a life in graveyards
If I search my iPhone camera roll for “grave” I get 82 results.
The first: the cluster of headstones encircling the Hardy Tree, a bygone curiosity of Old St Pancras Churchyard (and site of the first date of a relationship that has sadly/happily outlasted it). More recently: a lichen-covered skull and crossed bones on the outskirts of Bruges, a merchant’s tombstone I was so keen to visit earlier this year that I insisted on re-routing a bike-packing trip around the cemetery in which it’s nestled.
When I came across These Silent Mansions by poet Jean Sprackland in a gallery bookshop earlier this year, my immediate reaction was jealousy. A memoir through graveyards - why had I not thought of that myself? Landmarks around which I have always orientated myself in the cities where I’ve lived, and sought out in the ones I’ve visited. Overgrown and over-layered patches of history, storytelling, superstition and spookiness; everything I look for in a space to spend time. I loved the book and the neighbourhoods of silent mansions it described, many of them familiar from my own life in graveyards. While reading it I thought about the tombs I’ve walked among and the graveyards that have marked my own teens and twenties.
Driving alongside the undulating, packed lawns of Sheen cemetery in London as children, holding our breath as we passed just in case the ghosts went into our mouth. The battlefields trip to France and Belgium as a teenager, emerging after hours of raucous giggling on the coach to the stony silence of the undulating fields of Ypres and the Somme, full of endless bones of young men and a first encounter with mass death for many of us. Interrailing with my best friend when we were eighteen and trudging through three cemeteries in one day in Prague, headstones in Czech and in Hebrew.
Double exposure in Kent
A sprawling graveyard in Bedminster in Bristol, a walk away from an unchallenging internship I took right after I’d graduated, making newsletters about cars and arguing with colleagues about Brexit. I would take my full hour lunchbreak and walk to the cafe on its edge, sit on the patio with an unsatisfying sandwich from home and stare out over tombstones, wondering whether this was what adult life was going to be like.
Headstones piled high against the churchyard walls of St John at Hackney, my local on and off for the last seven years, winding through its churchyard by bike in the early hours and bell-ringing in its tower high above the silent dead and the noisy living. Frosted tombstones in Berlin marking the tail-end of 2020; mornings spent marching to various graveyards across the city as one of few cultural activities that the second lockdown allowed. Brushing our teeth under the bats while champing in Kent last summer, picking out the nine infant graves that inspired Dickens’s Great Expectations in grey dusk gloom.
The Skull Grave just outside Bruges
Au pairing in the middle of nowhere age 20 I read over a hundred books as I was too afraid to watch anything online after horror stories of German streaming law from my host family. There were no graveyards in cyclable distance, but ones on the page were comfort enough. I lived in the descriptions in Pure by Andrew Miller, in which a sprawling cemetery in 18th century Paris is meticulously moved due to its residents’ beginning to overflow into the living city beyond.
Running through the graveyard by my college in Oxford after all-nighters, watching the sun rise over the overgrown field it spilled into, dew-ridden cobwebs stretched between headstones, long grass brushing up my calves and sleep deprivation painting movement in the shadows. Creeping between grand tombs at dawn in Paris age 19, on the way back from flats that were not my own. Picking through the necropolis in Glasgow in the fog, under bleak grey clouds, and squinting to read the lettering on the memorials in Liverpool cathedral churchard. Eating a cinnamon swirl in a churchyard in Devon last summer in the shadow of a large elm and a lichen-painted anchor headstone to lost sailors, listening to my interview recordings and mulling on place and boundaries. This graveyard became a cornerstone of my dissertation later that summer, and this grave leads the second chapter.
“The day’s fabric thins, and the present loses its grip.”
Straining at the limitations of the fresh air date at the tail end of the pandemic,, I spent three hours stumping around Kensal Green Cemetery learning facts about someone that it was clear from the first ten minutes I would never need to know. I met the love of my life by the Hardy Tree weeks later. It fell down in a storm just before we got married.
St Mary's churchyard, Brixham, the marking line between the historic "Cow Town" and "Fish Town"
I can pick a graveyard from every period of my life and every place I’ve lived. I could probably do the same for cafes and GPs - bit less atmospheric.