AFTERTHOUGHT
Intimations of Mortality
By ALAN BRIEN
In the older, western area, the widows and sons, the servants and colleagues, who first super- intended the pious jerry-building, have themselves since taken to the earth, leaving no generations of mourners behind. For hours on end, as the well-fed grasses crunch beneath the unaccus- tomed trend of living feet, releasing a moist, sweet scent in the warm air, and the fattest flies in Chris- tendom play leisurely games of tag like tame love-birds under the shady boughs, there are no other eyes but mine to decipher the hopeful slogans promising eternal memory and the surety of being revived on the last day for the distribu- tion of heavenly sweets.
It might be the condemned playground of morbid and wealthy children who long ago moved on to new toys and fresh pastimes. Eternities seem to have passed since glassy hearses with silver fittings groaned up this killing hill, and queues of relatives in muffled black filed past clean, bright clay mounds. This is a world more alien and strange to me than Pompeii or Ur—
though, as a child, I roamed with holiday gangs through cemeteries on long summer days. There is a general impression that some minor earth- quake must once have shaken these funeral monuments so that the local inhabitants fled in fear and left the ruffled stoneworks to be knitted and woven over by a thick blanket of bushes and shrubs. I experience the curious illusion that I have been transmigrated into the pages of a Vic- torian novel for young people, full of wicked stepfathers, downtrodden governesses, orphaned cousins, Gothic mansions and secret, overgrown gardens.
The hub of the necropolis, reached by many a curved and sloping walk, is a circle of vaults whose entrance is an ugly gateway flanked by bulging piano-leg pillars and scabby, peeling obelisks in some bastard, mock-Egyptian style of cement over bricks. The vaults look more like bathing huts, or fairground booths, in stone and iron and on their marbled shelves weathered coffins lie within arm's reach like giant shoe-boxes.
sake, Henderson, don't shill)? shally1' hea■ 'For Some of the weighty metal doors are padlocked against strange corpses which might like to exert squatter's rights. Others are welded fast by age and would withstand a small tank attack. An occasional one has so far lost connection with its disintegrated tenants that the cemetery workmen use it as a store for barbed wire and tools. But one or two are still tenuously linked with the world of telegrams and anger like the vault of Radclyffe Hall, the authoress of The Well of Lone- liness, whose friend, Una, has inscribed the un- nerving words 'And if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death' on the gate post.
In the centre of this ring of death houses, and supported on their roofs, is a great mound which is invisible from below. It is a kind of idyllic park, a dreamy picnic ground from a British Travel and Holidays Association calendar, of tender, glowing grassland, studded by outsize flowers and ruled over by a magnificent, regal cedar tree. But there are, alas, no steps or bridge to this mirage of an oasis and the visitor can only yearn across towards it from the statue-cluttered pathway.
It is beyond this sunken circle of catacombs, at the very top of the cemetery with a leaf-fringed view of London to the Thames, that the most
ghastly and ironic demonstration of man's in- fantile pretence of immortality can be found.
This is an enormous erection, pompous block on block rising at least forty feet high to a domed roof and a cross, simply entitled The Mausoleum of Julius Beer.' It has no date and no other in- scription. The cemetery superintendent ('It was before my time, of course, and I've been here forty-five years') can only suggest that Beer is reputed to have been a diamond merchant. I suppose JB's attempt at survival into the future has been successful in that I am appealing here for some information about his life and fortunes. There is no trace of him in the Dictionary of National Biography or the Encyclopaedia Britan- nica—yet surely a businessman who could afford at least £10,000, in late nineteenth-century cash, to gratify his posthumous self-love must have left some other mark apart from this hell-hole?
I call Beer's mausoleum a hell-hole because even in nightmare I cannot imagine an edifice more certain to drive me insane if locked inside it for twelve hours. Looking through its wrought- iron door, the eye at first sees nothing except a greeny-blue haze like the bottom of an old well.
Then the thick, murky light from the stained-glass windows, high up in the hollow shell, reveals a statue of an angel inset on one wall and two horizontal mummified figures. But no living face can remain peering in for more than a minute because of the unholy, vile smell of corruption.
Over the years, the windows have lost a pane or two and now the memorial to Julius Beer is the largest pigeon-house in Europe. The floor is knee- deep in bird droppings, a lifetime's accumulation of guano, with half-sunken on the rotting surface the decaying corpses of dead birds killed in some incestuous war. The ancestral home of the Harpies could not be more frighteningly un- savoury.
If you beat on the massy panels, there gradually grows a hideous drumming and beating, as if a giant mad heart was suffering an aneurysm. And the pigeons fight and scrabble upwards in the gloom to emerge at the top screaming and howl- ing like demons being cast out of a possessed vampire castle. Julius Beer, whoever he was, has raised for himself a bird Belsen, a privy for pigeons. All his money has turned to a tower of excreta. I return home, inured to a quick, pagan cremation, with or without a two-line obituary in the local newspaper.
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