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

reader back, past the dead cow in the ditch, into the dark wood of the suicides, and she fills these places with whispers and eyes and monsters. When she was little, she endowed inanimate objects with life; animals and trees spoke to her, as did jugs and plates and knives and buttons and pebbles and stones and fragments of quartz and mica, and what they said was not always pleasant. The buttons talked in 'tiny metallic sounds' from 'pursed-up button mouths', which does not sound agreeable, and the enormous 'fat green body' of the heavy pincushion that sat on the kitchen dresser, bristling with hatpins and broken darning needles like an aged porcupine, is not a wholly friendly object.
    All children, according to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, have this capacity (or this misapprehension), and the animated object is a commonplace motif in stories for children.
The Adventures of a Pincushion
by Mary Jane Kilner, published in the 1780s, is a striking early example, with an undercurrent of violence, for the poor, downwardly mobile narrator ends very sadly. Uttley had this talent of animation to an exceptional extent, carrying the memory of it,
as well as the power to revive it, throughout her life. She also believed she had a gift for predictive dreaming, and her accounts of her experiences of this are uncomfortably plausible. She found it easy to put herself into a trance.
    The ability to 'receive' rather than to 'invent' has been claimed by other celebrated writers for children. P. L. Travers was another disturbing and difficult character with a penchant for the occult and a tendency to wish to dominate her illustrator. She was an admirer of Gurdjieff, whom she met in the 1920s, and of Jung and Ouspensky. She said, enigmatically, that she 'never for one moment' believed that she had invented Mary Poppins, who came to her while she was recovering from an illness; perhaps, she said, Mary Poppins invented her, 'and that is why I find it so difficult to write autobiographical notes'. Enid Blyton claimed that, while composing, she would shut her eyes for a few minutes, with her portable typewriter on her knees, and make her mind go blank, whereupon real children would appear and stand before her, and take on movement, and talk, and laugh, as though they were on a cinema screen. All she had to do was to watch and listen, and then to transcribe their words and actions. Uttley, Travers and Blyton had strong visual memories and imaginations, and all three seemed to have had something of the medium about them. They received and transcribed stories and messages from some source of childhood experience that is closed to most adults.
    Why do I find these accounts uncomfortable? Is it merely a natural scepticism that protests? Not quite. For, as an adult, Uttley continued (like Conan Doyle) to believe in fairies, and that is enough to make most people feel uncomfortable. The mixing of the power of childhood animism with a self-deluding sense of arrested development suggests that something went wrong with her progress towards what we call maturity. A touch of J. M. Barrie crept into her patchwork-quilt recollections. The animism
threatened to tip over into fanciful embroidery, the acute recall into whimsy. The elves invaded. The revered historic rural objects – the pincushion, the button box, the grandfather clock, the spinning top, the fivestones – became copies of themselves, endlessly celebrated, endlessly reproduced, like a picture on a calendar or a biscuit tin, their authenticity debased by repetition. She reworked her material too often. Maybe her talent was arrested at a certain point and then devoured itself. She was imprisoned in what poet and critic Susan Stewart calls in her book
On Longing
'the childhood of the self'. The memories sickened and became nauseating, though they never (except in her books for very young children) became sentimental or sweet. She was too clever for that.

IX
    Alison Uttley was indisputably an