Behavioural patterns

SHINING, crystallised flurries blow outside the window.

Deep drifts of snow around the dacha have silenced our Russian world, while the skis drip in the lobby and the dog snores by the stove. Inside, our heads are bent over a recreation of Hendrick Avercamp’s teeming landscape of a frozen river and a coloured multitude of ice skaters, reproduced as a jigsaw for the Rijkmuseum, in Amsterdam.

Bought in Schiphol Airport on the way to Moscow, it seemed an appropriate past-time for this Christmas holiday and has kept my granddaughter and myself, in daylight and lamplight, entertained, mystified and frustrated for more than a week. I have to leave it unfinished, yet the thought of its few final gaps makes my fingers itch to fill them in, to complete the pattern.

The accomplished novelist, Margaret Drabble, re-discovered the consolation of jigsaws when she and her husband (the biographer Michael Holroyd) had to deal with the implications of his cancer diagnosis. In this memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet, which began as a historic biography of the jigsaw as education and entertainment, she indicates her vulnerability to paranoia and depression, although her descriptions of her experiences of emotional gloom, of times when she is bereft of resources or restoration, have an optional aspect; what she describes seems to be a choice rather than a condition.

“The jigsaw project came to my rescue.

I bought myself a black lacquer table for my study, where I could pass a painless hour or two, assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained pattern, and thus regain an illusion of control.”

The illusion develops beyond the jigsaw. In a book dense with historical fact and personal memory, and a very clever interweaving of these two strands, Drabble attempts to solidify the illusion of control, but over her own childhood.

She is frank about a problem familiar to anyone who knows anything about the Drabble sisters.

There is one brother, who has kept out of the rather sour limelight endured by the two older girls; the third sister is the art historian, Helen Langdon, who doesn’t enter this competition. Margaret Drabble’s elder sister is Antonia Susan Byatt, novelist and Dame.

A shared childhood is, for a novelist, shared material and there has been significant public tension as to which of these authors has the most right to excavate their early family life.

Drabble’s use of a tea set in one of her publications was considered an unjustified appropriation, her fictionalised use of her family background in a novel was regarded as trespassing. They can’t escape awareness of this unintended rivalry; in one of life’s little ironies, both Drabble and Byatt (with ‘The Children’s Book’) have new books appearing at the same time.

It’s no wonder that as Margaret Drabble sat with her jigsaws, and found herself considering a thematic structure for a new volume, she realised that “this was dangerous terrain”.

To navigate it safely, she centred her reminiscences on the holidays she spent with her Aunt Phyllis Bloor, first as a child at Long Bennington, and then, the roles reversed, as an adult when retired teacher, Auntie Phyl, visited Margaret Drabble’s house in Somerset.

This device allows her theme to spread, as randomly as spilling water, over a great deal of ground. Aunty Phyl is affectionately delineated and much-loved, but she isn’t enough for an entire book. It is in the recollection of the games they played together, the board games of childhood and the card games of adulthood, that Drabble engages with the history of toys and the uses of designs and pictures fashioned into mosaics, maps, and puzzles.

From the Royal Game of the Goose to Belisha safety cards, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to monopoly, or to Mrs Mary Delany’s miracles of collage in botanically accurate, cut-paper mosaics, from Ludo to William Blake and Alison Uttley (creator of the Little Grey Rabbit stories), Drabble explores the traditions, inventors, patrons and markets of puzzles and playthings.

There is a great deal of information, along with a great deal of diversion – a combination which is in itself an ideal of childhood entertainment.

She unearths artists, both ancient and modern, writers drifting across the centuries and across continents, she discusses rural England, and the disappearance of children’s bookshops from St Paul’s Churchyard, in London; she restores the usefulness of the hot-water bottle in one chapter, and observes, in another, that an Egyptian funerary portrait “looks just a touch crazy, as, sometimes, does Cherie Blair”.

The conversational, confessional style has a refreshing edge, as if Drabble herself is surprised with where her research has led.

There will be many readers grateful, as I am, for the restoration of the provenance and dignity of a past-time that has vanished from modern homes. I treasure those meditative hours spent in contemplation of Avercamp’s vision and technique, how they united us in quietness, how we audited the misted houses and spires, the tasselled sleigh, the flight of birds like veins on the sky, this mute painter’s magical details.

There’s no need for a black-lacquered table, and as for the carpet – you must puzzle that out for yourself.