The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (24 page)

The bad example set by some of the royals, and notably by the Prince Regent himself, was in part responsible for the evangelical revolt against loose living and high stakes. Jane Austen's disapproval of the amateur theatricals in
Mansfield Park
is taken as a significant marker in this shift towards propriety, for, in her high-spirited girlhood, there had been little sign of such censoriousness. But her reservations about the tone of the amusements at Mansfield Park were mild compared with the condemnations of Mrs Sherwood, the autocrat of the nursery and the author of the best-selling and much reprinted
History of the Fairchild Family
(3 volumes, 1818, 1842, 1847). Mrs Sherwood (born Mary Butt) denounced card games with evangelical intensity, and in her memoirs she luridly describes the small-town life of her grandparents' generation in Coventry and Lichfield as bedevilled by raucous card parties. The ladies, she said,

always played for money, and often quarrelled so violently over their cards as actually to proceed to pulling of caps ... It was astonishing how fifty or sixty years ago this mode of spending the evenings prevailed among the ladies in towns. As the market and the church filled up in the morning, so did cards occupy almost every evening of females in a certain class.

This doesn't sound quite like the dull royal evenings, or like the peaceful games of cribbage, piquet, speculation, quadrille and vingt-et-un enjoyed by the county families in Jane Austen's novels, though it is true that the vulgar Mrs Philips in
Pride and Prejudice
enjoyed 'a noisy game of lottery tickets' with her nieces, and 'a little bit of hot supper afterwards', and we see the more refined characters in
Sense and Sensibility
recoil from the noisiness of a game of consequences.

Playing for money was, as Mrs Sherwood says, considered
normal. Harriet Martineau, who was born into a religious Huguenot family in Norwich, and who was herself as a child of a neurotically religious persuasion, records the pleasure of winning at cards without a hint of self-reproach, although she was by nature of a disapproving temperament: she disapproved of women writers who sustained themselves with alcohol when working late, and she disapproved of Mary Wollstonecraft because she succumbed to sexual passion. But playing cards did not carry an odour of sin.

The Wordsworths played cards at Dove Cottage, when they weren't reading Chaucer or Shakespeare to one another. But I don't think they played for money. The Coleridge children did jigsaws, but I don't know whether the Wordsworths did.

Elizabeth Gaskell's
Cranford,
set in the 1840s and early 1850s, also records without any note of censure the continuing prevalence of cards, although Gaskell was the wife of a minister (albeit a tolerant Unitarian one). The ladies of Cranford play 'the decorous, highly respectable game of Preference' regularly, nearly every evening, with passion and commitment, gulping down their tea in order to get at the game more quickly. 'Cards were a business in those days, not a recreation.' They played for threepenny points (these would have been little silver threepenny coins), and it was customary for each player to contribute a shilling towards the expense of each new pack of cards, placing the coin discreetly under one of the candlesticks as the green-baize tables were laid out for the game. Gaskell does not hint at any rowdiness or impropriety at these gatherings, and the gentle ladies of Cranford certainly did not indulge in the pulling of caps, though occasionally 'a few squibs and crackers' were let off at the end of the evening at careless or unlucky partners. All the ladies, we are assured, were in bed and asleep by ten.

Elizabeth Gaskell smiled on the quiet amusements of her townswomen, who learned to fill their empty and impoverished
days with harmless and mutually supportive activities – paying morning calls, knitting garters, talking about the London fashions, making candle-lighters (known to Miss Matty in Cranford and to us at Bryn as 'spills') from coloured paper, and embroidering Queen Adelaide's face in loyal wool-work.

Auntie Phyl taught us how to make spills by making little twists from old newspapers. We used them to light the little paraffin Kelly lamps that saw us to bed before electricity reached Long Bennington. I enjoyed this thrifty and simple activity of recycling. We kept the spills in a pot on the mantelpiece.

Elizabeth Gaskell had an affectionate temperament and an easy tolerance of eccentricities. She was fond of her old ladies, and writes about their small world with confident indulgence, while eschewing the sentimentality that often afflicted the prose of Mary Russell Mitford, her contemporary and a fellow chronicler of country ways. Mitford's
Our Village,
which provides a close parallel and an interesting comparison with
Cranford,
is a little overloaded with apple cheeks and dimpled faces and sparkling eyes and primroses and cowslips and hollyhocks and carnations and mossy dells and elves and fairies. The words 'delicious' and 'beautiful' are sprinkled too lavishly on the page, and even her admirers admitted that she enamelled too brightly. Her violets are too violet, her bluebells too blue. She was an ardent rambler and gardener, and her garden at Three Mile Cross, near Reading, was her solace for the hardships of a life that had, in fact, been thrown off course and nearly ruined by her father's gambling. Dr George Mitford (the professional title was largely honorary) was all too fond of cards. He had managed to get through a large fortune of some £70,000, which he lost on whist, piquet, speculation and greyhounds, playing for much higher stakes than the Cranford ladies, and his daughter had to write hard and fast to save him from his creditors and the King's Bench Prison. She might well have taken to speculation herself, for in 1797 at the age of ten, with a beginner's luck, she had personally selected a winning number in the Irish Lottery; she chose 2224, because the digits added up to ten, and the ticket won her £20,000. Her father got through that, as well as his own and his wife's inheritance, thus consigning his daughter to a life of scribbling. She gave up betting, and took up writing and gardening. He went on betting.

Most of Mary Russell Mitford's nineteenth-century prose sketches would translate easily into twentieth-century Heritage jigsaws. When South Africa-born novelist Barbara Trapido in
Brother of the More Famous Jack
(1982) describes a house in Sussex as being 'like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from measles', she could be describing many of the dwellings described by Mitford or painted by Helen Paterson Allingham – images of archetypal, timeless, modest, rural tranquillity, still faithfully reproduced and sold in village shops in the third millennium, despite the advent of more upmarket art jigsaws.

When Mitford was writing about her universal village for the
Lady's Magazine,
she seems conscious, like Gaskell in
Cranford,
of describing a vanishing Golden Age (and one that would vanish all the more rapidly if others were to continue to uproot and replant wild flowers as vigorously and profligately as she). Does the brightly coloured jigsaw box cast a shadow and a question over what was or was not the Real Thing? Elizabeth Gaskell solved this problem with exceptional tact and grace in
Cranford
and
Cousin Phillis,
where the lament for a passing way of life is securely placed in a context of inevitable progress and change, but Mitford, writing to stay afloat (and writing village sketches because they paid better than the poetry, tragedies and historical dramas that she had considered her true
métier),
was pushed (like Alison Uttley, though for
different reasons) into some kind of falsity of sweetness that strikes us uneasily now. She wrote for the market. It was her father's fault.

Helen Allingham (a family connection of Mrs Gaskell) also painted for the market, to support her ailing husband and her three children; her watercolours of Surrey cottages were for some years very popular, although they went out of fashion during her lifetime. But they lived on as jigsaws in the 1920s and 30s, enjoyed in an age when urban sprawl was destroying some of her subjects and vastly inflating the prices of others.

Mrs Sherwood would have disapproved intensely of Dr Mitford and his gambling, if not of his daughter's filial loyalty. She was by nature evangelical, censorious and dogmatic, and maybe her descriptions of the card parties of her grandparents' era are exaggerated. Yet her popular
The History of the Fairchild Family
is not an austere work, and it strikes a more lurid note than the cool, enlightened and rational tales of her contemporary Maria Edgeworth. Mrs Sherwood's stories were popular with children not for their moral lessons and interpolated hymns and prayers, but for their sadism and gluttony. They are packed with racy descriptions of childish naughtiness, violent retribution and sudden death, accompanied by tempting descriptions of roast fowls, venison, currant-and-raspberry pies, buttered toast and damascene plums. It is a rich and unwholesome mixture.

Children like unpleasant stories, and I was very fond of (though rather frightened by) some punitive tales called
The Misfortunes of Sophy (Les Malheurs de Sophie),
translated from the French of the Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1894) by Honor and Edgar Skinner. These volumes had a little of the Fairchild family spirit; they are full of horrors, which is why I remember them so well. Sophy was a greedy, hot-tempered, disobedient, rash and bold four-year-old, who stole sweets and tormented animals and let her wax doll melt. She was a bad little girl and a bad mother to her doll. Sophy was
naughtier than I could think of being. Her worst misfortunes are associated with the disgrace of cutting off the heads of her mother's goldfish, and drowning her tortoise while trying to give it a bath. I was appalled and frightened by these events, for I would never knowingly have been unkind to animals, and continue to be shocked by the fact that Maggie Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
let her brother's rabbits die. I am surprised these Sophy stories were given to me when I was so little. I was still at East Hardwick when I first read them; the book was presented to me at Christmas 1944, 'for good progress', by N. Royston, Head Teacher. I was five years old.

Is it significant that Miss Royston described herself as Head Teacher, not as headmistress?

De Ségur's morality tales were very popular in France. They are part of Georges Perec's enormous tapestry. Madame Marcia, antique dealer, has a varied collection of wares in her shop, including lubricious animated watches, 'trinkets, curios, scientific instruments, lamps, jugs, boxes, porcelain, bisque ware, fashion plates, accessory furniture, etc.', and a clockwork mechanical toy that 'could have come straight out of
Le Bon Petit Diable,
that Victorian children's story-book by the Comtesse de Ségur: a horrible old hag, spanking a little boy'. In de Ségur, in the French style, the sadistic/erotic and the pedagogic meet. In Sherwood, there is no such overt recognition.

I was never exposed to the Fairchilds as a child, for they had already been out of fashion for a century, though I discovered one of Sherwood's popular evangelical stories in a tiny bijou edition hidden away in a drawer in Grandma Bloor's bedroom at Bryn. It was titled
Little Henry and his Bearer,
and it was a missionary work set in India. I wonder whether my grandmother had ever read it. She was not a religious woman, and she was not much of a reader. I don't think I ever saw her reading a book. I don't know what
she would have made of the literary interests of so many of her direct descendants.

My grandmother preferred a game of cards. We used to play a game called Nap (after Napoleon) at Christmas, when Grandma and Auntie Phyl came to stay in Sheffield, and later, in Wylam-on-Tyne, where we lived when my father became county court judge of Northumberland. This, I think, was the only card game we ever played under my parents' roof. Grandma loved her game of Nap. We played for halfpennies, which was unusually exciting and seemed slightly irregular and un-Quakerly, but we never came to blows over the spoils of the kitty.

My father used to encourage me, a moody adolescent, to stop sulking in my bedroom reading books and to join the family card game. 'You shouldn't look down on games,' he said. 'What's the point of admiring Jane Austen, and then despising the way her characters spend their time? Come and play.' He actually said that, in more or less those words. It was a reproof that left its mark. He also confided, that same Christmas, that he dreaded taking Grandma Bloor her early morning cup of tea. 'Every morning, I think I'm going to find her dead in her bed,' he said. And she did look, had always looked, remarkably unhealthy – overweight, and with a bad yellowish colour. But she didn't die under his watch. She went home to Bryn, after that last family Christmas, and died in the brass bedstead from Leeds in the care of Joyce and Auntie Phyl.

My father always brought me an early morning cup of tea when I was staying as an adult at my parents' home, first in Northumberland, and then in Suffolk. I don't like an early morning cup of tea, I much prefer coffee at that hour, but I was touched by his kindness, so I always drank it, in gratitude. I could never have said I didn't want it.

Mrs Sherwood disapproved of cards, and she would have disapproved of halfpenny Nap, but she approved of geography, Biblical
maps and the jigsaw. These were all classified as educational. The Fairchild children, Henry, Emily and Lucy, are instructed by their father in the use of the globe and the locations of Europe, Africa, America and the Garden of Eden (which, we are firmly told, is to be found upon the borders of the river Euphrates), and they are also introduced to dissected maps. Visiting a richer friend with a very tidy and well-stocked nursery ('enough to furnish a toyshop'), the children are asked to select a toy each. Henry seizes upon a Noah's ark; Lucy 'chose a dissected map of England and Wales, and another which formed a picture, and Emily, a box of bricks and doorways, and pillars and chimneys, and other things for building houses'.