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

corpse is, to say the least, startling. I don't know what Wordsworth and Freud would have made of that.
    Eliot had no children, though he had godchildren, and it is said he could entertain them when he needed to. He wrote
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
in part for them. He is also said to have liked practical jokes, but I choose to consider that a sign of arrested development.

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    Liking children and 'being good with children' are gifts that seem to be somewhat randomly distributed. I do not know whether there is any literature on the subject of the child-friendly personality. I suppose there must be, but I have not been able to find a word for it. (The word 'normotic', coined by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, was suggested to me as a possibility by a friend, but, as she says, this seems to pathologize the very normality I am trying to describe.)
    Certainly not all parents possess these gifts naturally. We were lucky in Auntie Phyl. You could argue that being a good aunt was for her, as it was for Jane Austen, a strategic move, one that earned value in the family, but I trust there was more to it than that and, as she chose to be an infants' teacher, I think there must have been. (Not that there was much career choice, for women of her generation.) I have occasionally wondered whether she really enjoyed playing simple, childish games like Belisha with her little nieces and her nephew. At the time, I assumed she loved these diversions as much as we did. It did not occur to me that she was faking it for our sake until I had children of my own and found myself less than enthusiastic about playing endless games of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders and Snap with them. Then I began to wonder whether she had not, after all, been more possessed of great patience and generosity than of great childishness. I hope she enjoyed Belisha. I know she enjoyed the jigsaws.
    I am suspiciously loyal to the pleasure and purpose of jigsaws, which seem to me to belong to a higher category of activity than card games.
    When my father was near death, in a hospital in Amsterdam, I found myself asking him whether he had enjoyed our seaside family holidays at Filey on the Yorkshire coast. They had been happy times for me, on the whole, and I needed to know whether he had been happy too. I was worried, then, so near the end, that he had been pretending, all those years ago. But he smiled, and he said, as though I should not have doubted, 'Oh Maggie, I
loved
Filey.' That meant a great deal to me. I was glad I had dared to ask.
    My father worked very hard all his adult life and had little time for play, except during those long official summer vacations. Gardening, in his retirement, was his refuge from himself, from the dullness of time, and from my mother in the house. My father dreaded boredom. He admitted this openly, as few dare to do. Admitting to a fear of boredom is usually considered a sign of weakness. Some make a point of boasting that they are never bored. 'Oh, I've always known how to occupy myself, I've never known a day's boredom in my life!' are lines often spoken by those bores who do not fear boring others.
    Elizabeth Bowen's novel,
The Last September,
set in Ireland between the wars, describes a life of idleness under threat, of tennis, flower arranging, teas, dances, wasting lives. Discontented Hugo arrests his wife's gossip with the words, 'life is too short for all this,' but what he is thinking is that life is too long. The young are allowed to complain about the slowness of time; it is sadder when the old do so.
    My mother did not much like 'amusements'. I cannot blame her for that, for as an adult I did not like them very much myself. After my father's death, she said to me one day, 'I don't know what I'm expected to do with my time. I can't read all day, can I?' Auntie Phyl alleged that she gave up reading towards the end of her life, but I'm not sure that was true. My mother was in the middle of James