The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  My mother wanted to be modern. She hated coal fires, because they were dirty and reminded her of the South Yorkshire where she was born, and from which she had always longed to escape. She liked central heating and electric blankets and her electric kettle and her Teasmade. My daughter wrote a fine poem invoking that Teasmade.

  I suppose it is just possible that my grandparents bought the warming-pan as a non-functioning item of decor that would help to authenticate their removal from the coal belt of Mexborough to the clean air, flat fields, mild beasts and marching pylons of Lincolnshire. I have explained that they had no hereditary stake in that agricultural Midlands county; their forebears were from industrial Leeds, the horrors of which were chronicled in the 1850s by Engels and Elizabeth Gaskell, and from the Five Towns, which had to wait until Arnold Bennett for their scribe. What, then, was the source of their feeling for their Teas-with-Hovis home, and, two generations later, to what kind of legitimate connection with it could I make a claim?

  John Clare, the poet of the local, loved his native Midlands. In middle life, suffering from a form of dementia, he was taken south to an asylum at High Beech (now High Beach) in Epping, whence after a few years he absconded. He walked his penniless way back up the Great North Road (or, as he sometimes called it, the Great York Road) to Helpton, guided at one point by gypsies, and sleeping rough for several nights in trusses of clover, or sheltering from the wind beneath a row of elms or in a dyke bottom. On the third day, he writes, 'I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread I was hungry and eat heartily and in fact the meal seemed to do me good.'

  Clare in his madness had delusions of grandeur, and thought at times he was Robert Burns or Byron or Ben Caunt the prize fighter. (Some of his lyrics are more than worthy of Burns, and his pastiche of Byron is brilliant.) But he was at the same time realistically aware both of his own declining fame and status and (as Jonathan Bate has convincingly argued) of the falling sales of poetry in general, lamenting in his poem 'Decay', 'O Poesy is on the wane/For fancys vision all unfitting...' And yet he went on writing, not only at High Beech, but after his brief return to Helpton, and also through most of the years he spent in Northampton General Asylum. He could not cease to be a poet. The poetry poured from him; as another poet once said, 'there was no stopping it'. His first-hand observations of the natural world and his faultless ear did not fail him, even when there was hardly anybody left to read or to listen.

  We do not know how much a sense of failure and the drifting away of powerful friends contributed to his madness. Like many peasant and ploughmen poets, he had both profited and suffered from the dislocation of being taken up by publishers, aristocratic admirers and established literati. The gap between the world of the village and the world of literary London was almost unbridgeable, although at times he had seemed to have succeeded in crossing it. His instinct was to walk back to his birthplace, in a hope of finding himself and a way out of 'this sad non-identity'. But when he got there, he was not there.

  Writers are often and rightly accused of self-absorption and egoism, but many have a very fragile hold on the self. (These states are not incompatible.) At times I am not at all sure that I am a writer, although I have published more than twenty books and have earned what I consider a good living at the trade. I clearly remember an occasion years ago when I set off to deliver the typescript of a new novel (I think it was my fourth, Jerusalem the Golden) to my publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, whose offices were then in Bond Street. I was walking along cheerfully with my package, not quite able to visualize the building that was my destination, although I had visited it on one or two occasions. But I was confident that I had the correct street number and that it would materialize. However, when I reached 20 Bond Street, it wasn't Weidenfeld and Nicolson at all, but a dress shop. I stood there in the street, astonished. And my first reaction was shocking. Instead of assuming that I had made a mistake in the address, I knew, suddenly, in a thunderbolt of awareness, that I had been deluding myself for years, and had madly fancied myself a writer, when I was nothing of the sort. I had been living in a fantasy, and I had better get on the bus, go home to Highbury and adjust to reality. It was a bad moment, but I swallowed humbly and prepared to confront the madhouse that might await me.

  In a matter of seconds, I worked out that either the publishers had moved, or that I was in the wrong bit of Bond Street. And I was, of course, in Bond Street, instead of at 20 New Bond Street where I should have been. It was a simple mistake and easily rectified. I just walked down the road. But I was shaken by my first response. It wasn't even as though I had longed all my life (as some do) to become a writer. I hadn't. I had no lofty sense of destiny, I didn't suffer from that form of hubris. I had wanted to be an actress, but my stage career hadn't worked out as I'd hoped. Being a writer was a second choice for me. I had settled into 'being a writer', for better or worse, because I was (and am) no good at doing nothing, but I hadn't sunk my whole identity into the occupation. I now think that at that moment in Bond Street I was confronting the other life I might have led. Time might have split, as in an H. G. Wells or Borges story, and I might have rejoined the real world in which I might have lived, and rediscovered another and perhaps happier identity.

  I don't mean that I didn't value reading and books and literature when I was young. I valued them as highly as did my mother and Dr Leavis, and perhaps, therefore, too highly. (My mother had been taught at Cambridge by Dr Leavis.) But I didn't see myself as a contender.

  Whereas John Clare's poetry was his destiny. There was no avoiding it. And yet it alienated him from the very roots and source of his inspiration. This was a hard lot. He belonged to his home country and therefore he was wedded to loss. And yet, in his verse, the happy spring continues to sing and flow, as the poetry continued to flow, even when nobody would publish it, even when its burden took the form of a lament. Nothing could permanently dam it up or divert it. Of the little brook he wrote 'Go on, thou little happy thing, Amid the strife of men.' It is heartbreaking, this little brave metrical resurgence.

  XLVIII

  Bryn, to me, was rural England and, although it didn't belong to me nor I to it, I had known it all my life. I had been taken there in the womb before I was born, before the outbreak of the war. Its images were deeply imprinted. It was Clare country, and I think maybe that is one of the reasons why he means so much to me.

  I've tried to trace some of the ways in which images of rural life perpetuate themselves in jigsaws and calendars and tea caddies and card games and embroidery patterns and children's books and tea towels, long after the originals have disappeared. The maypole, the village green, the duck pond, the horse-drawn plough, the farmyard and the cottage garden live on in the memory of the race. Or that's one way of looking at it. It's as though we believe we could put England back together again, if we could forge enough copies of it. But it's not just a longing for real antiques like warming-pans or for fake antiques like carriage clocks. It's not just nostalgia.

  And this hankering after a rural past isn't exclusively English, though we associate it with Wordsworth's sublimated sense of the transcendence of landscape. We tend to think of landscape in connection with the English Romantics, and of sex in association with the French. But the French do landscape and nostalgia, too, in their plastic copies of the board game of the Royal Game of the Goose, in biscuit tins and cheese labels and promotional blotters and curtain fabrics.

  In the omnium gatherum of Perec's Paris apartment novel we find a strange hymn to a small market town in the department of Indre, which successful businesswoman Madame Moreau, now eighty-three years old, has been forced by accumulating wealth and the growth of her machine-tool business to abandon. (Indre is a real department, but I'm not sure whether Saint-Mouezy-sur-Eon is a real town.) She hates Paris, where she lives in reclusive comfort with her school friend Madame Trévins, giving the occasional smart and stylish promotional dinner party for clients. But
she hankers after Saint-Mouezy.

  She'd have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she'd been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, and a couple of beds for lettuces and cabbages – what more did she need? She would have sat by her fireside amongst the placid cats, listening to the clock ticking, to the rain falling on the zinc drain pipes, and the seven o'clock bus passing by in the far distance; she'd have carried on warming her bed with a warming pan before getting into it, warming her face in the sun on her stone bench, cutting recipes out of La Nouvelle République and sticking them into her big kitchen book.

  And she does go back to the villege from time to time with Madame Trévins, snatching a few hours and a night there whenever she can. But her parents' old farm has gone to ruin; it is damp; the wallpaper is peeling from the walls, and the orchard has ceased to bear fruit, and she can't get a gardener – not even a part-time local man, because Saint-Mouezy has become a second-home village, 'empty all week and chock full on Saturdays and Sundays', when it buzzes to the sound of townsfolk brandishing their Moreau tools as they lay bare old beams and old stone, and hang coach lamps, and convert barns.

  Long Bennington hasn't got to that stage yet, although Joyce's neighbour reported to us with some amusement when I was last there that he'd heard a Tesco van delivering in Church Street at nine-thirty at night. I don't know why we all found that so funny, but we did.

  If Madame Moreau was eighty-three in 1975, she was only a decade or so older than Auntie Phyl, and very much younger than my grandmother, who may or may not have used the warming-pan to warm her bed.

  Grandma Bloor was bad at making beds, an unfortunate defect in someone running a bed and breakfast. She was teased for this by her daughters. No hospital corners for her; the sheets wrinkled and bunched and drooped and fought you damply in the night. The hair mattresses of her beds sagged in the middle, in deep hollows and permanent declivities. I have no idea how old those mattresses were. Some of them probably dated from 1905.

  Grandma Bloor occasionally accused her paying guests – although luckily not to their faces – of wetting the bed. And maybe some of them did. 'They said the sheet fell into the chamber pot,' she would snort, indignantly, as she surveyed the damage. 'That's a likely story.' I was frightened of wetting the bed, although I was not a habitual bed-wetter. I was frightened of her scorn. Stammering was my childhood weakness, not enuresis.

  Grandma kept rabbits and chickens at Bryn, though not in my day. She inherited a kitchen garden from her predecessors, which produced potatoes and carrots and beans and peas and giant woody trees of sprouts. It had once produced asparagus, but Grandma couldn't be bothered with that. It was too much trouble. The little green curled heads, like bluebells or bracken, poked their way up randomly and in vain, recalling another more skilled and patient epoch. In Mexborough, in the dank backyard in Bank Street with the outside lavatory, there was no space for vegetables, so she can have had no knowledge of how to cultivate them. Unless such skill was bred in the bone and the blood and remembered through folk history.

  As a small child, I was enchanted by the very tiny new potatoes which I could unearth when nobody was looking. They were so small, and so white, and so shining, so doll-like and diminutive. They were like little marbles, or pearls, or jewels. We used them for pretend dinner parties.

  There is a public house a few miles from Long Bennington, in the Vale of Belvoir, which still gives me a shudder of authenticity. It is far from any urban centre, though not very far from what was once the Great North Road, and only a mile from the 'three-shires bush' where the three counties of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire meet. It is not, however, very easy to find; it is even advertised as a 'hidden place of England'. It is a pleasant, old, seventeenth-century, brick building, not unlike Bryn, and when I last saw it, it had not been over-restored. The food was modern, of course – scampi, chips and peas, fish and chips, lasagne – but the walls were old, and sepia agricultural photographs, together with a family tree of the people who gave their name to the inn, hung on them. My interest in the family is minimal but my interest in the building is almost painful. Unlike the Ram Jam, it makes me feel slightly vertiginous, as though I were in some uncertain patch of time from which I might quite easily disappear. That could be considered a whimsical, Mary Poppins, Alison Uttley kind of sensation, and I am not particularly proud of it.

  Unlike the Ram Jam, this inn is not a roadhouse. It was not built to cater for passing trade. Its place in the landscape would have been recognized by John Clare, George Morland, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cobbett or Anthony Trollope.

  I know that my feeling for Bryn and the landscapes around it is vulnerable to accusations of romanticism and inauthenticity. And yet these places work on in my memory and my imagination, representing something, as the fragments of the True Cross represented something to those who purchased them, even though they must have suspected that they were not very true.

  XLIX

  Archaeologist Matthew Johnson, in Ideas of Landscape (2007), provides an interesting and at times worrying analysis of what he calls W G. Hoskins' romantic view of the past, 'in which emotive kinship and empathy with the people of the past is primary'. He argues that the sense of being linked in feeling with the past, in a Wordsworthian continuity, may seriously mislead us when we try to interpret archaeological evidence. He sees this sense as a form of pathetic fallacy, a fallacy of empathy both with landscapes and with the dead. He writes:

  There is no a priori reason why medieval peasants are any more or less 'linked in feeling' to the modern world than prehistoric settlers. To suppose that they were, one would have to posit some extremely simplistic form of evolutionary theory in which the mentality of human groups becomes 'more like us' the closer to the modern world one gets. This might just be a sustainable position, but it is not an argument that I have seen made anywhere in the work of the English landscape tradition.

  The men, women and children who lived in prehistoric sites at Standon Hill and Grimspound, Johnson maintains, had 'feelings that were quite different from ours'.

  So much for my fanciful musings in the flint mines of Grimes Graves or in the Iron Age fort of Bats Castle; so much for my sensitive response to Cleeve Abbey; so much for my communion with John Clare in the ditch bottom at Bryn.

  Maybe I could invoke Jung and a concept of the collective unconscious here, to rescue me from the cruel chronology of history. This surely is what Hoskins wished to call upon when he wrote in The Making of the English Landscape (1955) of sitting beside a wide estuary

  as the light thickens on a winter evening, dissolving all the irrelevant human details of the scene, leaving nothing but the shining water, the sky, and the darkening hills, and the immemorial sound of curlews whistling over the mud and fading river-beaches. This, we feel, is exactly as the first men saw it ... for a moment or two we succeed in entering into the minds of the dead.

  Except, of course, as Matthew Johnson reminds us, the dead didn't have minds like ours, or eyes like ours. We might as well try to identify with amoeba or bees or bats. The race has no memory. There is no way back to that place. We invent our own family tree, we construct our own ancestry, we collect our own fragments, we ignore the pieces that don't fit, we deny the stories we don't like. We make up our own Golden Legend. We throw the extra pieces into a bucket, and pretend they belong to some other design, some other puzzle.

  Bryn was nothing more than a house that my Bloor grandparents happened to buy. And the house belongs once more to strangers.

  L

  Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. They were unnecessary. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like
the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

  I do not like to think of Auntie Phyl, as her solid body stubbornly resisted death. She had a powerful constitution that did not surrender easily. She struggled. Her GP had told her some years earlier, on one of her annual visits to the village surgery, that she could guarantee her good health up to the age of ninety but couldn't promise anything much after that. This prediction had proved uncannily accurate, although she was already in the home on her ninetieth birthday, where she deteriorated rapidly, as people do.

  Her character was such a strange mixture of stoicism and complaint that we found it hard to tell how she was feeling in her last days at Bryn, before she and Joyce decided she couldn't cope on her own any more. She used to get very cross with us if we didn't ring at the usual time on a Sunday, which made me cross, because it wasn't always possible to stick to the appointed hour, and I felt I was doing my best. I thought she was just being difficult, and only later did I realize that she was now finding it physically so hard to get from the front room to the telephone a few feet away in the hall that she would go and sit in the hall and wait there for the phone to ring. Of course she was cross if she had to sit there in the cold and narrow gloom for half an hour or more. This problem could have been resolved by moving the telephone, but somehow this never happened, partly because she didn't make the situation clear to us. She didn't like to ask for help.

  The last few occasions on which I visited her in Newark were a horror to me and I do not think they gave much pleasure to her. But I continued to make the old Belisha journey up the Great North Road and to comfort myself with a night in the Ram Jam, listening to the slipstream. What else could I do? I did not want her to think we had forgotten her, and I wanted to see for myself that she was not being neglected, although we hoped Joyce would have let us know if anything seriously bad was happening. Though Joyce, too, is a stoic and doesn't like to complain.