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

ancient thoroughfare. Was this a sort of Mr Polly-ish, Wellsian escape to a cleaner, happier world? I wonder whether they had any sense of returning to a way of life that their grandparents, before the industrial revolution, might have known. The towns and cities of the North of England and of the Midlands, which had expanded with such rapidity during the industrial revolution, were still informed with a sense of the nearness of a countryside that was felt to be a common birthright. Novelists of the North and of the Midlands, from Elizabeth Gaskell to D. H. Lawrence, J. B. Priestley and Alan Sillitoe, have described these Arcadian longings, these strangely intermingled neighbourhoods where fields and paddocks and quarries pock the haphazard housing developments. I have always felt an affinity with these landscapes.
    Sillitoe, a writer who emerged from a red-brick estate of council housing on the outskirts of Nottingham, and whose working life began in a factory at the age of fourteen, writes that he lived in 'a street with houses behind and fields in front'. As a boy he could walk, carrying a stick and a sandwich, through nettles, Queen Anne's Lace and elderberries the mile or so to his blacksmith grandfather's cottage. This cottage had neither gas nor electricity and smelled, in his view wholesomely, of stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine. His grandfather Burton was granted the gleaning rights to the wheat that grew too close to the hedges to be harvested by the combine harvester, a right that now sounds medieval. This was a life on the edges of two worlds, in which the memory of the old country ways persisted, and Sillitoe, a self-educated scholar, in his novels consciously evokes the pastoral idyll and Virgil's
Eclogues.
Working men spent their days in the factory and at the weekends bicycled, hiked and fished by canals. The countryside was penetrable and close.
    The Easter visit of a men's cycling club was one of the big
annual events at Bryn, and it made my dour grandmother almost girlish. She loved the bicycle boys and spoke of them flirtatiously. She liked to cook them their eggs and bacon.
    Long Bennington is not far from Laxton, a village in Nottinghamshire that boasts the only surviving open-field system of medieval strip farming in England. Children of my generation used to spend a good deal of time in history lessons colouring in maps showing strip farming, though I don't think we really understood what it was. In my fifties I was seized with a desire to see the Laxton system and try to read its meaning for myself. I suggested to Auntie Phyl that I could drive her there on my next visit – we could make it the destination for our pub lunch, I said. Unwisely, I mentioned the field system. She was not taken with the idea. 'I don't fancy wandering round fields to get at my lunch,' she said. I gave in instantly, for I was fond of the Wheatsheaf and the Staunton Arms, our regulars, but from time to time I am still visited by the picture of myself and Auntie Phyl, straying through cornfields or along strips of swedes or potatoes on our way to our scampi and chips.
    Sillitoe's Grandfather Burton was one of the last of the blacksmiths. In the Nottinghamshire village of Scarrington there is a pile of horseshoes, which Auntie Phyl used to take us to see as children when we were staying at Bryn. It is a fine phallic monument, seventeen feet high, weighing about ten tons, and it is said to have been built by blacksmith George Flinders, the village's last farrier, between 1945 and 1965. It is still there. What was once work is now labelled heritage. A bid was made to purchase this tower and transport it to America, but it was saved for the village by Nottinghamshire County Council. The village is very neat and trim now, with some grand houses and expensive new buildings amongst the old. I suppose it is a dormitory village for Nottingham. It doesn't look as 'real' as Long Bennington, but it is very