The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Read Online Free Page A

'The African jigsaw is difficult, but not impossible.' I think that is still her view of the situation in South Africa.)
    Auntie Phyl's eating preferences were also a little tricky. She was not a good cook, but when we were little she had cooked for us what I remember as delicious snack meals, like Welsh Rabbit (sic) and Scotch pancakes and drop scones and omelettes (a word that she pronounced, as I do, with three good syllables). She was not keen on anything continental. Late in her life she came round in a big way to the notion of the pub lunch, but she considered herself allergic to mushrooms, and it was surprising how many pub menus on Exmoor seemed to feature mushrooms in almost everything. I remember one potentially disastrous meal in the Notley Arms in Monksilver when she was presented with some dark dish (perhaps an omelette?) covered in mushrooms, but luckily the lighting in the pub was so dim that she didn't see them. She ate them all, and there were no ill effects.
    I maintain (though she queried this) that it was I who usefully introduced her to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton. On a fine summer day, as wasps circled the cider, the view was as glorious as the French Riviera, and we felt on top of the world. She took to scampi very well once she had got over the shock of the novelty. Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper she had always enjoyed, and she used to go out to get them from the van at Long Bennington when it did its weekly round of the villages.
    She always insisted that she deeply disliked mayonnaise, but one day, making egg sandwiches for our picnic, I thought, what the hell, and mashed in a generous spoonful of Hellman's while she wasn't looking. We ate our sandwiches in a green sloping field beneath an azure sky, surrounded by the surreal pink sheep of Somerset, as happy as can be, and she devoured every morsel. That evening she rang my sister Helen and I heard her say that she had had a lovely day out, and that Maggie's egg sandwiches were 'out of this world'.
    I wasn't as nice as I should have been to her succession of dogs. I didn't pat them or speak to them, and when I took them for walks I was silently morose. Auntie Phyl used to tell them, 'Now, be good for your Auntie Maggie, she doesn't like it when you make a mess on the carpet.' And she was right, I didn't. The first little white dog – a rescue dog called Kelly, whose original owner was in gaol – metamorphosed at some point into a slightly smaller and slightly better-behaved but otherwise almost identical West Highland terrier called Daisy. These were part of the summer deal, and they did alarm the rabbits, which since their visits ended have become completely out of control. When I was a small child, I had loved her large collie dog, Chum, but in my recollection Chum was a much better-trained dog.
    A friend of mine once suggested that the later dogs became so naughty because my aunt had de-trained them, and that, by allowing them to pee on the carpet, lick her face and feet, masturbate against her ankles, jump at visitors, and bounce on beds, she was expressing the bad behaviour that had been pent up in her by a lifetime of schoolmistressy propriety and younger-sister, maidenaunt syndrome. I think there is truth in that.
    My aunt preferred animals and birds to people. In general, despite the condoned anarchy of Kelly and Daisy, she was good with animals. In Doncaster, she had had a green budgerigar called Skippy who used to be able to say, 'Auntie go to school,' as she set off for her day's work at Woodfield Primary. She wore a little green Skippy feather in her hatband, which I thought was stylish. His death in the hard winter of 1946 was a sad loss to all of us, and the subject of eloquent letters of condolence from her nieces, which she preserved for the rest of her life.
    Creatures accepted her. Cats would come to sit on her lap, and calves offered