Last Friday, The Rumble Museum and Cheney School Library were delighted to welcome Paterson Joseph to cut the ribbon and formally launch the Rumble Forbidden Forest of Fiction mural, and to speak to students as part of World Book Day Celebrations.

 

 

Paterson, an author, stage, film and TV actor and chancellor of Oxford Brookes, arrived shortly before 12, and was first given a tour of some of our Rumble Museum displays by Year Twelve Museum Council students. He saw our Protest and Power Exhibition, including suffrage and racial justice items, and our Brain Exhibition, where he found out how heavy a brain was and took part in an illusion experiment display! He was also shown artefacts from ancient Greece and Rome such as a fifth century BC tetradrachm, and East African items including footstools and an akogo (finger piano). 

 

He then arrived at the school library to cut the ribbon to launch the new Rumble Museum mural which celebrates our collection of fantasy and speculative fiction early editions.  The mural of a forest filled with fictional characters and objects was conceived by the Rumble Museum director Lorna Robinson and painted by Milton Keynes-based artist and designer Luke McDonnell. It uses pen and ink style to render an intricate, book illustration effect on a huge scale. The mural features characters from well-known fantasy Oxford authors such as Tolkien's Gollum and Pullman's Lyra. It also features a character from C.S. Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet and a dragon from Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures. A Handmaid from Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale sits next to a Sandman from the dystopian novel Logan's Run, and Daphne from ancient Greek myth is seen encased in bark. There is a pegasus, also from Greek myth, and a leopard from Chris Beckett's Dark Eden. Objects such as the Auryn from Neverending Story can also be seen.  

 

 

In the afternoon, Paterson spoke to over 250 Year Twelves and Thirteens about the power of reading for creating empathy and understanding the world. Pateron's debut novel The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho tells the life story of the eighteenth century Black British abolitionist, and Paterson spoke about his early life experiences of racism and exclusion, and how his love of reading shaped his world views. He encouraged everyone, and especially young men, to read novels in order to get inside what another person is feeling, seeing and experiencing.