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

and she reminded me of Mr Turton's name, and of the brightly coloured pictures of Biblical scenes that Miss Cooper used to show us. I liked them very much. She also had some striking pictures of fields of tulips in Holland, tended by women in Dutch bonnets. They must have been part of a geography lesson. Teaching by pictures is a centuries-old tradition.
    I had liked East Hardwick, and I knew this new superior Sheffield school would be no good. I never liked it. It never liked me. I never fitted in.
    A child psychotherapist whom I consulted tells me that children who come from a disorganized, chaotic background may have difficulty in putting jigsaws together because they don't know how to start with the frame. 'They don't seem to see the straight line round the edge of the jigsaw.' That was not a problem from which I suffered.

II
    We always started with the frame. Auntie Phyl taught my sisters and me how to pick out all the straight-edged pieces of jigsaw first, to find the corners, and to build up the four sides. Then we would begin to sort the colours, and to construct areas of the picture. Unlike some people, we did not have a set procedure for this stage of the puzzle, and we were never of the wilfully austere school that does not look at the picture on the box. Looking at the picture for us was part of the pleasure. Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assessment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie. And it was not, for us, a form of competition.
    As we progressed from easy children's puzzles to more complicated adult puzzles (willow pattern plate, Dutch skating scenes, a Fra Angelico nativity, the birds of Britain) we would sometimes reach a stage when Auntie Phyl would say, 'Well, I can't see by the colours any more, we've done all the bright ones, so I'm going to have to go by the shapes now.' (I have just reached that stage with Uccello's
The Hunt in the Forest
from the Ashmolean; I've done all the bright-coated hunters, the horizontal leaping hounds and the
vertical tree trunks, and am left with the brown canopy of foliage.)
    I don't think that we ever did trick jigsaws, cut without identifiable edges. I have encountered them recently, in the course of research, and have found that they do indeed induce a mild degree of panic. But with Auntie Phyl, there was always the safety of the edge.
    I have another memory of early panic, this time connected with a maypole. I must have been very small as I was still at the East Hardwick school. I and a group of other children were taken by coach to a neighbouring village and issued with maypole ribbons of red and blue and white and asked to dance around a maypole with strange children from other schools. It must have been May Day, or was it a celebration of the end of the war? Nobody had rehearsed us or told us which way to go round, and we and the ribbons became hopelessly muddled and entangled as we all went in different and wrong directions. The teachers were cross and we were upset. I think what upset me most was the knowledge that the ribbons could and should have made a beautiful and intricate pattern, if we had been taught properly how to interweave them. Instead, there was this guilty muddle. I don't think I was prematurely mourning the death of village life and rural England; I was simply distressed by the lack of clear direction. This, strangely, is my only unhappy memory of East Hardwick. It was a happy school, where I felt at home, where our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
    Children need order, and the knowledge that a problem can be resolved. I don't know whether I, as a child, needed this more than most and, if so, why. But I suspect that my liking for jigsaws and my enduring affection for Auntie Phyl are connected with the fact that she was such a good teacher.
    At the very end of a large and difficult jigsaw, when there were just a few irregular bald