A Need For Plumed Horses

Places of burial places are of more significance to some people than to others. There was a time when you could definitely rely on having a designated location where the dead could be visited if you were one who leaned towards significance. Some families did not take advantage of this sensible custom and ours was one of them; where the dead rested in eternal peace simply did not seem to concern us terribly much. Not that they were forgotten altogether of course. Very far from it. Whenever we passed Dartford Cemetery on the 480 bus on our way to Northfleet my grandmother would comment that her Poor Arthur lay within and after a second or two, as if pausing to remember salient facts might add that her first Arthur was there with him too. Usually these remarks fell into the air, and were greeted with silence but once I ventured to ask how old her Arthurs were when they died. Then she straightened her shoulders a bit and said it was beyond her to remember and they were just wee mites. As she had given birth to a multitude of children it might not have been altogether odd that her memory for those who perished as infants was not as sharp as it might have been. Decades later when he was already in his sixties my brother said that in his opinion she harboured a great deal of guilt for the one, or maybe two, that were the victims of her drunkenness and thus found dead in the marital bed. He reminded me with an air of satisfaction that it was that very fact that led to our grandfather, Edgar Constant, giving up alcohol altogether. Sadly Old Nan never exhibited the same moral fortitude as her husband and continued to drink throughout her life.

I wondered if it was in fact her own culpability that prevented her from pausing by the infant gravesides from time to time but Bernard disagreed and said it was because we simply were not a family that set much store by graves. When I became an adult I began to understand that burial places are far more than places to conveniently house the dead. Within them we are exposed to a precise and accurate reflection of social, economic and ethnic history and so much of this information can be missed when they are bypassed because they allow us to step so effortlessly into the past. They also contain a treasury of fascinating personal stories where the pain of past families losing children to illness and lovers to war is brought abruptly into focus. Life’s injustices are exposed and the inequalities between rich and poor are forever evident. And even for those totally uninterested in these aspects of social history they at least offer quiet places in which to walk or sit and read a book or eat a lunchtime sandwich. And they are certainly permanent wildlife centres where an extraordinary range of fauna can be seen.

For me as I grew to adulthood they became places where I established a closer relationship with those I would have so much liked to have known in life – in Brompton Cemetery Emmeline Pankhurst and Richard Tauber, in Highgate Karl Marx, Radclyffe Hall and George Eliot, in Chiswick William Hogarth and James Whistler and in Bunhill Fields John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe. Without the restraining influence of my disinterested family I so rapidly became a graveyard devotee.

The post year wars was a time when the majority of people in the community had a more intimate relationship with relatives no longer living than they might these days so our family was very different in that we rarely went in for regularly visiting memorials to relatives. I came to accept our catalogue of dissimilarities and decided it was because we were more common and vulgar than the decent poor around us. I don’t recall ever being taken to the last resting place of the Constant infants neither to those of their four or five sisters who succumbed to Tuberculosis as young adults. It seemed that although no expense was spared when it came to funerals and it was rumoured that Old Nan insisted on splashing out on plumed horses on one occasion, extending the relationship with top up visits to the departed was not deemed necessary. In fact our grandmother could be quite matter of fact about family deaths and busied herself with what she saw as essential rituals such as burning all the combustible possessions of the deceased that had not been claimed by the living. Items of value such as pieces of jewellery were passed on but generally bed linen, clothing, etc was burned. My mother was of the opinion that all this burning had something to do with the passing on of infection when it was a young person who had died but had little to offer on the topic when it was pointed out that fires took place regardless of age. I knew her mind was on the greatly feared spectre of TB. I wondered a little uneasily if books would also have also been tossed onto the pyres because she was of the opinion that library books might hold the kernel of the disease within their pages but I never found out as few of my relatives were inclined towards reading.

Nevertheless I could not help but notice that other families did not seem to go in for ritual fires, more items were passed on and once the grieving period was over a distinctive relationship developed between the dead and their still living relatives, an association that nowadays barely seems to exist in quite the same way. York Road children regularly accompanied parents or grandparents to Northfleet cemetery and viewed the pursuit as an activity they largely looked forward to or at the very least did not mind too much. Molly from No 31 once said it was a pity that she and I did not seem to have any dead relatives and that she for one envied Rita Jenkins. Rita was invariably in a smart Sunday outfit complete with Dutch bonnet sporting appliqued felt flowers, when she and her grandmother made the weekly trip to visit her grandfather. In Molly’s opinion it was because she was an only child and everyone knew they became Spoilt Rotten.

When I ventured to ask if we could go visiting at the cemetery my mother shuddered and said she didn’t hold with it, that the dead should be left in peace and managed to make it sound as if she thought they were better left to their own devices and that intruding was ill mannered. However, I knew that she was in fact particularly alarmed by the idea of death, especially when contemplating her own and according to her sisters, who had always taken delight in taunting her, had always felt the same.

It was Mrs Bassant next door who finally said that if we liked to do so Molly and I could accompany her and her granddaughter Evelyn to visit her older sister, Poor Ada who had become a victim to the Great Flu that followed the Great War. Although neither of us felt particularly friendly towards Evelyn who was an unfortunately overweight girl and easily bullied we enthusiastically agreed. Evelyn was not quite as keen on the idea as her grandmother as it had not been long since the incident of the cricket bat that she had found on the Old Green and that I had deftly removed from her possession by falsely claiming that the finder was actually me. However as the Sunday of the visit approached and as I had been friendly towards her for several days in a row her fears abated and she seemed to almost be looking forward to the event. She importantly explained to both Molly and me that she would be in charge of getting the water for the flowers but that we could help and she would show us how it was done and where the best tap was. She warned us that we might have to queue. She also told us that Granny always took shortbread and sugared almonds along for a mid-afternoon snack and we would be able to share in the treat. We were most definitely looking forward to it.

On Sunday morning Evelyn and I were detailed to pick a large bunch of gladioli from the startling array planted by Mr Bassant in the back yard adjacent to the old Anderson shelter. These were to be placed on Poor Ada’s grave directly after Sunday dinner which Evelyn said was always a cold one on cemetery days to save time and energy. We walked to the cemetery, down the steep hill over the railway bridge and past Gemmel’s Farm and the little farm cottages on the right, then past the allotments on the left where Mr Bassant was a tenant and grew vegetables very successfully as he had done throughout the war years. Molly’s mother always maintained that we would never have got by without starving if it hadn’t been for Mr Bassant’s horticultural expertise and generosity. She didn’t say it quite like that but that is what she meant because his prize marrows were astonishing and lasted for days.

Evelyn was wearing a smart polka dot dress with a matching sunhat that had been made for her recent birthday. Molly and I were especially nice to her and in fact felt quite shabby as we walked beside her and Molly even told her that she wasn’t nearly as fat as some people said she was; she was just a little on the stout side. Evelyn said thank you and in any case she wasn’t really fat because it was a glandular problem.

When we got to the cemetery it was almost but not quite a veritable hive of activity. Along each row of graves women of mostly grandmotherly age knelt, some on cushions like the ones you find in church, and dug with miniature tools or pulled up weeds. Some were accompanied by men who seemed to be quite uncharacteristically, doing their bidding and many had children of various ages with them who seemed to be doing the same. It was the children who staggered back and forth from the taps set around the building in the central area that looked just a little like a fairy tale cottage but wasn’t because Evelyn said it was a Records Office. The children each with a watering can queued patiently at the taps for their quota of water, the boys always overfilling their cans. There was a great deal of noise but very little quarreling except from pre-schoolers arguing that there were not too young to help. Evelyn meticulously filled the first can very nearly to the brim and Molly had to help her carry it back to pour on Poor Ada. Then she generously said it was my turn so I smiled and thanked her politely and even for a fleeting moment thought of returning the cricket bat to her.

As they worked, these industrious visitors conversed effortlessly with each other, directing a comment or two to the dead and a great many to the child helpers. Mrs. Giles whose house was between ours and Molly’s said she only wished she had a willing kiddy to help her and she certainly would have had by now if any of her girls had married which none of them had. Molly whispered to me that it was unclear which girl now lay peacefully at her feet but she had a feeling it had been the dreaded TB that had made off with her. Old Mrs Mannering from Tooley Street arrived later than us, hurrying and wheezing as she did so, complaining that her Sidney always wanted a roast of a Sunday, cemetery or no cemetery. Mrs Bassant said she should simply provide something cold on visiting days and let him get on with it but Mrs Mannering said that would simply cause him to get the Hump and he got the Hump easily enough as it was.

When the gladioli had been arranged in their glass pot and all the weeds on Poor Ada’s grave had been deftly removed we three girls were given shortbread and sugared almonds to share just as Evelyn had promised. We sat on the steps of the fairy tale cottage to eat them and then helped the biggest boys to stack the watering cans tidily against what Evelyn told us was the North wall. It had been a most satisfactory outing and when we got home I immediately broached the subject of a Sunday in the cemetery once again with my mother but she was unresponsive and said a lot of time could be wasted in such places and she had better things to do which wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all.

Little more than a year later my father’s sudden death was to bring us face to face with the very place she had so determinedly tried to avoid. For several months we at last became part of that group of weekend visitors I had so desired to join and my brother and I were able to carry cans of water back and forth from the taps and arrange flowers in a jar just as I had hoped and I was even able to talk importantly about the visits at school. The gloss seemed to wear off remarkably rapidly however and perhaps that was because community attitudes were changing fast and a dedication to the dead was losing its attraction in our corner of North Kent. The tide was definitely turning for routine grave visiting and over the following years the rows of memorial plots that had once been regularly tended with such dedication, became unkempt and uncared for. The local population now emulated those sentiments that had long been present in the Constant Family and no longer felt it necessary to commune so frequently with those who had passed. It was as if a tsunami of Constant rejection for reverence had now spilled out into the lives of ordinary and more decent people, those who had never had to live in fear of being called Diddicais. Along with the trend a whole raft of human experience was being discarded and those family members who no longer lived among us lost a great deal of the importance they had once had in our lives. They were spoken of less frequently and only emerged in old photographs in dusty albums when someone might point out that Little Vera had her Great Aunt Edna’s eyes.

Long decades later my brother told me that when he was a child he had often wondered why our father’s grave seemed to mean so little to us and had decided that the lack of attention to it was ruled by an ingrown acceptance of tribal neglect exacerbated by poverty. That might of course have been true. Bernard had spent a great deal of time in Northfleet Cemetery when he was growing up simply because he said it was an excellent place to see birds and owls in particular. He had glimpsed not only Tawny Owls but once a Barn Owl not to mention the less frequently seen Little Owl, just six inches high, yellow eyed with an immediately recognisable bobbing head. In later years groups of Feral Parakeets made these now neglected environs their home and caused a flurry of excitement among local ornithologists.

By then, however, we had both well and truly emerged from our poverty stricken childhood and I had married a New Zealand doctor to my mother’s great satisfaction and my brother was on the brink of becoming extremely rich. Our father’s grave had by the year 2000 long welcomed our mother and lay as abandoned and uncared for as ever it threatened to be back in 1953. When Bernard died himself in April 2016 quite strangely his wife although she had no Constant blood whatsoever, decided not to go in for either a funeral or a grave. This bizarre decision ricocheted through family and friends who all knew he would have expected and very much liked to have had the former. Briefly I could even see why it was that when she could afford them plumed horses had been important to Old Nan. A funeral procession like those that are still occasionally seen in the East End of London when an infamous felon or a notable Romany takes his leave from the community would have had enormous appeal to Bernard as a valediction of his significance to those he loved and loved him but it was not to be. He would not have set nearly as much store by a grave though. There was a long line of Constants in him after all.

The Ending

It would be safe to say that we were not overly informed regarding North Kent Writers in the schools of Northfleet and Gravesend, with of course the notable exception of Mr Charles Dickens, of whom the local members of the teaching profession seemed inordinately fond. As a group they were perhaps not particularly adventurous when recommending reading matter and from the age of eleven or twelve we progressed somewhat conventionally through those Dickens volumes thought to be Suitable to the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin followed by John Buchan as we reached the great age of fourteen. None of this was particularly exciting even for those of us who definitely leaned towards literary pursuits but on the other hand our particular corner of the teaching profession would not have considered trying to persuade us that Enid Blyton and Noel Streatfield were particularly unacceptable. To put this attitude into better perspective this was back in the days when our younger siblings were still allowed to be fond of Big Ears & Noddy and even Little Black Sambo and our Grandmas still knitted gollwogs along with bootees for new babies.

I spent two years at the Girls’Secondary Modern in Colyer Road and very few memories remain with me except how much I hated mathematics and team games. I remember little about the teachers as individuals though we must have had an English teacher because it was there that our year group was introduced to Jane Eyre. I had already devoured Wuthering Heights and fallen deeply in love with Heathcliff so I was not averse to a better acquaintance with his creator. I think I had been great influenced by the film version, loved by my mother who definitely regarded the literary epic as `the book of the film’. For years I associated Heathcliff with Laurence Olivier and Cathy with Merle Oberon and the only believable Ellen Dean for me was Flora Robson.

When I went on to Wombwell Hall my most preferred subject remained English and what delights were in store with the wonderful Miss K Smith as the prominent English teacher in of memory. It was she who spoke passionately of John Steinbeck and thought we might read The Grapes of Wrath and even more enthusiastically of George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier. She was perhaps mindful of the poverty that existed still in the lives of her students in those post war years. None of us were keen to tackle Orwell but a little group embarked upon Steinbeck and even stuck with him for a while. It might have been that ever present poverty that confined us as a group of working class teenagers largely to escapist literature. A sizeable number of us had become seriously addicted to love stories of the Mills & Boon variety which were exchanged between devotees rapidly and rapaciously. Invariably the tales featured teenage girls not much older than ourselves, being wickedly Led Astray and forfeiting our virginity but still Good Girls at heart and for whom there was a predictable happy ending complete with handsome and bronzed hero. Jill Butler’s mother who had herself been a teenage bride thus awarding her daughters with an enviably slender, youthful parent, disapproved of such reading and so Jill was forbidden to read them. I was never as enthusiastic about them as my classmates but fortunately for me by that time my own mother was in awe of my reading determination and ability, did not prohibit anything at all and therefore the literary world was my oyster. Considering that fact I did not make a particularly good job of taking advantage of the situation and was inclined to revert to favourite authors of my earlier childhood as comfort reading whenever I felt under stress. I was also particularly attracted to poetry and quite delighted when Miss K Smith spent one Spring term examining the major poets of the First World War. It was then I fell in love with Siegfried Sassoon and a little later with Wilfred Owen.

It was in the very first English class of my very last term of Wombwell Hall that the delightful Miss Smith launched the idea of a School Magazine and said that those of us who had a mind to do so might write a contribution. As the class poetry aficionados Julia Hill, Valerie Goldsack and I might even consider writing a suitable verse. And that was how I came to write my very first poem.

The Ending
The Hollow In the forest is lonely now and bare. Now nothing can recapture the joy I once found there.
The joy of scaling hornbeams, of eeling in the fen are only two of many I’ll never know again.
Even the forest creatures have now forgotten me. They who were my only friends when all was wild and free.
And as along the footpaths my wearying footsteps trend, a mocking voice reminds me – all pleasures have their end.

It should be pointed out that I would not have recognised a Hornbeam had I come across one and it was clear that I harboured some confusion regarding where it would be most likely to happen upon a fen. Nevertheless I was reasonably satisfied with this poetic effort and handed it in promptly before forgetting about it.

I said goodbye to Wombwell Hall, eager to become a wage earner, before the magazine emerged and gave the project no more thought as life as a London commuter took over. It came as a surprise when someone sent me a copy of the magazine some months later and I was delighted to see my name In Print for the very first time. It was then that I realised the verse was not about the Kentish woodland flora and fauna at all. It was more about saying goodbye to childhood.

A Dearth of Gravesend Writers

It seems that these days I spend a great deal of time searching for books that either feature the area where I grew up or, better still, are by local writers. Unhappily not a great many of those with a creative bent and hailing from the environs of Gravesend are inclined to writing. What is more infuriating, a number of promising volumes with Gravesend in their titles seem to emerge from a totally alien place somewhere in suburban New York. And to add insult to injury our own town suffers somewhat from the huge success of the inspired and prolific Charles Dickens. His name is the very first that is likely to emerge from a determined search.

In the 1950s all local schools seemed intent upon fully informing their students about the life and work of our best known home grown writer. This wasn’t altogether surprising as the redoubtable Mr Dickens’ fame had certainly spread further by far than the area in which he had been born and raised and once we fully realised that, most of us could see the logic in spending time on him. Despite all that, Dickens was hard work for nine and ten year olds, even those who regularly read for entertainment as some of us did in those days before ipads and mobile phones. We could manage the Christmas stories well enough and even a few chapters featuring children of similar age suffering greater hardship than ourselves but a great deal of Dickens’ literary genius was wasted on us.

We knew absolutely nothing of Joseph Conrad who, by stretching a point or two, could also be considered a Local Writer. I am reliably informed that he wrote most of `Heart of Darkness’ whilst living in Gravesend and in fact the book begins there. Conrad was not a true local lad of course and apparently hailed from The Ukraine which was still a place most of us had never heard of.

By the time we were eleven or twelve we had even heard of Chaucer and knew he was responsible for `The Canterbury Tales’ and that the band of colourful pilgrims he spoke of must have at least brushed past our riverside town on their journey. We couldn’t have claimed him as a Local, however. For one thing he came from London and his focus town of Canterbury was about forty miles distant and a very tedious bus ride. But lack of Gravesend literature simply means casting the net a little wider.

When the overall dearth of North Kent writing is considered you can imagine the excitement generated in the last day or two when I stumbled across Brian Dillon’s `The Great Explosion’ telling the story of the catastrophe that ended the lives of over a hundred people in the early years of the twentieth century. Sinead discovered it in her local Islington library in North London. A book, set on the North Kent Marshes and practically on our doorstep. Dillon is a brilliant story teller and recreates the disaster in excruciatingly compelling detail. And as a lover of the area he evokes with clarity the remarkable landscape. To read it brings back childhood memories with a jolt so unexpected that the marshland smells are once again astonishingly real.

This ancient marshland is a special place and a childhood acquaintance with it leaves an impression that is never erased. Writer friend Jennifer Barraclough, now living in Auckland, whose own childhood was spent in Gravesend, fervently agrees. Her 2019 novel `You Yet Shall Die’ is set in the area and family secrets are revealed against a background all Gravesenders would immediately recognise and respond to. Jennifer and I are in complete agreement that considering the compelling allure of the area it is surprising that it does not attract more enduring links with literature. Perhaps she and I simply have to concentrate on writing more ourselves!