How do you write an autobiography without referring to almost anyone else in your life? In The Pattern in the Carpet, Margaret Drabble has done just that, using her interest in jigsaw puzzles to create a ‘hybrid’ book, part memoir, part history. The device allows Drabble to reveal more about herself than any exposé or biographer’s dissection, whilst leading us through the museums and galleries of the world in the search for puzzle trivia. The mildest of pastimes is Drabble’s ostensible subject, but the book is lively with an anguish only partly alleviated by the correct placing of a cardboard shape.
As a child, Margaret Drabble would lie on her back and contemplate infinity ‘quite faint with my own stupidity and desire’. The vastness of space, of large numbers, the fear of chaos, drives her to seek order where she could find it. Drabble despises the sentimental and ‘inauthentic’ renditions of the past, those artists and illustrators beloved of the heritage industry whose work lends itself so well to the jigsaw reproduction. Yet, there is in her memories of a depressed and painful girlhood, a yearning for the solace she found at the house of her maternal grandmother in Long Bennington, on the Great North Road. There, with her ‘Auntie Phyl’ she ‘felt able to be a child and to enjoy childish things’. The house ‘was a calm fixed point in a restlessly ambitious world’ and it is Drabble’s relationship with her aunt, nearly 50 years later, that brings her back to the world of puzzles and to thoughts of childhood.
The Pattern in the Carpet charts the history of games, such as the Royal Game of the Goose, as amusements for the aristocracy throughout 16th-century Europe. Many children’s toys originated as playthings for Royal nurseries and Drabble investigates the changing attitudes to children and their toys through the centuries, using paintings and literary sources to discover popular tastes.
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