Foreword
This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like
a memoir. Nor is it a history of the jigsaw puzzle, although
that is what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. I have always
been more interested in content than in form, and I have never
been a tidy writer. My short stories would sprawl into novels, and
one of my novels spread into a trilogy. This book started off as a
small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiralled off in other directions,
and now I am not sure what it is.
I first thought of writing about jigsaws in the autumn of ????,
when my young friend Danny Hahn asked me to nominate an
icon for a website. This government-sponsored project was collecting
English icons to compose a ‘Portrait of England’, at a time
when Englishness was the subject of much discussion. At random
I chose the jigsaw, and if you click on ‘Drabble’ and ‘jigsaw’ and
‘icon’ you can find what I said. I knew little about jigsaws at this
point, but soon discovered that they were indeed an English invention
as well as a peculiarly English pastime. I then conceived the
idea of writing a longer article on the subject, perhaps even a short
book. This, I thought, would keep me busy for a while.
I had recently finished a novel, which I intended to be my last,
in which I believed myself to have achieved a state of calm and
equilibrium. I was pleased with The Sea Lady and at peace with the
world. It had been well understood by those whose judgement I
most value, and I had said what I wanted to say. I liked the idea of
writing something that would take me away from fiction into a
primary world of facts and pictures, and I envisaged a brightly
coloured illustrated book, glinting temptingly from the shelves of
gallery and museum shops amongst the greetings cards, mugs and
calendars portraying images from Van Gogh and Monet. It would
make a pleasing Christmas present, packed with gems of esoteric
information that I would gather, magpie-like, from libraries and
toy museums and conversations with strangers. I would become
a jigsaw expert. It would fill my time pleasantly, inoffensively. I
didn’t think anyone had done it before. I would write a harmless
little book that, unlike two of my later novels, would not upset or
annoy anybody.
It didn’t work out like that.
Not long after I conceived of this project, my husband Michael
Holroyd was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer and we
entered a regime of radiotherapy and chemotherapy all too familiar
to many of our age. He endured two major operations of
hitherto unimagined horror, and our way of life changed. He dealt
with this with his usual appearance of detachment and stoicism,
but as the months went by I felt myself sinking deep into the paranoia
and depression from which I thought I had at last, with the
help of the sea lady, emerged. I was at the mercy of ill thoughts.
Some of my usual resources for outwitting them, such as taking
long solitary walks in the country, were not easily available. I
couldn’t concentrate much on reading, and television bored me,
though DVDs, rented from a film club recommended by my sister
Helen, were a help. We were more or less housebound, as we were
told to avoid public places because Michael’s immune system was
weak, and I was afraid of poisoning him, for he was restricted to an
unlikely diet consisting largely of white fish, white bread and
mashed potato. I have always been a nervous cook, unduly conscious
of dietary prohibitions and the plain dislikes of others, and the
responsibility of providing food for someone in such a delicate
state was a torment.
The jigsaw project came to my rescue. I bought myself a black
lacquer table for my study, where I could pass a painless hour or
two, assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained
pattern, and thus regain an illusion of control. But as I sat there, in
the large, dark, high-ceilinged London room, in the pool of lamplight,
I found my thoughts returning to the evenings I used to
spend with my aunt when I was a child. Then I started to think of
her old age, and the jigsaws we did together when she was in her
eighties. Conscious of my own ageing, I began to wonder whether
I might weave these memories into a book, as I explored the
nature of childhood.
This was dangerous terrain, and I should have been more wary
about entering it, but my resistance was low. I told myself that there
was nothing dangerous in my relationship with my aunt, and that
my thoughts about her could offend nobody, but this was stupid of
me. Any small thing may cause offence. My sister Susan, more
widely known as the writer A. S. Byatt, said in an interview somewhere
that she was distressed when she found that I had written
(many decades ago) about a particular teaset that our family
possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. She felt
I had appropriated something that was not mine. And if a teapot
may offend, so may an aunt or a jigsaw. Writers are territorial, and
they resent intruders.
I fictionalized my family background in a novel titled The
Peppered Moth, which is in part about genetic inheritance. I scrupulously
excluded any mention of my two sisters and my brother, and
I suspect that, wisely, none of them read it, but I was made
conscious of having trespassed. This made me very unhappy. I
vowed then that I would not write about family matters again (a
constraint which, for a writer of my age, constitutes a considerable
loss) but as I sat at my dark table I began to think I could legitimately
embark on a more limited project that would include
memories of my aunt’s house. These are on the whole happy
memories, much happier than the material that became The
Peppered Moth. I wanted to rescue them. Thinking about them
cheered me up and recovered time past.
But my new plan posed difficulties. I could not truthfully
present myself as an only child (as some writers of memoirs have
misleadingly done) and I have had to fall back on a communal
childhood ‘we’, which in the following text usually refers to my
older sister Susan and my younger sister Helen. My brother
Richard is considerably younger than me, and his childhood
memories of my aunt are of a later period, although he did spend
many holidays with her.
This book became my occupational therapy, and helped to pass
the anxious months. I enjoyed reading about card games, board
games and children’s books, and all the ways in which human
beings have ingeniously staved off boredom and death and despised
one another for doing so. I enjoyed thinking about the nature of
childhood and the history of education and play. For an hour or
two a day, making a small discovery or an unexpected connection,
I could escape from myself into a better place.
I don’t mean in these pages to claim a special relationship with
my aunt. My father once said to me, teasingly, ‘Are you such a
dutiful niece and daughter because you married into a Jewish family?’
And I think that the Swifts may have played a part in my
relationship with Auntie Phyl. I was captivated by the family of
my first husband, Clive Swift. He was the first member of his
generation to marry out, but despite this I was made welcome. I
loved the Swifts’ strong sense of mu...