I have an old, homemade chest of drawers in my study. It is small, barely a foot across, and the five drawers need to be wiggled and wobbled to get them open. Inside are thousands of rectangular cards. A section of a map of the United Kingdom has been glued to each of them, showing an area of about ten square miles.
I bought it many years ago at Spitalfields, when the weekly antiques fair shared the vast, empty market hall with five-a-side football pitches, rather than the pop-up eateries and boutique shops of today. The stallholder had struggled to sell it and admitted he had no idea what it was for, which was precisely the reason I bought it.
A lot of time has been invested in the cards, not just in their preparation but also in the years since. Every one of them is well-thumbed, marked by years of oily fingers, some of them rubbed smooth around the edges. The backs only add to the confusion. Each has four or five numbers or codes, crossed out and rewritten, in different hands and different coloured ink. Some of them are covered top to bottom with numbers and markings. They were important to someone, to lots of people probably, and for quite some time, but why?
My first thought was that they were related to the war, although exactly how was not obvious. Maybe the relevant sections of map were issued to soldiers or pilots ahead of missions. Maybe the map had been split into small sections to protect Britain’s secrets in the event of capture, with pieces issued on a need-to-know basis. None of that makes sense: there is only one copy of each location and no obvious filing system. Added to which, separate cards would be fiddly to use and the card backing would make them more bulky than the paper originals. And even beyond that, these are published maps, widely available and one of the easier things for foreign intelligence to source. The answer must lie elsewhere.
Embracing the chaos
Four of the drawers are tightly packed with bundles of the three-inch high cards, with makeshift dividers giving a semblance of order. It is an illusion though. There are no labels and there is no system. Looking at them is rather disconcerting, even panic-inducing. Once the cards are back in the drawers, any temporary structure is lost.
I’ve come to accept that I have been seeing it all wrong. The lack of order is the point. This is a jigsaw, on a massive scale. Or rather, it is multiple jigsaws, of a fluid shape and with a varying number of pieces. I discounted this idea initially, as to lay out the whole country would require a floor space impractically large.
But why would it need to be the whole country? The challenge might be a county, Staffordshire or Hertfordshire maybe. Or Cornwall, with its four hundred miles of coastline. Inland counties would be harder; no clean edges, just bordering counties with only the faintest of dotted lines to separate them. Somewhere in these drawers, somewhere among the eight thousand cards, are all the pieces you will need to need to complete a map of Cumbria.
This is a team enterprise, beginning with discussions about towns and cities in any given county, what to look for and how to go about it. No one’s geographical knowledge is perfect, but some men know their country better than others. And together they are better still. The fells and valleys of the Lake District. The hills and towns of North Wales. Then comes the big sift. Like finding all the pieces with tiger stripes or Big Ben on them. Gathering all the pieces of sky, for now or for later.
The dirtiest pieces are those of central London. It may have been the first of the maps to be chopped up or one of the most popular maps to reconstruct. Kensington is to the west of Hyde Park. Chalk Farm is in the north. Battersea in the south. The Thames runs through the middle. Many of the London cards are missing, unfortunately, so many in fact that they look to have been removed intentionally. A special few have evaded capture, though. From Highgate to Leyton, Hyde Park to West India Docks.
Jigsaws
The pleasure and purpose of a jigsaw is utterly baffling to some people. I am married to one such unbeliever.
So, tell me again, the conversation goes, you spend hours putting the whole thing together and then as soon as you have done it, you break it up and put it back in the box. Why do any of that? What is the point?
What they fail to see is that the joy is not in the completion but in the journey. The process has to be part of the pleasure. The jigsaw is a focus and a challenge. It can be a silent solitary activity or something shared with others. Done on your own, the puzzle keeps your hands and eyes busy while your mind is able to drift in and out of focus. Background music or the radio is optional. Television is a no no.
Done with others, the experience changes completely. There is a special pleasure in working alongside someone in quiet concentration. The completed puzzle is not where the pleasure lies. Laying down the last piece brings only a fleeting satisfaction, not enough to justify the hours spent before it. And the picture is rarely a surprise, having sat in front of you on the cover of the box. In the modern world, the jigsaw is a physical, tactile, quiet escape, a break from the urgency of technology and deadlines.
I’ll turn them over. You do the edges. I’ll do the sea. You do the mast and sails. If we complete it today, great, otherwise it will be here tomorrow.
The map segments themselves are undated and without a maker’s mark, but there are other clues as to their age. Some of the backing cards have been cut from cigarette boxes and whatever else was to hand, including some helpfully cut from the folded map covers. They are Bartholomew’s Revised Half-Inch Contoured Maps and date from the 1940s.
Finding a home
I begin to see a different home for this unusual set of map cards. If it was ever used by soldiers and spies as I had originally wondered, then they were likely either retired or recuperating. I picture it in a mental hospital or convalescence home, perhaps a form of therapy for returning veterans, the gore and shock of the war still raging in their minds. The awkward, troubled residents slowly begin to look through the tactile little cards and to search back through their lives, to recollections of a calmer time perhaps, the towns and physical features they remember from a visit to Norfolk or the first months of training when they were posted to an airfield in Kent.
George, you can sit in your chair, stare at the wall and remember all those horrid things. Or you can come over here and help Harry lay out Lincolnshire. That’s where your parents’ farm is, isn’t it?
