A Visit to the Museum
A series of memories
I step through the modern glass doors and am sent back in time. The traffic melts away and the marble steps loom upwards, imposing wooden doors confining me to this in between.
I am a child, a teen, a young adult, a woman.
It is an infinite space of time and memory.
Surrounded by mummies and broken pots, history and preservation, the children cascade about the exhibit. They have been left to do this ‘research’ alone, save for a handful of pained parent-volunteers, wishing it was their turn to drink overpriced coffee. They count, again and again, desperately trying to control the tidal wave of consumed sugar and excitement of being out of the school walls. They wonder why they signed up for this.
I smile comfortingly as another wave buffets me from behind and the adult apologizes with a raised eyebrow. It’s not until I become a teacher myself, take my first school trip out, that I truly understand the stress and worry this woman is feeling.
Worksheets flutter on forgotten clipboards, carried by instinct. Obsessed with the dead things behind the glass, the tales of brains removed through nostrils and hearts preserved in clay jars.
The children marvel at the messiness of the reimagined office, the grand finale of the Egyptology section. ‘Harold Carter’s Field Office, Egypt, 1922’.
“Miss, look at this!”
“It’s a right state!”
“There’s rubbish everywhere.”
I look through the Perspex and see a reflection of my own office space, piles of paperwork and discarded lists. Photographs on the walls and floor of places visited, work to be completed. Not so much has changed in the past century when we really look at the details.
Under the microscope molecules are still molecules.
On the first floor, I am equal parts horrified and mesmerized by the stuffed animals. We travel from the swamp to the African sands, past creatures local and exotic. At the end of the room, visible through every case, the gorilla. Alfred. Emblem of Bristol. Famous the world over. Infamous even in death.
Every time I visit the museum, I take time to go and look into his eyes. They are glassy and still now, no spark of the life that once infused the faded fur and heavy limbs.
His memory begins to fade. The children walk past with no second glance, just another exhibit of another foreign animal. Those who remember him are fewer in number now, lost in memories or memories lost.
I never feel as small as I feel in the gallery of the old Masters. There Noah’s Ark looms above us all, child and adult alike, geese the size of small children who look willing and able to leap the canvas’ boundary and chase you through the hall.
Two by two the children are marched along
As two by two the teachers count them off
Two by two the animals gaze down
And two by two we yawn and check the clock
I found my favorite poem here. I don’t recall how old I was.
I found the painting tucked between modern monstrosities of ‘ingenuity’ and ‘inventiveness’. A modest rectangular canvas, shades of grey and taupe.
She stands, naked, her back to you, gazing down at the swan before her. It is looking back at her. The scene is peaceful. Still. A snapshot of tranquility before a vicious attack.
At the furthest point of the highest floor, the caravan still sits. It has been there for as long as I have been visiting the museum, and still, it has a scent of adventure and otherness, of history and legacy and unknown.
I stand at the top of the faded red staircase looking in at another world, where privacy doesn’t exist and freedom is a way of life. I imagine a Famous Five style life, with ice-cold ginger beer and cold pork pies on the sunny bank of a tree-lined lane somewhere in the countryside.
I don’t know about the children who slept in the cupboard or on the ground beneath. I don’t know about the constant tying down of belongings to stop them breaking while moving. I don’t know about dripping in the rain as the whole family worked trying to push the wagon out of the muddy quagmire.
The shadow of Banksy’s eviction notice still mars the paintwork. They must have used the wrong glue. I laugh when I remember the tourists, the publicity hunters and name droppers.
“I wonder if he made the structure himself.”
“What do you think — MDF?”
We pass them, my mother and I, and exchange a knowing look. Banksy’s work is the yellow rectangle, nothing more. This exhibition is a game of spot the Banksy that only the locals and regulars will win.
Press the button.
The gems glow in the artificial night.
Lights on.
Press it again. Ignore the information below about the scientific facts. Marvel at the colors that only reveal themselves in the darkness.
Lights on.
Press it one more time. Wonder at the magic.
I do not realize my last visit will be my last visit. I am the proud local, navigating the corners and corridors as one born to the place. My friends stop and wonder at every exhibit. I smile and share their histories, my own histories tangled within. I am unsure what is fact and what is my own imagination.
I do not point out the suspended plane when we enter. I direct their attention to the artworks around us, keeping their eyes from lifting skywards. We reach the first-floor balcony and are eye-to-goggles with the pilot’s empty face, hands hovering so close to the controls they may as well be touching.
I tell of the short period a mannequin wearing a Guantanamo Bay jumpsuit was placed on the plane. We nod as if we understand the meaning behind it. We are lowly first years, unprepared to admit our ignorance.
I buy some postcards from the gift shop, frame them in my own private gallery.
They hang in my dining room now, above the charity shop piano, three hundred miles away.
