I picked up where I left off last week, in the cemetery. I walk here a lot. Different times of day, or year. Different weathers. Different moods. Different paths (and non-paths). I notice the same things. I notice different things. I walk here because it is a semi-wild space. Tended, but only as much as necessary. I see it not so much ‘managed’ as ‘co-operated with’. Trees are allowed to grow tall, regardless of the graves they ‘spoil’ (or enhance?). Deer and fox wander through, or maybe live here permanently. In summer some of the space is a wildflower meadow.
It is not summer though. It is a cold January day. I woke to frost, which I love, and a grey sky which…not so much. It was cold. The sun was a brighter patch of cloud, a greyness that sun's warmth couldn’t quite break through. The wind was wiping away the ice, even as it made the day feel colder than it actually was.
Last week the cemetery was alive with squirrels. This week it is alive with runners and power-walkers. The January get-fit campaign in full swing, by the look of some of them. I’m guessing they won’t last two months out. Others are clearly regulars, already fit, sensored-up to check their heartrates or distances or all the other things that won’t actually tell them whether they’ve had a good run or not. Depends on your definition of good, I suppose.
I’m not rushing. I’ve no objection to folk running these paths. I instinctively slow to a more respectful pace, not out of respect, but out of curiosity. I’m still reading grave stones. I still haven’t looked up where Clive’s grandmother lies. She’s in here somewhere and I half-hope that one day I might just stumble across her.
It’s a dismal day. Not just the weather, but mood also. I wander among sombre stones and the fallen leaves, still hanging to the ground despite the rain and frost. Maybe they need the weight of snow to rot down quickly.
I find myself in one of the children’s quarters. Children’s graveyards are like children’s hospitals – full of forced jollity. Here everything is bright and glitzy. Toys and tinsel still abound. Windmills and wind-chimes are a thing – movement, sound – perhaps so that the little ones don’t feel so alone. The birds join in. Bluetits and robins. Small birds.
Among all of these born sleeping, born an angel, born into heaven lost ones, are the even sadder sights of untended plots and broken crosses. I think again of that always, eventually, broken promise of ‘eternal memory’. I wonder how and why and when such small plots ceased to be visited. I recall again those words of Rosetti “Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad.” Maybe some of these bereft parents learned how to ‘forget and smile’. And if so, I think I’d be glad for that. And yet…I wish there might be another ceremony in which a burial plot, especially for these never-lived little ones might be closed, a truly final saying of goodbye, in lieu of just not turning up anymore.
I move on. Into the older part of burial ground. I enter via a Jewish corner. Their graves are simple and for the most part unostentatious. There are few inscriptions beyond names and dates and the Star of David and the Hebrew abbreviation which I think means ‘here lies’ – and then lines of text that I cannot decipher. One day I may meet a mourner here, and I might be brave enough to ask. I have never seen anyone in this part of the cemetery.
I like the simplicity though. And I like that here, unlike anywhere else in these grounds, I find descriptors of the person – not their job, or their relationships – but who they were as themselves. Simple lines again, but I learn that one was “a woman of worth”, another “wrote his own script”, yet another “found joys in the simple things of life”. The one that bore the quote “Why me? Oy vay” which might be open to interpretation, was balanced by that which spoke of “the tree of life and those that grasp it”. None of these graves spoke of eternal remembrance. They spoke of sadly missed and mourned by. There is something more immediate and transient about them, more honest. An acknowledgement that even those who mourn you, will in their time pass away.
Tucked away in a corner is a larger stone, rough hewn and bearing no names. It speaks to the murder of six adults and eleven children discovered in a mediaeval well some 800 years after their persecutors tumbled them down into it. They may too have been sadly missed and mourned, but we will never know by whom.
They were found during the construction of a shopping mall back in 2004. It would be another decade or so before scientific analytic techniques would start to provide probable answers as to who they were and why they died. The simple ‘having been thrown down a well’ spoke sufficiently to a violent death. These were not plague victims or other unfortunates.
Chemical bone analysis and other techniques found markers that tied them (genetically) to modern Ashkenazi Jews. In the 12th century the City had a thriving Jewish community, many of whom lived near the well site. It’s known that many of those would have been involved in banking and money-lending (at the invitation of the King, no less, let’s not forget that we condemned these people for doing precisely what we had invited them here to do) because of Christian prohibition on such activity.
Not all of the bones were subject to analysis, balancing scientific enquiry with the mores of the Jewish tradition that the dead be not subject to intrusion. DNA and other analysis indicated four were relatives, including three sisters – the youngest between 5 & 10 years old, the eldest a young adult. The others, if not definitively relatives, were presumably part of the same community: a community that, according to Ralph de Diceto, a near-contemporary chronicler, were subject to an
anti-religious purge by local Crusaders and their supporters: “Accordingly on 6th February [in 1190 AD] all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle". This theory was born out by detailed carbon dating.
The events of 6th February 1190 were part of a wider antisemitic campaign that commenced on Richard the Lionheart’s coronation day in London (1189), and erupted again in Norwich the next year, spreading to Kings Lynn, Stamford, York, Bury St Edmunds, Colchester and Thetford. It was undoubtedly stoked by the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming ‘Crusade’.
It’s thought that approximately 200 Jews managed to take refuge in Norwich castle – and the location of the well in which the bodies were found, just inside the City walls, might indicate not
that they lived nearby but that they were on their way to seek such shelter. And failed.
I did not know any of this.
A fragment of the unhappy history of the place I call home. I had started my walk in the cemetery thinking about individuals. The lives of those lain here, and the lives of those they left behind. I had not anticipated finding a larger story, or at least a doorway into a larger story, which may emerge again in other places as I continue my wanderings.
Here is reason enough to walk our local paths and plots, and to simply take notice and to be curious about what we find. Simply put: we will find things that we might have known, but did not. The discovery of the well was all over the local and national news at the time. I missed it. There was even a later ‘cold case’ investigation into it aired on national TV. I missed that too. But I paused by the grave, and I will seek out more of that history in time.
One of the things I miss most about no longer having Clive to talk to are those I did not know…moments, when we shared our most recent discoveries. It was sometimes surprising what the other did not know, and sometimes mutual, and another avenue of curiosity would be opened. It was always interesting. One or other of us would learn a little more. I don't have those conversations any more.
From the cemetery I wandered into happier places, but still places of memory.
I walked down wide avenues where every house is different and eccentrically shaped, built large and extended further in many cases. In the gaps between, I squinted outbuildings that I imagined as yoga rooms and artists’ studios. An unwarranted pang of envy struck home before I remembered my own place, that has its own writing space, practice space, library space and reading corners and all that I really want. I still wanted to walk around inside those suburban palaces, just to see how they were lived in. I didn’t (don’t) really covet them. Think of the dusting, my Mam would have said, think of the heating bill.
I like the wide avenues though, with their street trees and grass verges and tended gardens. No doubt there is also a mass of unseen wildlife here: hedgehogs and spiders and foxes and ants and the occasional lost muntjac. And birds. I see the magpies and jays. I hear robins and pigeons and bluetits and great tits. I catch a glimpse of small brown wing that might be wren or sparrow or dunnock.
I do have a destination in mind, because I know this part of the city. I’m heading for Heigham Park. It’s a small park that, somehow, I overlooked for all the years I lived only a few streets away. My internet search tells me that this is the City’s first purpose-built park. Just over a hundred years ago, this tiny patch of green and well-being was part of a larger area known as Heigham Playing Fields. It lay beyond the city boundary and bordered open countryside…countryside long gone, countryside already being lost – hence the decision to protect six acres of it, even if by turning it into a garden
that has nothing wild about it.
The design fell to one Captain A Sandys-Winsch – a man whose name will come up time & again as I explore this map. I know a little of his work, but they are also other stories for other places.
This particular one was commenced in 1921 and formally opened in 1924. It has seen changes over the years, but it still has an Edwardian feel about it. Taking a slow walk around its paths, I imagine governesses with babies in prams. Listening to the squeals from modern-day babes being pushed higher and higher in the swings, I see their 1960s, 1950s, equivalents laughing just as loudly. Just as I no doubt did in swings hundreds of miles away.
Another thing I miss: being able to play on the swings.
Today I peer into bushes and beds looking for signs of spring. There are one or two. The Japanese Mahonia is opening its first yellow buds. A few snow drops are braving the way.
And in another I did not know that moment I learn that what I thought were buds are actually the berries of the spindle hedges. Whoops!
At the end of the day, though, I’m a writer and the thing I love most about this park is the words on stones. The ‘Air’ stone. The HI/DE SEEK stones. And the beautifully enigmatic circular poem:
I am here out of habit
round and round and round
SPACE
PLACE
Roses:chemical messengers
Rockroses: Sisters
The words are inscribed on concrete benches arranged in a circle around a rose garden – an art installation from Bettina Furnée and Ali Dore. A little internet foraging tells me the piece is entitled “Space Place” which suggests that is where we are meant to begin, but as a poet I feel this piece can (and should?) start on any one of those lines, and it would mean something slightly different. I love that.
A lot of today’s walk has been about ‘memory’ in the wider sense of the word: memorials, history, etc. I finish it with a walk up a street where I used to live. I can picture the house. We had the top floor, me and Bev. Two bed-sit rooms. A kitchen where the sink would block when the outside downpipes froze, which we learned to unfreeze pouring kettles of water out of the window. A bathroom her boyfriend painted orange. In my own room, I would sit in the one armchair with my feet up on the sill of the open sash window on the warm days of that one summer, reading text books and novels, sometimes drinking perry, because I couldn’t afford wine, looking down on an overgrown garden, that we didn’t think we were obliged to anything about. It belonged to ‘downstairs’, even if I did hang my washing out there, and park my bike in the shed.
I walked up the street, and peered intently at the buildings, but I couldn’t find the house. I can’t remember the number and none of the front doors or upstairs windows looked familiar. That was an important year in my life. The year I graduated. The year Clive and I cleared our path to our future. I have pictures in my mind…but none of them equate to what I saw on that street today.
Then I remember just how long ago it all was – forty years – so many other lives will have wandered through those rooms since then. And I think about how much else I must have forgotten.
There is no such thing as eternal memory.
- Ralph de Diceto (c. 1120 – c. 1202, Archdeacon of Middlesex1153-1180, Dean of St Pauls 1180-1199)
- Check out more of Bettina Furnée’s work and her ethos here: https://bettinafurnee.co.uk/
