The re-imagined story …

I still visit the cemetery angels once in a while, just to check up on them. There are a couple that are badly damaged but I still like to pay my respects. They were a great comfort to me when I used to doss in the cemetery.

My usual pitch was a bender under the bushes near the Polish doctor’s grave. Sometimes I’d go down by the hedge that backed onto Fairview but it was too close to the houses and people used to report me.

I tried getting into the little building at the top of the cemetery but it was boarded up too well. The druggies used to go round the back there, but I didn’t want to get involved with any of that shit, I had enough of my own to get on with.

I’ve met a few angels since then – of the flesh and blood variety. There was Lesley who found me a room in a hostel and Steve who got me on to a counselling programme. I can do without the booze now, well most the time I can.

I don’t know a lot about my own family. I turned out to be a big disappointment to my mum and dad. Never did the right thing, not even as a kid. I know they were ashamed of me, they told me so often enough. I was lazy, had no backbone, no morals.

These days there’s a big emphasis on mental wellbeing, but my parents were of a different generation, obviously, but you know what I mean. They’d lived through a world war, they didn’t have a lot of time for mental wellbeing or depression and anxiety.

One of the angels I like to visit is down on the lower section of the cemetery on the way to the Clifton Street gates. She’s a particular favourite of mine. I wonder why we always think of angels as female. After all, the archangels were all male, Gabriel and Michael; and Lucifer, well he had to be a male. That’s about all I can name. It’s a bit like Santa’s reindeers, after Rudolph and Donner and Blitzen, who are the others?

This little angel is tucked into a window-like space in the stonework, a young angel knelt on one knee praying, her wings following the curve of the opening. Is there such a thing as a young angel, or an old one come to that? I suppose you get cherubs, but they are usually chubby, babylike figures with short curly hair. No, this one is definitely a young angel, her little hands clasped together and her bare toes peeping out from her dress.

Well, that little angel got me thinking. The inscription on the headstone is to an old couple. James John Wiltshire who died in 1938 aged 78 and his wife Jessie Charlotte who died in 1954 aged 90 and I got to wondering who had chosen the headstone.

I even went up to the crematorium where they hold all the burial registers. Of course, I could tell they thought I was a nutter, but fair play to them they were very kind and helpful. A young woman looked up the grave details for me and what a surprise we both had.

Before the Wiltshire family bought the grave for old James and Jessie, it had been a public grave and buried beneath them were four little children. Charles and Louisa Wright, who both died as babies in 1900 and 1901 and Amy and Vera Taylor who had died in 1900 and 1906.

We looked at each other in silence.

I wonder if the Wiltshire family knew all this when they bought the plot; now that little angel makes sense to me. I like to think of her praying for the little children who never had a life, and it helps me cling on to making some value out of mine.

The facts …

James John and Jessie Charlotte Wiltshire lived at 36 St Margarets Road at the time of James’s death in 1938 and Jessie continued to live there until her death in 1954. The 1939 list, available on Ancestry, reveals that Jessie was living with Emily B. Warren, also a widow and quite possibly her sister.

The children …

Charles Tilley and Louisa Caroline H. Wright were the children of Thomas and Mary Ann Wright. Thomas worked as a Smith’s striker in the railway factory. The couple were originally from London but moved to the Swindon area in about 1890. Louisa appears on the 1901 census as a one month old infant, the youngest of eight children still living at home in Byron Street with their parents. Born in between census years little Charles doesn’t appear on official records other than the birth and death indices and the burial registers.

Amy Blanche Taylor was born on January 16, 1900 and baptised on February 11 at St Augustine’s Church. She was the daughter of George Taylor, a clerk in the Works, and his wife Blanche who lived at 67 Dean Street.

Vera Grace was born in 1904 and was also baptised at St Augustine’s. By then the family had moved to 14 Jennings Street. She died in 1906.

By 1911 the little family had prospered and were living in Goddard Avenue. The census returns for that year include not only the details of their two living children, Raymond George 10 and Gladys Elsie 4, but the two children who had died, Amy Blanche 3 months and Vera Grace 2 years. The names had been crossed through. It was enough for official purposes just to state how many children had died.

Blanche died in 1918 and was buried in plot E8376 on March 28. George outlived her by more than forty years. He died in 1959 and was buried with his wife on April 2. Their grave is on the opposite side of the cemetery from their two little daughters.