David Dickinson - Death and the Jubilee

‘One blast on this whistle,’ he said to Wilson his coachman, ‘means come to the entrance as fast as you can. Two blasts means Help.’

Chief Inspector Tait had given Powerscourt some police whistles as a memento of the night in the King George the Fourth. Powerscourt had asked for three more for the children and regretted it deeply within twenty-four hours. Robert said it would be very useful for refereeing football matches with his friends in the park. Thomas and Olivia blew theirs once to universal delight. But they didn’t stop blowing them. Powerscourt thought their lungs must collapse under the weight of blowing, from the top of the stairs, in the drawing room, in the garden. They crept into the kitchen and blew them right behind the cook and her assistant, causing panic and near mutiny below stairs. They dashed out into the street and frightened little old ladies taking a quiet afternoon walk in Markham Square. Lady Lucy only separated Thomas and Olivia from the whistles by pointing out that she and Francis wanted to play with them as well. Even then Powerscourt had to invent a whole new vocabulary of police whistles. One blast on the whistle meant Go and get into the bath. Two blasts meant Get into bed. Three blasts meant Go to sleep.

‘Look at this place, Francis, would you just look at it.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was leaning on his spade, for all the world like a workman taking a well-earned rest, and looking at the vast expanse of cemetery. Well-ordered rows stretched almost as far as the eye could see. North towards the river, west towards Kew, the West London Cemetery was enormous. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of dead must be interred here.

‘My God!’ said Powerscourt, horrified at the prospect of searching for one grave among so many. ‘It looks to be about the same size as Hyde Park, Johnny.’

To their left was the Belgravia of this country of the dead. Avenues of great stone catafalques, temples to the departed, stretched out towards the rear wall of the cemetery. Even in death, Powerscourt thought, the rich had to be better housed than the poor. If you had money in this life, then you had to show it when you were gone, neoclassical temples with shelves and closed chambers to contain the dynasties of the wealthy. Iron grilles barred the entrance to these last resting places of London’s better postal districts. Inside spiders wove their webs very thickly. The air was musty. Bats no doubt came out at night to guard the money and the dead.

Powerscourt pointed this necropolis out to Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘In here, Johnny. We can wait till the place closes up. Nobody would find us in here.’

Crouching down beside the catafalque of the Williams family of Chester Square, five of them interred in their five star luxury, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald waited in silence until they knew the cemetery was closed. Powerscourt felt claustrophobic, choked. Fitzgerald was drawing something with his finger on the dust of the side wall. Powerscourt thought it was a wine bottle. At last they heard the bolts being pulled and the keys turning in the great locks of the main entrance. Until the morning they were alone. Alone with thousands of the dead, one of whose coffins might not contain a corpse.

‘We’d better have a plan, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt as they emerged from the dank air of Belgravia. ‘Should we start at the middle and work out, or begin round the edges and make our way into the centre?’

‘Maybe there’s one section where they put all the new arrivals, Francis. Like new boys at school. What’s this bugger called anyway?’ Johnny Fitzgerald pointed his spade into the middle distance as if the newest graves were there.

‘This bugger is called Freely,’ said Powerscourt, checking his piece of paper again, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely.’

The sky was mostly blue. Small clouds drifted overhead. The tombstones were warm from the late afternoon sun. ‘Let’s begin round the edges,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and work our way in towards the centre.’

‘All right,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely,’ he muttered to himself, ‘where the hell are you?’

By seven o’clock, after an hour and a half of searching, they had found nothing. Powerscourt reckoned they had covered less than a tenth of the territory. He began to worry that they might not find Dermot Sebastian Freely before it was dark.

The whole century is enclosed here, in this enormous cemetery, he thought. He passed the grave of a man born in the year of Trafalgar, 1805, when England was saved from invasion. He passed the grave of a woman born in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession to the throne. He passed an ornate headstone commemorating a man who had been born in the year of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 and passed away in the year of the Second Reform Act of 1867. He passed the last resting place of men who had been soldiers, who had fought in the Crimea or in Africa or in India, servants of the Queen who had turned into an Empress and whose dominions now stretched across the globe. He doubted if they had been heroes, these bodies sleeping peacefully in the evening sun, but as it said so frequently on the tombstones, they had fought the good fight, remembered most often by the loving tributes of husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Powerscourt thought of the ending of Middlemarch , Lady Lucy’s favourite novel: ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

By eight o’clock Johnny Fitzgerald was getting thirsty, muttering to himself the names of the pubs he knew along the river, the Dove, the Blue Anchor, the Old Ship as if it were a final blessing on the dead.

‘Who the hell was Zachariah?’ he asked Powerscourt at one of their occasional conferences. ‘I’ve seen quotations from the old bugger about five times in the last half an hour.’

‘Old Testament,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Prophet. Long white beard.’

Fitzgerald looked at him doubtfully but returned to his stretch of tombs. There was a breeze coming off the river, rustling the leaves of the trees, whispering its way through the tombstones. At nine o’clock they failed to notice a small boy who had climbed into the cemetery by a tree at the southern end and hid himself in its branches, keeping a careful eye on the two interlopers.

Powerscourt was thinking about Lucy and the journey they would take when all of this was over. Maybe the Italian Lakes, he said to himself, remembering Old Miss Harrison in Blackwater House describing her holidays there all those years ago. Charles William Adams, he read, Mary Nightingale, Albert James Smith, beloved husband of Martha.

Maybe the Italian coast, Portofino in its fabulous position right on the sea’s edge. Somebody had told him about Corsica, wild and mountainous but with magnificent scenery and great peaks rising out of the very coastline itself. Anne Louisa Jackson, Catherine Jane O’Malley, Thomas Piper, Gone but not Forgotten.

Maybe we shouldn’t go abroad at all, he thought. Maybe we should just go about our lives very quietly rejoicing in each other and the fact that we’re still alive and not in a place like this. The roll call of the dead went on, the names tolling in his head as he passed them by.

Peter John Cartwright, Rest in Peace, Bertha Jane Hardy, George Michael Simpson, Gone to his Father in Heaven.

‘Francis, Francis!’ Johnny Fitzgerald was beckoning to him from about two hundred yards away. Powerscourt ran the whole way, his spade over his shoulder, hoping that the long search was over at last.

‘Here he is,’ said Fitzgerald softly, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely, born 18th February 1820, passed away 30th May 1897. I am the Resurrection and the Life.’