Folk Work: Growing Up in the Past

Folk Work

What makes a curator? I never had a vocation until I had been doing what I do for several years. But I am a second-generation museum curator, as concerned with the representation of the past as my father George, the Roman archaeologist and numismatist, was for his working life and more. The Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes had a category for people like us; we are 'work folk'; we pursue the type of occupation that tends to run in families. For my children in the early '90s, a visit to 'grandpa's museum' seemed as natural as a trip to 'daddy's museum'. But I have never come across another curator who has followed a parent into the profession, so perhaps I am an exception disproving Geddes' rule. And I did not become a curator because I 'inherited the shop' or even because anyone particularly wanted me to work in a museum, least of all either of my parents or, consciously, me. We need a metaphorical extension of Geddes's mercurial and fragmentary world-view to illuminate this curious inheritance. Geddes proposed that the characteristics of place produced particular economic and cultural forms. Reflecting on my family inheritance, I am inclined to say that the 'place' my family inhabited was the past.

The eloquent phrase 'adrift in the present' seems to have been coined by the American essayist Wendell Berry to describe the state of those out of touch with the past. My parents, both classicists, by contrast created a family culture where the fourth dimension was ever present. Inevitably ours was a house full of books, including eighteenth and nineteenth-century editions of Latin texts bought cheap when George Boon was a student. The house's heartbeat was a long-case clock in the hall, probably Bristol made and in the Bristol-resident Boon family for generations. As a child I would look at the walnut veneer on the case and imagine it looked like the chest X-ray that I must have encountered in a children's alphabet book. In the way that a child makes sense of the world, it seemed right that the 'grandfather' clock should possess some of the anatomy of the flesh-and-blood grandfathers who had owned it. Family holidays were also taken in the past, most often holed up in provincial English market towns and consisting of a round of churches, castles, museums and second-hand bookshops. Sometimes the town was chosen because of an interesting archaeological excavation. We children would gaze uncomprehendingly into trenches, their meaning invisible to us, but knowing they had significance to the people my parents mysteriously already knew, even though we were five hours by train from home. The Boons, stubbornly unautomotive, travelled everywhere by train. And, almost inevitably, I was mad keen on railways, teased by my siblings for carting home discarded track components hunted out on walks along the closed railway line between Penarth and Lavernock. I pored over picture books of steam locomotives and, unwittingly, committed an encyclopaedia's worth of railway knowledge to memory.

Past and Present

I spent periods of my teenage years exploring the past of the Victorian South Welsh coastal town where I grew up. So at times I would prowl Penarth's overgrown docks, inherited camera in hand, relishing the sense of a place that had lost its purpose but which had not yet been superseded. (It has long since been redeveloped as a Marina.) I produced long sequences of pictures of industrial decay fit to bolster this adolescent's sense of identity, reflecting in miniature the moodiness of the post-punk late 1970s.

Growing-up in the sixties and seventies, my teenage enthusiasms were, however, invariably technical, and these alternated with my historical explorations. There were the long evenings in the cupboard under the stairs that served as a photographic darkroom. But I was also a fellow traveller of electropop in the years around 1980, as so faithfully rendered in BBC4's recent Synth Britannia programme. Always, it seems, there has been for me this dialectic between past and present and, it...