James Boswell described the 'innocent soothing relief from melancholy' of playing draughts, and Margaret Drabble - among countless others - has found a similar solace from assembling jigsaws. In The Pattern in the Carpet she describes the history of this uniquely British form of meditation, from its earliest incarnation as a dissected map, used as a teaching tool in the late eighteenth century, to the other cut-outs and mosaics that have amused children and adults from Roman times until the present. ALong the way we encouter Roman mosaics; the geographicsl playing cards that Cardinal Mazarin commissioned for the child Louis XIV; and the game named after the British transport minister responsible for the Gelisha Beacon.
Woven carefully through Drabble's account are intimate memories of her aunt Phyllis - her childhood visits to her aunt's Lincolnshire house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first visit to London together, the books they read and, above all, the jigsaws that they completed.
The Pattern in the Carpet is a unique and moving personal history of remembrance and growing older; about the importance of childhood play; and how we rearrange objects into new patterns both to make sense of our past and to ornament our present.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated at a Quaker boarding school in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of many highly acclaimed novels, most recently The Sea Lady (published by Fig Tree, 2006). She has also written biographies and screenplays and is the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. In 2008 she was created DBE. She is married to the biographc Michael Holroyd and lives in London.
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