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

their noses to her for a scratch. Birds flocked into her back garden, and sometimes came right into her large farmhouse
kitchen. She called them 'her little dicks', an unselfconscious abbreviation of the already curious phrase 'dicky bird'. Pheasants often visited her, flaunting their handsome plumage amongst the motley assembly of potted plants in her yard, and for a long while a little free-range hen, escaped from a neighbouring flock, came to peck about beneath her kitchen window. She was very distressed when a fox got it, leaving nothing but feathers.
    Bryn was full of pot plants on windowsills – geraniums, cactuses, African violets, streptocarpus – not all of them in perfect health. In the summer, she would put most of them out in the yard, by the stone trough full of the sturdy grey-green rosettes of stonecrop and houseleeks. 'If they thrive, they thrive,' she said. 'If they give up, well, that's it, they've had their chance.' One of these plants she called a 'hot water plant', and she watered it direct from the boiling kettle. It seemed to like this treatment and responded with a small purple flower. She gave me a pot of little hot water plant pups, and they did quite well for a few years in London. I don't know what their botanical name was.
    I still have in London a fine orange lily, a clivia, which I bought for her one Christmas, and reclaimed when she had to leave Bryn. It blossoms unexpectedly, I think every other year. I am pleased that it continues to flower.
    In Somerset, she enjoyed a visit to Home Farm at Blue Anchor with her great-great-nephews and nieces, to look at the sheep and the goats and the ducks and the piglets. She had no fear of animals, nor they of her. The only animal I saw her take against was a very large sow at Home Farm, who was lying on her side in her straw, exposing a vast, bald, yellowish underbelly of teats, over which various piglets squabbled and fought. The sow's expression was one of bored contempt. She was an unpleasant heap of flesh –'Not a pretty sight,' said Auntie Phyl, with a slight shudder. I think the sow reminded my aunt of her mother, who was not a pretty sight
either. Grandma Bloor was a stout, grim and unyielding woman.
    Auntie Phyl, in old age, was not pretty, though this did not prevent her from criticizing the appearance of others. 'Not very attractive, is she?' she once said, bluntly, of one of the new girlfriends of one of her great-nephews, to which the proper retort, the retort she would best have understood, would have been, 'Look who's talking!' But in fact, as a girl, she had been bonny: slim, with fair hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Most of the Bloor women were slim as children and adolescents; it was in middle age that their figures thickened, their waists spread, their bosoms swelled and drooped. I used to look at these women and hope I wouldn't get like that, but of course it was the genes that did it, not the diet or the lack of exercise. A waistless stoutness lay in wait for all of us. A piggish, balding, bristling yellowish pinkness was our genetic fate.
    My mother disliked exercise and became agoraphobic, but my aunt enjoyed walking through the village with her dog.
    We used to think the Bloors had Dutch blood, because many of them were potters, and because of their Dutch-doll colouring, but in fact Bloor (or Bloore or Blore) is an old English name. The Bloors (like the Drabbles) were English through and through. There is a little village in Staffordshire called Blore, which I once went to visit when doing family research for the background of
The Peppered Moth.
Our car got stuck in the deep damp unmown grass of the churchyard, and we had to ask some funeral mourners for a shove. They were more than happy to oblige. Helping hapless strangers was more fun than burying the dead.
    Auntie Phyl had little vanity, though she was proud of her yellow hair, and even in her eighties fancied that it kept a golden tint. (It did, but it was the