If there is the slightest chance you can get to Bromley in south-east London, I urge you strongly to stop reading now, contact the Keeping Gallery and book a visit without knowing what I’m about to describe. You can always come back here after your trip.
Have you been? Good.
I have added to our online archive Quick puzzle number 4,479. Like all concise crosswords, it is not intended to be remarkable. It appeared on Tuesday 14 August 1984, next to a Steve Bell cartoon about Fleet Street’s treatment of Arthur Scargill and below an advert for a BMX.
The solver of today might reflect that you wouldn’t now use “Modern type of university” to clue REDBRICK. The solvers of 1984 will have reflected even less. Except one.
Renate Keeping – an artist, teacher and, half a century earlier, Jewish refugee – looked at the puzzle and decided to do something remarkable. She hand-stitched a new version of it.
To hand-stitch something as intricate as a crossword is remarkable enough. To make it part of an autobiographical frieze is astonishing.
The frieze – which is kept in the Keeping Gallery, once her home – is “a mixed media of fabric, paint and stitch”. From a distance, it looks like a perfectly rendered assembly of 1980s ephemera: a Monster Munch packet, a photo torn from what used to be called a “colour supp”, sundry pieces of paperwork.
Closer up, the images and their original words have been changed to tell the tale of growing up as a German immigrant in the 1930s and 1940s, going to art school and starting a family. The crossword covers some early experiences between 1936 and 1938; its nine across is “This is what the terrible chilblains on my fingers and toes did”, for ITCH.
The frieze as a whole, which occupies a room, is a tremendous thing to try to take in, especially as it is kept as a surprise at the end of a tour largely of framed works by Keeping and her husband, the artist Charles Keeping. (You may know his illustrations for the poem The Highwayman.) That surprise is the reason for the gnomic first paragraph above.
As for the Bell strip? In Keeping’s hands, a hand-stitched cartoon depicting, hilariously, her early attempts at illustration. The puzzle has become one of my all-time favourites and suggests a new genre, the puzzle as personal portrait, which could work even if it were rendered in boring old newsprint or pixels.
The Keeping Gallery is at 16 Church Rd, Bromley
131 Words for Rain by Alan Connor is published on 14 November (£16.99, BBC Books). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply