Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford Page A

pick of them – with intense enjoyment – the rocking horse, the railway train, the building blocks, the tomahawk, the conjuror’s box, the puppet theatre, what grist they made for slow-laid, complex games (I nearly always played alone), what diverse lives they opened. At bedtime while I was being scrubbed or brushed I marshalled plans for next day’s work in earnest detail with serene absorption till switched off by sleep. It was heaven. Between the ages of three and a half and seven, as I now realise, I was able to lead a life given almost entirely to pleasure. By the time we returned to our house in Baden at the end of the 1914 War, that Aladdin’s cave had vanished. Few toys, if any – assuming that some must have been packed – survived our hazardous and protracted journey across a Germany in collapse and revolution, and although the cupboard when we reached Feldkirch cannot have been bare but stocked with relics of our pre-war vie de château, nothing would ever equal the glamorous profusion of the Merzes’ accumulated bounty, and in any case existence soon changed radically. My mother went, nanny not long after; what had once been my playroom was in a now unheatable part of the house too remote and spooky even in summer for me to visit ever again; my interests turned to outdoor and farmyard life. When there was time to play, I made my games with shapes I cut out from cardboard boxes, twigs and sticks and pebbles as well as the worn-out tennis balls. Meanwhile there was my father, chained to his possessions. The Collection: how I failed, being too young and know-all, to see any virtue or beauty in it (a catalogue of the sale by auction, turned up recently, shows that some of his things were beautiful); how I despised him for his attachment to ‘objects’, objects which I, conceitedly rational, wanted him to sell off so that we should not have to worry over being able or unable to buy other things. However unfeeling this was, the fact remains that the last years of my father’s life were almost entirely circumscribed, and not happily so, by his possessions. To this day I have to be careful not to look down on other people’s objects and would not own more than a minimum (a relative term) of them, serviceable ones at that, and would swap most potential acquisitions for the joys and comforts, ephemeral though they may be, of the day’s living. In my later youth, personal accumulations other than of a featherweight portable nature were not practicable or envisaged. I had a room of my own, blessedly, wherever I was staying. It was seldom the same room the second time round. If I left as much as a pair of tennis shoes, it would vanish. By the time I was thirteen I had attained to a state of possessionlessness appropriate to a monk.
    What did we do about books, then, my mother and I? Well, we always had them. Florentine bookshops, parcels from England, finds off landlords’ shelves, the Tauchnitz Edition, those invaluable continental paperbacks of that time when even railway stalls would offer well-printed copies of anything from Dickens and Kipling to Temple Thurston and Conan Doyle. My mother’s bed was a-stack with books, notebooks, lists, letters: letters received, letters begun, long letters sometimes finished; the paper pond Alessandro called it, and only she knew how to fish it. The Criterion ? Gibbon Vol. II? Your brother’s tailor’s bill? Here: under the tea tray, in that kitten’s paw (there were dogs and cats sitting on that pond in lieu of ducks and geese). No, we never lacked books, though the books too got lost, left behind, were replaced.
    Perversely the sole items that were treasured, kept, passed from hand to hand, were compromising, not to say dangerous, possessions, not openly come by; I am speaking of copies of the New Statesman (eventually they included even certain copies of The Times ). It was I who was charged with circulating the latest issue – children assumed to be politically