Cabinet of Curiosities

Now that I've been writing these blog posts for a while – 14 years, actually, which is rather more than a while – there are quite a few older ones that, if I were to write them now, I might well do differently. I've learned a lot about myself and my views by thinking about me and about them out loud and in public, as it were, and no doubt my ability to write has improved along the way, too. So at the moment I'm finding it an enjoyable exercise to find interesting posts that are more than a few years old and polish them up in the IH workshop to 2023 specifications. Expect to see more of these in future.

This one is a revised version of something I wrote in 2009. Our recent visit to Dorset, and the inevitable fresh haul of trophy rocks we brought back, reminded me of the central idea of that original post: that rocks and fossils can serve as both personal talismans and aides-mémoire. As with photographs, I find that in my case I can remember pretty much where and when and how each significant keeper was found, right back to the days of my childhood and the beginnings of my fossil-hoard ("collection" is far too grand a word for this unsystematic and unlabelled cabinet of curiosities).

A diabolical body-part

Six hundred or so years after the Reformation, the religious function of icons and relics is a distant and slightly queasy memory in England. The Protestant Tudors swept the whole paraphernalia of folksy religiosity into a bin labelled "Papist Nonsense", the lid of which was banged down firmly by the business-minded puritans of the English Revolution, and then sat on heavily by the puritanically-minded businessmen of the Industrial Revolution. The kissing of venerated bones is now about as un-English as you can get, although some – Ted Hughes, for one – have proposed that we have been in secret mourning for the loss of Merry Old pre-Reformation England ever since. Possibly; certainly, a few more public holidays would not go amiss. But getting intimate again with wizened body parts, ancient nails, and bits of timber, though? Not a chance. Although it will be interesting to see what our latest monarch makes of the latest Pope's coronation gift of two splinters of very old wood ("I saw[ed] these and thought of you").

Relics of the intimate life of celebrities past and present are still sought after by many, however. Locks of hair have always been popular for some reason, even before the advent of DNA paternity testing; I suppose that – unlike fingernails, bones, or teeth – hair is the only suitably flexible and non-compostable body-part to have hanging round your neck in polite company. Certainly, no visit to a stately home is complete without the opportunity to gaze into a glass-topped cabinet of "association" curiosities: a shrivelled orange that allegedly once passed through the hands (but not the digestive system) of Florence Nightingale sticks in my mind. The recent book by Warren Ellis inspired by a piece of gum chewed by Nina Simone and retrieved by Ellis at a concert in 1999 shows that the reliquary instinct is far from dead, even if the saints are rather more secular these days.

Personally, I have formed strong bonds with certain bits of rock; fossils, mainly. It all started when I was quite young. The glaciers that ground across England, smoothing off the gnarlier features of the landscape, eventually passed through the high chalk valleys where I grew up, before finally giving an icy shrug in the face of climate change and retreating back north, dropping flinty treasures from their overstuffed pockets into the topsoil as they went. As a boy with the innate collector's urge to gather up nature's leftovers I began to fill a bedroom drawer with them. A fossil sea urchin might turn up on a garden spade; I was given a perfect heart-and-star Micraster by my godparents, spotted in the chalky rubble of a new underpass being excavated near their house. More common were those ridgy shell ashtrays known as "devil's toenails", and the occasional spent bullet of a belemnite. Partial, perfect, or bumped and battered, they all went into the drawer.

On one memorable day, walking through the little copse behind our house, I knocked a stone lying at the side of the path with my shoe and it rolled over to reveal a fossil cockle shell, identical to the ones in the seafood man's van that trawled our street for business on a Saturday night, and just like the illustrations in my Children's Big Book of Fossil Porn [1], seductively half-concealed within its flinty matrix. I cannot exaggerate the importance to me of that accidental find; it felt like an almighty wink from the universe, a reassurance that something, somehow, was on my side. Or maybe, after I'd grown up a bit and learned a few life-lessons, that something, somehow, was inclined to have a bit of fun when it could spare me a minute.

My father had a stone, too. I still have it. It's a quartzite pebble, about the size and weight of a billiard ball, mottled with rusty reds and blueish veins. It lived permanently in our sideboard drawer, and always reminded me of the backs of his hands, in which slate-blue stone chippings were still milkily visible, embedded as a result of a war-time motorbike tumble in Egypt. Why had he kept this stone? It seems that one day in 1941 he had a close encounter when driving a lone truck in the Libyan Desert (he was a despatch rider, and they had realised pretty quickly that motorbikes were useless on desert terrain). Here it is as he told it in the memoir I encouraged him to write in old age:

A few days later I was approaching a slope which was the only way up an escarpment which rose sheer from the desert, a few burnt-out vehicles scattered around should have warned me to keep a sharp look-out, but as I got close to the slope a Gerry fighter-plane buzzed me. I went into the drill, hand brake on, ignition off and a running jump out and as much space as possible between me and the truck. The plane returned a few times and gave a few short bursts, but did no damage. I was tucked into the corner of the escarpment and as he came by I got off some shots with my revolver, until it was empty, he came back again and I was so angry that I picked up a stone to throw, but he turned and banked away and disappeared. For some reason I must have tucked the stone into my pocket, and later decided to keep it, which I have to this day. Much later I wondered how a polished stone shaped rather like a small hen's egg came to be in an area where everything was very hard and like slate (very difficult to dig through in a hurry, there were a few inches of sand on the surface, but underneath was a layer of hard packed shale, sometimes a pick would just rebound off it!). Near to this spot I found two graves with crosses and British steel helmets; they were two Hussars, I assume from a tank unit. The graves were well made and had large stones round the edges, with a note in German on each cross, so I assume that the Germans had carried out the burial.

It's not exactly a "lucky stone". I don't think Dad believed in luck, or that anyone would have characterised his post-war life as lucky, although he was easy-going enough (and perhaps wise enough) to have disagreed. So I doubt that stone acted as anything but a reminder of one of a number of occasions when the luckiest thing possible seemed merely still to be alive and in one piece. So, apart from his album of wartime photographs [2], it was pretty much the only object I had to make absolutely sure that I rescued from his residual belongings when he died in 2008.

Here is one of the photos from that album. The caption on the back, in my father's writing, reads: "Convoy, Pyramids in back, That's me waving". I have always found this a picture of pure exhilaration. When I was small, I could imagine that my Dad could see me, and was waving to me. Somehow, now that he's gone, and knowing so much more now about the truth and the magic of photography, I find I can believe that again.

1. Actually British Fossils, by Duncan Forbes, published in Black's Young Naturalist series, 3rd ed., 1961.

2. Not taken by him. Some other DR in his unit, or perhaps an officer, must have been a keen photographer, and documented their passage from Dunkirk, through the Western Desert, to India and eventually Burma. It's quite a document, which I will probably eventually donate to the Imperial War Museum in London.