Requiescat

Nigel Barley

Description

Between the two World Wars, the most famous employee of the British Museum was a cat called Mike. For some twenty years, Mike made it his home and his friend was a most irregular Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, a freebooting fieldworker and smuggler of antiquities. It was a time when the wildest spiritualist ideas were in full resurgence, when ghosts, mummies and lethal curses were held to stalk the earth and many leading scientists, writers and thinkers saw no contradiction between science and belief in the supernatural. And through such tempestuous times, Budge and Mike remained friends and allies as unearthly forces flickered all about them and the objects of the museum collection refused to be mere exhibits but pursued their own dark purposes across the years.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Great Britain
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 24 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456619947
• Langue: English

Extrait

Requiescat: A Cat’s Life at the British Museum
by
Nigel Barley
Copyright 2013 Nigel Barley,
 
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1994-7
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

 
 
 
To Kuting
 
 
Preface
Ernest Wallis Budge was a real person, born in 1857 out of wedlock and into rural poverty and, against all the odds, would become a pioneering Egyptologist at the British Museum - half Indiana Jones, half Mr. Pooter - who wrote prolifically, climbed socially and numbered the rich and famous among his social set. His friend, Mike, was a real cat and a real presence at the British Museum and received more elaborate obituaries on his death in 1929 than many of the seemingly eminent staff who were his colleagues. Unfortunately, being a cat, he left no records as part of his legacy for it is not just colonised peoples, but also cats, that are the muted groups of museums and the history they tell. Yet, institutions often show their most human face in their treatment of animal staff and, upon this basis, I have constructed a work not of pure but rather impure fiction where many of the events described are documented as happening, even if the fine detail escapes us, and all the strange and exotic objects mentioned as making their way, by the most diverse paths, into the collection, are also real. Inside the museum, they continue to pursue their own careers from one century to the next and occasionally erupt into the popular imagination and works such as this. To write a book of this nature is to cook a complex dish that cannot easily be teased back into the meat-and-two-veg of everyday truth and untruth and the linking together of disparate threads may or may not correspond to what actors saw as happening at the time. Most liberty has been taken with strict chronology so that some events have been stretched while others have shrunk. Thus, Sir Fredric Kenyon did not assume the grandiloquent title of ‘His Majesty’s Gentleman Usher of the Purple Rod’ until 1918 but I anticipate that elevation by a year or so and it seems unlikely that Budge and George Bernard Shaw overlapped as lovers of Edith Nesbit in time as well as space but authorial economy certainly demands it. As Edith herself pointed out in The Amulet , time is largely a state of mind. The institution described in the final chapter is clearly an entirely imaginary construct.
Budge adored the Savile Club and his friendships with some of the most famous writers of his day that were cemented there. For much of the public, he was the face of British Egyptology at that time, far more accessible and benign than the superciliously academic Flinders Petrie, for museums then had already begun to play the same Janus role of mediators between specialism and general knowledge that they do now and that relationship was just as uncomfortable and contested as it is today. His friendship with Dorothy Eady alias Bentreshyt alias Omm Sety, who became one of the most colourful and extraordinary figures of Egyptian historical research, is but one example of his accepting nature and the ways in which he did his bit to spread awareness and sympathetic understanding of his subject, regardless of academic niceties and the enforced sobriety of official museum space. Budge’s career benefited from high patronage without which he would never have been able to overcome the disadvantages of his birth but he also became embroiled in academic feuds of great bitterness that continue to undermine his professional reputation and it is to his disadvantage that his obsession with collecting became politically unfashionable. As an affectionate memoir, it is to be hoped that Requiescat may do some little to redress that.
Many thanks are due to Museum staff for their generous help. They had best remain anonymous but know who they are. My gratitude is profound and sincere. Mistakes remain my own and could even be deliberate falsehoods. After all, a cat cannot be expected to know everything.
Nigel Barley
Chapter One
In my book, until you’ve eaten a big chunk of pilchard sandwich off an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus you just haven’t lived. And I have lived. Some people like limestone but I stick to my gums and go for pink granite, the importance of that slightly soapy surface texture on the tongue that exactly complements the oiliness of the fish. Of course, there are other ways of relating to the past in museums. The silence of objects provokes an unbroken torrent of words from some people - gushing out like water from a burst pipe. Mere things are forever being prodded into all-singing, all-dancing rows like those dumb girls in the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies. So there’s always someone, standing around, trying to read vast significance into an unassuming fragment of something perfectly ordinary pinned in a glass case, like those old women in travelling fairs who see the whole world in the soggy leaves at the bottom of a teacup. (That’s three similes for you in as many sentences. You can see from this that I have not just lived but was raised with no expense spared.) And then, nowadays, like as not, there’s someone else busily trying to read yet more significance into the fact that the other people arrived at their own interpretation in the first place. Words, words, words. Round and round it goes. Museums are always driven towards the writing of their own histories. As repositories of the past, they invite it autobiographically - or do I mean cannibalistically? Either way, I suppose the argument is ‘physician heal thyself.’ As storehouses of objects supposedly rich in significance, they provide ample fodder both for the strictly personal and the sweepingly general. I seem to remember hearing some definition of classicism along those lines being thrown around, way above my head, at some point in my life. It’s true that we are said to live in a non-classical age but let it stand. I’m not afraid of the word. Never argue about words. Ultimately, words are just puffs of air or stains on a page, deformed inklings. They are not real and people worry far too much about them.
You might ask my credentials for doing as I am. Well, how about some twenty years of daily museum service, Christmas and weekends included? What about a whole working life with barely a day off to sickness? It’s hardly surprising, then, that my professional and personal lives should have overlapped as much as they have. And I am mildly famous as a custodian who has moved between the carefully painted public face of the museum and its less creditable lower functions, knowing no hours of opening or closure, no forbidden spaces, no exclusions and no censorships. I have ranged across its icy flagstones, rainswept courts, musty storerooms and even its crumbling rooftops with equal dedication by day and by night. In its halls, I have walked literally in the shadows - thrown indifferently by sun, gaslight and sparking electrolier - of the great figures of history. I have viewed my own face in the Aztec scrying mirror that Doctor Dee, magician to Elizabeth 1 st , used to glimpse the angels. I am the perfect amanuensis and my kind are rightly honoured among the museum’s most dedicated workers. My name is Mike. I am the museum cat.
***
Professor Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Litt.D., D.Litt., FSA, Scholar of Christ’s College, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, was known as ‘Budgie’ to friends, ‘Podge’ or ‘Bugbear’ to enemies, but himself favoured ‘Bulldog’ and encouraged the use of that nickname in the popular press. It was how he wanted to see himself, stubborn, committed, British. Somehow, it had never caught on. But physically he suited all such names very well, having a sagging moustache and a stolid, dumpy build and time had blessed him with jowls and – along with bad bridgework - had come the permanently clamped jaws that are seen as the mark of determination if not truculence.
‘You may call it superstition if you please, dear lady,’ he chortled gallantly. He sent his laughter running round the room like a sunbeam. ‘Yet I have always retained a romantic hope in the efficacy of amulets.’ His desk was littered with so many explorations of the idea of the cross in various shapes and materials and from so many different, historical periods that they were more a research interest than a statement of faith.
‘Personally, I have absolutely no doubt of their power, Professor Budge. That is not why I came. But I need something rather special. You see, in my previous books, my children have engaged in magical travel on a Persian carpet and also through the offices of a mythical being called a psammead that has the power to grant wishes. It is a creature of my own devising, a “sand-fairy” from the Greek, you see. My readers will expect more of the same but I have rather painted myself into a corner with my present manuscript in that I have had to make the psammead relinquish its powers so I need some sort of magical device that would free me by allowing time travel after the fashion of my friend, Mr. Wells. I was thinking of ancient Babylon and Egypt and possibly Atlantis as destinations, so naturally, when Mr. George Bernard Shaw gave me your name, I decided to consult you.’ She was a tall, thin woman, fiftyish, in the sort of simple, floaty, blue dress, gathered at neck and wrists, that was foisted on the ‘subject races’ by missionaries all over the empire as a detumescent aid to chastity. Sadly, its effect on Budge was oddly erotic, hinting, as it did, at a stubborn nudity under thin, rustling cloth. With her cropped, black, curly hair and deep, dark eyes, she re