Standing at the graveside

The re-imagined story …

That first week she visited her baby’s grave every day.  She stood by the small mound of freshly turned earth, every day.  There would soon be a bench placed close to the grave.  Somewhere she could sit and think about him, but today the cemetery was a barren, vast gash in the hillside.

A few trees remained scattered about, relics of the cemetery’s past when it had been a coppice ground called Howses.

And the new chapel stood in all its Gothic splendour, if on a small, parochial scale, the modest bell tower guarded by grotesques.  But there had been no tolling bell for her baby, no headstone, no marker for there was no money to buy the burial plot in which he lay.

On the day of his funeral she laid flowers.  The following day she bought a small pot plant and knelt on the soft soil and pressed in the roots with her fingers, reaching for her baby.

But the next day the plant had gone.  There could be no permanent marker on this grave, for this was a pauper’s grave and even in the vastness of the new, now empty cemetery, soon there would be others buried with her baby.  She didn’t know if this was a comfort or not.  She hated the thought of him lying there alone in the cold earth, but she didn’t want to share this space with anyone.

Then just four days later there was another woman standing at that graveside, the earth freshly turned, again.

They looked into each other’s eyes and saw the grief, but they did not speak.

After that she stopped coming every day, now another child lay on top of hers, placing him a little further out of reach.  She visited on a Sunday, sometimes, and always on his birthday and, so quickly afterwards, his death day, and then there were the other days, when she just wanted to remember him.

Shrubs were planted, headstones raised, she watched the grass grow and one day the bench appeared.  Sometimes she would sit there and watch; the cemetery was a busy place now.  Mourners left flowers set beneath a glass dome; she would have liked one of those for her baby.

She never met again that other mother.

The facts …

Albert Edward Wentworth was the second burial to take place in Radnor Street Cemetery on the day it opened, August 6, 1881.  He was one-month old.  His mother’s name was Lucy. Matthew Henry Bissell was buried in the same grave plot four days later.  He was one-year old.  His mother’s name was Susan.