For Wilfred, who was ready at the same time as this
book, and for Gordon, Charlie and Tom who inspire
us every day with their courage and strength
Note on the Powell – Cotton Museum
I first fell in love with the Powell-Cotton Museum, in Birchington, Kent, when I was three years old. Back then it was a magical zoo, one where the animals never duck out of sight or hide in the back of their cages. I accepted Major Percy Powell-Cotton’s Victorian ideas of conservation in the spirit with which they were meant and, much as he’d intended, I learnt about Africa and Asia, about wild animals, and about other lifestyles and cultures from his exhibits. Percy Powell-Cotton put his collection together with an, albeit misguided by modern standards, ecological intention. He wanted the people of Kent to see these animals in their natural habitat and to understand the importance – and the potential – of the wider world.
In 2012 I moved back to Kent, where I grew up, and my love affair with the house, museum, and gardens rekindled. I was lucky enough to meet Susan Johnson, Percy’s great-granddaughter, who told me so much more of the incredible stories behind her family and their legacy and it was that deeper knowledge that made me determined to write about a fictional version of the Powell-Cotton Museum, its grounds, and its collections.
Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton was born in 1866 and established his museum in 1896, adding the animal specimens and cultural objects to collections his family had begun a century before. Consequently, the collection is one of the most diverse and interesting in Europe: from Napoleon’s childhood drawings, to a canon from the Mary Rose.
Percy met his wife, Hannah, when she was appointed to help him with his papers and journals. They embarked on a trip – part African expedition, part honeymoon and married in Nairobi Cathedral. There is a theory (and one I very much favour) that Edgar Rice-Burroughs first got the idea for Tarzan and Jane from a newspaper story about Percy and Hannah and their life in the wilds. As Andrew Joynes writes in his biography Tracking the Major, ‘there are a number of themes common to Hannah’s tabloid account of her real-life jungle honeymoon and the setting of the Tarzan story. It is a startling coincidence that Tarzan, the jungle child, was the heir of the Greystoke family: Hannah’s husband, the Major, had been the heir of Quex.’ and that Hannah herself had collaborated on an article headed ‘Keeping House in the Boundless Wilds’ for the British Press.
There are so many wild and wonderful stories in the Powell-Cotton Museum: of Percy narrowly escaping death from a lion attack because of a rolled-up copy of Punch in his pocket; of his daughters – as a doctor and a nurse – accompanying him on many trips at a time when women did nothing of the kind; or the soldiers who came to convalesce at Quex, following injuries in the First World War. As Joynes reports in his biography: ‘The next morning Diana and Mary found some fifty wounded Belgian soldiers laid out in rows in front of the wildlife dioramas in the African galleries. Mute with morphine, traumatised by battle, the men gazed at the elephant, and the aardvark, the rhinoceros and the forest pig.’
Please do try and visit the Powell-Cotton Museum in its home on the Quex Estate in Birchington-on-Sea. Although you might not find Cate and Leo, a chapel or a domed library, you will find boundless magic and wonder.
Tracking the Major, Andrew Joynes, 2016, is published by Mickle Print (Canterbury) Limited.
Chapter One
A house absorbs happiness, it blooms into the wallpaper, the wood of the window frames, the bricks: that’s how it becomes a home. The people in it are movable, exchangeable: one set of hugs and shouts and words of love easily swapped for another. I am packing up our lives into cardboard boxes, folding away that happiness, those memories. It makes me want to turn to someone, anyone, and talk about Leo’s paintings, old gig tickets of Richard’s, postcards sent to me by friends, but it’s just me – all alone with the shriek of the tape gun as it zips up the boxes.
Everything is changing: the school term ended yesterday – my last term as a teacher, at least in the job I’ve been in for over twenty years. I am ‘redundant’: I don’t know yet how far into my life that word will stretch, how many parts it will cover. I am also – much more concerning as it involves my son every bit as much as it does me – homeless.
Leo has gone swimming with our neighbour and her daughter. The boxes and the bubble wrap have been making him feel unsettled. He’d be far worse if he’d seen the emails and the letters, but they’re my responsibility – and mine alone. There is a special anger that comes with impotence; with the basic failure to provide for your family. It is worse when that failure is caused by someone else, someone who had promised to be there and to help and to share the burden, someone who hasn’t upheld their side of that bargain.
Instead, I think, I’m supposed to be grateful that Richard’s family have offered us a place to go.
The offer is grudging. There have been letters backwards and forwards from solicitors. There have been emails of questions that are never answered, at least, not in any straightforward way: no promises, no reassurance. I have googled and searched, I have looked on maps and at faded postcards, but there’s very little information to be found about ‘Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World’. Today is the day that I finally get to speak to the ‘old family retainer’, to inform her that we’ll be joining her at the museum – or at least in the apartments above it – for the whole of this summer: until I find a new job and a new home for my son and me.
I’ve said I’ll ring at noon. Leo and I had a late breakfast – now that my schedule isn’t a daily drama of juggling school and home, and trying to get us both out of the door on time, I can do that – so I’m not hungry yet. Instead, I’ve made a coffee and set it down on a packing box marked ‘dining room, unnecessary’. Already I’ve forgotten what’s in that box or why I’ve kept it if it’s ‘unnecessary’. I found some biscuits at the back of a kitchen cupboard earlier: they’re out of date but unopened. I test one on my teeth and they’re fine so I’ll have a couple with my coffee. That’ll see me through till teatime when Leo gets home and I have to cook for both of us.
I arranged to call today because the landline is disconnected at midnight and then I’ll only have my mobile. It’s strange that I won’t have the same number that I’ve put down on forms and contact sheets for the last ten years. As I understand it, I won’t have a number of my own at all – apart from the mobile. It makes me feel unsettled: I’m not from the generation that exists solely through cell phones. What if I can’t get a signal?
I have no way of knowing whether there’s a signal in the house or not, or how isolated it is: Richard mostly refused to discuss his family home and I certainly can’t ask him now. He hated the place and so we’ve never even visited: he said it’s cold and draughty and miserable.
I’ve been curious over the years – and especially since Richard went – but one thing and another, and real life, and work and responsibility have conspired to keep me away. Almost every weekend for the last few years, I’ve intended to throw Leo in the car and go and look at this place, at Richard’s childhood and Leo’s inheritance, but it’s never worked out that way. In London, we have had too many friends to see, too many things to do, too many full and happy weekends. In my mind’s eye, in a sketch drawn from his very limited descriptions, it is gothic and decrepit, over-grown and covered in clinging spidery ivy; dotted with grey panes of glass that stare like blind eyes onto rusted iron gates at the end of the drive. Where we live now, in the heart of a London that is steadily being gentrified, there are lots of strange old buildings – hospitals, schools, fire stations, that have been converted into flats – and they’re all gorgeous. How bad can it be?