Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (18 page)

The Gayer-Anderson cat

It is seated upright, seventeen inches tall, an improbable cat in that its front legs are unrealistically long, but otherwise entirely catlike, sinuous, elegant, prick-eared, its back legs invisible beneath its haunches, its tail lying straight alongside. It has a powerful presence – its cavernous eye sockets seem to stare enigmatically. It wears gilt earrings and a nose-ring, a silver necklet, and there is a winged scarab on its chest and another on its forehead.

The original is a familiar presence in the Egyptian hall of the British Museum. Mine is a replica, sold by the Museum’s shop and a Christmas present from Jack over twenty years ago. The shop still sells them, online, for £450. Not as much, I trust, back then. The cat is a representation of the cat goddess Bastet, likely to have been a votive statue, and dates from what Egyptologists call the Late Period – about 664–332
BC
. For the Museum, it is one of its most iconic objects, much viewed and admired, and, as I write, I learn from the Internet that it is on loan this year to the Shetland Museum at Lerwick. You can’t get much further than that from ancient Egypt.

The cat was given to the Museum by Major R. G. Gayer-Anderson, who had collected it in Egypt in the 1930s along with much else by way of Egyptian antiquities – 7,500 items of all periods were given to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge by him and his twin brother. A sizeable haul, back in the days when scooping up antiquities from Egyptian traders was a favorite activity of foreign visitors. Today, removal of antiquities is strictly forbidden; you can’t – or shouldn’t – smuggle out so much as a potsherd.

Gayer-Anderson acquired the cat from a dealer and went to work on it to get rid of the accumulated surface incrustations, and to repair some of the damage it had suffered. His repairs seem to have been reasonably skillful but the cleaning process rather too enthusiastic; the original surface is now lost, and its present appearance – that gleaming greenish-black – is not what it would have been when it was created.

Gayer-Anderson was a friend of my London grandparents, and family legend has it that when he came back to England after his long residence in Egypt he loaned the cat to my grandmother for a while before giving it to the Museum, and it formed the centerpiece of her dining-room table at 76 Harley Street (my grandfather had been a surgeon in the days when such medical people owned an entire Harley Street house, and brought up their families there).

I wonder if this is true. Neal Spencer, in his booklet for the Museum on the cat, gives an account of its movements after it arrived in England which makes the family story somewhat unlikely, on the face of it. The cat seems to have spent the late 1930s and the war period in a sealed wooden box in the vault of Lloyds Bank in Lavenham, Suffolk, while a lady called Mary Stout, a friend of Gayer-Anderson and temporary custodian of the cat, argued with the Museum about the terms of the bequest. But . . . it is possible; there may have been some interlude when it ended up with my grandmother – she was certainly also a close friend, and this legend must have sprung from somewhere.

By the time I came to that house, in 1945, the cat was gone – if ever it was there – and Gayer-Anderson had died. But I had met him as a child, in Egypt, when my mother and I were occasionally invited to tea at the Bayt al-Kritiliya, the restored seventeenth-century Mameluke house in old Cairo where he lived and which he had made a sort of Arabian Nights incarnate with its fountains, mashrabiya windows, oriental furnishings. The tea served was conventional English afternoon tea, but the rest was exotic, magical; I adored it. Alas, of Gayer-Anderson Pasha (the honorific bestowed on him by King Farouk) I remember little. Large, jolly – that is the impression.

He had lived in Egypt for many years, having been seconded to the Egyptian army from the Royal Army Medical Corps after training as a doctor. There, he became Egyptian Recruiting Officer, and, later, Oriental Secretary to the High Commission – the British High Commission in Cairo, that is. This must mean some kind of adviser, I suppose – the man who knows a lot about how things operate around here. Gayer-Anderson probably did, and described himself as an Orientalist – that now somewhat discredited term. He contributed to a memoir of my Harley Street surgeon grandfather, and described their initial meeting at Gallipoli in 1915, on the Base Depot Ship
Aragon
, over a dinner with “many a good yarn capped by a better.” My grandfather was notoriously genial, and a raconteur, and they clearly hit it off, all amid the carnage of the Gallipoli campaign, with my grandfather honing his surgical skills when not breaking off for a convivial evening.

They met up again a bit later in Cairo, where Gayer-Anderson showed my grandfather around and described him as “unfailingly courteous and considerate” toward Egyptians of all classes “as is not always the case with Europeans.” I’m rather pleased to hear that, and I note Gayer-Anderson’s implied disapproval of the prevailing attitudes of the day; he was only too right, and it was much the same twenty years or so later, when I was growing up there.

So what does the Gayer-Anderson cat mean to me, staring inscrutable from one corner of my book-room? Its presence, first and foremost; even this replica has a force field – your eye is drawn to it, sitting in that room I feel as though I am not alone. Despite being unrealistic it is essentially catlike – not so much related to the comfortable complacent domestic cat we all know but to some more ancient, self-sufficient, prototype cat. I am reminded of the paper-thin feral cats of Cairo that I saw when last I went there, flitting the streets like ghost creatures. Perhaps they are just that, ghosts of all those cats turned into mummies in Pharaonic times – eviscerated, wrapped, stacked up in their thousands in animal cemeteries as tributes to the god.

I find myself responding to religions that recognize animals – that revere animals, indeed. Ancient Egypt above all, with each god having his or her own dedicated species. But it is universal in time and space, animal worship, animal respect. Christians and Muslims seem the only people to have abandoned it. We use animals – eat them, farm them, labor them – but we have lost touch with that elemental instinct to accord them status. We may abuse them less – in some parts of the world – but we can’t any longer see them as totemic, as imbued with individual significance: ibis, crocodile, hawk, bull, bear, monkey, serpent. And cat. My cat reminds me of that loss.

It is an emblematic cat, then – essence of cat. And it is also, for me, a cat that resonates in time and space, within my own time-span and beyond; it speaks of that tall house in Harley Street, of a Mameluke house in Cairo, of a ship anchored off Gallipoli in 1915.

Elizabeth Barker’s sampler

It is dated 1788. I doubt if Elizabeth Barker was a child; children usually give their age, on a sampler. No, a grown-up, I think, and while her sampler is not especially accomplished, it is pleasing, with text surrounded by stylized trees with birds and butterflies, and, below, two small stags and a pair of even smaller dogs, one brown, one black. It is the black dog that perhaps makes this my favorite sampler, along with the fact that it is the only one I have from the eighteenth century. The feisty little stitched black dog stands out, demanding attention from 1788.

At some point, way back, I thought I would start a sampler collection. I rapidly ran out of steam, partly because this proved a somewhat expensive undertaking, but also, I think, the commitment waned. So I have just eight samplers. I am still interested in, attracted by, samplers, but I feel a certain ambivalence. One of mine claims to be the work of: “Sarah Nottage. In her 7th year. 1836.” I sincerely hope it wasn’t. If six-year-old fingers really toiled over that canvas, made those tiny stitches, then that was child abuse. I hope – and suspect – that an adult hand helped out, at the very least.

Sarah’s text is a standard one:

Food, raiment, dwelling, health and friends

Thou, Lord, has made our lot

With Thee our bliss begins and ends

As we are Thine, or not.

And so forth for two more verses . . . Piety is always the textual note.

Anna Maria Stacey, aged ten, in 1846, has:

Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand

As the first effort of an infant hand . . .

Which is straight out of the pattern books from which both texts and designs were taken. Pious sentiments, and formal designs of trees, flowers, animals, which may form a border round the edge, or motifs within. In a child’s sampler, there is often an alphabet somewhere.

All of mine are fairly run-of-the-mill samplers. One is a map of England, another popular choice. All are worked in basic cross-stitch, and none have the elaborate originality of Victoria & Albert Museum quality samplers, as I realized when I looked into the matter once. In fact, the most interesting is perhaps the least immediately appealing – not well laid out, rather crudely worked. But the text is odd:

Then ill [I’ll] be not proud of my youth or my beauty since both of them wither and fade but [be?] in a good name by well doing my duty this will scent like a rose when I am dead.

Entirely secular; no religious sentiment. What is going on here? The next line is the key: “This was done at New Lanark School by Janet Martin aged 11 years. Finished her sampler 7 April 1813.”

What is going on here is the first breath of utopian socialism. Robert Owen – the industrialist and social reformer. New Lanark cotton mills in southern Scotland came under Owen’s management in 1800. Thinker and philanthropist, he believed in the alleviation of poverty through socialism, and had conspicuously rejected formal religion: “all religions are based on the same ridiculous imagination, that make man a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite.” So, no “Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand . . .” in his school, and the very existence of a school on that industrial site is a testimony to enlightenment.

I don’t know where I acquired this, and I didn’t realize its significance until some time later, deciphering that puzzling, awkwardly stitched text, and thinking: oh! New Lanark! Robert Owen! That sampler should be my favorite, for its historical and ideological freight, but I’m afraid Elizabeth Barker’s little black dog has always elbowed it aside.

Samplers have had a further, personal relevance. My Somerset grandmother made one of her home and its setting, an exquisite, original design that shows the house, the garden pond with frogs and dragonflies, the white fantail pigeons, the dogs, the horses in the stables and, at the bottom, a row of small embroidered children – the wartime evacuees. She finished it in 1941, and it is my most treasured possession; an heirloom, indeed. Furthermore, set against my routinely worked nineteenth-century samplers, this is in a different league. My grandmother’s work is indeed of Victoria & Albert Museum quality.

Her design was creative, elaborate, ingenious. She used not just basic cross-stitch but a wide variety of stitches, thus giving depth and texture to her piece. And she worked with specially dyed wools in a subtle palette of blues, greens, buff, and a soft plum color.

Is this art or craft? And wherein lies the distinction, anyway? My grandmother had done fine needlework all her life: drawn-thread work, Assisi work with silks, Winchester wool work. The essence of this is craft, I suppose, but she had always created her own designs – not a pattern book in the house. And with the sampler it seems to me that craft segues into art, if what is implied is a grander concept, an enhanced vision. Her sampler is an embroidered painting, a fond and sometimes witty image of a place, executed with elegance and imagination. I am always a little awed by it, knowing I could never have aspired to such work myself.

The leaping fish sherd