The great leveller

I spent much of my early boyhood in a disused cemetery — a Gothic beginning to my adolescence which was the result of nothing more romantic than the fact that only a high wall, over which I could climb with the help of an elderberry tree, divided our back garden from the overgrown graves.

I spent much of my early boyhood in a disused cemetery — a Gothic beginning to my adolescence which was the result of nothing more romantic than the fact that only a high wall, over which I could climb with the help of an elderberry tree, divided our back garden from the overgrown graves. It was wartime and the fetid jamjars — green with the slime of rotted flowers — smashed against weeping angels and shrouded urns with a noise that was near enough to an explosion to fuel my fantasies. I thought of the jamjars as hand grenades and of the weeping angels as German paratroops in disguise. From time to time, I read the inscriptions on the memorials that I violated. ‘Within the confines of this grave/ There lies a soldier, bold and brave./ And when the last great trump doth sound/ He is to fettled quarters bound.’ One tomb, which particularly impressed me, contained the mortal remains of a whole family ‘Drowned in the Great Sheffield Flood’. It ended, ‘… and an infant of unknown age’.

The experience encouraged me to believe in ‘village Hampdens …guiltless of their country’s blood’ whose humble toil should not be mocked by ambition. It also permanently focused my attention on the last resting places of other ‘youths to fortune and to fame unknown’. The history of England is carved on the gravestones of its country churchyards.