LISTEN WITH MUMMY

Since it is HALLOWEEN and supposing you are staying in tonight -- and, after all, it might be wise -- with, of course, the doors locked, the windows secured and the curtains tightly drawn, then you might, perhaps, enjoy a little story...

So I'd like to offer you a diversion - merely in order to take your mind off any disturbing thoughts of things that might - just posibly - go BUMP! or BOO! in the night...

Several years ago now, I wrote a radio play entitled The Next in Line and it is, I think, exactly the kind of story for a night like tonight...

This innocent and diverting tale is based on a short story by my friend Ray Bradbury collected in his 1947 book Dark Carnival. My dramatisation was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (as part of a series called Fear on Four) on 31 December 1992, but this story was not originally set at the turning of the year, but in another season entirely and in a place where Halloween goes by another name: El Dia de los Muertos --- The Day of the Dead...

This tale first seized my fevered imagination when I came across a book entitled The Mummies of Guanajuato, containing Ray's story and a suite of deeply disturbing photographs by Archie Lieberman. The book, now long out of print, presents the combined response of two creative artists - one a fictional flight of fancy, the other a documentary record - to the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Many stories are told about Guanajuato and its mummies...

There are accounts of the ferocious cholera plague that swept through the surrounding countryside in 1833 necessitating vast numbers of burials...

And there is talk of the tradition - so alien to our thinking, but so natural and matter-of-fact in a devoutly Catholic country where death is not the end but a beginning - of exhuming and cremating bodies after five years of burial - in order to make room in the good earth for those who have yet to die...

More alarming, perhaps, is the chilling knowledge that it was possible - for those who had relatives with money - to financially secure a permanent final resting place on an annually renewable basis amounting to "Pay up or you're dug up!"

The real melancholic fascination with the deceased of Guanajuato is that over a hundred of the bodies exhumed five years after the cholera epidemic were found to have been naturally mummified - a fact which led to the uncorrupted dead being exhibited for the freakish astonishment of the paying public from 1870 until the present day...

That, briefly, is the background to Ray's story and my play and - if you are quite sure your nerves are up to it - you can listen to The Next in Line, right here...

...and (click - if you dare!) NOW!

[May 2007 - The availability of this recording has now been disabled]

There are many websites with information - both factual and faulty - about las Momias including (among the better ones) Mexico: The Dark Side and Don Quijote, while Catholic writer, Ann Ball, offers a spiritual contemplation on viewing the dead of Guanajuato in her article Powerful Memento Mori.

And, if you listened through to the end of my little play for Halloween, you can read more about the production of The Next in Line at Phil Nichols' Bradbury Media to whose site I am especially grateful for the link to the download of my play!

Visit Window Gazing and buttons' blog for more Halloween images...