HAPPENINGS
IN A MUSEUM

Roma Tearne,
Artist-in-Residence.

A Report on Conditions in Antiquities

Walking in, on a bright autumnal afternoon in October there is no hint of the museum’s other life. A life, nevertheless, that is startlingly evident on the brief days when it is closed. Then, in the partial gloom, everything seems different somehow.  Less remote maybe, more eloquent perhaps. Shadows, formed without the flat glare of spotlights, mark the times of day. Staff move softly, like priests amongst their shrines, carrying baskets, removing, replacing, or constantly examining objects in some enigmatic communion with the past. The centuries, on such ordered days belong to themselves.

It was on just such a Monday morning that a curious and inexplicable incident occurred. Such was the meditative calm of these closed-to-the-public days that no one registered the incident. Sometime between 8.30 a.m. and 8.45 a.m. (no one can be precisely sure) a monk was seen washing the floor in and around the medieval gallery. At least three members of staff witnessed this but, astonishingly, no one thought to question him. By 9 a.m. when an attendant switched on the lights in the gallery he had vanished without a trace. The attendant noticed that the floor was very wet and a peculiar smell hung in the air. More mysteriously, that night, a curtain of bone-handled fish knives tied with linen appeared in the false arch above the entrance to the medieval gallery. A small plaque below the capitals read simply:

‘Who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the saints at All Hallows’.

The date was 31 October. All Souls' night.