Lapidary afterthoughts
Patrick Cosgrave
On every day that I come into London I am obliged to suffer two minutes of dark depres sion. They arrive as I cross the churchyard of St Mark's, Kennington, on my way to the Oval tube station. The church building itself is square and grave, rather than handsome.
The churchyard is an expanse of now desiccated grass, pockmarked by abandoned rose beds. Derelicts, dog-walkers and untidy children inhabit the purlieu. And, away to the left, stacked like playing cards close to the railings, are the gravestones which it was once the purpose of the churchyard to house. Of these memorials Bishop Healey said in 1967, 'This life is incomplete without death ; and the visible church building is incomplete in its witness to this world without this outreach to the dead.' The sacramental purpose of St Mark's is obscured, and to some extent destroyed, by the tolerance of successive incumbents for the violation which has made their churchyard a desert.
The comparison with discarded playing cards-I take from the second edition of The Church}ards Handbook* by the Revd Henry Stapleton and Mr Peter Burman, which conceals under its sober and even dull title a series of grave, intelligent, and occasionally deeply moving reflections on the character, care and importance of churchyards. Nothing is omitted : here we find a disquisition on epitaphs; there a study of wild grasses. In another place there is a determined and learned assault on the mass production of headstones; and in yet another an examination of the comparative value of sheep and geese as instruments for keeping down excessive growth in churchyards. Nowhere, however—and this is a remarkable feature of the book—do the authors lose sight of the living, theological functioning of such places. They are wise, indeed, to disdain Sir John Betjeman's preference for that 'much more honest name', graveyard, for it is the organic connection between church and churchyard whichgives life to these most affecting of places.
Only in an age as secular as our own would it seem at all paradoxical to emphasise life in connection with churchyards. Yet it is, in a simple way, the most obvious of emphases. In our better churchyards there has usually been a resistance to proposals to landscape: grass is not excessively tightly cropped, and the temptation to turn them into gardens resisted. Herbicides and grass regulants have often been ignored. Thus, in Suffolk recently, it was possible to discover more than 300 different varieties of wild flowers and grasses. Some Norfolk and Suffolk churchyards still contain some rarely seen wild orchids. As naturalists like Richard Mabey fight for the preservation of hedges, so readily destroyed nowadays in the service of progressive agriculture, it is to the tradi tional churchyard that they can most readily turn for examples of the real value of the real thing. As the concrete order of the urban sprawl reaches out further and further into the countryside, voles and squirrels re treat to live their little lives under the peaceful protection of the dead. 'Oh let them be left, wildness and wet', as Hopkins wrote, 'Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.'
Stapleton and Burman set their faces against any change in this order of things, for they find in it an agreeable propriety.
The sense of a continuing stream of life which they find so important comes out most clearly in their chapter on the epitaph.
Its three main purposes they see as being to honour the dead, comfort the living and in form posterity. Few, alas, among modern inscriptions fulfil these purposes with dignity but, kindly as always, they advise an incumbent against putting too much pressure on the bereaved to avoid the saccharine: 'If mourners insist on clichés, they must have them.' Their own love of the classical is abundantly clear. They put together three delightful epitaphs. Of a boy killed on the Somme, there was simply a quotation from an eyewitness of his death, 'When things were at their worst he would go up and down in the trenches cheering the men, when dan ger was greatest his smile was loveliest.' Of John Cook of Sutton his mourners tell us, plainly, that he was 'many years a respect able Collar and Harness maker of this
Parish.' Of John Parr it was said that he 'was ranger of Durham Park, under the NOBLE EARL of Stamford and Warrington for
thirty-three years, which Situation he filled with credit to himself and Satisfaction to his Noble employer'. And then, in a pleasing classification of their own, the authors observe that 'it is easy to believe, of all three men, that they did their duty in their generation.' There is literary grace.
Of all the rules that they lay down about the composition of epitaphs Stapleton and Burman insist above all that they are public documents, however humble their subject may have been. It should, therefore, always be stated clearly what the dead man or woman did in life: it is this, and the possible eternal consequence of it, that most contri butes to the three great purposes. Rarely can the first or second have been better served than by the inscription on the gravestone of a Salvation Army officer to the effect that he had been 'promoted to glory'. Rarely can so minatory a note have entered into an epitaph as in the statement composed for his own headstone by the arsonist John Carter, to the effect that his crime should be recorded 'as a warning to his companions and others who may hereafter read this memorial.'
Of all the more famous inscriptions my own favourite is that composed by Samuel Parr for Dr Johnson's statue in St Paul's. The history of its composition (which took twelve years) and of Parr's quarrels with Johnson's executors, bears out nearly every rule and caution advanced for the preparation of humbler efforts by Stapleton and Burman. It should have been, as Parr insisted, on Johnson's memorial in Westminster Abbey, not on a statue. The author quarrelled bitterly with Johnson's friends over their desire for what he considered to be exaggerated rather than exact praise. (Johnson himself was more indulgent, saying that an epigraphist should accept the fact that 'allowance msut be made for some degree of exaggerated praise'.) He sought 'universality' and 'classical stability'. But he eventually gave way and commented on the executors that they were 'blockheads' who 'made me spoil my epitaph.' Later, he performed the same service for Gibbon, Burke and Sir John Moore and observed complacently to Butler, 'It's all very well, Sammy, to say that So-and-so is a good scholar, but can he write an inscription ?'
We cannot, unfortunately, hope for the dedication and confidence of a Parr today. Nor, indeed, can we hope for much in the way of individual gravestone design. Stapleton and Burman, however, are willing to break a lance in this good cause as well. They give excellent advice on how to procure individual work at not much greater expense than the uniform products of death factories. And they favour recording a mason's name.on his work. This is a departure from the policy laid down in the first edition of the handbook, but is, in my own, sufficiently justified by the hope that it will 'prevent the bad mason hiding under the cloak of anonymity and encourage the good mason's work to be admired.' And they provide manY photographs of admirable work to judge by. Of all of them [like best that for Austin Bruce Ferguson, from Penn churchyard. It is in traditional form, somewhat varied bY a local sculptor, and contains merely the name, the dates, and the simple legend, 'an unassuming, courageous and most compassionate man greatly loved.' There are distinguished churchyards all over Europe, and in many other parts of the world as well. But it is not chauvinistic,. I think, to say that the English churchyard is, at its best, unique and uniquely impressive. There is no peace of soul deeper than the peace to be found from a quiet walk through one. Through the wars—and especially the seventeenth-century wars—when churchyard crosses were desecrated ; through all manner of social and economic upheaval, through even the decline of organised religion, during which more and more church
men chase off like deranged hippies after false gods and falser doctrines—through all this many churchyards have remained, serene and unchanging in their testimony. It may be, of course, that St Mark's is the sYmbol of this future. If we believed that we might as well give up now. But I do not think it is. As long as something in the human heart maintains reverence for life itself, as long as men and women look back to the past with curiosity, regard and even love, and as long as they look to their future With interest and awe, then the churchyard Will be the still centre where all their concerns meet. Teeming with its own life, peaceful in its own death, it can survive many more bruises and blows. For the moment it is good to record that an official church handbook recognises its value.
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