Simon Clark - Humpty's bones

Humpty’s Bones And Other Skeletal Fragments

We’re in the graveyard. A cold November day. The ancient tower of St Lawrence’s Church looms over us. Centuries of burials have raised the ground immediately around the church by four feet or so. The soil is dark; so very, very dark. Meandering amongst the tombs, we read inscriptions: William Tobias Wrelter, drowned at sea in Scarborough Bay, 1863 . That makes for a salty grave I tell myself. Kathleen Prior, died in her one hundredth year. After much pain there is peace. And on the back of one headstone, visible from the road, is engraved a mischievous reminder of our mortality: Until you follow me: Peace be unto you.

My daughter, Helen, then aged seven, is interested in a patch of freshly turned soil where someone has planted pansies.

‘Cornflakes,’ she announces. ‘Why has someone left cornflakes in the graveyard?’

‘Maybe someone lost their breakfast.’

‘Dad!’

Okay, I admit it. The typically bad Dad joke. Usually, finished off with a tickle, or a playful throttle, to distract the child from a lack of parental wit.

Choking with laughter, Helen cries, ‘The cornflakes! Where do all the cornflakes come from?’

‘Ah… ’ Serious now, I examine the disturbed earth. ‘They aren’t cornflakes, they’re pieces of bone.’

‘Bone. How did bone get here?’

‘It is a graveyard.’

Helen’s too smart to be patronised. So I explain that these grey flakes are the bones of our village’s ancient dead. The church is built on a pagan temple site, so burials here, of some sort or other, stretch back into prehistory. Nothing dramatic happened to the old tombs as far as I know. Nobody dug up the skeletons and smashed them to pieces in a frenzied orgy of post mortem destruction. Instead, down through the centuries, the old, forgotten burial plots were accidentally recycled in what is, after all, a restricted tract of hallowed ground. Old bones got mixed with the soil-fill. Gradually, these, in some semblance of resurrection, worked their way to the surface to rest in the light of that cold November day.

Helen, being inquisitive, immediately picks them up to examine them. The fragments do resemble cornflakes — although a bony, pale grey in colour. And if you’ve just eaten cornflake cereal, or are just about to, I apologise for the comparison. So whatever you do, when you spoon those crunchy morsels into your mouth, don’t think about crispy fragments of human skull. Remember: cornflakes are nice to eat. Pieces of ancient skeleton — though they resemble cornflakes — are not!

The bygone people of my village buried their deceased relatives in the churchyard. Back then, the proper Christian thing to do, of course. They had no idea that subsequent burials would bring the bones of the beloved to the surface.

And here’s the notion that fascinates me, and which neatly nudged me into writing Humpty’s Bones : whatever we dispose of by burying underground, it has a habit of returning. Which could be a metaphor for the revenant returning to haunt a house. However, it’s important to appreciate that whatever we bury is not only likely to creep back to the surface, it also returns in an altered stated. When objects are buried — whether corpses, coins, chemicals, or secret stuff we don’t want people to know about — it has this knack of undergoing a transformation.

The cornflake-look-alike skull shards were fleshless after all these centuries. They were also uncannily insubstantial. As if the bone’s density had altered, leaving them as light and as crisp as… well… flakes of toasted corn. In my garden I found a musket ball; salts in the soil have leeched metal from it, too, so it is peculiarly weightless. A Roman cloak pin made of bronze came to my notice a while ago, poking from a flower bed. Again, the earth had sucked some of the ore from it, leaving it almost porous. These artefacts are ghostly versions of their former selves.

Perhaps the ancients got it right. They often buried their dead in womb-like tombs to prepare the deceased for rebirth. Perhaps some race memory acted on me when I wrote Humpty’s Bones . I imagined what it would be like to find an ancient burial in a supposedly ordinary garden. Yet it couldn’t just be some inert skeleton, could it? Those buried instincts that I (and you) share with our prehistoric ancestors couldn’t permit a person’s skeleton to be entirely lifeless. Deep down, we suspect that interred bones are merely resting. That they will have a future, and a life of sorts. Yet after so long in the earth an alchemy must have taken place, and they will possess a power to touch our lives in some uncanny way.

So: welcome to my world… a world where there is a pleasant garden. Near the garden wall there are fruit trees. Concealed in their roots, mysterious bones. One by one they are rising to the surface. Now, push aside that bowl of cornflakes (not that you have an appetite for them anyway now); walk into the garden with me. And we’ll recite these words as we go:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…

Simon Clark

Yorkshire, 4th December, 2009

Poem

Humpty’s Bones

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses,

And all the king’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

So, if they can’t, who can?

‘The train doesn’t want me to go there.’

She’d murmured the words under her breath. Yet an old man in a turban, dozing in a nearby carriage seat, must have thought she’d intended him to hear.

‘Then you should go back home.’

Slightly flustered by having the stranger talk to her, Eden Page smiled. ‘Pardon?’

‘Go home.’

His dark brown eyes regarded hers… such wise, old eyes, she thought. And he sat there with such quiet dignity.

‘I can’t go home,’ she replied. ‘It’s just not possible.’

‘Oh.’

‘I wish I could.’

‘Then find somewhere else to go. You should always respect omens. If we are sent a warning that we should cease our course of action then we must take heed.’ His accent was pure Yorkshire, yet his Asian ancestry gifted him a melodic way of stressing certain words: Home… omens… warning… ‘I bought a power saw,’ he continued. ‘It’s so hard to cut wood straight without one. My brother borrowed it before I could use it. “Give me it back, it’s mine,” I told him every time I saw him. He always forgot. This went on for six months. Then I needed the power saw to fit a kitchen worktop. I drove to his house. The car got a puncture. It never stopped raining. My brother wasn’t there when I arrived. I had to wait one hour. When I got the saw home I saw the plug had been smashed. I had to fix that first. So frustrating… so annoying. However! At last I could switch on my expensive power tool and — ’ He held up his deep brown hand. His first finger ended at the second joint. ‘I only went and cut the thing off.’ His face remained impassive. ‘Blood everywhere. Dripping down the walls. Turned the kitchen sink bright red. Eight hours in hospital. Six stitches. Arm in a sling for a month, so… If you see omens.’ He held up the ruined finger. ‘Beware, beware, beware.’ He appeared satisfied he’d offered his advice, because he turned to gaze out at the flat landscape that rolled past the carriage window. The train clickety-clacked along the line. A slow heart-beat of a sound.