Swansea museum a prose poem

 Swansea Museum

http://www.swanseamuseum.co.uk

Water babies in the river of time. My dad and I enter through the tall coffin shaped doors, pale and varnished at the top of the wide stone steps. A cold hush welcomes our wide eyes. With a nod to the doorman we walk down a few steps, turn a corner and the first room on the right has glass cases full of stuffed birds. All are holding branches in place, or so it seems, and each has its name printed on a white card. Wonder sat still and as dead as a last drawn breath. Not a sound; birdsong absent without leaves. Then there at the end of the room a barrier rail to lean on. Beyond is a dead Welsh kitchen with manakins dressed of old. See the black-leaded ‘range’ enclosing the fire with its cast iron oven for baking and the black kettle hanging above the false flames. The mantelpiece, the table, the crockery and the hooks. Something about it reminded me of our kitchen at home. What a funny place this is, that my dad has brought me to see. Birds that I could see outside (well most of them ~ certainly not the golden eagle!) and a kitchen as dead as the grave.

Further on we enter a room full of glass display cases with examples of pristine Swansea china. Blue designs and china as white as dried bones. Probably before the Industrial Revolution decimated the Swansea valley. They look forlorn without anyone to handle them onto a dining table.

There! Look there! Up on the wall a fossilised ichthyosaur, well that is what it says on the plaque dad said as we climbed the stone stairs with the shiny wooden hand rail above the painted wrought iron. Big stairs! There on the halfway landing a huge stone receptacle that was full of pale light from the many-paned window. On and up slowly to enter the mummy room, with the sacred sarcophagus held open to reveal a real embalmed mummy. Here in Swansea ancient history was inches away from a child’s wild imagination. The pale gold wrapping looked so threadbare tired one wonders how it could hold one’s attention and inclination to flee. 

Then there was the dry room with the resounding wooden floor that had glazed display tables down the centre and wall cupboards that hoarded every artefact of the Red Lady of Paviland. Her remains were found in Goat’s Hole cave on the Gower. That is where I was born I thought ~ not the cave but at Stouthall Gower. This lady also lived there so many years ago, and died before I was born. It was all a strata of historical perspective that was not labelled on any glass case, but was a fact I took home free of charge that day. Even dad did not see me take it.

 Moth balls and camphor spilled from the large thin drawers in the tall cabinets. There flight was pinned stunned by the display of moths and butterflies. Not the ones my cousin and I chase across the meadows but these dusty beauties that itched to have the glass broken so that they could feel the air just one more time. We closed them with an addiction to open each one just in case.

The sunlight bathed the museum that morning as we stepped outside onto the grass area around the museum. There were the machines that pumped the oil in the oil works, all painted resplendent in reds and greens. Yet again, nothing moved ~ no animated displays in those days, and yet a feeling stirred in a young lad deep across the oceans of longing to know more of these past times. To be at the fulcrum of the tug of war between the past and the future. To know exactly where we came from and why things were and are as they are. The word museum burst into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. 

We went back many times.  

Nothing ever changed except that everything had.