Looking for peace and perspective? You can't beat the wilder corners of an English cemetery
It sounds a little strange, I know, to say that cemeteries can be pleasurable places. You wouldn’t think so, what with all the signposted mortality; everywhere you turn, a grey and mossy reminder of death; the shadow of the scythe. But it’s the stillness, the respectful hush that I appreciate.
It’s not a lofty silence. The sort found in a museum, predicated on intellect (or a performance of). It’s not the tense, taut silence of an exam. The silence in a cemetery is a carefully weighted amalgam of love and reflection, and many more emotions besides. Not all easy, obviously, but part of the human experience.
My favourite cemetery is Highgate in London. People tend to focus on the famous and notable buried there. There is an entrance fee and a map. There is a tour. If you’re interested in seeing a giant sculpted Karl Marx head, then Highgate is the one to visit. It is the final resting place of George Eliot and George Michael. It’s fascinating to see the end points of such luminous lives, which is why the equally star-studded Père Lachaise in Paris seems to cameo in every film shot in the city.
But it’s the denser part of Highgate I like best, where the green grows thick and the stones are part-obscured. There is no death without life, and cemeteries are a rich source of tiny biographies: unheard-of occupations and conditions; an eyebrow-raising number of wives, or children, or both. The tragedy in dates too close together, evoking Hemingway’s baby shoes, never worn. In Thiepval, the site of the memorial to the missing of the Somme, I once stood among row upon row of graves of boys the same age as I was then.
My favourite grave in Highgate? A tiny, unimposing stone belonging to one Fanny Toy. There is scant information about Fanny Toy’s life, but her name is enough.
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Often, the landscaping in cemeteries equals that of the best parks, and there is aesthetic joy to be found in certain memorials. In Highgate, the artist Patrick Caulfield has a wonderful, pop art-inspired headstone (pictured). Some inscriptions make me laugh. The sassiest I’ve heard is Jesse James’s (on the wish of his mother): “Murdered by a traitor and coward whose name is not worthy to appear here.”
There is one other reason I can happily sit quietly in a cemetery on a sunny day at the end of a walk. And that is gratitude: I will admit that I have come close to death, and it is because I have sought it out. Cemeteries are not just the residencies of the dead, but places that reiterate the gift in living.
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