The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  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, caves – 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 eightpence, 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, wheatgerm, 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 Dvoऱák 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 12 s 6 d per person per night that was then the going rate. Auntie Phyl had said we could keep any money that we made.

  When we were little, visitors would occasionally and unpredictably give us a sixpence. This was very exciting. There was a little low wooden gate separating the kitchen from the narrow hallway and the guests' dining room. It was painted a thick glossy globby milk-chocolate brown, and it was just the height of a small child. I used to hang around behind this gate, peering over it and hoping for a tip. I don't think my parents would have approved of this, but Grandma and Auntie Phyl didn't mind.

  I remain a little nervous about frying eggs, and watch with apprehension as chefs in breakfast buffets in hotels nonchalantly crack them and sizzle them and occasionally discard those that go wrong. We weren't allowed to be so casual during the war or in the years of austerity after the war. Dried eggs were not pleasant (although dried mashed potato was delicious) and a fresh egg was a treasure. I remember being enthralled, as a small child, by a riddle about an egg that appeared in one of Alison Uttley's story books. I thought it was in one of the Sam Pig or Tim Rabbit series, but I can't find it there, though I came to know it by heart.

  In marble walls as white as milk,

  Lined with a skin as soft as silk,

  Within a fountain crystal clear,

  A golden apple doth appear.

  No doors there are to this stronghold,

  Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

  I loved this rhyme and thought for many years that Alison Uttley had written it herself, but I now discover that it is what is called 'traditional' or 'anonymous'. I still think it enchanting and am full of admiration for the way it manages to transform the unpleasant, mucous texture of egg white into something pure, clear and wondrous. And when did I last pause to look at that 'skin as soft as silk'? Maybe it was thicker and stronger in the old days, before battery farming, when hens were better fed.

  One of the pleasures of visiting Bryn was the opportunity to reread my way through the store of children's books that Auntie Phyl owned. I could not read them often enough. She had sets of Alison Uttley and Helen Bannerman, some Enid Blyton and many annuals – but no Noddy, and no Beatrix Potter, or none that I can remember. Little Grey Rabbit, Sam Pig, Little Black Sambo, Little Black Quasha, Epaminondas – these were my friends at Bryn, and some of them as I now see were charged with a racist innuendo that at the time escaped me completely.

  Epaminondas is a little black boy, a character created in 1911 by American author Sara Cone Bryant, but the version we had was an English adaptation by Constance Egan, illustrated by A. E. Kennedy (who also illustrated Uttley's Sam Pig) and published by Collins. The story I loved best was 'Epaminondas and His Mammy's Umbrella', which turns on the little boy's over-literal interpretation of his mother's instructions to go to find the umbrella she had left beside the grandfather clock at his grandmother's house. He finds it, but fails to bring it home, as his mother had not explicitly told him to do so. She greets his mistake with, 'Sakes alive! Epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with,' a reproach that I seem to have internalized, as I often say it to myself when I do something particularly stupid. But it is a reproach that does not destroy, uttered in what I hear as a benign voice. The Mammy of Epaminondas is a fat and kindly figure who loves her foolish little boy, and who knows he means well.

  One of the most Epaminondas-like things I did was to come home from school in Sheffield one day wearing odd shoes, one of my own, and one that belonged to the girl with the next peg in the cloakroom. I was about nine years old at the time. My mother and the mother of the other girl (I can remember her name but dare not write it down) were extraordinarily angry about this. I could not see why, for the two pairs of brown Clarks lace-ups were almost identical and to me interchangeable. Who cared? My mother cared, and the other mother cared, and their wrath was annihilating. I think the Mammy of Epaminondas would have been more forgiving.

  A. E. Kennedy's illustrations now look grotesque, but the story still seems harmlessly engaging, and the Mammy still smiles.

  For some reason we despised Larry the Lamb from Toytown, as we despised crinoline ladies, but, again, I don't know why. Maybe we despised Larry, or failed to find him amusing, because he, like me, had a stammer. 'Mr M-m-m-mayor...,' he used to bleat. But I don't think I took that personally when I was a child, any more than I noticed the black racial stereotypes.

  It could be that Auntie Phyl noticed Larry's stammer for me, for she was personally and professionall
y sensitive to the way children were treated. I remember she told us off for teaching our very little brother, when he was aged two or three, to parrot: 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace...' The way he pronounced these words was so sweet, and we loved to hear him say them, and we got him to repeat them again and again as we sheltered from the rain in the beach hut on our summer holiday at Minehead. But Auntie Phyl was quite right, it wasn't at all the thing. We were nasty teenage sisters, and we should have known better.

  At Christmas one year Auntie Phyl was given a new biography of Alison Uttley, with which at the time she professed herself pleased, but when she had read it she told me that she had not really enjoyed it. It was too sad and not what she had expected. Not having read it myself, I did not know what had disappointed her and was not particularly interested in why she had disliked it. Now, many years later, trying to track down the causes of her disturbance, I find I cannot even be sure which biography she read, for there are two candidates. The first, by Elizabeth Saintsbury, published in 1980, seems chronologically the most probable, but it is hard to see what aspect of it could have upset her. It cannot have been solely the perfunctory nature of the author's narrative and research. The first three-quarters of this work are largely a paraphrase of Uttley's own many diffuse and scattered autobiographical writings, drawing most heavily on her classic childhood memoir The Country Child (1931), and it adds little to what was already known. But there are darker elements suggesting that the ending of the story was sadder than the author could say, and Auntie Phyl may have found it threatening.

  It now seems to me much more probable that she must have read Denis Judd's fuller and franker account, published in 1986, though I am slightly surprised that she had tackled it in her late seventies, when her eyesight was beginning to deteriorate. This biography would indeed have shocked her, as it shocked me.