Booth Museum

The Booth Museum is a natural-history museum on Dyke Road whose exhibits enter Bunny Junior’s thoughts in two connected ways: as a place where he has seen stuffed seagulls, and as an image for the fragile work of preserving memories. Its cases offer a contrast to the loss he cannot prevent: museum specimens remain fixed, while his remembered image of his mother is fading.

Setting and Exhibits

The museum is described as world famous. Bunny Junior recalls that it contains a couple of stuffed seagulls, which he associates with his strong dislike of the birds. He remembers reading that seagulls on England’s south coast are particularly large and aggressive, and believes they deliberately target people when they defecate and attack reflective colours such as yellow. In his account, that helps explain why the Yellow Fiat Punto is always so messy. These claims are presented through Bunny Junior’s recollections and convictions, not as information independently established by the museum.

A Model for Memory

As Bunny Junior sits in the car, he tries to arrange memories of things he did with his mother like exhibits, frozen in time, recalling the stuffed birds behind glass at the Booth Museum. The comparison gives shape to his effort to keep shared scenes available to himself. Yet the method cannot hold her image: when he remembers being pushed on a swing, he can still see himself laughing in the air but can no longer clearly recall who is pushing him. The museum’s fixed displays thus sharpen the difference between an exhibit preserved in a case and a living person increasingly indistinct in memory.

Narrative Significance

The Booth Museum links Bunny Junior’s habit of storing knowledge to his more painful attempt to preserve personal history. He can collect and retrieve facts, but the memory of his mother does not behave like an orderly specimen: it dissolves even as he tries to make it permanent. The museum therefore serves not only as a remembered Brighton landmark but also as a precise image for the limits of recollection.