Autumn. Blustery walks, thick socks, hot chocolate, heating on.
Today, as if in acknowledgement of the official turn of the season, there’s a new chill in the air, and one of my regular walks, around West Norwood cemetery, takes on a different character.
There’s something about a cemetery walk, especially when the cemetery is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’, the grand Victorian burial grounds established in the 1830s to ease the burden of overcrowded cemeteries in central London. Mausoleums, catacombs, a necropolis. The Victorians were good at death, honouring its vastness and finality with appropriate awe.
Sometimes I walk fast, merely using the grounds as an attractive backdrop for my constitutional, even if the surroundings tend to imbue a certain melancholy. There’s a nice little slope to get me slightly out of breath, and the network of paths offers opportunities for extending the walk. On a good day a green woodpecker will show me the way, bouncing ahead of me, always keeping me at a safe distance.
But today I take it slow, linger a while. Five magpies, harbingers of death in some folklore, chase each other through oak and scrub, chacking loudly. Rosehips weigh down branches. Leaves flurry. Ivy climbs the walls, engulfs a catacomb. A stone angel reaches for heaven, a carrion crow perched incongruously on its head.
It’s idle curiosity, rather than any morbid impulse, that makes me examine the headstones, reading names and dates under my breath.
Herbert (1914-1974), Eileen (1857-1938), Danny (1940-1997).
Stones, undermined by subsidence, list drunkenly. Flowers – fresh, plastic, dried – tell of enduring remembrance.
Gloria (1944-2000), Leslie (1913-1987), Tracy (1976-2008).
Lives long and short; remembered and forgotten; good and, no doubt, bad.
Some stones are plain, just a name and dates. Others express the grief of the bereaved in poetry – doggerel, really – that in any other context might have a cloying effect. But the honesty and grief shines from them, smothering any mocking urge. Still, though, I prefer the plain stones, the simplicity of the carving giving nothing away.
What was that person like? How did they live their life? What did they achieve?
Greta (1923-1999), Bernard (1878-1965), Samantha (1965-2000).
She would have been my age. There but for the grace of god etc.
And then the kicker, a stone for a baby girl, born one day in 1993, dead the next, and I try to place myself in the skin of her parents, try to compute the unspeakable, unimaginable, unprocessable love and pain and grief, and I fail and flail and there is nothing for it but to go home and make hot chocolate and thank a god I don’t believe in for health and life and love.