The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (19 page)

It is, in theory, easy to get from the British Library to the Museum of London via King's Cross on the underground, and had I been in less of a hurry I would have gone on the tube, courtesy of my old person's Freedom Pass. But I knew from past experience that the Barbican is itself a giant puzzle. Its exits and entrances, like those of the reconstructed King's Cross, are bewildering, its layers labyrinthine. So I resolved to take a cab, which would take me straight to the right hole in the fortress wall. I usually resist travelling by taxi, for reasons that do not involve expense, but I decided
to save time and make an exception to my rule. I would ask to be dropped off at the correct entrance, and thus gain at least half an hour of working time.

This was a lucky lapse of rigour. When I stated my destination, the taxi driver said to me, reasonably enough, 'Doing London in the day, are you?' I was mildly offended; I was a scholar, not an ageing tourist from out of town, going from museum to museum with nothing better to do. Did I look like an idler? So I said pompously, 'No, I'm doing some research.' He changed gear at once and politely asked about my subject. When I told him, he enquired, 'So when was the first jigsaw made?' I was able to reply, with unusual precision if not necessarily with historical accuracy, 'In 1766.'

He thought about this for a moment, as we headed east. Then he said, 'No, that can't be right. There must be earlier jigsaws. Think about it. What about mosaics?'

I thought about this challenge, and have continued to think about it. As he spoke, little brightly coloured particles of memory began to scatter and glitter and connect in the back of my brain. Tesserae, tesserae. Click, click, click. Mosaics, patterns, kaleidoscopes, tapestries, pictures. Dispersion, cohesion, mastic, gum, glue. Mimesis, mimicry. Children in antiquity, playing with pebbles and bones and teeth on a cave floor. Tragic children, dying early in their droves, before they had had much chance of any fun. Greek knucklebones, Greek fivestones. Roman pavements, Roman masonry, Roman
spolia,
architectural salvage. Hadrian's Villa and the Doves of Pliny, Florentine table tops,
pietre dure, opus sectile,
inlay, marquetry, intarsia. Monte Oliveto, Urbino, Gubbio. Disconnected moments of epiphany, moments of recognition. Reconstructions, reassemblings, replications. Collections, cabinets of curiosities. Simulacra, copies, reproductions. Calendar art, conversion art, paper flowers, elves made of gummed paper. The half-arts,
die Halbkünste,
the
compositae.

The jigsaw model of experience and of the universe.

The model in which the scattered pieces from the first dispersal are reunited at the end of time.

I first went to London with Auntie Phyl. She took me and my sister Susan to see the sights. I had never been further south than Bryn. I was about eleven, I think, with a centre parting and little brown plaited pigtails, and a hopeful smile and Clark's shoes and wrinkled knee socks and a nice cloth coat with a nipped waist and buttons and lapels. We stayed for a few days in Bloomsbury, in the Kenilworth Hotel (or was it the Ivanhoe?), and I found every moment of our sojourn extraordinarily stimulating and exciting. London was wonderful to me. There were moments of terror, like the moment at breakfast when the waiter asked me, 'Black or white?' and had to repeat his question several times. I had no idea what he was talking about, as he hovered threateningly over my cup of coffee with a heavy silver-plated jug of hot milk. And Auntie Phyl had to tell me that in a hotel I didn't need to make my own bed. I had never stayed in a hotel before. I found it hard to believe that somebody else would make my bed for me. At home, we always made our own.

London, the greatest city in the world, was known to me through books, and through the Monopoly board, and as the destination of the parlour travellers in Belisha. I knew of Mayfair and of
Marble Arch. Auntie Phyl had been whetting our imagination for years, with tales of the zoo, and Kew in lilac time, and St Paul's cathedral, and Trafalgar Square, and the British Museum, and Madame Tussaud's, and the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the underground, and the Lyons Corner Houses. All these things we now saw and sampled. We fed the pigeons and went to the zoo. Auntie Phyl was tireless in those days, and thought nothing of climbing the Monument, or the stairs up to the Whispering Gallery. We had our supper in the Corner House on the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, where, if I remember rightly, there was a live orchestra playing for us. She and I usually ordered the same dish, which was called
omelette aux fines herbes.
I thought this the height of sophistication. The speckling of green on the neatly folded yellow flap, all reposing like a quiet oval fish on an oval silver salver – this was a luxury, yet a luxury that did not make us feel uncomfortable or outclassed.

I do not think that Auntie Phyl referred to the Corner House waitresses as 'nippies', as others knowingly did, for I do not recall hearing the word at that age, and I remember being slightly surprised by it when I first came across it. I suspect she might have disliked its familiarity and its condescension. Like me, she was a little nervous with waiters, waitresses and other figures of authority, whom she considered to be more than her equals. Like me, she much preferred public transport to taxis. Like me, she was not a good employer and did not enjoy bossing people about or giving instructions. In her later years she came to rely heavily on Joyce, as cleaner, carer, confidante, neighbour and friend, and on Joyce's husband Eddie as handyman, mechanic, gardener, neighbour and friend, but she relied on their good nature rather than on any contractual relationship. I used to worry that neither of them ever got paid.

Joyce had looked after my grandmother at Bryn in her last
illness, and after Grandma's death she inherited the care of Auntie Phyl. I remember Auntie Phyl saying to me once, after some slight tiff, 'I'd better keep on the right side of Joyce. I'd be sunk without Joyce.' I often think of that phrase, and see Auntie Phyl sinking, heavily, helplessly, beneath the waters.

But when she was in her thirties, she was tireless. She was overawed by upmarket restaurants and fancy department stores, but she relished the adventure of staying in a hotel, or taking a journey across Europe, or catching a liner to Scandinavia, or a tourist coach to East Germany. In her own way, she was enterprising. One year, astonishingly, she drove to Istanbul. (She shared the driving with my father, and, unlike my mother, she did drive.)

Our week in London was a treat. I wish I could remember more of it. We liked the little zoo-born polar bear, Brumas. That year at Christmas we bought each other little white Brumas replicas, made of soap. Auntie Phyl allowed us to indulge these childish longings without making us feel silly. Both my parents often made me feel silly. They wanted us to grow up. They didn't really like children. They didn't dislike them, but they found them tiring and tiresome. My mother said she liked babies, but she was impatient with noisy, dirty, independent, uncontrollable youngsters. Their company bored her. Neither of my parents had been very happy as children, and, unlike Auntie Phyl, both had longed to escape from South Yorkshire. My mother saw childhood as a state to be endured, a time of hard work and study, of pleasure deferred. We were praised for high marks and passing exams, but nothing else we did seemed to be of value. A disappointing university grade (an Upper Second instead of the expected First) was mourned like a death in the family.

When I tried to have some fun as an adolescent, I would be told, 'Wait until you get to Cambridge, you can do that when you get to Cambridge...' It never seemed to occur to them that any of
their children might not get into Cambridge. I distrusted this attitude. I had the sense to know that the competition for places was fierce, but they seemed to expect I would be offered one as of right. The pressure to follow in their footsteps was unquestioned and intense, so intense that none of us actively rebelled against it. It seemed to be the only way to get away. Cambridge had liberated them, and in turn it was expected to liberate us.

Auntie Phyl never imposed such expectations on us, because nobody had expected much of her. She let us enjoy ourselves.

I can't remember whether Auntie Phyl took us into the National Gallery, but I have a photograph of us amongst the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

I loved the underground, and the famous map of it, from which we could work out how to get to anywhere from anywhere. (The maze-loving Georges Perec, of course, saluted this map.) It all seemed too good to be true. The names of the stations enraptured me – Regent Street, Chalk Farm, Swiss Cottage, Russell Square, Earl's Court. The map was so clearly marked, its routes so logical, so reassuringly easy to follow. We always knew where we were when we were underground on the underground. We could not get lost. It made visitors feel at home, in control of a vast strange city, which was our own and not our own. It was an immense romance.

I don't think we can have done Hampton Court on this visit, for how could there have been time? But I do remember taking Auntie Phyl there, many years later, when she was staying with me in London while recuperating from her cataract operation in Moorfields Eye Hospital. We had a lovely day out, wandering in the gardens, sitting in the sun in an outdoor café taking tea and cake, and talking to another couple of elderly idlers at the next table. She did appreciate an outing.

Hampton Court, like East Hardwick, is a bright and sunny place in my memory. It is festive and light-hearted, a palace built for
pleasure. Sometimes, when I am in very low spirits and beset by troubles, I think that I might cheer up if I were to take a trip to Hampton Court. And in the blazing hot summer of 2006, in so many ways a bad year for Michael and me, I did just that. I went for a day out to the Hampton Court Flower Show, where my son Joe was presenting show gardens for the BBC programme
Gardeners' World.
He sent a car to collect me from the Lion Gate. I watched him, proudly, as he spoke to camera, and I wished that my father could have seen him. A keen gardener himself, my father would have been so surprised and pleased to find he had a gardening grandson. Auntie Phyl and Joyce often saw Joe on telly, and Joyce and her friends in Long Bennington continue to follow his career with interest. But my father died too early to know of Joe's metamorphosis.

Joe refused to have much truck with higher education or university. He probably thought there'd been too much of that kind of thing in the family. He did his A-levels, in his own relaxed and laid-back fashion, and then he found his own way. He seemed to know what he was doing. His father and I didn't interfere. We were and remain full of admiration for his independence.

I like being a tourist and seeing the sights. So I shouldn't have reacted in that defensively hoity-toity manner when Kevin asked me whether I was up in London for the day. But I'm glad I did, for otherwise I might not have started to think about mosaics, and the mystery of patterns and composites. I might not have seen that they, too, are part of the plan.

I made a date with Kevin, who agreed to take me on a tour of London in his cab, starting from the City of London, to look for mosaics and other jigsaw analogies. We met at Farringdon Station, and he chose our route. He showed me the new buildings and the old, the complex infill and patterning of Roman London, and the succeeding waves of two thousand years of overbuild and underpass. We gazed at Minster Court in Mincing Lane, and at the sparkling isometric diamonds of the windows of the Gherkin, and at the rugged brick remains of the Temple of Mithras, and at Tivoli Corner at the Bank of England. We drove over Holborn Viaduct, beneath which the shops of the printmakers, mapmakers and puzzle producers of Holborn Hill have long been buried. He described to me the legendary Knowledge that London taxi drivers are obliged to acquire. London is a jigsaw, and he knows
better than to most of us how the pieces fit together.

Unlike many taxi drivers, he approved of the bold new architecture of the last twenty years and pointed out the high-rise buildings of the City that he liked best. But he also took me to St Ethelburga's in Bishopsgate, a medieval church that was blown up by a massive IRA terrorist bomb blast in 1993. The tower and the west front of the building had collapsed, and the church was so badly damaged that it was thought it would have to be demolished, but much of the original material has been salvaged and reused. The church may now be impressively photographed, if you are clever enough, with a view of the diamonds of the Gherkin soaring up like a spacecraft behind its modest façade.

The restoration of St Ethelburga's, Kevin suggested to me, had been a kind of giant stone jigsaw. (Kevin should have written a chapter of this book.) At his prompting I discovered how frequently the word 'jigsaw puzzle' is used about restoration projects. Angkor Wat, the Dead Sea scrolls, the stained-glass windows of Lincoln cathedral, the shredded Stasi files of East Germany, the three seventeenth-century Chinese vases that were broken by a careless member of the public in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge when he tripped over a shoelace – all these and many more similar undertakings have been described as 'jigsaws'. The Fitzwilliam snatched advantage from adversity by creating a 'Reconstruct your own Fitzwilliam vases' twenty-piece jigsaw-puzzle postcard, retailing at a modest £1 from its seductive online shop.

Fashions in restoration change. I was shocked to read that all the heads of the figures of that vast, struggling mountain of antique marble known as the Farnese bull are fake, and a lot of the limbs, too, and that all the animals except the dog and the bull are late additions. There it stands in the National Museum in Naples, this monument to successive waves of antique, Renaissance and eighteenth-century taste, surrounded by pious admirers, but much of it is guesswork. It is now widely considered by art historians to be remarkable only for its size, and for the miraculous preservation of the sculpted rope tied to the bull's horns. The giant legs of the neighbouring figure of Herakles, also salvaged, like the bull, from the Baths of Caracalla, are very controversial. They have been lost and found and restored and re-restored. We don't do so much of that now, or not with such classic masterpieces. It's a long time since anyone tried to stick a head on the
Winged Victory of Samothrace,
or arms on the
Venus of Milo.
Only pranksters and surrealists and postmodernists and Oulipeans play around like that these days.