The Museum of the Republic

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of national heritage, assembled from the rubbish.

The front room of No. 4½, cleared. Objects on shelves, each with a little card. The bucket, dripping, on a plinth.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Museum of the Republic; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, founds a national collection, and discovers his greatest treasure belongs to Mercy Crimp, who would like it back for the tea.

Interior. The front room. HORACE, curatorial, arranging a boot on a shelf. MERCY in the doorway.

HORACE. Mercy. You are standing in the National Museum of the Republic of Dudgeon. Mind the exhibits.

MERCY. It's the front room, Horace. That's a boot.

HORACE. (reading the card) "The Boot of State. Worn, it is believed, by a President, on an occasion of importance." A nation, Mercy, must have a heritage. A people with no museum is a people with no past, and a people with no past can be told anything. (indicating the plinth) The centrepiece: the Republic's Ceremonial Bucket. Still, note, in active service. Living history.

MERCY. It's dripping on the good floor.

HORACE. It weeps, Mercy, for the nation.

SFX: the door. REED-BED FRED, purveyor of antiquities dug up on Thursdays, enters with a sack and the manner of a man doing you a favour.

FRED. Morning, President. Heard you was collecting. (tipping out the sack) Now. You'll want provenance. Here — a pre-Flood spoon, genuine, very old, I dug it up myself only this — (catches himself) — only centuries ago. And a fragment of the True Original Sump Lane Milestone. And — (reverently) — this.

HORACE. (breathless) What is it?

FRED. No idea. That's what makes it a relic. Two shillings. Three, if you want a card saying what it isn't.

HORACE. (paying eagerly) The spoon — is it — could it be the Found Spoon? The one lost from the Kalendar since 1731? To exhibit the Found Spoon, Fred — the realm would —

FRED. (smoothly) Could well be, President. Nobody can prove it ain't. And in the antiquities line, boy, "nobody can prove it ain't" is as good as a deed.

MERCY. (flat) It's got "M. Crimp" scratched on the handle, Fred. That's my grandmother's teaspoon. You had it off the dresser last Thursday.

FRED. (unruffled) ...Then it's a documented piece. Even better. Provenance, see.

AUBREY VANE arrives, ledger in hand, to certify whether the Museum legally exists.

VANE. I'm told there is a Museum. If it exists, I must record it. If I record it, it exists. (surveying) ...A boot. A dripping bucket. A spoon marked "M. Crimp." A relic that is, by its own card, unidentifiable. (sighs) Mr Dudgeon, a museum requires at least one object of genuine and acknowledged worth. Have you anything here that a person would truly cross the parish to see?

HORACE. (faltering) The — the Boot of State —

VANE. Is a boot.

HORACE. The relic that is a relic because nobody —

VANE. Is a stone, Mr Dudgeon.

A pause. And then MERCY, who has come in with the tea things, sets down the kettle on the exhibit shelf without thinking, to free her hands.

VANE. (stopping dead) ...What is that.

HORACE. (dismissive) That? That is merely Mercy's kettle, it is not part of the —

VANE. (approaching it with real feeling) ...That kettle has boiled, I should say, forty thousand times. Look at the char on it. The dent where it's been set down hard by a tired hand, ten thousand nights. The lid that's been lifted so often the hinge has worn smooth. (quietly) This, Mr Dudgeon, is the only object in your Museum that anyone has ever loved. It has kept this house warm and watered through every winter of your Republic. (beat) That I would cross the parish to see. Certify it, and you have a museum.

HORACE. (seizing it, triumphant) Then it is the centrepiece! The National Kettle! Fred — a plinth! A card! "The Heart of the Republic —"

MERCY. (taking it firmly back out of his hands) — is making the tea in ten minutes, Horace, and every night after, because that's what it's for. (beat) You can't museum a thing that's still needed. That's the trouble with your whole collection. Everything worth keeping is still in use.

A long pause. VANE closes his ledger, oddly moved.

VANE. ...She's right, you know. That's the truest label in the room. (to Horace, gently) You've built a museum of things nobody wanted, Mr Dudgeon, and left out the one thing anybody would grieve — because it was too busy being loved to be exhibited. (beat) I can't certify a museum. But I'll certify that: a house where the treasures are all still in service. It's a rarer thing than a museum, and there's no card for it.

Interior. The kitchen. The kettle, restored to the range, singing. HORACE, subdued, holding the Boot of State.

HORACE. (quietly) ...The greatest exhibit in my Museum, Mercy, turned out to be your kettle, and I could not keep it, because you needed it to make the tea. (pause) There is something in that I shall be a while chewing.

MERCY. (pouring) Chew it over a cup, then. Out the thing itself. (fond, flat) That's the National Kettle you're drinking out of, mind. Behave.

HORACE. (with reverence, sipping) ...It is an honour.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented The Museum of the Republic. The collection has been quietly returned to the dresser, the drain, and the feet. The National Kettle is in active service and declines to retire. In Sogmarsh, the things worth keeping are the things too loved to put behind glass.

The kettle sings. Slow fade.

— end —