asked whether he knew any jigsaw historians. He responded immediately and helpfully with many suggestions, and also volunteered some personal memories:

  Jigsaws played a huge part in our Granville Road childhood. They always had bits missing, so that one got almost as used to a particular space as one did to a piece. And the pictures that gradually emerged; once they came together, it was almost as if a chord of music suddenly played. There was a Red Indian in a canoe, given to me by Father Christmas at a London store, which was always particularly atmospheric. We also had old, pre-war jigsaws of Victorian-looking battleships, scenes from silent films – I can see them all now. A woman standing on a round table, all long legs, while a man swatted at a mouse. No one questioned what was going on – we simply accepted it as part of the quite often occasionally crazed world of the adult.

  My aunt and mother – both still alive – carried on doing jigsaws when almost anything else, including dominoes, had become too much for them. I suppose the obvious symbolism is making order from chaos, but with the nice fall-back position that order is always attainable in the end so long as one works hard for it.

  I find it interesting, and comforting, to discover after all these years that the Tucker family was so little worried by the missing pieces. The Tuckers were a comforting presence, down the road. They weren’t anxious, or neurotic, or depressed, like us. Or so it seemed to me when I was fifteen. My mother used to mutter that the Tuckers had no stair carpets. I have no idea whether this was true or not, or how she made this discovery. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would notice. But I did think that it was none of her business.

  Nick’s grandfather used to make wooden jigsaws and favoured the tradition that went right back to John Spilsbury. ‘One particularly useful one was the counties of Britain. I still have a vague idea of what Montgomeryshire and Flintshire looked like, and how easy it was to lose Rutland!’

  Rutland, the smallest county. The Ram Jam Inn on the Great North Road is in Rutland, or it is at the moment. Over the years, Rutland has been lost to the map of England, and restored to it. The county boundaries of this part of Middle England shift from time to time. Sometimes the poet John Clare was born in one county, sometimes in another – his natal village, Helpton, used to be in Northamptonshire, but is now in Cambridgeshire. We were told to address letters to Long Bennington to ‘Nr Newark, Notts’, although I think it was really in Lincs. (This was before the days of postcodes, before the days when Bryn had to have a street number, before the days when it was demoted to ‘80 Main Street’, a number that I could never memorize.) Auntie Phyl liked Rutland and was pleased when it came back on the map. The symbol of Rutland is a horseshoe, because it is a county through which so many travellers pass. I have been happy in Rutland.

  XVIII

  My first physical encounter with a Spilsbury map was a significant moment, a jigsaw epiphany. I discovered that examples of Spilsbury’s earliest works were held in the Map Room of my familiar haunt, the British Library, and I thought I would go to visit them. I do not often venture into the Map Room. I spend most of my time in Humanities Two, a pleasant place that I find conducive to study and within which I am conservative about my choice of seat, as I used to be in the old BM Reading Room. But off I boldly went, up one floor into the alarmingly unknown, to see whether I could set eyes on the famous Spilsbury maps.

  After some negotiation with various helpful members of staff, I was presented with Spilsbury’s Map of Europe Divided into Kingdoms, in an edition dated 1767 (or was it 1766?), some two years before Spilsbury’s early death. There had been some question as to whether it was available to view, or hidden away for conservation, but eventually it appeared, in its mahogany box, and to my surprised delight I was allowed to sit there at a large desk and assemble it. I didn’t even have to wear gloves. (I have always hated wearing gloves, even outdoors in bitter weather. And yes, just as I was warned, my fingers have grown stiff, possibly as a result of this phobia.) I was politely asked to check whether any pieces were missing, and I was able to confirm that the pieces representing Scotland, the English Channel, the Low Countries, Sardinia, Corsica and the Gulf of Finland were indeed absent, as a note in the box that housed them confessed. I wondered how many decades ago, how many centuries ago, those pieces had vanished.

  I also had time to assemble a map of Africa in forty pieces, which arrived in a box with the handwritten inscription ‘A gift of Lady Cecilia Johnston, May 27, 1792’.

  There was something exhilarating, touching and anarchic about being allowed to handle and assemble the pieces of these dissected maps, with their delicate colouring of pink and green and acqua and yellow. I was not sure that I should have been given permission to touch; it seemed too much of a freedom. The sense of escape from books and words was physically and mentally liberating. Those who spend much of their lives writing and reading often yearn for a different form of activity. Some go fishing, some garden, some go
on long walks, some take up watercolours or bookbinding or cabinetmaking, some work at jigsaw puzzles.

  I think one of the reasons I am drawn to these puzzles is precisely because they have no verbal content; they exercise a different area of the brain, bring different neurons and dendrites into play. Like many people, I use the word-based, verbal, left side of my brain too much, and have begun to think, in the light of recent neurological research, that one of the causes of my stammer is a defective link between the left and right hemispheres – nothing to do with childhood trauma or parental expectation. I have a bad spatial sense and suffer from embarrassingly poor powers of facial recognition (this is a recognized condition, called prosopagnosis), and I like jigsaws partly because they give me a quiet chance to look at wordless patterns. I feel this must be good for me, and it surely can’t be harmful. Stroke patients are sometimes advised to do jigsaws as an aid to recovering a loss of spatial sense. (Neuropsychologists Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein did a lot of work on the cerebral cortex in this context, and it was Ornstein who advised Doris Lessing to encourage her son to do jigsaws after he suffered a stroke.) Chess might be even better for me, as it is clearly a spatial game, but it is too competitive, too demanding, too intellectual.