In search of dead men’s bones

Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what she and her husband John were living on top of in their pretty house in Worcester Cathedral Close, into which they had recently moved when John became the diocesan bishop. The house is on top of a medieval charnel house that can be reached by opening a trap-door in the cellar. Inge opens her book with these words:

I live over dead men’s bones. Dead women’s, too, for all I know. Every day when I leave my house to escort my children to school, I walk over them.They insist on nothing, demand or require of me nothing except the admission, which I make seldom and reluctantly, that one day I shall join them in bare beauty, stripped even of flesh and sinews, disjointed, naked and alone.

It will happen to all of us, of course — as we seldom and reluctantly admit — but to Denise Inge it has already happened. She died of cancer on Easter Day this year, aged 53, soon after finishing this book, which is a travel book about ossuaries and a meditation on bones. A posthumous book is not necessarily a good book: we must avoid the funereal tones of whispered over-praise that are all too easily lavished on the works of the prematurely deceased. But Inge writes with freshness and grace about a subject many of us would rather not think about: the physical reality of earthly existence post-death.

She sets out with a friend across Europe to visit four charnel houses and ossuaries in obscure places, describing as she goes the casual discomforts and bewilderments of foreign travel. In Czermna in Poland, hundreds of fidgety schoolchildren are crammed into the ossuary with her, and they’re lectured to by a ‘femur-wielding nun’ with a microphone.