The Ghost Lake, page 3
When this cemetery was being laid out, a vision was being planted: of hedges the colour of burnished gold, set against the grassy hillside, the dark green of Row Brow Woods above, and the blue North Sea below. There is no rush here, no feeling of being watched. Each section has small entrances within the hedging, through which mourners might leave and enter without the awkwardness of having to step over neighbours who might be tending to a plot. A mourner could come to one of these enclosed spaces and sit by their loved one’s grave and it would be intimate, personal.
In the original part of the cemetery, the feeling is one of being enclosed by nature, surrounded by trees and hedges. There are mature trees on the corners of each square, and the avenues between the grid layout are luxuriously wide, allowing enough space for two cars to pass comfortably. The whole of the cemetery is lifted by the scent of the sea and the mulchy woodlands behind. The higher you climb up the slope, the better the view, until on reaching the top you can see over the rooftops of Scarborough town, over the local school, the hospital, and the spires of the many churches, to the castle on its promontory, the higgledy old town and further out to the white cliffs trailing away down the coast to Bempton, Flamborough, Bridlington and the wide North Sea.
At its highest point, the cemetery ends abruptly; the paths and roads and headstones butt up against Row Brow Woods, which continue as far as the eye can see. Row Brow Woods is part of a wider woodland complex, which joins Raincliffe Woods to the north and seeps down into the leafy, cool Forge Valley on the western side of the Tabular Hills – the flat-topped, table-shaped hills which edge the Vale of Pickering and the North York Moors. This ancient woodland is studded with Bronze Age burial mounds, several of which are right behind the cemetery. The effect of this woodland backdrop is that wherever you are in the cemetery, the sound of the forest ripples out. It is echoey. You can hear twigs snapping, animals passing through, and the sound of boughs moving in the breeze. It forms a soothing white noise. My daughter died with ventilators and resuscitation attempts, noise and sterility, and this place is the absolute opposite of that. I feel I have shushed her into the ground, here, truly put her at peace.
Today the air is cool with a sea fret, but already the June heat is burning the edges off that chill. The squirrels are making a ruckus in the branches above my head, and somewhere up near the woods something – a crow, a jackdaw? – is squawking. This is perhaps the thing I love the most about this place: the wildlife. There are squirrels, magpies, crows, sparrows and dunnocks. There are rabbits, foxes, and sometimes deer will come seeping out of the mist, making their way gently down between the headstones, quietly clipping the grass. When I arrived this morning, a magpie was sitting on one of the headstones, its iridescent black and sharp white feathers perfectly suited to the rows of marble grave markers.
The road up to the top of the cemetery is steep and lined with headstones from the nineties. Some don’t even have a name on, others have inscriptions that are almost letters to the dead, with every family member mentioned by name. The inscriptions on these headstones are keen to tell us that the person in the ground fell asleep, rather than died. Words are powerful. My daughter’s headstone says she was ‘born sleeping’. She wasn’t. She died in between delivery and birth. There was a resuscitation attempt, a fight to bring her back, after we’d travelled from our local trust, whose care had been poor, to Leeds hospital, where she was born. Could I have coped with that language at the time? Perhaps the code that people use around death – the code of passed away and born sleeping – is about compassion for the bereaved, but sometimes it is better just to say ‘died’. On the day of her birth, her death, coming round from the light general anaesthetic, after the clamour of the emergency crash delivery, I asked for my daughter and a nurse told me she’d ‘gone’. I had to get my husband to clarify whether she was alive or dead because ‘gone’ could have been a baby being whisked to ITU, or it could have been what it was, a baby in a cot, still warm, but not alive. Words have the power to carry trauma or relieve trauma. People find it difficult to be truthful when confronted with the need to deliver news which is so obviously going to cause immense pain to the receiver. For most people, it’s in our nature to prevent pain. But I feel there is a genuine need for more guidance in the way that medical professionals in particular deal with the language around death. Being honest without being callous is a kindness, it allows people to begin, immediately, to deal with what has happened, rather than leaving them to work it out for themselves. Partly, though, I wonder how much of this is, again, my oddness that is at fault. I have found, especially in stressful situations, that I need information laid out in black and white in order for me to process it.
A squirrel arrives, moving up the line of headstones. I like seeing them here. They are emblematic of the living, the surviving, the nature that is benefiting from our place of death. This skinny wee thing looks like it has seen better days. I imagine it as a mother with a litter, run ragged trying to consume enough to feed her growing babies. She (let’s call her she, though I have no idea how to differentiate male from female) stops to put her head into a flowerless flower holder, which must be filled with rainwater. She takes a good long drink. It confirms to me that putting a bird bath on my daughter’s grave was a good idea, and I get a little thrill from imagining a squirrel drinking from it. It moves in the staccato way that squirrels do, hand-like paws occasionally rooting into the earth, presumably looking for last year’s nut stash. And then it’s gone.
As I get to the very top of the cemetery and walk along the road that crests the rise, the sound of the birds in the forest increases. A crow is rasping and there’s a clumsy clatter as a wood pigeon breaks from the trees into the sunshine. I sit down on a bench overlooking the expanse of headstones and the Scarborough rooftops. It has a plaque on it, a donation from the Special Care Baby Unit at the hospital. I recognize it immediately as the bench I used to sit on when I would come to the cemetery daily to see my daughter. It must have been moved up here at some point and, yes, now I come to think of it, there is a bare spot of ground near the entrance to the children’s section. How had I not noticed that before? Possibly it is because I no longer stay in the cemetery for any length of time when I visit. I have followed a drive, park, flowers, kiss, goodbye routine, but today has made a nice change. It has been a long time since I removed myself from the nitty gritty of grieving and looked about me.
The cemetery my daughter is buried in is the same cemetery where the sexual predator and Scarborough resident Jimmy Savile is buried. It is a fact that has consistently affected my peace of mind since he was brought here, to a spot in the cemetery, now unmarked.
I know where the grave is because I saw it in all its gaudy glory when he was first buried. At the time the grave was festooned with flowers and gifts, and people would come to gawp at the spot, which had to be fenced off with swags of metal rope. It had a huge black marble headstone in three parts – a tryptic of Jimmy portraits, Jimmy words and Jimmy celebrations. The whole thing was Savile’s song of praise to himself: the charity work, the accomplishments, the poem about loving Scarborough which, as a poet, made me want to take a marker and edit it so the rhythm worked better. Even without the allegations that spilled out later, and the knowledge that went with them, it was uncomfortable to look at. Its lack of humility made me cringe. It dominated that section of the cemetery, and all the other headstones were dwarfed by it. In hindsight, the overbearing headstone looks like a deflection, or some sort of offsetting of good deeds against evil ones. I suspect that’s exactly what it was.
My daughter was buried in 2010, and Savile was buried in 2011. 2011 was a tough year. But it was made tougher by the stream of tourists coming to see Savile’s grave. One day, while I was kneeling next to my daughter’s grave changing the flowers, a man barged in, right up to me, almost standing on the soft pink roses. Without any sort of preamble, he asked me where Savile’s grave was. I was simmering with resentment and anger, but I felt obliged to tell him. It happened several times, but mostly people were more polite.
When he was exposed, after his death, as a serial sexual predator, the headstone was removed. The town was ashamed, and when people still came to see the spot, they took every identifier away. If you didn’t know where to look, you’d miss the slightly discoloured grass, beneath which is concrete, protecting the grave itself from treasure hunters looking to rob it of its gold chains and medallions.
For the people left behind, external markers of loss are important. Even in cremation, when ashes are spread, they tend to be spread where the dead person had an emotional connection, and this place becomes the external marker for the people left behind. Of course, where cremation is concerned, this is a transient marker which only exists as long as the people who remember the spreading of the ashes are alive and able to share the memory of the place. When we mark a grave, it is for the people who are left behind. If grief is a continuity of the relationship one has with the deceased, then the markers that we use to define the place where a person is buried is like a halfway point – a letter to the dead, rather than a face-to-face conversation. It’s more than that. It’s a communication to the deceased, and a reminder to ourselves, but it’s also a message to the community we exist in. It tells anyone who might be passing that this person existed, that they were cared about or at least they were thought of and remembered enough for someone to place something permanent, knowing that the physical form of a person is not. Long after the body is gone, the headstones remain. Remembrance of the true person – their personality, their traits and physical appearance – can only occur when someone still exists to remember them, but having the marker, whether it is a burial mound or a headstone, allows there to be a connection even without the living memory of the person who has died. How we remember the dead and having the space and facilities to carry out those rituals, no matter what shape they may take, are important.
Removing that external marker is a ritual in itself, a ritualistic striking out of the memory, but still, in a thousand years’ time, when the headstones of this place are likely to be gone, the memories of the people lost, what will the people of the future infer from the graves themselves? There will be no tangible evidence of my daughter, and most of the people in the cemetery will be nothing more than darkened earth, but Savile – with his swags of indestructible gold, his chains and rings and belts – will appear to be a high-status individual, someone special. His wealth will give the impression of superiority and say nothing of his moral character. I think of the burial mounds of the lake people and their simple grave goods – pottery and flint, stones from the beach – and what they imply about their lives. I think of my dad in his wicker coffin, with just a crocheted blanket and a bed of hay, and my daughter, her small skeleton in a white coffin, a photograph, a letter from us and a stuffed toy.
The newest part of the cemetery is very basic. It is a field with a crop of headstones. There are no trees, no hedges, no fences. There are no magpies or doves or squirrels. There is just a blank of green, neatly aligned, and the mower has clearly been able to get straight across without hindrance. It has the feeling of being a storage facility for the dead.
I watch a small bumblebee clasping the head of a tiny blue flower which has somehow avoided being scythed down. Life finds a way. I walk past the rows of headstones back to the lower part of the cemetery and make my way to the area behind the toilet block. Here is a new development: a place for parents to bring the remains of their babies, babies who haven’t made it to a point of any sort of certification of life. It is a gravelled area, with a purpose-built structure which looks a little like a spherical filing cabinet with small drawers. There’s a bench at one end of the development, along with rows of small plots, and a container of planted flowers at the other. Each little plot has an identical granite flower holder. It is very neat, and yet the parents who have bought the plots to remember their babies have coloured outside the lines; there are toys and balloons, birthday cards and windmills spread all over the place, in the way that love, and grief, is untidy.
It’s a perfectly acceptable place but there is no green, no grass. It feels not unlike a car park, and that makes me uneasy. I had a miscarriage in 2011 and another in 2012. Around that point, visits to my daughter’s grave became more structured and ritualistic. My grief manifested in my need to have something to ‘do’ at the grave. I planted things, I grew flowers, I enjoyed the sound of the trees above my head, the sound of birdsong, the bees and butterflies. There was a ‘doing right by the dead’ aspect and certainly a need to be parental, maternal, to care for the grave. I am also aware that it allowed me to connect to the ground and the soil, growth and death inextricably linked.
That sense of nature is missing in this gravelled area. It is as though we are afraid of the messiness and lack of control in nature, which is something that is reflected in our fear of death. We mostly die in hospitals these days. Our bodies are wheeled to mortuaries and from there to funeral homes and from there sealed in caskets and delivered into the ground or into the cremation chamber. It is almost as if death is an embarrassment, a failure of the ultimate goal of being healthy. When my daughter died, I had the opportunity to wash her body and dress her. I let the midwife carry out these simple acts while I watched, somehow afraid that I would break her, which is how all new parents must feel. Those moments we spent together and those few days on the ward with her body made a difference to my grief. They allowed me to process what was happening.
With my dad, we were able to sit with him before life support was turned off. We were there, comforting him as he died, though there was no way of knowing whether he could hear us. And afterwards we were able to have that last connection with his body. As with being with my daughter’s body, that was an important part of the grieving process, the recognition that the body and the person I knew as my dad had separated – that he was gone.
With both the loss of my daughter and my dad, there were weeks when it felt like there had been a mistake, when I expected a phone call from the hospital to tell me there’d been a miracle, and my daughter had, after all, lived. Or that I would look up from the kitchen table at my mum’s house and see my dad striding down the path with his battered old hat and oil-stained jacket. This too is a natural part of the grieving process as the brain reprogrammes itself to acknowledge the losses. Being around their dead bodies started that process. In nature, plants die, animals die, they decompose, and their bodies become the nutrients that other life needs to grow.
Nothing, then, ever really dies. The atoms are just reused in different combinations. This thought pleases me. It is reassuring in a way that religious ideas of heaven and the passage from one place to another never really were. My Methodist upbringing didn’t feel like a structure I could cling to after the loss of my daughter, but nature did, landscape did.
This small, neat place of remembrance at Woodlands Cemetery is a perfectly adequate area, not unlike the gardens of many people (though not mine, mine is horrifically overgrown). But I find myself questioning how we can connect with the dirty, but ultimately natural, journey of death and grief if all we have as a place of connection is something hard, gravelly, scentless and silent? I wonder whether cemeteries could gear their design more towards supporting the grieving and less towards aesthetics and convenience. That might help ease parents’ complex feelings around baby loss and child loss.
Surprisingly, I didn’t mark my miscarriages in any way at all. Though I grieved for the two small lives we briefly created, there was not the same need to care for them, for myself. However, having spent some time in the infertility community supporting parents who have lost babies, I have seen lots of people do just this: take their baby’s cherished remains home, at whatever stage they were lost, to bury in plant pots and gardens, planting trees and rose bushes on them, creating spaces to grieve, creating beautifully cared-for shrines. There is nothing growing in this place of neat lines and gravel. And that makes me sad.
I stand up and take a deep breath. The air smells faintly of seaweed, and the seagulls are wheeling above, the day sharpening with heat. I go to stand again at my daughter’s grave. The little windmills are whizzing and the windchimes are clinking. I kiss my hand to the marble and tell her she is not forgotten.
CHAPTER THREE
Seamer Beacon
Seamer Beacon is a natural earth mound, covered in trees and surrounded by a Bronze Age burial ground. It is a visible marker, sitting proud on the horizon on the northern side of the lake site. If you know what you are looking for, the mound of Seamer Beacon is visible from almost anywhere in the valley. I am aware of it in my daily life, as I travel from my village into the nearby towns, as I drive along the edges of the long-gone lake, past the ghosts from my own life, my own past. I can see the mound while driving down the Vale of Pickering towards Malton and York, and from inland over the moors. It is such a prominent feature, rising on the lip of the valley, that it has become an emblem of home, a sign to look out for.
This whole valley – and the moors and the Dales and the Wolds too – is marked with signs of past lives and past deaths. It is a place of ritual and burial. The barrows and earthworks are meant to be seen, meant to connect the living to the dead, the present to the past. Barrows, also known as tumuli, are the burial grounds of prehistoric people. They are made up of earth and sometimes stones and are as individual as the communities who built them, people who used the local resources available to them. They are part of the umbrella term ‘earthworks’, which includes barrows as well as the raised banks and mounds associated with fortification. Earthworks are often all that is left to show us the activities of prehistoric people who lived thousands of years ago. It is a strange and beautiful coincidence that the mound itself, and the round barrows, are directly above the cemetery, my cemetery, the place where my daughter is buried. The ancient burial ground, my emblem of home, and the place I laid my daughter all those years ago are separated only by a semi-circle of ancient woodland: Row Brow Woods. This feels to me like a continuation of grief – something that connects us, me, to the ancient past.
