The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble
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Authors: Margaret Drabble
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would not in itself have confirmed it as an item of inauthentic retro-chic.
Can a horse brass ever be authentic? A warming-pan may be, but I'm not sure whether a horse brass can. Antique, yes, though not many are; authentic, no.
Samuel Johnson loved an inn as well as a post-chaise, and he
claimed that good inns contributed greatly to human happiness. But he is very unlikely to have supped in Bryn, for it was not then a public house. He might well have stopped at the George in Stamford, or at the Angel in Grantham, or at the White Hart in Newark, and seen a group of fellow travellers or locals playing cards or the goose game. The Great North Road is lined with famous coaching inns with long pedigrees. The upper dining room of the Angel in Grantham, with its three fine, deep oriel windows, is one of the most handsome public dining rooms in England. King John and Richard III both knew this inn, so why not Dr Johnson?
There is no evidence that Johnson ever played the goose game. As we have seen, Boswell regretted that his friend did not play draughts after leaving college, 'for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often ... there is a composure and gravity in draughts ... which insensibly tranquillises the mind.'
That's what I feel about jigsaws.
XII
Once you start looking for a motif like the Royal Game of the Goose, you find that it pops up in unexpected places. It has now been forgotten in England, but it had its day of fashion here. In the mid-eighteenth century in England, the Duchess of Norfolk planted an outsize goose game of hornbeam in the grounds of her vast mansion at Worksop, which Horace Walpole saw on his visit in 1758. Unfortunately the manor, its five hundred apartments, and all its paintings and
objets de vertu
were destroyed by fire three years later in 1761, and we hear no more of the hornbeams. A generation later, Byron knew about the goose game and refers to it in
Don Juan:
'For good society is but a game/The royal game of goose, as I may say.' And the game lives on in the popular culture of Europe. French and Italian children still play it, as we play Snakes and Ladders. It surfaced recently in Spain and Italy as a game show. A human form of it, claiming to be more ancient than the board game, is played in the square in Mirano, near Padua.
In France, the game flourished from its first introduction. Many pretty, fragile and delicately coloured versions of it survive in the Print Room of the British Museum, with variants embracing journeys through the street vendors of Paris (a penalty is exacted for a
stay at the vintner's), the myths of Greece, Roman history (a penalty for landing on the space representing the Emperor Commodus), the military campaigns of Napoleon, and even the lives of famous actors and actresses. Most of these spin-offs have vanished, but the classic board game is well remembered in France, and cheap and cheerful plastic mass-produced versions of it are still on sale in French toyshops. I bought one in Nice in 2005. Its images are of an old-world, bucolic, farmyard prettiness.
I had assumed that it was on the way out in Italy, its birthplace, as my attempts to buy it there in the spring of 2007 were unsuccessful. But my requests for it in newsagents and toyshops were met not with blank indifference but with a smile of happy, nostalgic recognition, the same kind of smile that often greets a query about jigsaws in England. Oh yes, of course they knew the Gioco dell'Oca, they didn't happen to have it in stock, but of course they knew it. And finally I found it, in the autumn, in a newsagent's in Sorrento, where the proprietor who sold it to me told me it was 'un gioco classico'. The board I bought is made by Clementoni, one of the most famous of contemporary jigsaw manufacturers, and the counters are in the form of little wooden geese. They are pleasanter to handle than the French plastic pieces. The scene portrayed is in
Can a horse brass ever be authentic? A warming-pan may be, but I'm not sure whether a horse brass can. Antique, yes, though not many are; authentic, no.
Samuel Johnson loved an inn as well as a post-chaise, and he
claimed that good inns contributed greatly to human happiness. But he is very unlikely to have supped in Bryn, for it was not then a public house. He might well have stopped at the George in Stamford, or at the Angel in Grantham, or at the White Hart in Newark, and seen a group of fellow travellers or locals playing cards or the goose game. The Great North Road is lined with famous coaching inns with long pedigrees. The upper dining room of the Angel in Grantham, with its three fine, deep oriel windows, is one of the most handsome public dining rooms in England. King John and Richard III both knew this inn, so why not Dr Johnson?
There is no evidence that Johnson ever played the goose game. As we have seen, Boswell regretted that his friend did not play draughts after leaving college, 'for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often ... there is a composure and gravity in draughts ... which insensibly tranquillises the mind.'
That's what I feel about jigsaws.
XII
Once you start looking for a motif like the Royal Game of the Goose, you find that it pops up in unexpected places. It has now been forgotten in England, but it had its day of fashion here. In the mid-eighteenth century in England, the Duchess of Norfolk planted an outsize goose game of hornbeam in the grounds of her vast mansion at Worksop, which Horace Walpole saw on his visit in 1758. Unfortunately the manor, its five hundred apartments, and all its paintings and
objets de vertu
were destroyed by fire three years later in 1761, and we hear no more of the hornbeams. A generation later, Byron knew about the goose game and refers to it in
Don Juan:
'For good society is but a game/The royal game of goose, as I may say.' And the game lives on in the popular culture of Europe. French and Italian children still play it, as we play Snakes and Ladders. It surfaced recently in Spain and Italy as a game show. A human form of it, claiming to be more ancient than the board game, is played in the square in Mirano, near Padua.
In France, the game flourished from its first introduction. Many pretty, fragile and delicately coloured versions of it survive in the Print Room of the British Museum, with variants embracing journeys through the street vendors of Paris (a penalty is exacted for a
stay at the vintner's), the myths of Greece, Roman history (a penalty for landing on the space representing the Emperor Commodus), the military campaigns of Napoleon, and even the lives of famous actors and actresses. Most of these spin-offs have vanished, but the classic board game is well remembered in France, and cheap and cheerful plastic mass-produced versions of it are still on sale in French toyshops. I bought one in Nice in 2005. Its images are of an old-world, bucolic, farmyard prettiness.
I had assumed that it was on the way out in Italy, its birthplace, as my attempts to buy it there in the spring of 2007 were unsuccessful. But my requests for it in newsagents and toyshops were met not with blank indifference but with a smile of happy, nostalgic recognition, the same kind of smile that often greets a query about jigsaws in England. Oh yes, of course they knew the Gioco dell'Oca, they didn't happen to have it in stock, but of course they knew it. And finally I found it, in the autumn, in a newsagent's in Sorrento, where the proprietor who sold it to me told me it was 'un gioco classico'. The board I bought is made by Clementoni, one of the most famous of contemporary jigsaw manufacturers, and the counters are in the form of little wooden geese. They are pleasanter to handle than the French plastic pieces. The scene portrayed is in
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