The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble Page A

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Authors: Margaret Drabble
Tags: History, Biography, Non-Fiction
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the Italian Alps, with a mountainous backdrop, a chalet-style farmhouse, an old-fashioned well, cows, a goat, a pig, a rabbit, a tortoise, a butterfly and other designators of rustic life, and the game is described as suitable for players aged from five to ninety-nine. The description doesn't conceal the fact that it is a game of chance, but magnificently insists that the journey along the spiral track also symbolizes 'una vicenda, un'avventura, lo scorrere del tempo, la vita stessa'. (An event, an adventure, the flowing of time, life itself.) We need to justify our diversions.
    Why the goose game survived on the continent and not in England is a mystery. Why did we go for Snakes and Ladders and
Ludo instead? It was clearly well known in Zembla, that northern realm created by the arch-cryptographer and games-player Vladimir Nabokov in
Pale Fire,
where his royal narrator alludes to a version 'played with little airplanes of painted tin'.
    Games and manias come and go – board games, card games, collecting crazes. One year the playgrounds and streets are full of mini-scooters, or hula hoops, or yo-yos, or Frisbees, or skateboards, or roller skates, or children wearing bouncy antlers or springy tiaras on their heads, and the next year these objects vanish, or go underground for a while. Pokémon succeeds cigarette cards, and tamagotchi pets succeed Pokémon, while sudoku and kakuro chase the crossword. Some seemingly classic pursuits veer towards extinction or linger on with a small cult of practitioners. Diabolo, a juggling game played with two sticks and a spinning top, and once considered wickedly addictive, is rarely mentioned now, but it was once immensely popular. It is said to have been imported from China to England in the 1790s, round about the same time as the emergence of the jigsaw, and it caught on throughout Europe. Unlike gambling, it wasn't a social evil, but it was a real time-waster and, unlike the hula hoop two hundred years later, it could not be convincingly claimed that its aim was to provide bodily exercise. Dexterity, perhaps, like fivestones, but not good health.
    One of the most bizarre tributes to the Royal Game of the Goose appears in a little-read novel by Jules Verne titled
Le Testament d'un excentrique,
published in 1899. I came across this very recently, but as a child I read and re-read Verne's more popular stories. I loved
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
to which I owe an enduring interest in volcanoes and a character in my novel
The Realms of Gold.
I treasure a copy of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
given to me by my parents for Christmas 1948, which I reread with intense pleasure and renewed admiration as part of the research for my most recent novel,
The Sea Lady.
The edition is an
attractive Rainbow Classic, published in Cleveland, Ohio, by the World Publishing Company, and edited by May Lamberton Becker, who, I now find, was a distinguished Anglophile American scholar and journalist. (There was a room dedicated to her memory in the National Book League at 7 Albemarle Street; it was opened in 1960 by none other than'T. S. Eliot.) My copy has good illustrations by a German-born and widely travelled artist, Kurt Wiese. As a nine-year-old, I liked best the pictures of the narwhal and the submarine forest. As an adult, I was pleased and astonished to find the narrator and his manservant Conseil portrayed in handsome (though not full-frontal) nakedness.
    Verne has long been the darling of armchair parlour travellers. He had an interest in scientific discovery and experiment, and an extravagant love of all forms of locomotion and communication, coupled with a childlike eagerness for geological 'wonders'. The travel industry is greatly indebted to his novels. He preceded mass tourism and globalization, but he was a prophet of both.
    I used to feel slightly embarrassed by my juvenile liking for Verne's work, and was both surprised and relieved to discover that he is one of the

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