The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  And Norbury's alphabet technique reminded me of something else. Sitting in Rare Books and Music, musing on children dead and gone, I began to see an explanation for a passage of a memoir that had been puzzling and distressing me for years.

  Robert Southey, in his autobiography, which was written as a series of letters to a friend, describes his early childhood in the late eighteenth century. (He was born in 1774.) He was a lonely child, brought up in Bath between the ages of two and six largely by his eccentric aunt, Miss Tyler. He had no playmates, little exercise and was never allowed 'to do anything in which by possibility I might dirt [sic] myself'. He was obliged to share her bed, and as she always went to bed very late, he had to lie motionless for hours until she woke in the morning in order not to disturb her. 'These were, indeed, early and severe lessons of patience. My poor little wits were upon the alert at those tedious hours of compulsory idleness, fancying figures and combinations of form in the curtains, and watching the light from the crevices of the window-shutters.' His aunt was, luckily, acquainted with the Newbery family, and he was presented with a whole set of delectable Newbery books, 'a gilt regiment', 'splendidly bound in the flowered gilt and Dutch paper of former days'. Miss Tyler was also an impassioned theatregoer, 'an amateur and a patroness of the stage'; as he was considered too old to be put to bed before the performance began and could not be left alone with the servants, she took him to many incomprehensible yet delightful performances in Bath and Bristol: 'I had seen more plays before I was seven years old than I have ever since I was twenty.' He loved Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline and As You Like It, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle perplexed him terribly. Its sense of humour, he thought, was not accessible to a child.

  His aunt, who hoarded everything except money, had a collection of playbills that Southey says Dr Burney might have envied, and they became

  one of the substitutes devised for my amusement instead of healthy and natural sports. I was encouraged to prick them with a pin, letter by letter: and for want of anything better, became as fond of this employment as women sometimes are of netting or any ornamental work. I learnt to do it with great precision, pricking the larger types by their outline, so that when they were held up to the window they were bordered with spots of light. The object was to illumine the whole bill in this manner. I have done it to hundreds; and yet I can well remember the sort of dissatisfied and damping feeling, which the sight of one of these bills would give me, a day or two after it had been finished and laid by. It was like an illumination when half the lamps are gone out. This amusement gave my writing-masters no little trouble; for, in spite of all their lessons, I held a pen as I had been used to hold the pin.

  This passage, when I first came across it, struck me as little short of tragic: the thought of this poor solitary child, employed at this pointless indoor activity, has haunted me over the years, and I hope I have at last here found it a home. I need to draw it to wider attention.

  And the reason why I had dipped into Southey's childhood memoir was in itself a little sad. I came across it when I was first revising The Oxford Companion to English Literature in the early 1980s. I had tried in vain to find a scholar eager to revise the entry on Southey, but nobody seemed to want him, nobody would adopt him, so I had to do him myself. (I got left with an odd crew, as I suppose I should have predicted: some so difficult that none dared take them on, some so obscure that none wished to take them on, and some plain dull.) Southey, unlike his friends Wordsworth and Coleridge, was and is deeply unfashionable. On University Challenge in October 2006 nobody recognized him as the author of the once-famous and long-lingering 'The Battle of Blenheim', with its bitter refrain: 'It was a famous victory.' The poem itself, his last claim to fame, was forgotten. In the revised entry in the Oxford Companion, I had to reduce Southey's sad revelation of his long loneliness to a few words, but at least I registered it, thus improving on the absence of any reference to his childhood in the volume of my predecessor, Paul Harvey.

  I now see that perhaps Southey's pricking of the playbills was not quite as bizarre and deprived an activity as I had at first thought. Maybe it was merely an extension of the Norbery, learn-your-alphabet book-pricking, and not much more pointless than playing with a dissected map. So I need not have felt so sorry for Southey after all. And he lived on, despite Miss Tyler, because of Miss Tyler, to enjoy a long and successful life surrounded by friends and a large family. He married for love the daughter of a Bristol tradeswoman, whereupon Miss Tyler cast him off for ever, and eventually his home Greta Hall in the Lake District became something of a commune – not quite the pantisocracy of which he, Coleridge and his friend Robert Lovell had once dreamed, but a warm and crowded family home. De Quincey, in his essay on 'Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge' in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine (1839), described it thus:

  The house itself – Greta Hall – stood upon a little eminence ... overhanging the river Greta. There was nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements: in all respects, it was a very plain unadorned family dwelling; large enough, by a little contrivance, to accommodate two or, in some sense, three families, viz., Mr. Southey and his family; Mr. Coleridge and his; together with Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to compose a third.

  Mrs Southey, Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Lovell were sisters, and Southey liked to describe the hill on which Greta Hall was built as 'the aunt-hill'. As well as aunts and nephews and nieces, Greta Hall also housed successive generations of cats, including Lord Nelson, Ovid, Virgil, Prester John and Hurlyburlybuss; it was Southey's belief that 'a house is never said to be perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks.'

  (Southey and the three Fricker sisters spoke with a West Country accent; Wordsworth, however, presumably pronounced 'aunt-hill' as 'anthill', and when I was little I always called Auntie Phyl 'Antie'. I knew no other pronunciation.)

  Southey has been credited with writing one of the best-known of all children's stories, The Three Bears, which survives in a prettified version. The character we know as Goldilocks was originally an old female vagrant, destined for committal to the House of Correction. Southey wrote this tale to be read aloud, preferably by several voices, by Mamma, or Papa, or, as he said, 'some fond Uncle, or kind Aunt'. The picture of a happy family gathered round a fireside reminds us of the long hours Southey spent as a boy lying painfully bored and lonely in bed, longing for the day to begin.

  Not many writers describe boredom as well as Southey did. It is an ignoble and shaming state to which few are confident enough to admit. Graham Greene and Alberto Moravia admitted to it, and so, as I have noted, did my father. But most do not. (In 1960 Moravia published a novel, La Noia, which has recently reappeared in translation with the title Boredom; it originally appeared in English as The Empty Canvas, because his English-language publishers were, wrongly, afraid that boredom would not sell. I snapped it up on the strength of the title alone, and although it did not prefigure Perec's obsession with jigsaws, as I had hoped it might, it had some interesting material about an artist destroying his own canvases, which connects with the allied theme of the ephemeral sandcastle.)

  The woodcuts in Little Goody Two-Shoes portray a vanishing world, and Newbery's productions mark a transition from an England still largely rural, to a country increasingly dominated by the purchasing power of the metropolis. The Newberys originally came from Berkshire and John Newbery's father, like the father of Little Goody Two-Shoes, was a farmer. The woodcuts remind me of the simple landscape I thought I could see in the deeply rural, flat, agricultural countryside round Bryn, where the cows and bullocks are to this day known as 'beasts', and where until recently the watermill by the river was used to grind flour. But these Newbery books were purchased for town children, who would enjoy the farmyard pictures of animals with which they were no longer necessarily familiar at first-hand. Children's toys and books have always harked back to the idyll of Home Farm. We learn
our letters from building blocks that represent a way of life that has gone, and children who have never seen a live cow or a pig may discover them in illustrated alphabets and board games.

  The Newberys moved to London in the 1740s and established themselves in the busy heart of eighteenth-century book production. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was published at the sign of the Bible and Crown, but Newbery soon moved to the more famous Bible and Sun, near the Chapter House in St Paul's Churchyard. John Spilsbury, the mapmaker and the first puzzle maker, operated from Russell Court, off Drury Lane, a neighbourhood that is still home to cartographers, as well as to antiquarian and second-hand book dealers. The book and toy trade had its own well-defined territory, much of it within the City of London; it encompassed St Paul's Churchyard, Holborn, Covent Garden, Cheapside, the Strand, Fleet Street, Cornhill and Clerkenwell. Here many of the significant figures in the history of children's publishing were clustered, including the Newberys, their successor John Harris, John and Edward Wallis, and the Darton family. The geography of this neighbourhood was a board game of its own, with its interlocking lanes and alleys and rows and terraces and courtyards. J. H. Harvey Darton, the distinguished historian of children's literature, writing nearly two hundred years later in 1932 in the Cornhill Magazine, describes Ludgate Square as 'a small recondite Square ... a kind of rectilinear maze, such as I liked to contrive on paper when I was a boy. It can be reached only by narrow one-way traffic lanes, and half-secret footpaths under archways.' He edited The Chatterbox story-book and annual from a building as 'elusive as Todgers's and as neat as a nest of Chinese boxes'.

  And even today, after sixty years of blitz and demolition and grandiose post-modern reconstruction, some memories of the old region linger; there are still arches and byways and terraces and footpaths and courtyards and dank areas sprouting with stubborn buddleia. You can still get lost in the urban maze. But in the third millennium the only shop approaching a print shop or a bookshop in St Paul's Churchyard is a branch of Clinton Cards, witness, some would claim, to a new illiteracy. All the bookshops have gone. (Paternoster Row was wiped out in all but name on the night of 29 December 1940, along with six million books.) Two hundred years ago, this was the centre of the new world of juvenile literature. Everybody knew exactly where to go in London for children's books and games. Here is an extract from Dame Partlet's Farm (1804) published by John Harris, who succeeded John Newbery's widow Elizabeth Newbery as publisher:

  At Harris's, St Paul's Churchyard,

  Good children meet a sure reward;

  In coming home the other day

  I heard a little master say,

  For every penny there he took

  He had receiv'd a little book,

  With covers neat, and cuts so pretty,

  There's not its like in all the city;

  And that for twopence he could buy

  A story-book would make one cry;

  For little more a book of riddles:

  Then let us not buy drums or fiddles,

  Nor yet be stops at pastry-cooks,

  But spend our money all in books;

  For when we've learnt each book by heart

  Mamma will treat us with a tart.

  A book rewarded by a tart: a pleasant bribery, the best of both worlds.

  The publishers who followed in the Newberys' footsteps became more and more inventive. They made little boxed collections and cabinets of booklets that appealed to the eyes and to the fingers as well as to the mind. Movable books with 'turn up' or 'lift the flap' devices, peepshows, harlequinades and dress-the-doll books proliferated. Printers'S. and J. Fuller, operating from a shop fancifully called the Temple of Fancy in Rathbone Place, London, created a dress-the-doll book in 1810 titled The History of Little Fanny, in which the head of Fanny could be inserted in seven different, hand-coloured, cut-out costumes, to the accompaniment of a moral verse telling us that Fanny will come to no good if she insists on playing with her doll instead of reading a good book – another device that has its cake and eats it. F. C. Westley's The Paignion (c.1830) is a slot-book with sixty-five cut-out, movable figures of adults, children, nurses and babies, and twelve delicately coloured, hand-painted scenes from everyday life such as the Pastry Cook's, the Chemist's, the Bazaar and the Drawing Room, with which a child could create many varied narratives and tableaux.

  These were expensive items intended to be treasured, but the cut-out, like the jigsaw, may also provide one of the easiest and cheapest of home-made entertainments. You don't have to aspire to the artistry of Mrs Delany to gain satisfaction from this activity. In the opening section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, six-year-old James Ramsay is amusing himself on his summer holidays by cutting out a picture of a refrigerator from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, while Mrs Ramsay sits by him knitting a brown stocking. When he has finished the refrigerator, and it has been duly admired, she tries to find him a rake or a mowing machine, which would need 'great skill and care in cutting out', and thus distract him from his father's gloomy weather forecast. Children still like cutting out, as did little King Louis XIII. We can all remember those blunt-ended scissors.

  I have a clear recollection of sitting under the privet hedge of Auntie Phyl's house in wartime Doncaster, playing with a paper doll that I could dress up in a Shirley Temple outfit, or in paper garments snipped out of fashion magazines or sewing patterns. The hedge towered above me, and I made myself a little house in its sour earthy roots. And when my children were much the same age as I was then, I made them two paper dolls, called Pierre and Cinabelle, which I persuaded them were so precious that they could only be taken out of their cabinet drawer as a reward for excellent behaviour. They were a special treat. The children entered into this bizarre collusion with surprising enthusiasm. We were in Paris at the time, living on a travel bursary, which is why the dolls had French names, and why we had no television. We had to make our own bedtime amusements in the rue Blomet.

  XXXII

  Booksellers, book dealers, printmakers and cabinetmakers have always encouraged the habit of collecting. Cabinets inspire a sense of order, which parents are keen to encourage, and a manufacturer who unites an appeal to the collecting impulse with an attractive container has hit on a winning combination. Children are notoriously bad at putting their toys away (see the controlling Mrs Sherwood for a vivid description of an untidy nursery, littered with 'English, French and Dutch toys, which generally lie pell-mell in any corner where the careless, listless, toy-saturated child may have thrown or kicked them') but some containers are so attractive that the act of restoring their contents may be presented as a pleasure in itself.

  It is probable that Lady Charlotte Finch encouraged the little princes and princesses to take the responsibility for returning the pieces of their Spilsbury maps to the correct drawers of the mahogany cabinets with their own royal hands – though this in fact is not an easy task, as they have to be fitted in with great care, or the drawers won't shut. One of Lady Charlotte's successors, Miss Planta, bore witness to the fact that 'Princess Elizabeth is a lovely little fat sensible thing and so tidy that she never leaves her needles, or scrap of work without putting them all in a tiny bag, for the purpose', so one imagines that efforts towards discovering the fun of tidiness were considered part of a girl's education.

  Jane Austen made a tiny bag for her sister-in-law, inside which was 'a little rolled up housewife', furnished with minikin needles and fine thread. In the housewife was a tiny pocket, and in the pocket was a slip of paper written as with a crow quill, with a little dedicatory poem. Austen's nephew wrote: 'It is the kind of object that some benevolent fairy might be supposed to give as a reward to a diligent little girl.'

  Auntie Phyl, it has to be admitted, was not a tidy person. She let things lie. Her kitchen table was home to scores of objects, and must have been the despair of Joyce as she tried to introduce order and cleanliness to Bryn. My mother, who was a tidy person, found visits to Bryn in later
years trying on this score, and occasionally remarked that the exemplary neatness of Joyce's cottage made her feel ashamed of her sister's squalor. In The Peppered Moth I described Auntie Dora's table:

  The kitchen table, once a plain wood, was covered with an unappealing pink-check stick-on badly fitted plastic coating, which began to peel round the edges, but stuck there, barely wiped, for decades. Biscuit tins gave way to – or rather, alas, were joined by – plastic boxes, Tupperware, melaware, polythene. Drawers burst and shelves buckled with hoardings. The new post-war rubbish was more durable than the old. It did not perish.

  Auntie Phyl had many of the characteristics of the Good Aunt, but an old-maid neatness was not one of them. There was an anarchic streak in her. In later years one of our entertainments was to go up the rickety ladder to the apple-loft bedroom, where she stored apples from the orchard, and throw those that had gone rotten out of the window into the garden below. The loft smelled of cider and fermentation, and the soft, brown, decaying, apples smashed and splashed into the grass and weeds beneath.