The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (12 page)

Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay
I thought them all eternal when by Langley bush I lay
I thought them joys eternal when I used to sit and play
On its banks at clink and bandy chock and taw and ducking stone
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone.

When I used to lye and sing by old eastwells boiling spring
When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a swing
And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a thing...

In the work of Philippe Ariès we find a similar, prevailing sense of loss and falling from grace, though it occurs at the other end of the social spectrum from that experienced by Clare. Later historians have associated his backward glance with his political affiliations with Vichy France and Action Française for Ariès was a romantic royalist. He gives much space to the well-documented infancy and education of Louis XIII – indeed, this seems to have been the starting point of his intellectual journey. Louis graduated from dolls, toy soldiers, clockwork pigeons, crambo, playing charades, cutting paper with scissors, hide-and-seek, and other childish diversions, to the manly pursuits of hunting, riding, fencing, archery, tennis, hockey and bowls. Ariès notes that at this period games of chance using dice were played by both adults and children alike (Louis XIII, Louis XIV and his mother, Richelieu and Mazarin were all keen gamblers), and that these games attracted no censure except from those sections of the clergy who disapproved indiscriminately of all amusements. (Little Louis XIII was applauded for winning a turquoise in a raffle.) The notion that dice games were in themselves wicked had not yet been widely disseminated.

Incessant moralizing about 'good' games and 'bad' games came later, but it crept in inescapably and in some ways imperceptibly. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, writing in 1938 ostensibly in praise of 'homo ludens' (as his book of 1944 was to be titled), understandably condemned the 'puerilism' of the culture of boys'
clubs and badges, marching, rallies and boy scouts that were shortly to lead to the closing of the University of Leiden and his detention by the Nazis, but in passing he also condemns playing bridge as a 'sterile' activity. Underlying this casual criticism lay the view that play should be educational or culturally rewarding, and that an immense expenditure of intellectual effort on playing card games for pleasure or money was disproportionate. John Locke, one of the most influential of all educational theorists, thought the timeless sport of knucklebones (or 'dibstones', as they were known to him) a time-waster, and wished that all the practice that children put into it could be applied to something more useful: in
Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
he wrote: 'I have seen little Girls exercise whole Hours together, and take an abundance of pains to be expert at
Dibstones,
as they call it: Whilst I have been looking on, I have thought that it wanted only some good Contrivance to make them employ all that Industry about something that might be more useful to them.'

Knucklebones, or fivestones, or dibstones, were still played in Alison Uttley's childhood, and in mine. The game is probably prehistoric, and its materials are free for all. But Locke is right: it has no information content, and apart from improving manual dexterity and co-ordination it cannot be described as educational. Marbles, usually associated with boys rather than girls, are not very educational either, and are moreover surrounded by an aura of
Just William
anarchy. Coveted, quarrelled over, embattled, scarred and confiscated, marbles are individual, capricious and subversive. Teachers and policemen disapprove of marbles, because they constitute an alternative economy, a different set of values. Teachers prefer games that teach.

Ariès does not mention the goose game specifically, either in praise or blame, but we know that French children as well as adults played it. A lost painting by Jean-Siméon Chardin, first exhibited in
1743 and surviving in an engraving, shows three young people, one of them still a child, grouped round a goose track laid out on a card table, solemnly intent on the next move. The engraving is accompanied by the obligatory sanctimonious little verse, at once trite and cynical, which claims that the game represents the risks and perils of adult life (
Que de risques à craindre et d'Eceuils à franchir),
but Chardin's art, as so often, escapes the subsequent superimposed interpretation. He painted children, not homilies.

(In the National Gallery, a luminously beautiful and affectionate painting by Chardin titled
The Young Schoolmistress,
showing an older girl teaching a younger child to read, is accompanied by an offensive tag that was attached to Lépicié's 1740 engraving. It says: 'If this charming child takes on so well the serious air and imposing manner of a schoolmistress, may one not think that pretence and artfulness come to the fair sex no later than birth?' This misinterpretation of childhood is deeply, revealingly shocking. We don't have a word for the attitude it represents. The comment is sexist, but it is also contemptuous of children.)

Games designed specifically for children are of recent origin, and the invention of the jigsaw puzzle proves to have been much more closely connected with education than with play. I would never have guessed this, and it comes as a surprise to most people to whom I've spoken. But, as historians such as Ariès like to insist, childhood was not invented until long after the Renaissance. Infant mortality rates were so high in earlier centuries that less attention and affection were invested in young children than in our childcentred and medically reliable era – or so one plausible theory goes. Even Simon Schama, who persuasively queries the theory in his account of Dutch family life in
The Embarrassment of Riches,
appears to accept that there may be some truth in it.

The most famous early illustration of children at play is Brueghel's
Children's Games (Kinderspieler)
of 1560, which has of course been made into a jigsaw, and which appears in most discussions on the evolution of the concept of childhood. It shows a scene of various and, in places, extremely vigorous outdoor activity in a very public space in front of a town hall, with children playing Blind Man's Buff and doing headstands and inflating bladders, playing at leapfrog and tug of war and king of the castle, climbing trees and building sandcastles and whipping tops and rolling hoops and riding on barrels and playing shop and blowing bubbles. The most peaceful and sedentary activity portrayed is a game of knucklebones, and the only artistic pursuit appears to be the playing of a flute. Scholars claim to have identified more than ninety different games in this painting, and to have counted 246 children, of whom 168 are male and 78 female.

Its iconography has been submitted to much controversial analysis. Is it a satire on human folly, and are the children miniature adults representing adult follies? Is an alchemical reading possible? Is the blue of the cloaks used in the 'blinding' and 'hiding' games the colour of deception or of truth? Are the naked swimming
children emblems of false trust, and the boy on stilts of false pride? Is the game of Blind Man's Buff a tope for the blind choice of marriage? Why is nobody flying a kite? Are these children to be seen as ugly, gnomelike, miniature peasants, full of original sin, or are they innocents at play? Does Brueghel intend them to look like squat, diminutive, imitation adults, in their trousers and clumsy shoes and aprons, or is he deliberately distancing himself from the Renaissance tradition that portrays infants as naked, airborne putti?

The painting may be seen as an encyclopaedia or compendium of games, a successor to the famous list by Rabelais, in Chapter XXII of
Gargantua.
Published some thirty years earlier than the Brueghel was painted, this enumerated 217 Gargantuan games (a list to which Rabelais's English translator Thomas Urquhart generously added various English examples), including lottery, nivinivinack, the squares, the lurch, the madge-owlet, the gunshot crack and bo-peep. (Rabelais, Urquhart, John Clare and Ariès all relish such evocative words.) Many of these games were played with cards
(chartes),
dice
(dez),
and chequers and chessboards
(renfort de tabliers),
to the accompaniment of 'wenches thereabouts, with little small banquets, intermixed with collations and reer-suppers'. This large-scale panoramic sense of play is well illustrated by Brueghel, although it is to be noted that none of his children is eating or drinking. They are too busy for that. Maybe there is a moral significance to the absence of food. And, then again, maybe not.

My own feelings about this work, which I have come to know much better through its jigsaw format, changed very considerably during the course of my study. At first, I saw it as a satirical view, not of adult folly, but of childish cruelty, for some of the children did seem to be engaged in actively tormenting one another. There is a game of what seems to be hair-pulling, and another that shows a boy being stretched over a log as though about to be sawn in half by his captors. The small cowled boy whipping his top, and the
hooded figures playing Blind Man's Buff, powerfully suggest flagellation and the activities of the Inquisition, with which Brueghel and his contemporaries were all too familiar. Moreover, my jigsaw had an odour of hell. It smelled very odd. I could not for some time locate the source of this unpleasant stink in my study, and kept wondering whether there was a dead mouse under the armchair, or dog shit on the carpet. But no, it was the pervasive smell of the cardboard, recycled from God knows what source, that filled my workroom. Was this odour in itself a commentary, a message from Brueghel and the dark and troubled times he lived through?

I decided not, and in time (for it took me a long time to complete this easy puzzle) the smell diminished, and I found that I was learning to like the children, or at least some of the children, more and more. Their unsupervised but contained freedom, their involvement with one another, the intensity of their concentration on their pursuits, their fertility of invention began to remind me of the playground of the school at East Hardwick, where we had played games as laborious, as delightful, as timeless as these. I no longer saw the children as images of futility and cruelty. I saw them as images of friendship and of hope.

I missed the little children when I finished the puzzle. They had become my companions. I could feel their little hands in mine. I did not like putting them back in their dark box. I delayed for days, gazing at them as they played on the black lacquer table.

Putting a jigsaw away can be a sad moment. Some people glue their finished jigsaws to a background and mount them on the wall, but this seems a curious perversion of what is intended to be an ephemeral activity. Some, more creatively, turn them into collages. In one of her many lives, my friend Gus Skidelsky taught mathematics for years to prisoners in Lewes Gaol and was able to alleviate the loneliness and boredom of one isolated, non-Englishspeaking, French inmate by responding to his request for 'un
puzzle'. At first she didn't know what kind of 'puzzle' he was suggesting, but when she worked out that he meant a jigsaw, she took him one from her store. (She is an expert at games and puzzles.) It had taken her many hours to complete, but he did it very quickly, over the weekend (well, he wasn't as busy as she was, was he?) and then he glued it together to show to her, somewhat to her surprise. Why had he done that?

She kept him supplied with puzzles from Age Concern and Oxfam, until he was moved on to the next gaol.

Prisoners and royals and convalescents are fond of jigsaws.

I didn't glue the
Kinderspieler
together, but Michael took its photograph, so I have a memento. A photograph of a jigsaw of an oil painting is an odd treasure, but I am fond of it. I now think that I have come to associate this painting with my first school. I find it strange that I have no unhappy memories of East Hardwick, apart from the maypole episode, which involved transport to another school. I see us all in the playground, little moon-faced, country children, perhaps wearing home-knitted pixie hoods in winter, as children in those days did. The Girls and Boys outdoor toilets in the yard consisted of a row of wooden seats over a row of buckets, but I don't think I minded this, which is odd, as I was brought up to be fastidious and frightened of lavatories. My mother was very fastidious, and I suspect that she was fierce about toilet training, but the overriding sense of security and good intentions at school must have negated fear of the unhygienic buckets.

No photographs record this era to jog the memory, for no film was available in wartime. I remember once trying to emulate the bigger children by doing a somersault over an iron railing. I lost my grip and fell hard on my head. But this is not an unpleasant recollection. It hurt, but not very much, and nobody was cross with me. It was at the next school, at the Sheffield school with the defective, infantile jigsaw, that I lost much of my physical confidence.

The Brueghel children are confident, egalitarian, experimental, and the large space in which they play is their kingdom. I no longer see them as cruel brats or neglected ragamuffins. They are well dressed, well shod, well tended, yet happily free from supervision.

I was aided in this growing appreciation of
Children's Games
by reading two commentaries with a sharply contrasted outlook. One writer insisted on seeing every image in terms of its emblematic meaning, and found a message of folly and vanity in every image and every act. When she insisted, in an analysis of Pieter de Hooch's
The Linen Chest,
that the two women putting neatly folded linen into a cupboard were a symbol of miserliness, I parted company from her altogether. No, no, they were women putting away the washing, not women hoarding worldly goods, and the little child playing in the background was not an abused or neglected or naughty child, but a child in a happy and orderly household contentedly playing with a ball and a stick. And the chequered tiles and the painted basketwork are of a ravishing beauty, such a celebration of pattern! How could this painting be a satire on hoarding? It isn't even a satire on the embarrassment of riches, though of course we know what Simon Schama means by the phrase. But this painting is a salutation, not a condemnation.