The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  Auntie Phyl, in old age, was not pretty, though this did not prevent her from criticizing the appearance of others. 'Not very attractive, is she?' she once said, bluntly, of one of the new girlfriends of one of her great-nephews, to which the proper retort, the retort she would best have understood, would have been, 'Look who's talking!' But in fact, as a girl, she had been bonny: slim, with fair hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Most of the Bloor women were slim as children and adolescents; it was in middle age that their figures thickened, their waists spread, their bosoms swelled and drooped. I used to look at these women and hope I wouldn't get like that, but of course it was the genes that did it, not the diet or the lack of exercise. A waistless stoutness lay in wait for all of us. A piggish, balding, bristling yellowish pinkness was our genetic fate.

  My mother disliked exercise and became agoraphobic, but my aunt enjoyed walking through the village with her dog.

  We used to think the Bloors had Dutch blood, because many of them were potters, and because of their Dutch-doll colouring, but in fact Bloor (or Bloore or Blore) is an old English name. The Bloors (like the Drabbles) were English through and through. There is a little village in Staffordshire called Blore, which I once went to visit when doing family research for the background of The Peppered Moth. Our car got stuck in the deep damp unmown grass of the churchyard, and we had to ask some funeral mourners for a shove. They were more than happy to oblige. Helping hapless strangers was more fun than burying the dead.

  Auntie Phyl had little vanity, though she was proud of her yellow hair, and even in her eighties fancied that it kept a golden tint. (It did, but it was the tarnish of age, not the bright flax of youth.) As far as I know, she never had a boyfriend or a love affair. When I was a small child her single status seemed natural and desirable to me, for it enabled her to concentrate her affections on her nieces and her nephew. Later, I wondered whether she had lesbian leanings. She had several close female friendships, some dating from her college days when she did her teacher training course at Homerton, but none of them seemed to me to have a sexual component. (One Homerton couple lived together, but I doubt whether they were practising lesbians. Sexual abstinence, like sexual ignorance, was far more common then than it is now.)

  Born in 1909, she was too young to be considered a member of the tragic generation that lost its fiancés and lovers to the Great War, so I assume she lived alone by choice. She had several male friends, some of them connected with the trade that my grandparents had plied at Bryn, which they bought when it was already established as a bed and breakfast and tea garden. These friends included the toffee boys, as we called them, who drove a lorry full of confectionery up and down the Great North Road; another couple called Len and Arthur; and a young man who worked at a gentleman's outfitters in Grantham. I think now that maybe these men were what we would now call gay.

  I do not think my aunt had any sexual interest in men, although she liked children, and in my mother's view would have liked to have had a baby. Maybe she was asexual.

  In the late 1960s and 70s she and my parents came every year to stay with me in Hampstead for a few days over Christmas, and Arnold and Dusty Wesker, then living in Highgate, adopted a kindly habit of dropping in for a smoked-salmon high tea on Christmas Eve. I think they felt sorry for me, coping alone with such an intense and loaded domestic celebration. And, indeed, I sometimes felt sorry for myself. It was exhausting, for my first husband Clive and I had by this time separated, and it was a lot of work for one person. I don't know how it happened that I became the daughter who always did Christmas, and when I suggested that it was somebody else's turn, I was met with a blunt refusal. 'They wouldn't want to go anywhere else' was the miserable excuse I was given. This was disingenuous, to say the least.

  Arnold closely observed the bickerings and manoeuvrings of the elderly trio (these became so fractious that eventually my father used to sleep in a friend's house over the road) and speculated at one point that maybe Auntie Phyl had been in love with my father when young. Arnold is a writer, and he saw a plot. Two sisters, both in love with the same handsome, eligible, upwardly mobile bachelor in Mexborough: one wins the man, marries him and has children, the other stays single all her life. An Arnold Bennett story. (My aunt's middle name was Bennett and, as we are from the Potteries, we claim some as yet unverified connection with the great man.) But I don't think Arnold Wesker can have been right. Arnold is strong on family and aunts, but his imagination is (or in those days was) inexorably heterosexual. I do not believe that my aunt loved and lost. It was not like that. I don't know how it was, but it was not like that.

  My aunt survived both my parents by nearly ten years, and that is one of the reasons why I now think of her so often. She lies more recently in my memory. And my memories of her are less painful than my memories of my parents. It is true that she could be rude, cutting, ungrateful, demanding, even offensive, but her insults or rejections were not wounding. One Christmas, she examined her newly opened gifts with some scorn, and complained that the book she had been given would be too big for her bookshelf, and that the chocolates were very near their sell-by date. I think the rest of the family just found this funny, whereas my mother's criticisms of presents I gave her wound me to this day. I remember them word for word.

  I cherish Auntie Phyl's remark about the queen's corgis. I arrived at Bryn one year from my hideout on the A1, furnished with a newspaper I had acquired at the Ram Jam: it was a tabloid, bearing a banner headline proclaiming CORGI BITES QUEEN. Auntie Phyl read the item with interest, and a naughty, girlish, sideways little smile lit up her face.

  'Good!' she said.

  She preferred animals.

  I tried to write about her and my mother in my novel The Peppered Moth, where she became dressmaker Auntie Dora, and her white dog Daisy became a marmalade cat called Minton. (My grandmother, before her marriage, had been a dressmaker, and I think one of my Wadsworth great-aunts, Auntie Lizzie, was a wigmaker.) I caught some of her eccentricities and mannerisms, but in fictionalizing her I moved her into a dark territory that was not her natural habitat. It was my mother's, but it was not my aunt's. By writing this book I would like to rescue her (and thereby a part of myself) from that contamination, to show her in plainer, brighter and more cheerful colours and in simpler prose. Many of the happier times of my childhood I owe to her, and although I often tried to tell her this, she was not much of a one for compliments or emotional declarations. She did not know how to deal with them.

  I see some of those childhood scenes at Bryn in bright colours and clear blocks, like the large pieces of a child's wooden jigsaw. I see the house with its red-tiled roof and its Virginia creeper and its front door set squarely in the middle, as a door should be. (The Virginia creeper was of a great age, and I think Bryn, a century earlier, had been called Ivy House.) I see the sash windows with their small square panes, the apple loft that served as a bedroom for us children, the stone pump in the back yard, the shallow muddy pond in the field, where once I thought I saw a fish. I see the greengage tree, the Victoria plum, the apple orchard, the bonfire, the deep gulley of the hedge bottom, the stone slab over the dangerous cesspit. I see and smell the cool larder, with its perforated zinc window and its rows of bottling jars and its pre-war tins of corned beef and its leaning towers of tea plates and its shelves of little cracked cream jugs.

  I see the rhubarb rearing up through an upside-down tin bucket in the yard, and the houseleeks growing in the stone trough and on the outhouse roof.

  The deep hedge bottom reminded me of the poetry of John Clare. Or, more chronologically, I should say that when years later I came to read the poetry of John Clare, I was reminded of the hedge bottom. He had a ground-level, tree-root view of the natural world, not a prospect view. I knew in my bones that the hedge bottom dated back to the enclosures of 1796.

  It was an old house, and it smelled of old England, and it seemed full of folk memory. But it wasn't a family house, an inherited house. My grandparen
ts bought it in the 1930s. My grandfather gave up his job as an electrician in Mexborough in industrial South Yorkshire and bought it as a going concern. He borrowed some of my aunt's teacher's savings to help him to do so, or so she later claimed. She did not resent this, or not much. She might have resented it a little, or she would not have told me. But she thought he had pluck to take a chance in middle age with a new life. That was the word she used. 'Pluck'.

  My grandparents came from a background of northern urban streets. My grandmother, who was born a Wadsworth, came from the nineteenth-century, densely terraced housing of Leeds, now occupied by students, and my grandfather Bloor from the Potteries. Photographs of now unidentifiable young women standing on well-scrubbed, white-edged doorsteps on bleak pavements suggest a life of hard-working respectability. Neither of my grandparents was country born, but they chose to escape the coal mines and pot banks to move to a not particularly picturesque Midlands village, to an old house on an ancient thoroughfare. Was this a sort of Mr Polly-ish, Wellsian escape to a cleaner, happier world? I wonder whether they had any sense of returning to a way of life that their grandparents, before the industrial revolution, might have known. The towns and cities of the North of England and of the Midlands, which had expanded with such rapidity during the industrial revolution, were still informed with a sense of the nearness of a countryside that was felt to be a common birthright. Novelists of the North and of the Midlands, from Elizabeth Gaskell to D. H. Lawrence, J. B. Priestley and Alan Sillitoe, have described these Arcadian longings, these strangely intermingled neighbourhoods where fields and paddocks and quarries pock the haphazard housing developments. I have always felt an affinity with these landscapes.

  Sillitoe, a writer who emerged from a red-brick estate of council housing on the outskirts of Nottingham, and whose working life began in a factory at the age of fourteen, writes that he lived in 'a street with houses behind and fields in front'. As a boy he could walk, carrying a stick and a sandwich, through nettles, Queen Anne's Lace and elderberries the mile or so to his blacksmith grandfather's cottage. This cottage had neither gas nor electricity and smelled, in his view wholesomely, of stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine. His grandfather Burton was granted the gleaning rights to the wheat that grew too close to the hedges to be harvested by the combine harvester, a right that now sounds medieval. This was a life on the edges of two worlds, in which the memory of the old country ways persisted, and Sillitoe, a self-educated scholar, in his novels consciously evokes the pastoral idyll and Virgil's Eclogues. Working men spent their days in the factory and at the weekends bicycled, hiked and fished by canals. The countryside was penetrable and close.

  The Easter visit of a men's cycling club was one of the big annual events at Bryn, and it made my dour grandmother almost girlish. She loved the bicycle boys and spoke of them flirtatiously. She liked to cook them their eggs and bacon.

  Long Bennington is not far from Laxton, a village in Nottinghamshire that boasts the only surviving open-field system of medieval strip farming in England. Children of my generation used to spend a good deal of time in history lessons colouring in maps showing strip farming, though I don't think we really understood what it was. In my fifties I was seized with a desire to see the Laxton system and try to read its meaning for myself. I suggested to Auntie Phyl that I could drive her there on my next visit – we could make it the destination for our pub lunch, I said. Unwisely, I mentioned the field system. She was not taken with the idea. 'I don't fancy wandering round fields to get at my lunch,' she said. I gave in instantly, for I was fond of the Wheatsheaf and the Staunton Arms, our regulars, but from time to time I am still visited by the picture of myself and Auntie Phyl, straying through cornfields or along strips of swedes or potatoes on our way to our scampi and chips.

  Sillitoe's Grandfather Burton was one of the last of the blacksmiths. In the Nottinghamshire village of Scarrington there is a pile of horseshoes, which Auntie Phyl used to take us to see as children when we were staying at Bryn. It is a fine phallic monument, seventeen feet high, weighing about ten tons, and it is said to have been built by blacksmith George Flinders, the village's last farrier, between 1945 and 1965. It is still there. What was once work is now labelled heritage. A bid was made to purchase this tower and transport it to America, but it was saved for the village by Nottinghamshire County Council. The village is very neat and trim now, with some grand houses and expensive new buildings amongst the old. I suppose it is a dormitory village for Nottingham. It doesn't look as 'real' as Long Bennington, but it is very pretty.

  I don't know whether my grandparents had any sense of returning to a countryside in which they had never lived. They, too, must have had uncles or great-uncles or grandfathers who had been blacksmiths or ploughmen or farm labourers. Maybe the old way of life called to them. But it is more likely that they thought they were making a fresh start, and moving up in the world into the era of the genteel, 1930s, middle-class, Hovis tearoom.

  As a child, I never thought much of these matters, though I was aware of the difference between the professional aspirations of my parents and those of the household at Bryn. I have no personal memory of my Drabble grandparents, as they both died when I was too small to notice. Auntie Phyl was not particularly interested in social history and local history, but her friend Joyce Bainbridge was, and still is. Joyce's house and garden in Long Bennington have an unbroken history. The village has spread around them, with many new houses built in the last twenty years, but the house where Joyce lives is unchanged, and its carefully tended cottage garden is a garden of earthly delights. She grows flowers and vegetables through the seasons – crocuses, daffodils, tulips, dahlias, begonias, scarlet runners, courgettes, carrots, broad beans, beetroots, potatoes, tomatoes. The flowers blossom colourfully and clamber amidst a miniature landscape of stone animals, birds and figurines.

  People give Joyce garden ornaments, and there they cluster in their magic village, which like Bosch's painting has its own random scale, with giant rabbits, large shoes, tiny manikins, middling-sized elves, little cottages, drinking birds, stone bird-baths. And there stand old agricultural implements that her husband Eddie salvaged, collected and treasured. Eddie had worked as a ploughman for the local farmer and he knew these objects and their history well. They are authentic. Eddie, like John Clare, appreciated and loved the landscape that he worked. He was saddened when the Lincolnshire potato went out of fashion. He regretted the dominion of the continental supermarket potato. He gave me some fossils that had been turned up by the plough, and he told me that village people called them 'the devil's toenails'. I put them in a novel once, these coiled and wrinkled twists of stone, and I keep them in my study.

  III

  My rediscovery of jigsaws belongs largely to the years after my parents' death, to the last decade of Auntie Phyl's life, when she was the senior surviving member of the family. It was, in a way, a second childhood, though she never lost any of her wits. She was all her life, at heart and in part, a child, with an ability to enjoy childhood things. This is a rare gift, and it was important to us.

  Watching the news on television with her one evening, when she was in her eighties, we were exposed to one of those regularly recurring items about poor conditions and abuse in homes for the elderly. I was distressed by the sight of old people dumped in recliner chairs, and by interviews with defensive staff, and I worried that it would distress her, but it was too late to switch off without drawing more attention to the subject. So we sat through it. Auntie Phyl listened in silence, but all she said when it was over was, 'I'd always rather work with children, I don't know why people take on jobs like that.' She still saw herself as a worker, not as a victim, as the helper, not the helped. She never identified with the old.

  The death of my parents in the early 1980s left me with many unanswerable questions, which I have tried to work through in my own way, and now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an
incomplete picture. I may never fully know why my mother was so unhappy and so angry, or whether there was any way in which I could have made her life (and therefore mine) less painful. But I cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together, although I know it is a doomed pursuit and has in the past made me profoundly unhappy. Maybe through the story of Auntie Phyl I see some hope of another chapter, a less despairing coda, a more gracious farewell.

  When campaigning for the NHS funding of child psychotherapists, I have presented myself to the world as a 'depressed child'. But I was not continuously depressed. Sometimes I was quite happy. I had periods of intense misery, but maybe they were no worse than those of many children. I claim no singular status. My mother was seriously depressed for much of her later life, and her depression oppressed and infected me, or so I have come to believe. She was fond of the very word, which she applied to herself with some pride. 'I suffer from endogenous depression,' she would tell people, whether they wanted to know or not.

  Many writers have suffered from childhood depression. Harriet Martineau and Edith Wharton, women from very different social backgrounds, both appear to have had a keen sense of unallocated guilt when very young, which both managed to outgrow through lives of exceptional activity and productivity. My mother succumbed, in part, I believe, because she felt action was not available to her. As, in many ways, it was not.