Requiescat: A Cat's Life At the British Museum

By Nigel Barley

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456619947

Nigel Barley

Nigel Barley was born in Kingston-on-Thames in 1947 and studied Modern Languages at Cambridge before completing a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. Having taught at University College London and the Slade School of Art, he joined the British Museum in 1988 as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ethnography and remained there for some twenty years. After publishing several works of academic anthropology, he wrote The Innocent Anthropologist (1983) about his fieldwork amongst a hill people in Cameroon, West Africa. It contradicted so may of the cherished assumptions of the discipline that it led to calls for his expulsion from the professional body of anthropologists. He remained, however, and now the book has been translated into some twenty-five other languages and is often the first work encountered by students of anthropology in their studies. He left the Museum in 2002 and is now a professional writer, living in London but dividing his time between the UK and Indonesia. His most recent work is Island of Demons (Monsoon Books, Singapore), a fictionalised treatment of the life of the painter Walter Spies.

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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 1st, 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 resembled nothing so much as a fey choirboy or one of the worldly-wise Egyptians whose portraits were painted on the coffin boards of the Roman period. The eminent names also excited him.

Budge sighed. ‘Miss Nesbit…’ he began.

She frowned. ‘Nesbit is simply my maiden name and the name I write under. My real name is Bland, Mrs. Bland. I am also a priestess of the Order of the Golden Dawn but I may not tell you my name within that order. You will be aware that one of our principal inspirations is the thoughts of the Egyptian mage Abramelim, as preserved by Abraham of Worms, who leads us to spiritual enlightenment and self-fulfilment through rituals of the goddess Isis.’

Budge blinked. ‘I see.’ Who the hell was Abramelim? Her dress rustled as she leaned forward and crossed her legs under the dress, an oddly masculine gesture.

‘In Eltham,’ she added.

‘The goddess Isis in Eltham. I see.’ His voice became gentle and conciliatory and very, very cautious. He had met poor deluded creatures of this kind before. It was an unavoidable part of the Egyptologist trade. He was glad he had left his office door wide open. He knew Shaw consorted with wild, wild women in liaisons of the most irregular kind that flouted the rules of decent, suburban life as firmly as the bizarre ‘rational’ dress he had adopted. You never knew what they might do.

‘Naturally, I should also wish my characters to witness scenes that would help them to understand the inevitability and desirability of the socialist future that awaits us all as Mr. Wells has shown.’

‘So you are looking for a socialist, magical amulet? Perhaps a Bible left by Karl Marx in the Reading Room?’ He grinned like a naughty boy.

She stared at him blankly. ‘I never knew Mr. Marx but his daughter, Eleanor, was a close friend until she took her own life so tragically. I don’t quite see…?’

Budge blushed and blustered. She clearly had no sense of humour. He was disappointed. In his experience, sex and a sense of humour had always gone hand in hand if not in a more intimate posture. ‘Well…I think we may have something in your size. Let us take a look. Pray accompany me into the gallery and I will point something out.’ He hurried to the door and waited, bowed over, like a footman. Get her out of his office at all costs and into the public gallery where there were witnesses to anything insane she might do. They clip-clopped along the springy floorboards that always reminded him of a dance floor and he led her to a wall case where various small objects were pinned onto a backboard as if crucified. ‘Let me see…Well, now, we have several on offer.’ He tapped on the glass. ‘We have various animals, a heart amulet, an eye of Horus, human limbs, a headrest, pillars, scarabs of course… All amulets of various form and function.’

She glided up and down like a cat watching goldfish, then stopped and pointed, transfixed. ‘That one in shiny, red stone.’

He worked his eyebrows to comic effect. ‘1857,0811.22? A tyet. It would be set on the neck of a person at time of burial. It is probably of red jasper and from the mid-eighteenth dynasty. An intriguing piece. You will see that it includes a knot and some say its shape alludes to a woman’s menstrual belt or cloth, an object of great danger and terror, cannibal, child-killing blood, harnessing the power of women over life and death.’ He looked at her like a corset salesman, pleased to be able to get away with such bum-tweaking naughtiness in the name of expertise. ‘The inscription is the owner’s name, of course.’

‘A female sign of power?’ she brightened. ‘Power over life and death? How did this particular one come to be here?’

Budge pushed up his glasses and peered at the label through long-sighted fog and smiled. ‘It came through a man of Italian origin who lived in Alexandria, always Egypt’s most cosmopolitan city, Giovanni Anastasi. We don’t know too much about him. His father grew rich, supplying the French army and, with the fall of Napoleon, went bankrupt so that Anastasi moved into other areas of trade.’

‘Napoleon, oh yes. We must have Napoleon in it.’ She finally smiled.

‘It is said to protect the wearer against evil deeds and act as a sort of passepartout to the different regions of the next world by invoking the power of the high goddess, Isis herself. Perhaps you already knew that. Is that, possibly, why it appeals to you, as a priestess in your own right – in Eltham?’

She shook her head, turning the whole body from the waist like a little girl. ‘No, professor. It is simply the one I think the children would choose for themselves if they were given the choice. It doesn’t look in the least like a dirty, menstrual rag, it looks just like a gingerbread man, good enough to eat.’ She turned back from the case and moved very close as she stared him boldly in the eye and licked her sharp, little teeth. He shrank back in sudden surprise and terror. ‘In fact, professor, it looks more than a little like you,’ she whispered in his ear and her breath was hot on his neck.

***

You may regard me as proof of the redeeming power of high culture. As cats, we are born into jostling blindness. We first learn the world through the senses of touch, smell and taste and only later do these come to be translated into sight. So a museum is the very opposite of a feline experience, being a zone of sensory deprivation where sound, smell and taste are discouraged if not downright illegal and the sense of sight alone rules. ‘Look. Don’t touch,’ say the signs and nobody thinks to lick or sniff the exhibits or try to get a cheerful tune out of them but then the museum public don’t really go in much for singing and dancing. But during that first suckling period, as cats, we know only the rubbings and snufflings of our littermates, the black heat and sweetly furred scent of maternity and congealed afterbirth, in which we are all as limbs of a single sentient being. Like Romulus and Remus in the hills of Rome, my siblings and I first flourish in a bathhouse in Bermondsey - to be more precise, in some part of a discarded mangle tub in a Bermondsey bathhouse that lies behind a failing fishmonger’s where the air is alive with the mournful hoots and toots of the river trade and the occasional deeper throat-clearings of steamers from the far world. And from the railway termini, blows across the sound of shunting - a constant low commotion.

Consider the fact that cats are hopelessly addicted to fish. Fish swim in and out of our dreams. The smell of them haunts our fantasies like insubstantial medusas and can freeze us in mid-step by day or night. Yet we cannot go into water which is where fish live and so abide in permanent exile from bliss. Do you wonder that cats don’t believe in a beneficent deity? We know the world as one vast conspiracy to pour cold water on our heads. Fish are always tantalisingly out of reach, except to certain brave and swimming cousins around Lake Vann and even remoter kin of Asian wetland distribution but these feral relations, of no fixed abode, have always seemed to me not quite respectable and that is why we have domesticated humans – to bring us fish. Humans are incapable of true happiness and seek to embody it in others – children, exotic natives, the saved in Heaven, or cats. And so, in your doings with us, we allow you to appear, to yourselves, benevolent, loving and generous and all we ask in return is fish. And if fish is the answer, who cares what the question is?

My first human encounter is with the owner of the Bermondsey shop, a suitably whaleboned Mrs. Betty Bracegirdle, a Northern woman of powerful but frustrated maternal instincts – totally barren as any creature of periodic sexuality would immediately know. This, however, she does not herself know for she continues to mate pointlessly with the hirsute and saturnine drover who carts in her fish in the early foredawn and she can often be heard putting a lot of wasted effort into it. Her ringing, cat-like cries are unmistakable over the curled haddock and cod that lie unheeded and smoking into the air in their pools of melting ice, and call us to feed as surely as church bells summon Christians to their own cannibal rite of communion. Anyway, for us the association between fish and human sexuality is a given, compounded of slime and wet, slithery surfaces. No point in crying over spilt milt. Why else do you think we curl up so readily on your laps and dream there in vulnerable, twitching ecstasy?

***

What the hell had happened? He was fifty years old, married, stolidly employed, life reduced to a steady routine, emotions turned down to a low simmer on the back gas-ring. He should not have done it. He regretted bitterly having done it. He had never done anything like it before – even abroad where I wouldn’t have counted. He wanted to do it again. There was some quote somewhere about God punishing men by giving them what they most earnestly desire. He ran his handkerchief over his features and sweated and goggled at the memory. His first impression about Edith Nesbit had been correct after all. She was a woman free of all modesty and decency and it was also true that she was wearing absolutely nothing under that missionary shift. It had not been at all like Dora, his wife. She regarded herself - deludedly - as a sinfully beautiful temptress whereas she was actually simply a rather handsome woman of mature years who showed absurd self-regard. She had explained her lack of both embarrassment and sexual shyness as the result of socialism and bicycle-riding and had totally devoured him, as a cat does a mouse, with her bare and brazen body. No wait. It had been like being eaten alive by the goddess Ishtar. He sat, dazed, in his chair and gaped at the madness of it. To simply have sex right here in his office in mid-afternoon with a total stranger and the whole museum raging about them, to grunt and gasp and slobber like a drunken labourer in this his temple of learning and respectability. It was terrifying and intoxicating. It could have cost him his job, ruined his whole life, undermined the careful work of whole decades. Other people had keys to his room. They might conceivably have walked in. He would have been humiliated, shamed before the world, shamed – oh God – before Dora. He would not see her again. He would have to be careful lest she wrote to him, make sure he saw the mail before Dora. Some sort of answer would be necessary if she wrote but the indiscretion would be nipped in the bud by a blast of cold words. But wait. She had said things that hinted at her regular use of the Reading Room. She could turn up out of the blue at any moment…She had no proof. She was a madwoman and he could deny everything. He would change the days on which he received public enquiries or put one of his juniors on duty with talk of ‘bringing him on.’ He had a trip to Egypt coming up. He could bring it forward but not by too much. He had to be sure the whole thing had died down and that there was no risk of this madwoman approaching Dora directly. Anything was possible. After making love, which she referred to as ‘having sex’, she had smoked a cigar, regardless of fire regulations and been careless with the ash. He threw his head back against the leather of the armchair. God he was terrified. God he felt so alive. Life could not be that simple, just wanting something and then having