Anecdote – The Natural History Museum nearly changed my life!

The Natural History Museum nearly changed my life!

I was nuts about animals and my little friend Billy Mason was nuts about fossils and minerals. We were ten years old and eager for knowledge. The most exciting place on the planet for both of us was the Natural History Museum in Kensington. We loved it.

So, very regularly, sometimes once a week, we would take ourselves up to London and spend a day going round the museum. We were systematic, well Billy was systematic, and so we always selected two galleries to go round. We looked at everything in detail.

Billy was a strange boy. He didn’t like football or playing games. He liked collecting fossils, writing out Latin names for the specimens we collected, storing them neatly in boxes in his ‘museum’, and doing weird experiments. His bedroom was full of all weird stuff. He had a shelf with big flat-bottomed round flasks on it. They were full of yellowy brown liquid. I asked him what they were and he told me that it was his urine. He had heard that it would change into ammonia so he was storing it to see if it did. He also had a tiny phial of what looked like congealed milk. He told me that he had collected it from lactating mice. I believed him. He was capable of anything. But I learnt a lot from Billy.

One of Billy’s favourite rooms in the Natural History Museum was the mineral collection. He used to delight in pointing out all the different crystals and how many facets they had. I was impressed with the giant quartz crystals, the Derbyshire spar and the incredible bright yellow sulphur. But my favourite was stuffed animals. They had a great Auk and Dodo. I enjoyed looking at them and imagining them in the wild. I was already disgusted with the tales of how the sailors had wiped out the naïve, trusting Dodos and slaughtered the whales. I was horrified at what they did to the poor turtles. Cruelty outraged me.

One day we were looking at this display. It was of all the things found in an Emperor Penguin’s gullet. There were lots of small stones and pieces of rock. This man was standing listening to us arguing about it. He asked why penguins ate bits of rock. We explained to him about the stones helping break up food so that it could be digested and probably there were minerals in the rocks that would be useful in shell construction. He seemed impressed that two young kids could come up with these theories. He took us to the canteen and bought us both a bottle of pop and some chocolate. We were delighted and bought him a pack of cigs in return (how times change). He was very friendly and we got on great. He seemed so impressed with us and how much we knew about animals and fossils. We arranged to meet up the following week.

Back home I eagerly told my mum and dad about the kind gentleman we had met. Alarm bells rang. We never made that meeting and I do not remember ever going back with Billy again. My parents put their foot firmly down.

I reckon they ruined my life. Billy and I thought the pleasant gentleman was probably a learned professor, a naturalist; he could even have been David Attenborough! If we had gone back he might have taken us under his wing and our lives might have been transformed. There again he might have taken us home and our lives might have been transformed in another way.

We’ll never know.

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