her fantastic tale, this time saying that the Sety Temple was her home. They were vexed and at a loss, even a bit frightened. They could only hope that she would outgrow whatever the problem was. Her father didn’t judge her too harshly, for reasons of his own. Although he was a fine, established master tailor with a devoted clientele, he had unfulfilled dreams of his own, dreams of a life in show business. Like his daughter, he was restless and unpredictable and given to drama. Reuben Eady had Irish blood in his veins, Omm Sety liked to say, explaining the family eccentricities.
When Dorothy was six or seven there was an incident at school. Her teacher had discovered her unusual talent for art and drawing and had asked her to draw a cat and a fox for display in the classroom. Which she did, except that the perfectly drawn cat’s head had the body of a human female, and the fox had the body of a man – both looking vaguely Egyptian.
“Why would you do such a thing?” the teacher demanded.
“Because they look more beautiful this way,” Dorothy said. The pictures were never displayed.
Dorothy couldn’t help creating incidents. She had a pronounced sense of justice and an affinity for underdogs, which often put her in the way of trouble. On the way home from school one day she saw two men engaged in a street fight – Cockneys, she recalled. One was a big hulk of a man and the other was younger and much smaller, and being beaten to a pulp while a crowd egged them both on. It was unbearable to watch. Counting on her way with words, she convinced a passerby to lend her his hockey stick – just so that she could feel the weight of it, she said sweetly – then she ran into the middle of the melee and struck the big man hard on his back with her weapon. The sight of the small girl and the large stick stopped the bully in his tracks. He shouted obscenities at her as the owner of the hockey stick ran to reclaim it and pull the girl to safety.
This was a child who did not consider the consequences of her actions if she believed she was in the right. It was a trait that was to leave a considerable amount of disturbance in her wake, even up to the last days of her life. But with her engaging smile and explosive laugh she was usually forgiven her well-intentioned excesses.
In her family and among close relatives there were no children her age, and the children she knew from school didn’t understand her at all. She had no use for toys or dolls. She would rather be alone reading books about Egypt. Her other consuming passion was for animals. She would pick up anything that came her way that had no obvious home: frogs, snakes, lizards, wild rabbits. Her harried mother never knew what was about to join the rag-tag menagerie, but the poor child had few friends, she reasoned, so what was the harm in it?
In London, Dorothy’s youngest aunt, only a few years older, was her closest friend and confidant. She had accompanied the family on that outing to the museum and she was fascinated by Dorothy’s strange ideas about things. They delighted in their time together, talking and giggling late into the night when they were supposed to be asleep. From beneath the covers they would chant their rebellious anthem:
Early to rise, early to bed
Makes you healthy, wealthy and dead!
When they talked about what they would do when they were grown, one of them, at least, knew exactly what her plans were, and her final destination – and that one was Dorothy.
I remember asking Omm Sety if she thought that her bizarre childhood behavior had to do with that fall, and she answered with her charming sense of humor, “Well, it is quite possible that my chute down the staircase could have knocked some screws loose in my head.”
Whatever it was, her father’s tolerance had finally been worn away. His only hope was that a proper and sober schooling would fill her mind with more normal ideas. He enrolled her in a good school and hoped for the best, but Reuben Eady was no match for his daughter’s stubborn determination. Every chance she got she would sneak out of school, a truant, and go to the British Museum.
the famous Dr. Budge
By the age of ten she had become something of a fixture in the Egyptian Galleries, and Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, the renowned Egyptologist and director of the collection, had noticed her. He wondered what on earth the child could be doing, staring at the hieroglyphic inscriptions with such intensity.
One day he asked her why she wasn’t in school. She replied that she was not particularly interested in what she was taught there. “And what is it you wish to learn?”
She answered with a single, emphatic word: “Hieroglyphs!” And so it was that Dorothy Eady became the youngest and most unusual student of the great Dr. Budge. He immediately recognized her talent for copying the complex hieroglyphic figures and gave her some chapters of The Book of the Dead to copy and translate, rewarding her with bars of chocolate for work done properly. He was at a loss to explain such early aptitude and passion for an extremely difficult subject. And why would a girl from a good Christian family care to learn about a pagan religion that had been dead for 2000 years? As far as his new student was concerned, Dr. Budge knew everything she felt urgent to know about: the language, the gods and goddesses, especially Isis and Osiris – in whom she now fervently believed – and the magic. Dr. Budge was the keeper of mysterious and powerful secrets.
Omm Sety would recall Dr. Budge with great warmth. “He was my first and most earnest tutor. He adopted the ancient religion and deftly used Egyptian magic for benevolent ends. In fact, he wrote books on both subjects. He once said to me, ‘My child, Egypt taught us everything. I follow all the Egyptian teachings, and when you go there one day I am sure you will do the same.’”
She once asked him to teach her about magic and he asked her why. “Well,” she said, “I have an uncle who says awful things to me about Egypt and I want to get rid of him.”
He drew back in pretend horror. “Oh, no, no, no – you’re not the one to learn magic!” But magic – heka – was something that continued to fascinate her.
That same year, 1914, the Great War broke out. For two more years Dorothy continued her studies with her doting mentor at the museum, immersing herself in a wondrous world that was far more vivid to her than this one. But in 1916 when the air raids began over London, many families sent their children away to safer havens for the duration of the war. The Eadys made arrangements to send their daughter to the countryside, to her grandmother’s farm in Sussex, where she had spent many summer holidays among the horses, cows and chickens.
Near the day of departure, just as the government was preparing to shut down the museum as a precaution, Dorothy paid a call on her tutor to bid him farewell. Budge was touched. He apologized for not having a bar of chocolate to offer her. “Will you study your hieroglyphs when you are with your granny?”
“Every day,” she replied.
“What makes you so keen to continue, my child?”
“Because I used to know, and now I must remember it all again.”
The old man regarded her silently. He was probably the first person besides her skeptical parents to become aware of her peculiar relationship with the far past. A diminutive man, he got down from his chair and held her affectionately at arm’s length, saying sternly, “Don’t you do anything foolish when you are in Sussex, and I don’t want to hear about any problems you make for your granny. Now run along, child, and God bless you!”
She reluctantly said her goodbye and kissed the old man on both cheeks.
Sussex
From the first
