I was reading Necropolis
on the National Express,
counting the hours to Victoria and measuring success
by the bleeps of a phone. Asked
and found in a shopping mall, awkward until
our hands touched, in rain-sheen, still,
on buses and the hill.
The public space
of the Tube lit up as if by fire or starlight;
furtive, beautiful kisses on a hot night.
A massive sheet of grass where glass faces
once stood, hiding in the bushes like adolescents,
frozen-armed and all-ablaze, lost in his scent;
Greenwich, TV, drunk with love, no
privacy.
Museums, walks, bookstores, endless cups of tea.
Until it had to end, in hail, a rainbow—
where I would be, forgotten on the kerb:
this monster city, don’t disturb.
You know?
Idealization in the pain: it only goes to show.
This
poem was written almost four years ago, and the sentiments of bitterness and
regret over a lost relationship no longer hold true. Fortunately for me, the heartbreak in it
turned to true love!
But
enough about me. I’ve come back to this
because I acquired the book Necropolis: London and Its Dead from work as a
giveaway and have since picked up where I left off, never having finished the
book in 2008. It happened that the book
was quite topical, given that I visited Kensal Green Cemetery last weekend,
with plans to see the other “big six” Victorian London cemeteries later in the
summer.
What
can I say? I like history, I like the
macabre, and one reason I love living in London is that the history is thickly
layered nearly everywhere. As I
remarked, there is almost nowhere in the urban center that was not a cemetery
or burial ground at some point, including the very area in which we live. It makes the London Walks on Halloween all
the more fitting, yet somehow it comforts me, for if I haven’t been haunted
yet, it seems unlikely that I will.
Visiting
graveyards as a touristic proposal has some struck some as weird; I would think
it unpleasant myself if they had remained the boneyards of the early 19th
century. However, the classical London
cemeteries we have today, if a little neglected, are nevertheless pleasant to
stroll through in the same way Père Lachaise was designed to be a resting place
for the dead and a green space for the living.
While you are not confronted with visceral death in the same way that
you are in the catacombs of Paris, walking through them is a somewhat sobering
experience, especially when you start to realize the vastness of the
ever-expanding Kensal Green.
London’s
burial history in Necropolis begins
with the “Celtic Golgotha” of the 70,000 Romans killed by Boudicca’s army in
her spree of vengeance, buried around the Thames near Battersea. Then we speed forward to the 4th
century C.E., to the Spitalfields Woman, whose coffin revealed “the skeleton of
a young woman, perfectly preserved, lying on a pillow of bay leaves and wrapped
in an elaborate robe of Chinese silk, decorated with gold thread from Syria.” And I have a personal connection to the
Spitalfields Woman as well, as her coffin and reconstructed face, residing in
the Museum of London, inspired me in 2007 to write,
Prehistoric
It’s a stripping away:
of skin and flesh, sinew and artery, capillary,
nerve endings, knee cap and gland;
each a new way to keep you
from me. Soon
there will be bone
and nothing left to string
it together, not a tender tendon,
not a ligament of promise or hope.
Only magic and insanity
to keep the skeleton functioning,
carving out a semblance
of a human being, like a chalk
figure carved on a cave wall.
By then there will be no lips
left to kiss, no fingernails,
no breasts, not even a heart
pumping blood.
Only sheer force
of will. Only
you
can bring back the bits,
mold me like an anatomist’s clay,
taking shape like the reconstructed
face of the prehistoric Spitalfields woman
in the museum.
(I fudged
a little when I called her prehistoric!)
In
the chapter called “Danse Macabre,” our attitudes toward death and burial are
contrasted with those of the medieval Londoner, whose response to the Plague
was best described in Herman Hesse’s Narcissus
and Goldmund; I feel I’m covering similar ground to that described of
medieval France in Metrostop
Paris: History from the City’s Heart. For the people of the Middle Ages, being
buried close to or within the church
building was the ultimate. “Builders demolishing the remains of the
Blackfriars monastery after the Great Fire of London discovered four heads, in
pewter pots, in a wall. The heads, which
were embalmed, had tonsured hair.”
London survived another Plague, described in great detail by the likes
of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys, and the Great Fire of London, in the 17th
century. By the 18th century,
Catharine Arnold argues, attitudes toward death and funerals had changed, in
part due to a rising middle class (it’s always the rise of the middle
class). The craze for mausolea, “such as
Vanbrugh’s for Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which made such a terrific
impression on the gothic novelist Horace Walpole that he observed it ‘would
tempt one to be buried alive!’”
After this, things definitely went downhill. No one seemed to want to make any burial
fields outside of churches or, moreover, outside of London. Conditions grew appalling in the inner
city. As reformer George Alfred Walker
remarked, “The soil of this ground [Portugal Street] is saturated, absolutely
saturated, with human putrescence . . . The living here breathe on all sides an
atmosphere impregnated with the odor of the dead.” Yet people seemed reluctant to act. Arnold posits that the conditions of the
living poor were so bad, the conditions of the dead were but an extension of
their “miserable” lives. This makes
sense up to a point, as much of the underhand dealing, personified in the Enon
Chapel scandal, was kept hidden from the “great and good.” However, the whole phenomena just seems
incredible from a modern perspective.
Enon Chapel, by the way, was a space measuring 59 feet x 12, where
around 12,000 bodies were crammed at 15 shillings a time. (All of this in
direct contrast to the city’s Jewish cemeteries, which were by Judaic law kept
to a certain size and then “remaining undisturbed.”) “One explanation as to why
families had permitted their dearly beloved to be consigned to such a hell-hole
was the lingering fear of body snatchers.”
It took another epidemic, this time of cholera, whose effects were
recently demonstrated to me during an exhibition at the Wellcome Centre, to
shake people out of their complacency.
It’s now the 1830s, and Kensal Green, that first great pioneer, has been
designed and is about to become the fashionable
burial ground. Even today, its mixture
of Gothic and Classical styles (as well as modern, which include blue and green
glass from the 1960s, photo tombstones, and huge extravagances in black marble)
is a quirky selling point. There are
impressive mausolea; weirdly beautiful Gothic spires; towering Egyptian
obelisks and tombs; yet Arnold seems to prefer Highgate. Most people do. From the creation of much healthier
cemeteries, there seemed to give rise to the elaborate Victorian funeral and
the Good Death, not helped by Queen Victoria’s excessive response to Albert’s
death. A long battle was fought in
England to allow the use of crematoria, though eventually people began to see
how sensible this option could be; Arnold cites the example of the desecration by
French revolutionaries to the Bourbon vaults as turning public opinion away from
interment. The public response to Diana,
Princess of Wales’ death is seen as a throwback to a Victorian desire for
pageantry.
The final chapter focuses on the 20th century and how world
wars have irrevocably changed our attitudes toward death and burial,
particularly WWI and the invention of the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier. Though we get saturated in the
discussion of such things, I still found descriptions of ordinary Londoners’
courage during the Blitz to be quite inspiring.
Necropolis, with all its
emphasis on the rotting physical body after death, is also a book about
life. It describes how the living must
live with death and somehow provide a sanitary and hygienic way to do so. Also, it is a celebration of a wide parade of
people, from Radclyffe Hall to the Chevalier d’Eon, from the 5th
Duke of Portland to visionary John Claudius Loudon, from Christina Davis to
reforming writer Mrs Isabella Holmes, from Jeremy Bentham to Martin Van
Butchell. Passing St Pancras often, it
is interesting to note that it was once known as “Catholic Pancras” because it
was a particularly popular burial ground for Roman Catholics. And so we come full circle, to where echoes
of the past are always with us, whether we realize it or not.
