The English Way of Death

By Way of Kensal Green

I would wander through Kensal Green Cemetery, a silent and ramshackle necropolis covering 75 acres which I visited almost every day in the hot summer of 2022 when I was staying with a very kind but tough and simpatico woman after my relationship had broken down and I had to move out and move on. It was on the Harrow Road side of the site and one of my favoured rambles. I liked this part of the cemetery for its elaborate Victorian tombs and that few visitors strayed to this part of the necropolis. In fact, very few of the living seemed to visit this place with its melancholic memories and crumbling memorials. Until late summer when the grass and vegetable growth was cropped it is wild and overgrown, birds wheeling and crying overhead like distant mourners. There are hidden places where I could sit on a tomb out of sight and eat my lunch and read and write. I’d visit the resting places of two great English writers, JG Ballard and Harold Pinter, and offer a prayer of thanks for their work and peace for their souls. Sometimes I’d visit with my friend Ryan whom I had met on the Freedom marches and we’d climb over the wall when the cemetery gates were shut on those hot summer nights, drink beer, talk endlessly, and smoke roll-ups on the sun-dappled graves as darkness decended slowly. This city of the dead provided a respite from the endless noise and traffic and bustle of the city beyond its walls. I liked it so much that I considered applying for a job tending the space as an attendant gardener.

It’s strange and wonderful how certain spaces can help in the healing of mind-storms and troubles.

The dead don’t scare me or bother me; I am only disturbed by the living.

One day when I was wandering I saw in the distance a tomb reflecting the late afternoon sun, so bright. I approached, stooped, read the bevelled inscription, ambled on to my favoured spot, and wrote this in my notebook (everyone needs to carry a notebook and a pen):

A Grave in Kensal Green

On path ahead the sun on polished stone
Reveals the tomb of Ernest W Hone
1896, wife Frances ’68 
Interred alone: St George’s by the Gate

I wonder did they love and who they were?
Alone in death but do they still confer?

Searching the historical records I find Ernest, I see he was born in 1856 and died in 1896. Spouse listed as Fanny Louisa Young; that would be Frances. So strange to our modern ways that the bourgousie should erect such elaborate memorials in this necropolis. In Highgate Cemetary to the North whole families would promenade and pay respects to the graves of their departed. For the Victorians death was a big thing. If you’ve ever attended an English funeral you will see the remnants of this high formality. When my ex-partner’s sister died the funeral cortege led by the undertakers could’ve been from that era, with a petrol-driven hearse taking the place of the horse-drawn carriage and the funeral directors bedizened in black sombre fustian, the lead women wearing a truncated top hat and carrying a silver-topped cane. 

Although brought up in the Catholic faith I can think of nothing better than the funeral rites of the Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer, and therein The Order for The Burial of the Dead:

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. […]

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.

In the mid 19th century London was running out of space to bury the dead. By 1850 the population stood at nearly two and a half millions, doubled by what it was 50 years before. A parliamentary bill was passed in 1832 which led to the establishment of burial grounds outside the city of London. Following this bill great Necropoli were established on what were then the suburbs and outskirts of the Great Wen. Kensal Green (1832); West Norwood (1837); Highgate (1839); Brompton (1840); Abney Park (1840); Nunhead (1840); and Tower Hamlets (1841). These are known as The Magnificent Seven, with Kensal Green being the first to be put into use. Unlike churchyards, these ‘garden cemeteries' were not linked to parish churches and were privately run. They were inspired by the 1815 opening of Père-Lachaise in Paris. This was, and is, a landscaped park of trees, roads, and walkways where people would visit for a Sunday outing and to picnic amoungst the graves. The London cemetaries, whilst copying the model  of Père-Lachaise, were less romantic, typically English utilitarian, many being contructed on grid layouts. As I said earlier, though, Kensal Green is more ramshackle and less ordered. The decades of decay and changing attitudes to death have left the great London cemetaries as overgrown and peaceful refuges and to visit them is to experience what the Japanese call ‘wabi-sabi’ or the beauty of decay and impermanence. 

My best friend croaked and, damn, it was a serious shock, he was the same age as me, heart gave out, me and Louise visited the grave recently, quiet and discreet in a Suffolk churchyard. I loved him like a brother but stuff happens. The funeral was so beautiful and his wife chose the hymns and the address. When The Order for The Burial of the Dead was read at the graveside we bowed our heads at the words from centuries ago and which still work to heal the hurt as the body was interred.  

The English attidude to death, indeed the Western formality, has changed. It is preferred that death is a subject to be muttered sotto voce, to be hidden away, hence the scant visitors to my beloved Kensal Green and churches and graveyards and cemeteries. In 1973 a book by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker titled The Denial of Death touched on the squeamishness of Western societies to confront the inevitabilty of death and the mortality of our species. Becker wrote “I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols." Like Alfred Adler, Becker was opposed to the Freudian school of thought which forefronts the terribly  damaging concept of aetiology which rakes over the past, a past which has gone forever, a sort of modernistic determinism, the genesis of a secular new religion and repurposed original sin based on long-ago trauma, guilt, and shame. Adler denies trauma and says it is only our response in the here-and-now which matters; the past has gone and the future is to come.

Don’t the days fly by? Sometimes, writing as a worker, one day seems much like the other. I simply have to work, to put bread on the table, to pay the rent on my flat, and I trudge every day to the place which pays a salary each month, as regular as the welkin turns from winter to summer and back again.

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.”  ― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Here in Ipswich there are many graveyards and cemeteries. There is a large crematorium on the outskirts and a modern municipal cemetery situated likewise, set out in grid form. The old burial ground, close to Christchurch where we meet every Sunday for Stand in the Park, is much more beautiful and peaceful. Still, the most poignant graveyard in Towen is the tiny walled 19th century Jewish cemetery behind Fore Street. There was a Hebrew community here, now long gone, although there are still Jewish folk in the towen. How brief is a life, how short is a life, how sadly curtailed from its natural span sometimes.

A rich man once inquired of the Japanese monk Sengai 仙厓 義梵 of the key to happiness of his family 

Sengai replied: "Father dies, son dies, grandson dies."

Naturally the rich man grew angry because he didn’t understand the koan.

The monk explained that this is a disruption of a natural order "If before you yourself die you son should die, this would grieve you greatly. If your grandson should pass away before your son, both of you would be broken-hearted. If your family, generation after generation, passes away in the order I have named, it will be the natural course of life. I call this real prosperity."

Later, after the funeral service, at the wake of my friend in the Swan Inn in Alderton near the shores of the Deben river close to where it meets the North Sea, I realised the truth of the koan as I spoke with my mate’s mother.

The Parsees put their dead on a rock to be devoured by vultures; they call this a sky burial. When the soul has fled the body there is nothing left except a rotting corpse. Muslims wait for three days and then the body is interred or incinerated as it is believed the soul leaves the body after this time. Christians inter or burn our dead, mostly out of sight. Us English gather in solemnity, pay our respects, and then, like our Irish cousins, go to the pub for the wake and sink pints in remembrance.

Live life, live it full, look around, it will soon be gone. Love your family, love your friends, love your sisters and brothers in the whirl of existence for the brief span of consciousness on this plain of being, this miracle of life.

G.K. Chesterton wrote this poem in 1913.
  
The Rolling English Road 

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

The old Jewish cemetery in Ipswich

The most beautiful setting of The Order for The Burial of the Dead that I know is by the great English composer Henry Purcell from the 17th Century. Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, 1695