Cemeteries are wonderful, peaceful, serene places, writes Rob Rattenbury.
OPINION:
I have always liked cemeteries.
Sounds macabre and disrespectful, but I do not mean it that way. Cemeteries are wonderful, peaceful, serene places. Places to be alone and to walk quietly, treasuring the names and the history of the place. Some say they are thin places. Places between now and then.
I left home at 17. For 15 of those years, I lived over the road from our local cemetery, a wild, hilly place full of gullies and wild spaces, dating back well into the mid-19th century, the resting place for our early people.
As children we were taught to be respectful of the place but also, as children, we could not help exploring it and playing amongst the graves, climbing the trees, making swings over gullies, building forts.
The part of the cemetery we preferred is now referred to as the memorial cemetery, long closed to burials, even in my childhood.
Those took place in the nearby lawn cemetery section where we kept our distance from.
There was another section, the soldier’s cemetery where we also trod with respect. Most of our fathers and quite a few of our mothers were returned people in those days.
So the memorial cemetery was the place for high jinks, from young ones to teenagers whose activities were sometimes less than innocent.
It was a place close to our surrounding hills so was used to access those hills by people tramping or hunting.
It was not unusual to see a man walk out of the bush line through the cemetery with a wild pig over his back and dogs playing around his feet. Meat for the family and neighbours, maybe not the freezer, we didn’t have them.
Every now and again the Sexton, Mr Batty, a friend of Dad’s, would put his foot down and clear us out or some old biddy would ring the cops who would dutifully drive through the cemetery roads in their big Snipe or the Ford Consul, drive out and away, knowing we were all watching and wetting ourselves.
We’d all scarper when they had gone and stay away for a few days.
It was all a game of course.
Now and again we would read the epitaphs, the history of the people, the tragedy and loss.
Even as children we understood and were respectful.
We had rules: no standing on the graves, no entering the old tombs that had opened through vandalism or nature, leave the people alone.
A few accepted dares to stay the night, I never did - too windy.
My first experience of watching men work was in the lawn cemetery.
Mr Batty and his crew of grave-diggers.
They all must have been ex-military as, in the 1950s, they were still wearing old army shirts and trousers with the odd battered lemon squeezer hat to keep the sun or rain off.
They were thin, wiry, tough men, always with a durry in the corner of their mouths.
We would sit and watch them dig six-foot-deep graves by hand, chatting to themselves, giving us the odd word or glance, never swearing.
Adults never swore in front of children then, not even tough working men.
They were weather-beaten souls who we would follow behind, usually with the odd dog, back to their hut where they sat and drank tea between digging holes.
They had an old Model A Ford pickup which chugged around the lanes and roads of the cemetery.
Until the day arrived when Mr Batty drove through the gate with the brand-new grey Fordson tractor and trailer.
The old Model A was consigned to a nearby gully where it rusted away over the years.
Later in life, of course, cemeteries sadly become part of what we sometimes have to do: farewell loved ones, friends and acquaintances.
Being keen on history and with a wife who does a spot of genealogy, I have visited cemeteries all over the country and in Britain, tracing forebears.
It’s a labour of love to follow those lines of inquiry and to stand in front of a grave containing the mortal remains of a long-passed relative.
It’s reflective and sobering. It fills the gaps in the research perhaps already done, leading to this point.
The life the person led, the problems they faced, the times they lived in.
Looking around the town the cemetery is in knowing that your relative walked those streets, even visited those shops and pubs, worked in those fields.
Walking away with a sense of completeness, of history, of belonging to something.
Yes, cemeteries are important places still. They are places to be deeply respected but also to visit and learn from, to step back in time for a while.