The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  I liked the girl's low blouse, her crazed bare shoulder, her chinawhite eye, her wild coiled hair, her tragic intensity. I tried to find a place for my feeling for her in The Sea Lady, but I couldn't fit her in. I managed to work in Chios and the massacre, but I couldn't find a home for the girl in the cemetery. I don't think she will ever be made into a jigsaw.

  We knew that York was a historic city, because we regularly walked under Micklegate Bar and along its Roman and medieval walls, two by two in a crocodile. We even had a Roman soldier's tombstone propped up in a basement corridor under the school, and in the sixth form those of us doing A-level Latin were allowed to avoid the shivering, bare-kneed misery of hockey by digging for dull shards of Roman pottery in a trench in one of the school gardens. But the aesthetic impact of the monumentality, the historicity of York eluded me almost totally. When we went on outings to Rievaulx or Fountains Abbey (and I suppose these outings must have been intended to be educational rather than devout, as they were for the history boys in the movie of Alan Bennett's play), I could induce myself to thrill at the sight of the bare ruined choirs, but I think that was because they appeared to me in a pantheist poetic guise, filtered through the works of Walter Scott and Charlotte Bronte. In my reading preferences, I was already graduating from Walter Scott to George Eliot, but my artistic responses remained those of an unschooled child.

  Kevin knew a great deal about the architecture and history of London, which I imagine he had taught himself. The palimpsest of the city fascinated him, and he kept an eye on its changes. He likened the labyrinth of arches and tunnels that burrowed under St Pancras and King's Cross to great cocoons. Their mouths, as they opened onto the street that flanks the stations, used to house car mechanics, wine stores, junk shops, machine tools, but who knows what was hidden in the further reaches of their long, subterranean bellies? Lost treasures from the National Gallery, or the bones of mastodons? Kevin liked the idea of this hidden hinterland. Most of the tunnels are now sealed up and redeveloped, spruced up in palepink and ochre brick, and St Pancras Station, next door to the British Library, now boasts, according to the press, 'the longest champagne bar in Europe'.

  (The St Pancras hotel has been closed, undergoing restoration, for most of my adult life. A friend tells me that his father used to sell asbestos samples to the railway men when they had offices in this building. His sister died of mesothelioma, as, more inexplicably, did my father.)

  What creatures of the future had once lain in these cocoon burrows behind the stations, awaiting metamorphosis? I wonder whether Kevin saw the BBC TV series Quatermass and the Pit, which was first shown in 1958, before he was born and before I had a TV set. I recall a plot about an unexploded bomb, which turned out to be a spacecraft containing fossilized creatures from millions of years ago. The bones and skulls of the ape-like bodies were embedded in the wall of the underground, behind the Victorian brickwork.

  An urban myth claims that some of the tunnels of the underground can never be restored because if you start to mess about with bits of the crumbling brickwork the whole of London will collapse into a giant crater. We just have to live with them as they are, held up and stuck together by the glue of time.

  Kevin and I didn't get to see the restored Butterfly Mosaic in Camberwell, on the wall of the old Public Baths building on Wells Way, but he told me about it. We did the Borough and Waterloo and the wine bars, but we hadn't time to go to the Camberwell Beauty. Michèle Roberts, in her kaleidoscopic and evocative memoir, Paper Houses, celebrates this mosaic. It is part of her patchwork of London memories. Kevin would be impressed by her knowledge of the Knowledge.

  XXVII

  I did not open my eyes to art and architecture until I went to Italy, at the age of seventeen, when I studied Italian for three months at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia. Nobody had warned me about these marvels. My father had been in Italy with the RAF, but he did not speak much of his memories. The Roman forum, the Capitoline Museum, the Appian Way, the Villa d'Este, the paintings of Giotto, the hill towns of Umbria, the Piazza della Signoria, the Primavera of Botticelli: how could such things be, in a world that also gave birth to Nether Edge? I fell in love with antiquity and with the Italian Renaissance, with light and marble and stone, with carvings and capitals and gemstones and mosaics, with fountains and avenues and obelisks. A sense of history rushed over me like a torrent. A walk in the Campagna made me feel faint with joy, and ruins and cypresses and broken columns filled my dreams. The tomb of Cecilia Metella enraptured me. I had not read any Goethe then (and probably still thought his name was pronounced Goeth) but when years later I came to read his Italian Journey and first heard the phrase 'Sehnsucht nach Süd', I recognized the sense of yearning that had swept through me when I was seventeen. It was a longing for the South.

  London and Rome are both ancient composite cities, full of spoils, and the discovery of Rome illuminated my love of London. I began to see new layers of the past.

  I recently came across a book titled The Eloquence of Appropriation: A Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, which describes in some detail the process of recycling that is so poignantly visible in Rome. Its author, Maria Fabricius Hansen, a Danish academic, deals with a specific timespan, but her book prompts thoughts about the universal processes of recycling and adaptation. In England, stained glass from churches has reappeared in follies and in private libraries; church masonry has been used to build town houses, priories and abbeys have become hotels; antique marble pillars have become garden ornaments; and an Egyptian obelisk has been erected on the London Embankment.

  Thomas Hardy, with his keen apprehension of entropy, was affected by the reuse of identifiable relics. In The Woodlanders he describes the ruins of Sherton Castle, where two or three of the arched vaults 'had been utilized by the adjoining farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which glistened with the moisture'. His not very attractive, new, red-brick house at Max Gate was built over the remains of a Neolithic stone circle and a Roman-British cemetery, and a sarsen stone still stands in its garden. Hardy was proud of his 'skellingtons'.

  Stones may be reborn. There's a phrase for this, as the book on antique spolia told me. Rediviva saxa. And if stones, why not we?

  I find even the title of this book about spolia oddly moving. It describes a process of melding, joining and reassembling that affirms not entropy but continuity and survival and the grand aesthetic of time. This may not have been what was intended by the architects of early Christian Rome, but this is what they have achieved in posterity. Maria Fabricius Hansen (of the Department of Art History of the University of Aarhus, and herself perhaps in the grip of the Northern longing for the South) is at pains to point out that appropriation, before the Romantic movement and our own authenticity-conscious age, was ethically and visually much more acceptable than it is now. Plagiarism was no crime, and originality and authenticity were not necessarily virtues.

  Jacob Burckhardt and Bernard Berenson may have judged the recyclings of Late Antiquity as a falling off from the creativity of Classical Antiquity, but that is not how Hansen sees them. She writes in praise of heterogeneity, plurality and diversity. Her photographic plates show some striking examples of recycling – of classical capitals transformed into baptismal fonts, of pagan columns erected upside down in Christian churches, and, most famously, of the miscellaneous panels, figures and reliefs of the Arch of Constantine rearranged in a new configuration with a radically different purpose, the sum having a different meaning from the parts. Constantine's Arch, with its reused materials from the reigns of Hadrian, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, was described as a 'scrap-book' by art historian Martin Robertson, but she allows it more dignity.

  It may be, as Hansen suggests, that Constantine and the early Christian emperors saw these transformations as a purging of paganism, as a deliberate profanation o
f the sacred stones of the old gods. Walking on a pavement of antique marble fragments furnished with outworn pagan inscriptions was literally an act of 'trampling on the enemy'. The enemy is now long dead, and most of the creeds have faded, but the stones remain, reassembled, like the painted glass of Lincoln cathedral, to please the eye; they acquire, in the process of survival, other meanings and send us other messages. They cry out to us, with their own eloquence, through interpretation after interpretation.

  The pieces of the jigsaw scatter and are recombined in a new pattern that does not always strive to work from a lost template. (Is that because there is no fixed state, no frame, no archetype? The model may be evolution, not rediscovery.) Stone jigsaws, city jigsaws are around us everywhere, and not all the heroes of salvage are purists and conservationists. There are few emperors in this story. Some have been building contractors and demolitionists and scrap-metal merchants. John Mowlem of Swanage, stonemason and son of a quarryman, made a fortune as a young man in London, Dick Whittington style. With his nephew, the contractor George Burt, he spent much money refurbishing his home town with miscellaneous objects and reused materials, including 'the lamps from London Bridge, an illuminated clock made for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Cheapside entrance to the Mercers' Company, re-erected as the town hall for Swanage in 1881'. Hardly Constantine's Arch, but quite a memorial. This elaborate façade, described in Pevsner (Dorset, 1972) as 'an overwhelmingly undisciplined example of the City of London style' of the mid seventeenth century, became redundant when Cheapside was being widened; the original proposal had been to incorporate this fantastic erection, with all its swags and fruits and putti, into a new building on the old site, but it was decided that it was so thickly covered with 'London black' that cleaning and restoration would be too expensive. So it was moved to Swanage where, it was later noted, 'at this remote spot Nature's cleansers have perfectly done their work'.

  Saxa rediviva.

  I don't know how these speculations connect with my sense of the safety of the frame, the safety that Auntie Phyl provided at Bryn, but I know they do. One of the pleasures of the jigsaw-puzzle world lies in that safety, of knowing that all the pieces will fit together in the end. But where is the frame of an evolving city? Or of an expanding universe? Where are the boundaries? As a child, like many children, I was intrigued, aroused and tormented by the question: 'Where does space end?' I used to lie on my back and gaze at the sky and try to imagine the boundaries of infinity. I could make myself feel quite faint with my own stupidity and desire. I am still waiting to find an answer that I can begin to understand.

  Very large round numbers make me feel giddy. How do we know that we are made up of a hundred trillion cells and a hundred billion neurons, as neuroscientist Steven Pinker so casually remarks? Did he count them all, one by one? How do we know that 'between one and three million' Cambodians died in Year Zero? That Cambodian number upset me so much that I wrote a novel about it, not because I wanted to justify Pol Pot, but because I didn't like the large yet vague roundness of the large number. Who were all these in-between people? Didn't they count at all? Could they be counted? The larger estimate has been revised downwards, and a sociologist in Chicago called Patrick Heuveline has tried to answer my query by devising a system of accounting, using electoral registers that attempted a more precise figure. I was pleased to think I had prompted him to that effort. It spared some of the unnumbered dead.

  Led by Kevin, I have strayed out of my frame and along a branching spiral track of free associations. But no associations come for free. They cost the neurons dear.

  XXVIII

  I used to think until quite recently that one would grow out of mental pain. One would simply become, towards the end, too old and too numb to feel it. I didn't like the prospect but, looking around me, at old people I knew and old people I didn't know, such insensibility seemed, like death, inevitable. As Hopkins warned us: 'creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/Life death does end, and each day dies with sleep...' Bodily pains would replace the pains of the spirit. The intensity of despair would be overtaken by arthritis or cancer.

  That's what I used to think, or fear, or hope. When I was a child, my father had encouraged me to believe that the depression from which I suffered would pass with adolescence and, to a degree, he was right. Bringing up three children, working and writing to support the family and pay the mortgage, cleaning, shopping and cooking, left me too busy to sink too low for too long. I began to think that brisk activity, followed by a stiff whisky, could cure anything. My mother's angry depression seemed to me to be clearly related to her inertia and frustration, which afflicted so many educated and half-educated women of her generation; if she'd had more to do, if she hadn't had so much domestic help, if she'd been able to pursue a career, if she'd been more active, if she'd gone out for walks, things might have been different. I did notice that my father's depression had not vanished with age and, indeed, began to gain on him towards the end, but I never thought this could happen to me. My father was too well mannered to indulge in complaints and laments, and I think he found some solace in a sense of religious and social hope, but he did, in his seventies, reveal dark moments of the kind of lonely melancholy that besieged Dr Johnson. He suffered as a boy and as a young man, and he began to suffer again when he retired from the bench and lived in too close a seclusion with my mother. Or that's how I read what I observed. I should have taken warning from that.

  I keep the telephone number of the Samaritans to hand. I have a very high regard for them. They have saved me on a couple of occasions. I worry now about the 1471 facility, because the anonymity of the phone calls was so reassuring. I don't understand the new technology of witholding numbers, and I suspect no phone calls are really secure. The Samaritans assure me that they never try to contact a caller without consent, except in the most extreme circumstances, and I trust what they say. But the very possibility is disquieting.

  At times I feel some pride in my continuing capacity for feeling really, really bad. I think of the envious comment of a friend of mine, at a party, observing a well-known, hard-drinking novelist who is even older than we are: 'How can she still manage to get so drunk, at her age?' The friend who made this comment is not herself abstemious or censorious; her remark was made in a spirit of admiration. Drinking and suffering require stamina.

  My father published two novels while he was a county court judge. The first, which appeared in 1971, was a workmanlike detective story; the second, Scawsby, which appeared in 1977, was a more ambitious book about multicultural adoption, set partly in a north-eastern fishing village not unlike Filey. It is far-sighted, humane and moving. Adoption was a subject in which he had a keen professional and personal interest, and he was well acquainted with multi-ethnic issues. In his unsensational plot he includes the question of underage sex, of which he took a lenient and rational view that would horrify most of today's journalists, and there is an 'honour killing' (a phrase not then current). He manages to evoke sympathy for the perpetrators of this crime as well as the victims, which not many writers would have attempted to do or have succeeded in doing. He was not inhibited by anxieties about political correctness. He was correct from his heart, not from fear of misunderstanding.

  He was working on a third novel, set in a northern solicitor's office, after he retired. He asked me to read this work in progress, about which he said he was not confident, and I made some comments which he may have found discouraging, though I hadn't meant them to be so. I wish now that I had been more positive. My mother was angry with me about this. 'You should have told him it was going well, whatever you thought of it,' she said. 'It kept him busy. It gave him something to do.'

  She should have followed her own advice. Once she said to me, 'I'd have written novels too, if only I'd had the time.' And maybe she believed that.

  When I was young I used to repeat to myself, as one of my early mantras, some lines of Joachim du Bellay on the ruins of Rome. I foun
d them more congenial, less terrible than the Terrible Sonnets of Hopkins, which I had learned at school. I bought my copy of du Bellay, an ancient, yellowing, 1918 Librairie Garnier paperback, in Cambridge in February 1959, in my last year at university, two or three years after I first went to Rome. It is still with me, its stitched and aged spine brown and peeling like bark, scattering Sibylline fragments whenever I handle it, and looking as old as the ruins it laments. These are the lines from Antiquitez de Rome that I know by heart:

  Tristes desirs, vivez donques contents:

  Car si le temps finist chose si dure

  Il finira la peine que j'endure.

  Edmund Spenser translated these lines, but I've never been able to commit his version to memory. It runs:

  My sad desires, rest therefore moderate:

  For if that time make ende of things so sure,

  It als will end the paine, which I endure.

  But time doesn't finish either, ever.

  I had some grand and solemn moments in Rome aged seventeen, but I also had some trivial ones. Early one morning, after a night spent for some reason on the Stazione Termini, my friend (my friend of the melanzana parmigiana) and I tried to buy a ham sandwich at dawn in an espresso bar. The chap kept barking at us 'Crudo o cotto?' rather as the waiter in the Kenilworth had reiterated 'Black or white?' We weren't stupid, we knew what both these Italian words meant, but we couldn't imagine why he was using them. It seemed a very Lévi-Strauss kind of question. Who on earth would want raw ham, at six o'clock in the morning? Raw ham, in a sandwich!