Home life
Body search
Alice Thomas Ellis
The daughter and I and her friend Anna went off to the British Museum on Saturday to look at Pete Marsh only we couldn't find him. We couldn't find Old Ginger either. I kept approaching officials intending to find out where these dead people had been positioned and then re- fraining out of some obscure sense of delicacy. It seemed too ghoulish to go flying around simply looking for bodies. Last time I was in a museum was in Cairo and a guide with a gun slung over his shoulder (there were big notices every- where forbidding the public to address one single word to these guides so I guess their function was other than to direct one to Tutankhamun) beckoned us aside, and whispered that if we crept round the back of a certain sarcophagus we would be able to see the body because the outer casing had a hole in it. So we did and we couldn't. As far as we could tell there wasn't anything in there at all. We were rather disappointed.
Our little party then got distracted by the Assyrians and their winged monsters and fruitless speculation as to what it must have been like living in those times. A bit alarming I should imagine, although I don't suppose they had to fill in as many forms as we do. Of course I shouldn't like to be in a fold with the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on it, but I sometimes think death might be preferable to coping with the reams of paperwork of which so much of our present existence seems to consist. If our government scribes had to chisel out their silly and impertinent ques- tions on basalt I bet that would serve as a disinducement to them.
I put aside these bitter reflections when we came to a colossal pot in a glass case. I have a passion for enormous earthenware containers but this one was really over the top. What could its purpose be, I won- dered. It was certainly not intended to hold a bunch of flowers. When in doubt, I told myself, read the instructions. With me this involves donning the spectacles and then remembering to take them off before venturing a further step, because if I attempt to walk while wearing them I always fall over which embarrasses the children. The author of the instructions was none too clear about the function of the pot either. He thought it must have been made in sections because it was huge, and he thought it might have been in- tended as a storage jar for grain or olive oil, and he thought that, in the end, it might have been used to put dead people in. I removed the spectacles and stood back to consider this proposition. The jar has a very narrow top and 1 couldn't think how they would have got their grain or olive oil out of it. It would have taken at least four strong men to tip it up when the time came to make a little vinaigrette or whatever, and I could not begin to think how they would have got a body in it. All chopped up in weensy bits? Ugh. When bodies are cremated they require no larger container than a cocoa tin so the whole thing was most confusing.
We then moved on until we came to another pottery container. 'That', I said in a psychic flash, 'is a bath. And I bet you anything you like they used to bury bodies in it too.' The daughter protested that it was too small to be a bath and I said it was a sitz-bath. Slapping the specs back in place I stepped closer to peruse the card, and I was absolutely right. I really can't think how I came so quickly to the correct conclusion, because after all it would not occur to us nowadays to bury our loved ones in the bath — or stuff them in the cruet, come to that. The past is very, very peculiar or else the interpreters of it have got it a bit wrong. We will never exactly know and I find it frustrating. Next time I'm going straight to Pete Marsh who can't be any more of a memento mori than the rest of the museum, or perhaps we'll take a picnic to the cemetery and at least get some fresh air while we ponder the Last Enemy.
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