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

time killer, a way of getting quietly through life until death, an oblique confrontation with the absence of meaning, but it can also be a companionable pastime. In a family group you can talk, you can work silently at your corner, you can discuss other matters, you can engage in minor spats about intrusive elbows or pieces wrongly placed. I met a man recently at a friend's wake, a distinguished-looking man with a white moustache, who became quite fierce about his mother-in-law's contributions to the family Christmas jigsaw; she would force pieces into the wrong place, he said, and he had to creep down in the night when she was asleep to prise them out.
    When I do jigsaws now I can hear my aunt's urgings and admonishments, and hear the click and suck of her teeth as she concentrated on her task. She is present with me as I sit alone. She had good teeth, much better than mine, and much less expensively maintained. I have spent as much on dentistry as Martin Amis, with whose problems I have great sympathy. Auntie Phyl's teeth,
well coated and preserved by nature's protection of plaque, lasted her very well.
    She it was who taught us that we must always sort out the edge and construct the frame of the puzzle first. This, she assured us, was the only correct procedure. Only once you had formed a complete rectangle (or, more rarely, a complete circle or oval) were you allowed to embark on filling it in.
    So strong was this directive that I experienced one of the most intense panics of my early life when I was asked to do a jigsaw with an incomplete edge. I remember the occasion with vivid humiliation. I must have been five or six years old, and my mother had taken me for an 'interview' at the Girls' Public Day School Trust school in Sheffield, known as Sheffield Girls' High, the junior department of which I was shortly to attend. I am not sure who was interviewing whom, but I was sent off to sit in a corner at a low, undignified, nursery table with a box with jigsaw pieces in it, and told to play with them. I must have regarded this as an intelligence test (a notion that my mother would have encouraged) because, while my mother and the Junior Head conversed, I struggled seriously with the task. It was impossible. The pieces were too large and easy for a child of my age, and some of the edge was missing. How could I be expected to tackle a baby jigsaw that was so incomplete? Was it a trick? I was indignant and confused. It was an intensely distressing quarter of an hour. I cannot remember whether or not I protested; if I did, my mother would have turned my protest into a story that went: 'Margaret was so clever that she complained about the missing pieces.' She was always telling everyone how clever I was. This made me much hated in some quarters. Even today, I get letters from women my own age telling me how much they hated me, even though they had never met me. They sometimes say they don't hate me any more, but if so, why do they bother to tell me about it now?
    What I remember from this episode of the little Goldilocks table is the feeling of bewildered inadequacy, of knowing that I would never fit into this new school. I had loved my old village school in East Hardwick just outside Pontefract, where we lived as evacuees from Sheffield during the war. I had attended this school from the age of three and a half, travelling to it by bus with several other children, and I felt at home there. From the bus stop, just outside our house, Mr Turton would pick us up and drive us all to school. There were two classes, one for big children and one for little children, and I have not forgotten the two teachers, Miss Cooper and Miss Royston, though I have not seen them for well over sixty years. I fancy I can still see their grave and friendly maiden faces, their neat blouses, their coils of hair. Miss Cooper's hair was brown, Miss Royston's grey. I met a woman in Norwich recently who had been at this little school at the same time as me,