We Fail To Find The Elephant Man

I am still alive and kicking, very much in the Eighties, Simple Minds type way. A busy weekend of family and friends has spilled over into a busy week of more family and friends. I am crouched here in the darkness, tapping away before the next lot arrive.

On Saturday I lured my husband out to play with me by promising to show him an excellent graveyard. Over the years he has learned to tolerate what Marian Keyes would describe as my ‘sudden, wild enthusiasms.’ Some are over and done with in six months, others bed into my life in more enduring ways. My love of a good graveyard has been going strong for the last forty years and shows no sign of slowing. At first, Jason used to accompany me to show willing, and probably because he was worried I would get murdered if he let me wander off alone. Eventually the bemused tolerance has turned to a more gentle enthusiasm of his own. I think he also likes it when I take up hobbies which don’t cost a lot of money, and there really isn’t much to spend your money on in a cemetery.

We spent the morning wandering around the City of London Cemetery which I had whizzed past on the bus the previous week. There are 200 acres to cover, with over 1,500 grave stones and about a million burials. It’s very impressive. We knew we weren’t interested in a route march. The weather was nice, it wasn’t busy and there was no rush so we took our time, drifting where we felt inspired rather than with any plan in mind.

Wandering past one of the chapels, we came across a pond full of huge, koi carp. We were intent on watching a wily heron, up to its bum in water, attempting to lure a fish the size of its own body to its sure and certain doom, when we heard a peeping noise from the reeds. The heron took fright and out of the undergrowth came marching three, coot chicks. They were sentient balls of fluff with enormous comedy feet that made them look like they were wearing flippers. Peeping and peeping they came flip, flapping up to us, convinced that we had delicious snacks to give them. As we were beating a retreat because we did not have anything of the kind, the mother coot came beetling round and kept trying to corral the chicks and keep them away from us. They were having none of it and pursued us down the path until we managed to shake them off round a corner.

We had just calmed down after being chased by comedy clown birds when we bumped into a fox sitting next to a man on a bench. The fox was completely unbothered by both him and us, and seemed fine with sharing his patch of the graveyard with us as long as we remembered our manners and/or produced chicken. We bumped into him a bit later when we were on our way back. He’d given up stalking members of the public at this point and was engaged in having what looked like an exceedingly satisfying sun bath.

For a place of the dead, it was teeming with life. It was very different to Abney Park, which is much more urban and full of human drama. This is a place of creatures, busy with lives that don’t concern you and which happen regardless of your presence. Even though they were created at roughly the same time, City of London feels like a place of deeper time, of slower rhythms and of a world which is only tangentially interested in what human beings are doing out there. Being amongst the dead reminds us of the shortness of our span. Being amongst the animals reminds us of the unimportance of our span.

We loved it, despite the fact that we didn’t see the graves of Catherine Eddowes or Mary Ann Nichols, two of the victims of Jack the Ripper, given back their dignity in Hallie Rubenhold’s brilliant book; ‘The Five’. Nor did we see the burial site of the Elephant Man, which when I read about it made me laugh because it says ‘soft tissue only’ in brackets and I read it in the ‘New customers only,’ voice and amused myself enormously. The Elephant Man came from Leicester. We treated him shockingly and he sprang himself from the poorhouse by running away to join the circus. Who could blame him?

After we had failed to help a lady who asked us the way out and when we confessed we didn’t know, was very sad because she had been there for two hours already, we got a bit lost ourselves. We did make it out in under two hours and ran away to Wanstead where we bought ourselves a picnic and sat in the park, people watching and eating sandwiches. I was most impressed by a family who bought a very large bucket full of ice and alcohol to their picnic and proceeded to drink chilled Prosecco while thousands of children ran around screaming and playing football over their heads. You would need a drink for that, to be honest.