Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

     
Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

     
He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

     
At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

     
Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

     
I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

      
Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

     
There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.