The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (20 page)

It's said that it was Louis XVIII of France, whose brother lost his head, who put an end to the idea of providing the
Venus of Milo
with new arms. I don't know whether that's true or not.

With lesser works, and with more recently or chance-destroyed churches like St Ethelburga's, we still strive for the authentic. We try to put the pieces back in place. A craftsman working on a panel of the 1894–5 Tiffany Ascension window of the Calvary Methodist Church in Pittsburgh complained that it 'was like doing several jigsaw puzzles piled on top of each other and mixed up at that'. The restorers had to undo the work of previous restorers, who had incorrectly put back some of the 8,268 pieces of glass, like a delinquent mother-in-law driven mad at Christmas.

In the past, fidelity to a historical template was less highly prized than it is now. The large round Bishop's Eye window in the south transept at Lincoln, with its flowing stone tracery, is filled with a composite of fragments of medieval painted glass that makes no attempt to reproduce the original design, thought to have been of the Last Judgement. The cathedral was seriously damaged by Parliamentary troops at the time of the Civil War, and much of the coloured glass was destroyed or dispersed. In the late eighteenth century the surviving fragments were reassembled and rearranged in the frame of the stone rose with no regard to subject or content, achieving what scholars critically describe as a 'haphazard array' that is 'pleasing to the eye but devoid of content'. The north transept rose window retains most of its medieval glass
in situ,
but the south rose is an eighteenth-century folly in a Gothic frame. Meaningless, but nevertheless glorious.

Auntie Phyl took us from Bryn to see Lincoln cathedral. We liked the Lincoln imp in the angel choir. She had a gift for capturing a child's attention by pointing out such things. The rose windows were too big for me, too bright, too high, too far away, and I had no interest in their iconography, authentic or jumbled, but I could see the imp and the angels. We liked to talk about such memories. 'Do you remember when we went to see the Lincoln imp?' 'Do you remember the horseshoes at Scarrington?' So we built up our picture of the past.

In Somerset, I took Auntie Phyl and Daisy to Cleeve Abbey, a beautiful group of Cistercian monastic buildings standing not far from Nettlecombe, and an easy outing from Porlock. I have come to know it well. I went round it on one occasion with a friend who had once been a Cistercian nun, and she explained its architectural and religious significance to me, stone by stone, in great detail, all of which I have now forgotten. (This friend was going to write a memoir called
Stark Mad in White Linen,
but she never got beyond this inspired title, and she is dead now.) Auntie Phyl and I just liked the look of Cleeve and its happy situation. I like the gatehouse and the ruins and the stonework and the well-kept greensward and the little river and the moat full of green tresses and yellow flowers – primroses, irises, monkey flowers, marsh marigolds, as the seasons changed. In the Middle Ages the abbey was rightly known as Vallis Florida, the Valley of Flowers.

Cleeve has a famous decorated tiled pavement, dating from the thirteenth century, now protected from the elements by English Heritage and a new tent-like structure. The pattern of the pavement is simple. Yellow, ochre, terracotta and brown tiles, bearing heraldic devices of chevrons, lions, fleur-de-lis and double-headed eagles, are arranged diagonally, divided by darker bands of plain tiles. Part of the arrangement is complete and lies
in situ,
but at one end of the exposed rectangle bits and pieces of broken tile, as in the Lincoln windows, have been jumbled up and laid together randomly. For Cleeve Abbey, like Lincoln, has been through many changes, and after the Dissolution it became a gentleman's residence, and then a farm, with the cloister serving as a farmyard, the dormitory as a barn, and cattle lodged in the monastic buildings. Thomas Hardy would have read its history well.

One of the most precious objects I salvaged from Bryn is a square tile. I think it may once have been used as a teapot stand. It is decorated with a symmetrical, six-petalled, white flower, the sort
of boldly simple daisy one used to draw at school when learning how to use a pair of compasses. The white petals, separated by light-green-grey bells, are set into a dark-blue background, a blue of an intense and luminous richness, and the flower is surrounded by a dark-brown border with a simple, light-brown, fronded, curving motif. The tile itself is thick, and heavy, and always cool to the touch, as though it remembers a cloister or a church or a grotto, although it was never set in any floor or wall. On its underside (which is perforated with small holes) it tells me that it was made by the Campbell Tile Company in Stoke-upon-Trent, so perhaps it represents a link with the Bloor potters. I think there were several of these spare tiles at Bryn. The weight of it is a comfort to the hand, and its simple symmetry is a pleasure to the eye.

At school in York, I received no education in the visual arts at all, or none that I can remember. We learned nothing of paintings, and next to nothing of architecture, although we were so well placed to study it. We went to York Minster for special occasions, but it remained to me a vast and impressive but incomprehensible mass of stones. The school was a Quaker school, which may explain why this branch of our education was so conspicuously neglected. There was a principle involved here, of plain living and high thinking. We attended Quaker Meeting twice weekly, on Wednesdays and Sundays, in a plain Meeting House. We dressed plainly. Visual ornament was not encouraged. There were some books on art in the school library, and I remember browsing through the paintings of Delacroix with an intense and presumably erotic emotion, but when I was discovered at this private occupation it was suggested to me that these works were 'morbid'. I suppose 'morbid' is a fair word for
The Massacre at Chios
and the
Head of the Girl in a Cemetery,
but it was discouraging.

I liked the girl's low blouse, her crazed bare shoulder, her chinawhite eye, her wild coiled hair, her tragic intensity. I tried to find a
place for my feeling for her in
The Sea Lady,
but I couldn't fit her in. I managed to work in Chios and the massacre, but I couldn't find a home for the girl in the cemetery. I don't think she will ever be made into a jigsaw.

We knew that York was a historic city, because we regularly walked under Micklegate Bar and along its Roman and medieval walls, two by two in a crocodile. We even had a Roman soldier's tombstone propped up in a basement corridor under the school, and in the sixth form those of us doing A-level Latin were allowed to avoid the shivering, bare-kneed misery of hockey by digging for dull shards of Roman pottery in a trench in one of the school gardens. But the aesthetic impact of the monumentality, the historicity of York eluded me almost totally. When we went on outings to Rievaulx or Fountains Abbey (and I suppose these outings must have been intended to be educational rather than devout, as they were for the history boys in the movie of Alan Bennett's play), I could induce myself to thrill at the sight of the bare ruined choirs, but I think that was because they appeared to me in a pantheist poetic guise, filtered through the works of Walter Scott and Charlotte Bronte. In my reading preferences, I was already graduating from Walter Scott to George Eliot, but my artistic responses remained those of an unschooled child.

Kevin knew a great deal about the architecture and history of London, which I imagine he had taught himself. The palimpsest of the city fascinated him, and he kept an eye on its changes. He likened the labyrinth of arches and tunnels that burrowed under St Pancras and King's Cross to great cocoons. Their mouths, as they opened onto the street that flanks the stations, used to house car mechanics, wine stores, junk shops, machine tools, but who knows what was hidden in the further reaches of their long, subterranean bellies? Lost treasures from the National Gallery, or the bones of mastodons? Kevin liked the idea of this hidden hinterland. Most of
the tunnels are now sealed up and redeveloped, spruced up in palepink and ochre brick, and St Pancras Station, next door to the British Library, now boasts, according to the press, 'the longest champagne bar in Europe'.

(The St Pancras hotel has been closed, undergoing restoration, for most of my adult life. A friend tells me that his father used to sell asbestos samples to the railway men when they had offices in this building. His sister died of mesothelioma, as, more inexplicably, did my father.)

What creatures of the future had once lain in these cocoon burrows behind the stations, awaiting metamorphosis? I wonder whether Kevin saw the BBC TV series
Quatermass and the Pit,
which was first shown in 1958, before he was born and before I had a TV set. I recall a plot about an unexploded bomb, which turned out to be a spacecraft containing fossilized creatures from millions of years ago. The bones and skulls of the ape-like bodies were embedded in the wall of the underground, behind the Victorian brickwork.

An urban myth claims that some of the tunnels of the underground can never be restored because if you start to mess about with bits of the crumbling brickwork the whole of London will collapse into a giant crater. We just have to live with them as they are, held up and stuck together by the glue of time.

Kevin and I didn't get to see the restored Butterfly Mosaic in Camberwell, on the wall of the old Public Baths building on Wells Way, but he told me about it. We did the Borough and Waterloo and the wine bars, but we hadn't time to go to the Camberwell Beauty. Michèle Roberts, in her kaleidoscopic and evocative memoir,
Paper Houses,
celebrates this mosaic. It is part of her patchwork of London memories. Kevin would be impressed by her knowledge of the Knowledge.

I did not open my eyes to art and architecture until I went to Italy, at the age of seventeen, when I studied Italian for three months at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia. Nobody had warned me about these marvels. My father had been in Italy with the RAF, but he did not speak much of his memories. The Roman forum, the Capitoline Museum, the Appian Way, the Villa d'Este, the paintings of Giotto, the hill towns of Umbria, the Piazza della Signoria, the
Primavera
of Botticelli: how could such things be, in a world that also gave birth to Nether Edge? I fell in love with antiquity and with the Italian Renaissance, with light and marble and stone, with carvings and capitals and gemstones and mosaics, with fountains and avenues and obelisks. A sense of history rushed over me like a torrent. A walk in the Campagna made me feel faint with joy, and ruins and cypresses and broken columns filled my dreams. The tomb of Cecilia Metella enraptured me. I had not read any Goethe then (and probably still thought his name was pronounced Goeth) but when years later I came to read his
Italian Journey
and first heard the phrase 'Sehnsucht nach Süd', I recognized the sense of yearning that had swept through me when I was seventeen. It was a longing for the South.

London and Rome are both ancient composite cities, full of spoils, and the discovery of Rome illuminated my love of London. I began to see new layers of the past.

I recently came across a book titled
The Eloquence of Appropriation: A Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome,
which describes in some detail the process of recycling that is so poignantly visible in Rome. Its author, Maria Fabricius Hansen, a Danish academic, deals with a specific timespan, but her book prompts thoughts about the universal processes of recycling and adaptation. In England, stained glass from churches has reappeared in follies and in private libraries; church masonry has been used to build town houses, priories and abbeys have become hotels; antique marble pillars have become garden ornaments; and an Egyptian obelisk has been erected on the London Embankment.

Thomas Hardy, with his keen apprehension of entropy, was affected by the reuse of identifiable relics. In
The Woodlanders
he describes the ruins of Sherton Castle, where two or three of the arched vaults 'had been utilized by the adjoining farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which glistened with the moisture'. His not very attractive, new, red-brick house at Max Gate was built over the remains of a Neolithic stone circle and a Roman-British cemetery, and a sarsen stone still stands in its garden. Hardy was proud of his 'skellingtons'.

Stones may be reborn. There's a phrase for this, as the book on antique
spolia
told me.
Rediviva saxa.
And if stones, why not we?

I find even the title of this book about
spolia
oddly moving. It describes a process of melding, joining and reassembling that affirms not entropy but continuity and survival and the grand aesthetic of time. This may not have been what was intended by
the architects of early Christian Rome, but this is what they have achieved in posterity. Maria Fabricius Hansen (of the Department of Art History of the University of Aarhus, and herself perhaps in the grip of the Northern longing for the South) is at pains to point out that appropriation, before the Romantic movement and our own authenticity-conscious age, was ethically and visually much more acceptable than it is now. Plagiarism was no crime, and originality and authenticity were not necessarily virtues.

Jacob Burckhardt and Bernard Berenson may have judged the recyclings of Late Antiquity as a falling off from the creativity of Classical Antiquity, but that is not how Hansen sees them. She writes in praise of heterogeneity, plurality and diversity. Her photographic plates show some striking examples of recycling – of classical capitals transformed into baptismal fonts, of pagan columns erected upside down in Christian churches, and, most famously, of the miscellaneous panels, figures and reliefs of the Arch of Constantine rearranged in a new configuration with a radically different purpose, the sum having a different meaning from the parts. Constantine's Arch, with its reused materials from the reigns of Hadrian, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, was described as a 'scrap-book' by art historian Martin Robertson, but she allows it more dignity.