Dry Storeroom No. 1 (3 page)

Countless specimens: rows of cabinets and drawers for storing the insect collection. In 2007, this storage was being replaced and renewed.

I should explain that the Natural History Museum was then known in the scientific trade as the BM, the British Museum. The official title of the museum at the time of my employment was in fact the British Museum (Natural History). The South Kensington museum had split off from the original BM at Bloomsbury when the natural history collections had become so large as to require separate accommodation. The divorce from the mother institution was slow and legalistic. Formal separation from Bloomsbury did not happen until an Act of Parliament of 16 August 1965. The old BM title nonetheless had a magisterial presence that could not be instantly erased. My colleagues would call me up to make a date to “come to the BM” as if that were the only way in which it could be referred to. At conferences, I would still describe myself as belonging to the British Museum—after all, there were other natural history museums all over the place but only one BM, which housed collections made by Sir Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin. However, since the public at large referred to it as the Natural History Museum, in 1990 that finally became its official title. Farewell to the BM, with the finality of the end of the gold sovereign or the landau carriage. Even so, some of my more senior colleagues still sneakily find themselves talking about “finding time to call in at the BM….”

So there I was in my official premises, surrounded by the collections upon which I was to work and to which I was supposed to add. My contract had specified only that I “should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,” which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: “Amuse yourself—for money.” But I did have a boss to whom I was accountable. As I have mentioned, the head of department in a British national museum is called the Keeper. This may call up an image of a man in braces mucking out a gorilla cage, or it may have connotations of somebody jangling keys and going around inspecting security locks. It is, however, rather a grand title, one that entitles the bearer to an entry in
Who’s Who.
My boss, the Keeper of Palaeontology, was H. W. Ball—Harold William. Above a certain level in the hierarchy one was allowed to call him “Bill” otherwise, it was always “Dr. Ball.” He had the room directly above me, a place of leather-topped desks and filing cabinets. He was guarded by the kind of devoted secretary who exists mostly in the pages of spy novels, like the prim Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond thrillers. She was called Miss Belcher. She was an unmarried lady who lived with and cared for her mother; in the Palaeontology Department she was omniscient. Some years later, I discovered that her Christian name was Phoebe, but I would have no more dreamed of addressing her by that name than I would of addressing the Queen as “Lizzie.” She occupied an anteroom through which one had to pass to access the presence of the Keeper; and she always called him that, just as she always called me “Dr. Fortey” until she retired. She regarded such access as a rare and precious commodity, and an audience was a privilege to be awarded reluctantly. In fact, one usually went to see the Keeper because one was summoned. Few employees dropped in for a chinwag.

Occasionally, the summons was for doing something naughty. It was easy to anticipate these occasions. Normally, Dr. Ball gestured towards a chair, beaming, and said something like: “Sit ye down, dear boy.” He had a slightly polished-up, satisfied air, like the head boy of a posh school. On the other hand, if you had transgressed one of the rules, you earned a particular stare that P. G. Wodehouse described as “basilisk” when emanating from one of Bertie Wooster’s more terrifying aunts. Once I was ticked off for the key offence—leaving them displayed to the world upon my desk. Then there was a diary infringement. The diary was a hangover from the early days of the Museum, being a little book into which the employee was supposed to write his activities, morning and afternoon, and which was collected every month and signed off by the head of department. It was a very tedious bit of bureaucracy, and nobody on the shop floor took it seriously. I took to writing “study trilobites” on the first day of the month and ditto marks for the rest of it. Miss Belcher called me up to say that the Keeper didn’t regard this as adequate, and would I please put in more details. So the following month I put in entries like “a.m. open envelopes” and “p.m. post replies” and at the end of the month: “p.m. write diary.” My attempts at humour were not appreciated upstairs. The Keeper gave me a flea in my ear and sent me on my way, remarking that nobody was indispensable. Such encounters were, fortunately, infrequent. Diaries were abolished after a few years, and nobody mourned their loss, not even Miss Belcher. The concept of accountability was fairly rudimentary then, so a more usual meeting was an interview once a year with the Keeper to check on my progress. After the “sit ye down” invitation, this grilling usually consisted of noting that I had finished one or two publications that year, jolly good, and see you next year. I had to report on my curatorial assistant, Sam Morris, in similar terms.

Once I was settled into the Museum I vowed to explore the five science departments: Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Zoology, Botany and, in some distant redoubt, Entomology. The hidden museum seemed to stretch in every direction. As more and more new corners were discovered, there seemed no end to it. The public galleries were flanked, underlain and overlain by hidden rooms and galleries and laboratories. There were separate wings and towers. There were odd blind alleys, others that opened into another unsuspected gallery. Some corridors were narrow and poorly lit, and suddenly took a turn downwards into flights of stairs. Others were wider, lined on both sides by mahogany doors carrying the names and titles of the researchers who hid behind them: Dr. J. D. Taylor, Mr. F. Naggs and Miss K. Way were just down the way from my office in the basement. Most of the names were to be matched with faces over the coming months. There were a few I never met face-to-face. Down here in the vaults, there is none of the grand decoration of the public galleries; plain slab floors are the rule, pipes and cable housing run here and there, and almost everything is smothered in institutional cream paintwork. On all sides there are locked cabinets bearing tantalizing labels: Blattidae; Lucinidae; Phyllograptidae. What could they all mean?

Outside my office loomed stuffed elephants and giraffes covered in tarpaulins, dead exhibits that had once graced the main hall. They were now slightly down-at-heel and neglected, with a few bald bits, and rather sad, like a disused sideshow at a fair. The corridors were sealed off into sections by doors that could be opened using the magic keys. It is said that rats, when learning a new maze, make short dashes from home base to start with, gradually extending their range so that unfamiliar territory becomes familiar. So it was with my exploration of the underground or behind-the-wall labyrinth of the Museum. I was able to probe my way from my office in several directions, and I could usually find my way back again. If I got lost, I could pop out of one of the doors into the nearest public gallery to locate my position. Gradually, the most arcane corners of the Museum yielded their secrets.

Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read “Departmental cock”—I never did find out what that meant. Beyond the door, a corridor stretched away lined with polished cabinets on both sides. I had left the Palaeontology Department and entered Zoology. The cabinets housed shells; thousands upon thousands of shells. This was the mollusc section of the Zoology Department, a place where the lingua franca was shells. The cupboard labelled Lucinidae was just one family among many of clams. Any drawer in the stack housed a dozen different species belonging to that family which might come from anywhere in the world, packets of shells laid out neatly in labelled boxes. Many of us have made desultory collections of shells while pottering on the beach on summer holidays: these collections were like an almost infinite and systematic multiplication of that brief acquisitiveness. Dr. J. D. Taylor and his colleagues occupied the offices whose doors opened between the cabinets. Like my own office, they had windows facing out on to the lawns in front of the Museum, and their offices, too, were lined with collections and books, which gave them a cosy, nest-like quality. I soon got to know John Taylor, Fred Naggs and Kathy Way as the mollusc people, the conchology gang, at home with gastropods and bivalves, squids and slugs, nudibranchs and pteropods. As I write this, they are still working in the same rooms, tucked away in their basement redoubt, John Taylor labouring on his beloved molluscs long after most of his contemporaries have taken to the golf club or the allotment. Downstairs from John Taylor’s room there was a collection of octopuses and other soft-bodied animals stored in jars, pickled in alcohol and formalin, dead things all pallid and covered in suckers, slightly threatening, as if they might creep out of their accommodation when no one was looking.

Giraffes’ heads stored behind the scenes as part of the zoology collections

At the end of the corridor a small door led to a narrow, dimly lit staircase. It looked as if nobody had passed this way for years. At the top of the stairs was another curious little door, which bore the legend
THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED
. What secrets could be hidden behind it to require such inviolability? It opened out into a broad atrium, and across the way were some huge photographs of insects—beetles, I believe—and a fine formal entrance with double mahogany doors, above which was the notice “Department of Entomology.” I had passed through the Zoology Department into the kingdom of the insects. Who could resist the region of the hexapod, the realm of a different Keeper, the habitat of another batch of experts all tucked away from the world in this secret place? Through the doors and beyond there lay another vast empire of the natural world, rank upon rank of cabinets bearing labels identifying the family of insects to which the specimens belonged. I knew that there were further floors above me, and I had a brief vision of swarms of insects beyond number, as in films I had seen of plagues of locusts. Around the perimeter of this huge squarish gallery there were offices with names on doors, Dr. This and Dr. That, all presumably the authorities on the insects in the drawers that lined up in their thousands in ranks in front of me. Perhaps it was not surprising that the drawers themselves were only half as deep as those I had opened in the Palaeontology Department, because insects are mostly rather small, and you can fit a lot into a confined space.

A tray of molluscs from the original Sloane collection, which formed the nucleus of the Natural History Museum

Still, opening one drawer at random, I was surprised to find that there were dozens of butterflies inside, all neatly lined up, as if they were brooches in a jeweller’s shop. Every butterfly was pinned tidily through its thorax, with wings spread out to display the fore and aft pairs, each wing shimmering with iridescence as if it had met its death only minutes ago deep in the Amazon rainforest. Some specimens were laid out to show the underneath of the wings instead, which were brown-blotched and mottled, although no less intricate than the dorsal surfaces, if less spectacular. As I pushed the drawer closed again, my gaze wandered along row upon row of similar ranks of drawers. Some part of me tried to do the arithmetic: there must have been about a hundred butterflies in the drawer I had been looking at. Multiply that by the number of drawers in the rank before me, and that number again by the number of cabinets—the mind soon began to reel as the noughts piled on. And to think that the butterfly specimens I happened to be examining were some of the largest and most spectacular of the Class Insecta—the Lepidoptera, the show-offs of the Entomology Department. To be sure, most insects are flies and small beetles, and maybe five times as many of these modest animals could be shunted away inside a single drawer. Many, many more of these insects must have been secreted away on other floors of the department. Hundreds of thousands soon became millions. I need hardly add that very few of these are on display.