The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Read Free

or of ships at sea, and heaven knows what: also puzzles in the shape of maps of Europe, square puzzles, circular puzzles, star-shaped puzzles, reversible puzzles, anything one can imagine in the way of puzzles ... when I went to bed I would dream not of George, nor of babies locked away from me where I couldn't feed them, nor even of childbirth, but of pieces of blue sky edged with bits of tree, or small blue irregular shapes composing the cloak of the Virgin Mary.
    There is also, I note, some attempt to contrast the 'jigsaw puzzle mind' of the narrator, who is writing a doctoral thesis, with the carefree, creative pretensions of her friend Lydia, who is trying to write a novel. I must have been wondering which of these characters I wanted to be.
    Many jigsaw puzzlers reveal a degree of anxiety about their hobby, fearing it reveals a neurosis that might expose them to hostile analysis. Do they do puzzles because they are lonely, like the orphaned heroine of Elizabeth Bowen's
The Death of the Heart,
who dutifully works on pictures of aeroplanes given to her by an equally lonely and much older family friend? Or because they are
dyslexic or autistic and no good at fireside conversation? Or because they are timid, uncreative and imitative, satisfied with reconstructing the ready-made, like would-be artists who prefer to paint by numbers? Or because they know that jigsaws are designed to waste time, and that the killing of time is, as Daniel Defoe said, the worst of murders?
    I had completely forgotten that I had written about the subject until Danny reminded me. It must be an old obsession.
    According to their chronicler Anna Funder, the 'puzzle women' at Nuremberg who work on the shredded security files of the East German Stasi claim that they took on this task because they have always enjoyed doing jigsaws. They say they still go home to do jigsaws in their spare time, after a grim day's work piecing together thousands of scraps of torn paper detailing ruined lives. This, one could claim, is obsessional behaviour, but it is a useful obsession, harnessed to a higher purpose.
    Maybe I did purchase the odd jigsaw when I was in my twenties and thirties, but I think that I took to them seriously when Auntie Phyl began her annual Somerset visits, when I was in my forties and she in her seventies. Together we rediscovered the jigsaw.
    Auntie Phyl was not wholly easy to entertain on holiday. She was so used to living alone that she was slightly uncomfortable with the concept of conversation. My mother talked incessantly, but Auntie Phyl lacked small talk, and had to be encouraged. She was not interested in any of the television programmes that might have interested the rest of us, although she consented to watch the news. Once, watching images at Bryn of famine or genocide in Africa, she said to me, more in enquiry and bewilderment than with anger or resentment, 'What are these people to us?' At home, she occupied herself with crochet, and needlepoint, and stitching yards and yards of decorative trimming round the edges
of pillowcases, and holding amorous or teasing conversations with her dog, or playing games of patience. But with us she was clearly in need of some other form of diversion. The summer days in Somerset were straightforward, for she loved an outing, a picnic, a cream tea, a visit to Ilfracombe or Minehead, a flower show, a dog show, even a tour of a church. She was surprisingly knowledgeable about churches and antiques. The evenings were more difficult, until we thought of the jigsaw.
    Why do I say 'surprisingly' knowledgeable? Because she set so little store by her own knowledge. Her bossy and manipulative big sister had staked her claim as the clever one and the pretty one, and Auntie Phyl always had to make do with second place. Her family tended to take her on her sister's estimate. My mother's attitude to her sister, both socially and intellectually, was offensively patronizing.
    Doing a jigsaw can be a solitary