Dead kitsch
The government has new ideas about burying the dead, but won't publish them because of the Iraq war. John Gibb says new thinking is badly needed
My mother came from a family that refused to acknowledge its own mortality. Her only reference to death that I can remember was that 'cremation seemed to be a grubby way of disposing of one's leftovers'. To her, cemeteries were dignified repositories of the irrelevant and forgotten. My father's memorial was a slab of Welsh slate decorated with a vase of flowers. It was the soul that my mother respected, not the remains. I took her attitude to mean that in the absence of instructions she would prefer to be buried.
She was approaching her 98th birthday when the August heatwave got her. When I went to see the burial site where we would lay her to rest next to my father. I came across a large bustling memorial attended by elderly mourners kneeling on rubber cushions and fiddling about with trowels. It was the grave of a young wife and the 'piste' featured a square of miniature pine decking bordered by roses, heather, forget-me-nots, pansies and a spray of fuchsias. A plump dwarf pine stood by the stone and the whole was bordered by a pale-green corrugated plastic fence, about three inches high. Chinese bells hung from an angle bracket fixed to the gravestone, and jingled in the breeze. It could have been the garden of a dolls' house. The regulation two-and-a-half-feetby-six-feet cultivation space had certainly been expanded.
'It looks like an allotment,' I said afterwards to Mr Church, the dignified and immensely competent funeral director who was in charge of Mother's final arrangements. We strolled over to examine it and search for vegetables. 'Classic case of grave creep.' he replied. 'Happens all the time.' By 'grave creep' he meant that the bereaved had, undetected by cemetery staff, grabbed a few extra inches by extending the corrugated edging. 'It's a problem for the cemetery management,' he said. Looking around I began to realise that the memorial business is going through a radical change. The old-fashioned idea of neatly mown grass bordered by rows of granite or Portland stone is being replaced by a brave new world of uninhibited, brightly coloured clutter in which the life and times of the deceased are interpreted in varying ways.
Cemeteries are no longer the sombre places of my childhood. Many regulation six-by-eight-foot graves have become objects of creative frenzy. Wandering around a new garden of rest near Andover, I came across miniature windmills whirling in the breeze, and soft toys that had been carefully placed by the memorial stonework. I found a grave with a Chinese garden and privet hedge set off with a B&Q split-pine surround. Once, in the dusk of a summer night in Basingstoke, the wide flat space took on a ghostly look as candles flickered across the field of headstones. During a short tour of graveyards in the south-east. I found countless laminated photographs of pets, number plates, a crash helmet, a bicycle bell, beer mugs and a golf club (number seven iron) cemented to the base of a stone or fixed in some way to the plot. Your modern grave rarely carries reference to the hereafter. Rather, it tends to be a reminder of the lifestyle enjoyed by those who have passed away.
There have been boundary disputes resulting from 'creep'. Unlike the proliferating neighbour-from-hell actions over suburban fences and leylandii, however, -creep' does not seem to have made it to the county court, although in the opinion of Mr Church and a judge sitting in the Family Division, it is just a matter of time. Brent Stevenson, a member of the man
agement committee of the National Association of Memorial Masons, told me, 'It's for the cemetery staff to deal with these matters tactfully because the bereaved get understandably vexed when they realise that the neighbours are nibbling away at their memorials.' Fair enough. Anyway, who are we to judge what is acceptable and what isn't?
Stevenson has been in the memorial business all his life. 'There's much more choice about the final resting place today,' he told me. 'Some municipal burial grounds have gone through a change in recent years because we want to express our feelings about relatives who have moved on.' Some cemeteries are strict about what you can put on the graves, and others recognise that the public have their own ideas about expressing their feelings. For instance, Bleasingdon cemetery near Preston is always busy and the graves are littered with mementoes: little teddy bears, toys, elaborate floral arrangements. Some plots are floodlit. On Mothering Sunday the place is packed. You can drive your car up to the grave, but you find that everyone is falling out because there's no room to park. There were hundreds of people at Bleasingdon this year and it was the same on Christmas Eve and Father's Day. No one is twisting their arms to tend the graves. It's a serious business, which seems to me to be right and proper. Yet in some cemeteries you are only allowed a headstone, and if you lay anything on the grave the staff remove it. The result is that some traditional cemeteries are hardly visited, because people are not encouraged to tend the graves.
Stevenson says there is a fine line between decorating graves and going over the top. 'I see some things and I think, that's just too much, but the people who are doing it don't think there's anything wrong. There was a problem recently where a bereaved electrician installed an infrared sensor on the memorial. When you walked through the beam, it played "Somewhere over the rainbow", sung by Judy Garland. Now I can understand that this could irritate others visiting their loved ones and wanting to preserve a modicum of peace and dignity. But the memorial in this instance was for a small child and the parents felt strongly that they had every right to remember her in their own way.' Cemetery managers could become a little more lenient. Stevenson thinks that the change in attitude has much to do with Alan Titchrnarsh and television programmes such as Ground Force, which encourage people to be creative in the garden. 'The smaller the space, the bigger the horticultural challenge,' he says.
It is certainly true that the garden-centre industry has unearthed a new market and is doing well out of cemetery business. Even Brent Stevenson now buys his green chippings from B&Q. 'I can get them for a fiver a bag, whereas in the old days they would cost £30 from a specialist supplier,' he says. 'Costs are coming down for the grave gardener. For instance, moles are often a problem and so the first thing people do is buy a membrane and lay it down; then they may buy a bit of bordering and a couple of bags of peat and some chippings plus a square foot of decking. Plastic windmills are popular ornaments. Mourners would put them up to irritate the moles, but people who tend graves can be very competitive and I think someone noticed the windmills and thought, "Oh, that's nice, I'll have one," and now they're more decorations than mole-frighteners.'
Stone memorials are becoming increasingly elaborate. There is a gypsy section in Bleasingdon. 'Gypsy stones tend to be very large and expensive,' says Stevenson. The gypsies like to depict all aspects of the life of the incumbent, including carved reliefs of books, ponies, caravans — anything that occurs to them. Each stone is more ambitious. It is very competitive. Streatham cemetery is popular in the Greek community, Greek graves need a large plot and the memorials have elaborate gates and high walls, inside which the bereaved may sit in private and enjoy a snack. Many Muslims are buried in the private cemetery at Brookwood. Expatriate communities like to stay together.
The biggest burial ground in the UK is the 150-acre crematorium and cemetery in Manor Park. It is the home to the Cemetery and Cremation Management Association, whose secretary, Tim Morris, gave me a tour. Manor Park is a traditional garden of rest, opened in 1850 by the City of London Corporation. There are enormous memorials, vaults, mausoleums and wide open spaces whose only visible link to death are the small indentations in the dry earth that show where the poor were once stacked one on top of the other in rough wooden coffins. Even today, those too poor to pay for their own burial are piled into unmarked graves, their names listed in columns on a stone paid for by the Corporation, and their known details written in a ledger.
Cremation is popular because it is cheaper than burial, even though the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 restricted emission levels into the atmosphere from pollution caused by mercury in dental fillings. Costs amounted to £150,000 per incinerator and charges are about to go up again because of new EUdriven requirements for filtration systems. Burial costs will also increase. The Home Office has established an advisory group, under the chairmanship of the New Labour environmental MP Andrew Bennett, which has prepared a consultation document on the overhaul of burial law. However, much to the irritation of the chairman, the government, concerned for our emotional health and safety during the Iraq war, has delayed publication and declared. 'The time is not right to engage the public in a debate about mortality.' In the meantime, as we all have to die and, according to Tim Morris, no one knows how many cemeteries there are in the United Kingdom, there is mounting panic among local authorities that we will run out of land.
Although cremation now accounts for 70 per cent of the disposal of remains and an urn requires less space than a coffin, many bereaved are borrowing money to acquire larger plots so that they are able to accommodate the family ashes in more than usually spacious sites with a cordon sanitaire around the memorial. As well as keeping out unwelcome intruders, large, clearly demarcated family graves also discourage 'grave creep'. The run on cemetery space is occurring in spite of new regulations introduced to permit the disturbance of old graves so that they can be reused. As old memorials crumble and are made safe, yellow labels are taped to the stonework and letters sent to the last known address of the deceased before the plot can be allocated to a new owner. If there is no answer within six months, you could acquire a historic grave with an ancient monument as your headstone.
I'm not sure about gardening in graveyards. Perhaps the Kray twins had the right idea. Ronnie took his journey to the hereafter very seriously. On his shiny black memorial stone, his portrait is protected in a waterproof oval frame and his epitaph reads simply, 'THE LEGEND'. Every year at about 11.30 on the anniversary of the twins' birth, a group of balding villains arrive in hired cars, stamp out their cigarettes on the kerb and wander down the dank lanes to a far corner of Chingford cemetery. At about 11.40, a lone Spitfire takes off from Old Warden in Kent and flies north-west across the Essex marshes, arriving 300 feet above the cemetery at midday, when the pilot kicks the rudder and rolls gracefully above the grave. As they listen to the sound of the Merlin fading away, the old boys pull up the collars of their camel-hair coats around their necks, before setting off to an Italian restaurant in Borough High Street for a meal and a chat about old times. That's what I call respect.
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