Circus

by Claire Battershill

  Needless to say, Jemima’s juvenilia were steps towards a more refined version of her craft. After Barnaby’s dollhouse came miniatures of each of the seven wonders in succession. At first she relied on mail-order catalogues for pre-made dolls and tiny rolltop desks and stove-top kettles. These she combined with more inventive furnishings of her own construction made from seashells, beach glass, and elastic bands.

  You’ll notice as we work our way through the exhibits that over her career as a miniaturist, Jemima’s creations became smaller and smaller. By 1988 she was working with a laboratory-quality microscope and using implements designed for the dissection of insect wings. The smallest artifacts you’ll see in the museum are in this display to our right, which has been set up with microscopes so that you can appreciate the intricacy of these late works. If you take a peek – yes, don’t be shy! Have a good look! – you’ll see a lighthouse made out of a grain of rice. Then, next to it in the display case are four balsa-wood elephants and a plastic elephant trainer inside the eye of a needle. Finally, you have a summer cottage that’s no larger than a crystal of sea salt. By the time she was working at this minute scale, it took Jemima six months to produce one figurine. The cottage, for example, consists of 107 individual polymer clay pieces, which are completely invisible to the naked eye. Legend has it that she spent a year and a half rendering the shell of an oyster, complete with a single pearl, only to have it vanish when she sneezed.

  I’d like us to pause by the second display here. Why don’t you find a spot with a good view? This magnificent house, which you’ll see is larger than most of the miniatures in the museum, has six rooms and measures exactly two feet tall from the tip of the roof to the foundations. In order to fully appreciate the craftsmanship, I’d like to take you through each room. To offer you a tour within the tour, so to speak, and make sure that you appreciate the key details that set these models apart from your average child’s plaything.

  I always begin with this particular building because it’s my favourite. It’s not the most lavish – that would have to be the Taj Mahal – nor is it the most complicated – the English country manor to our right might take that title on account of the fully functional watermill. The museum is not organized chronologically. We’ve gone for a thematic approach: dollhouses and domestic spaces here on the ground floor, natural and man-made wonders upstairs, and in the attic is outer space and the ocean. Other tour guides might organize the visit differently, starting with the European castles montage or the moon landing with all of its black-lit stars, but sometimes the most important details are the ones people overlook when they rush through. I prefer to draw your attention down to the level of a mole painted on a doll’s cheek or to a shrub that conforms to accurate botanical descriptions. As you can see, Jemima could glitz it up with the best of the artisans, but her own taste tended more towards the small moments one might instinctively forget. Besides, I like to think that half an hour per tour is a loose time guideline, not a hard and fast rule.

  At the top of the house is the attic, which hides in the peak of the pointed roof. No one lives there, but it’s not an attic stuffed with heirlooms that might one day be uncovered. There are no trunks full of letters or black-and-white photographs, but there is speculation in the scholarly community that Jemima may at one point have constructed the trunks and then removed them. Professor Norbridge, an expert from the University of British Columbia in the history of early twentieth-century domestic hobbies, visited the museum in 2010 and showed us some historical reconstructions of an early version of the room. Or, as much as the academics can recreate it from descriptions in Jemima’s personal papers, anyway. But let me just say I had a lot to teach him, which was a real treat for me since he’s an actual expert.

  As I’m sure you can see, the walls are constructed to look incomplete, with exposed beams fashioned from whittled, walnut-stained unsharpened pencils and pink insulation made of hand-dyed cotton wool. Note the single bare light bulb. If you look closely, you’ll see that instead of a light switch, there’s a string hanging from the ceiling just behind the bulb. If you pull it, delicately, using only your thumb and index finger, the bulb wakes up, even now, like a sleepy glow-worm, and the string dances as it catches the new light. No, ma’am, you can’t pull it. As you can see, the entire house is behind glass, being kept safe in the cabinet. Even I have turned the light on only once by hand, as a reward for being Miniatureland’s most committed tour guide in 2007. I also received a complimentary spa visit for two at The Oasis. I took the runner-up tour guide, Jenna, because that’s how much of a team player I am.

  The electricity in the house works, by the way. Every filament of every bulb can produce a little glimmer of light. See that green button on the wall to the left of the display case? If you’d like to press that, sir, you’ll see all the lights of the house come on. Yes! There we go. Don’t worry, it’s not witchcraft. I’ll explain the masterful engineering later. On the attic floor is a trap door with a matchstick ladder that folds down, but no one ever uses it on account of how tiny the crawl space is, and also because all the inhabitants of the house are rather restricted in the mobility department. They are confined to their rooms, each glued into a single daily activity for all eternity. Even the houseguests never leave. They also never overstay their welcome.

  The Hendricks were a church-going family. Mr. Hendricks worked for thirty-eight years in the local fish cannery. Jemima wrote that his beard smelled like the inside of a mussel shell and his hands were the colour of sockeye salmon. Mrs. Hendricks made her famous Bakewell tarts for every church bake sale and did some bookkeeping for the cannery when the usual girl was on holiday. Jemima was their only child. Mrs. Hendricks suffered four miscarriages before her daughter was born, and two more afterwards. We know all this because she kept a diary. The forty-seven volumes are housed next door in the same building as the oldest, largest, and most wonderful cabinet of curiosities in British Columbia. I’m supposed to tell you that you should check that out after your visit with us. The diaries are still restricted-access files, because of their age and fragility, but I was lucky enough to receive permission to enter the archive last summer.

  I’m sad to say that reading Mrs. Hendricks’s diaries was not an altogether scintillating experience. In fact, I think I’d better stop calling them “diaries” so no one gets too excited about them. When I sat down at the desk in the archive and opened my first little navy leather book, I found that Mrs. Hendricks’s daily records were in fact ledgers, and contained point-form lists of what she cooked each day, who came calling from her church group, the entire family’s medical history, and a record of every penny she spent. No, sorry, I don’t know how the currency would convert based on inflation, so I can’t tell you what the numbers mean, but I don’t get the impression that she was a big spender. The cabinet of curiosities attracts more visitors, because of the preserved bull testicles and the camera obscura, but I know when I’m in there with those leather books that I am the beholder of historically significant, if outwardly tedious treasures. Anyway, it’s a good thing we have the notebooks, because they tell us, through the indisputable logic of cake recipes, that Jemima was a cherished daughter indeed.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks were glad to see the back of Uncle Barnaby, whose unruly presence was like a tsunami rushing through this canning town that had only known a gentle seaside breeze. His most catastrophic faux-pas was whisking Jemima away on an excursion to Dithers Landing: perhaps you’ve been there already? It’s the second-best attraction in town, so I’d highly recommend a wander over there this afternoon. Anyway, the trip to the Landing was the only thing Jemima had ever done without her parents’ permission. It was a crowded summer’s day when Barnaby and Jemima went for their walk along the pier. The tide was out as they strolled along past the fish stalls, where the boats moored in the low water. Fishermen pulled out buckets full of their day’s catch to sell on the docks before the rest was shipped to the cannery. This was before
they gussied it up for the tourists, so it was a quieter place than the salmon-mad bustle you’ll see today on a Saturday.

  Barnaby laughed his uproarious, rosy laugh and patted his belly with satisfaction when Jemima asked questions about London. As he doddered along, Barnaby told Jemima about the omnibuses in the streets and the carriages in the park and the people as numerous as prawns are in Dithers. Jemima couldn’t help but imagine that everyone in London was as boisterous as her uncle, and she promised herself that she would go with him someday to swim in the Serpentine and sleep on the steps in front of the Prince Albert memorial, the way Barnaby said he often did. I went to London myself once. It was my first and only time out of the country, actually, and I wouldn’t recommend it. People ride the underground like they’re heading either to Heaven or Hell – all elbows and hurry for the next, better thing, or else they look shrivelled and drooped like kelp away from the sea. Give me a damp fishing town over a world-class city any day. You guys have made a very sensible choice for a vacation spot at this time of year: who wouldn’t prefer a light shower over a swooning heat?

  During their excursion, Barnaby bought Jemima an ice cream sandwich wrapped in wax paper from an enterprising fisherman who kept an icebox full of confections. Then he lifted her up and spun her around until the sea and the horizon teeter-tottered and the ice cream made its way back out of Jemima and onto an unsuspecting passerby. That’s when Barnaby himself stumbled and fell into a chuckling heap at her feet. Instead of getting up he lay down flat on his back in the middle of the dock, looked up at the clouds, and invited Jemima to join him. Mrs. Low from the post office had to step carefully over Barnaby’s body in order to get her basket of halibut safely to shore. Such public shenanigans were unheard of on the Landing before Barnaby’s arrival, and Mrs. Hendricks in particular was adamant that something must be done before he ruined the family’s good name.

  The Hendricks did, however, approve of Jemima’s other new hobby. The dollhouse was quiet and relatively tidy, and kept her inside, right where they could keep an eye on her. She would take out the scissors, Q-tips, and glue from a dedicated section in her mother’s sewing box and set up her craft station by the fire in the drawing room after dinner. As she stitched and glued, her parents would snuggle on the loveseat, rubbing noses, which was the closest they ever got to expressing physical affection in front of their daughter. Jemima found it somehow more embarrassing than actual kissing.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Barnaby stayed to whisk Jemima away on more seaside adventures. Would she have given up miniatures after that first dollhouse? Wouldn’t you, if you had a jolly uncle to play with? Jemima wrote in her diary that Barnaby promised to take her dogsled-ding in the Great White North, snorkelling in the Caribbean, and around the world in a hot air balloon. The voyages he promised had not even occurred to her before, growing up as she did in a pre-television, pre-Internet era here in Dithers, where she attended the one-room schoolhouse across from the cannery. But Barnaby did vanish, as was his way, and so instead of riding camels in Constantinople, or floating across the Atlantic ocean with a steamer trunk, she was left with just the frame of a wooden house and the bare outlines of its inhabitants. Sometimes I can’t help but think she spent her life building and rebuilding that summer out of materials she could shape with her own hands.

  So, why don’t we move along to the next room? Directly beneath the attic is the nursery. As you can see, there are two babies here. The twins. I call them Jessica and Mary-Beth. An interesting fact about miniature babies is that they don’t have bodies. They consist only of porcelain heads, swaddled in handmade cloths. The swaddling garments are constructed by splitting a single length of yarn into several individual threads and knitting them together in the usual purl-knit stocking stitch. You can tell that the babies are fraternal rather than identical twins because Mary-Beth has blue eyes and Jessica’s are green. Well, you do have to look very closely, yes, but they are definitely different. The nurse sits in a corner, reading a book of ABCs, presumably aloud, for the edification of the infants. Imagine how well behaved the babies must be for the nurse to be able to relax like that! The pink paisley wallpaper in this room was chosen by Megan Cunningham, Jemima’s dearest childhood friend, who frequently donated supplies to Jemima’s work throughout her life. Mrs. Cunningham remains a trustee on the board of this museum to this day and is often consulted on historical matters. Like many witnesses, she has her own biases. The museum needs to keep her happy, of course, but she’s not the best person to ask about Jemima’s adult life: in fact, they were estranged once Mrs. Cunningham married the local doctor and had children. From Megan’s perspective, it was a gradual growing apart, but I have my suspicions. She is well known to be a dreadful correspondent.

  When Jemima was sixteen years old, her mother died unexpectedly. Rosalie Hendricks was discovered near the sea by a beachcomber, with a hermit crab clutched in her left hand. Though her father never explained the cause of death to Jemima, I read in the historical newspaper archive that it was a sudden cardiac event. She was still wearing her blue gingham apron when they found her, and she left freshly baked oatmeal cookies on a cooling rack in the kitchen. Mrs. Hendricks’s meticulous diaries stop abruptly at this point, obviously. Yet, the day after her death, Jemima wrote a single line in her distinctive pinched cursive: “The world is tired today.” You must make of that what you will. But I’m sure you can imagine how moved I was in the archive when I turned the page and found Jemima’s own handwriting. It felt like a sudden cool rain after a dusty, parched summer. There was no sign of Jemima writing in the diaries before this moment, but after her mother’s death she began to write every day, and not just accounts but her own reflections. At first she wrote brief phrases, but then she began to record her life more fully as the years went on. In my view the early aphorisms are the best, because with fragments you can fill in the meaning yourself, can’t you?

  The other day I was on the local bus and everyone was yawning, even the driver. I read somewhere that yawns are contagious. Have you guys heard that? Must have been in the “Health” section of the paper. Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of poor Jemima and her tired world. I can’t get that line out of my head sometimes. Perhaps she meant something more than a bus full of sleepy commuters, but I’m not an authority on such matters.

  After the tragedy, by all accounts, Mr. Hendricks carried on carrying on, in the way that men did in those days. He kept the hermit crab shell on the mantelpiece.

  Directly beneath the attic, you’ll see an artist’s studio. Inside is a tiny nude, posing for a miniscule portrait. She sits in a semi-recumbent posture on a burgundy upholstered chaise-lounge and holds out her palm as if she’s offering invisible desserts on a non-existent platter. The artist is dressed in grey, paint-splattered clothes, and has what I’m sure you’ll agree can only be described as whimsical hair. He holds his brush aloft, just above the painting. To the naked eye, what’s on the canvas just looks like random strokes of paint, but if you use the specialized magnifying goggles to the right of the display case, you’ll see that it is actually an abstract interpretation of the nude, who appears, half drawn, in bold shapes. I don’t know if I’d use the word “monstrous” myself, ma’am, but of course everyone sees modern art differently, don’t they? Jemima achieved the detail by painting the image using a brush with a single bristle. Maybe it’s a good thing that the sitter can’t see the painting. It isn’t what you would call flattering. No, her gaze is fixed on the back of the easel, and her wrist just floats there, like a starling that is about to strike a window. It’s a departure, as you’ll see, from the realism of the rest of the house. You’re quite right, sir, it does feel a bit out of place, whatever she’s trying to communicate with it. Thank you for saying so. I’ve often thought the same thing.

  In the years following her mother’s death, Jemima set about the task of finding Uncle Barnaby. Perhaps it was a way of dealing with her grief, or perhaps it was simply
a quest to find the man who had unwittingly discovered Jemima’s great talent. Megan Cunningham seems to think that Jemima remained the same after her mother’s death, carrying on without mentioning the loss. However, the diaries show otherwise, and if Mrs. Cunningham had bothered to read between the lines at all, well, she’d have a better understanding of how Jemima’s grief shaped her work. I’m not one to speculate on these matters, but shortly after her mother’s death, Jemima’s work took a domestic turn, focusing once again on the detailed interiors of houses, just like the one you see before you. Personally, I think that means something, but Mrs. Cunningham tells everyone I’m over-reaching. As if such a thing is possible when it comes to the intimacy of sorrow! All I know is that I still speak to my mother every day, and I’m an adult. (Though sometimes I think she probably wishes I would leave her alone!) I certainly found that at sixteen I could hardly cope with the idea of death, let alone an actual tragedy.

  But I’m getting off topic.

  Since Barnaby Supple was a fake name, Jemima had no luck in her quest to find her uncle. Her father was no help, because even if he had known of his brother’s whereabouts, he didn’t think his daughter should be associating with such a scoundrel. Periodically, she wrote letters of inquiry to Supple residences across North America and in England. Over the years, she received several kind replies offering visits and whiskey and information about other Supple families who would eventually prove not to be related to her at all. One such correspondence, with a gentleman named Adam Supple, a welder from Boston, Massachusetts, lasted three years, and was, perhaps, the greatest love affair of Jemima’s life. They wrote to one another weekly for the duration of their acquaintance and met in person only once, for a romantic weekend in Niagara Falls. They went to the world’s largest aviary, kissed sweetly among the parakeets, and felt small against the rushing green of the falls. In a fit of passion, Jemima wrote in one of her later letters to Adam that she wished they had jumped off the edge of the falls hand in hand and let themselves spin to the very bottom of the world together. A bit of lovesick melodrama, if you ask me. I’m sure Jemima didn’t mean it. Besides, Mr. Supple was a married man with three children, so their affair was not one of consistent physical closeness, but was confined instead to a flutter of envelopes and loops of cursive: OxOxO.