And there was this old lady at Wickham Market and she was in three different coffins. They called her Cheat‐the‐grave at last. All these things happened because people will insist on checking on death with a mirror, which isn’t a mite of good. The only way is to stick a shred of cotton‐wool where the lips part and if there’s the least little wind of life it will flutter. I can always tell if a person is dead by looking at the eyes. I never make a mistake about dead eyes. I see at once when the seeing has gone.
Village folk have been buried over and over again in the same little bits of churchyard. You have to throw somebody out to get somebody in – three or four sometimes. I always put all the bones back so that they lie tidy‐like just under the new person. They’re soon all one. The parson said to me, ‘How is it that you get so many in one grave?’ and I always tell him that I must have disturbed a plague pit. Parsons will believe anything.
The rich people are buried in vaults, you know. I had to open a vault the other day and put a woman in. She joined six or seven others and I had to shove ’em over and say, ‘Come you together now, make room for a little ’un!’ Vaults are sweet places. Everybody lies in lead first, then wood, so there’s no smell. I went into the vault at Stanton when Lord Eastham’s wife died. It was full and I had to lay her on the floor because her relations had all the shelves. It was first come, first served. The coffins were all made of panelled oak, great black things as black as a fireplace. Good God, they last for generations!
I’ve dug for all denominations, from Catholic to Plymouth Brethren. The chapel people are the worst. First of all they’re a good three quarters of an hour in the chapel while the preacher spouts about the dead man and estimates whether he’s saved, and then, when they get to the grave, on it goes again. There’s no end to it. They forget we all knew the corpse. And then, when they’re none too sure about the saving, you should hear them then! There was Jed’s funeral – well we don’t need any telling about Jed! Well Jed might have been a bad lot but he wasn’t a bad sort. You know. I mean he was Jed, wasn’t he? Well, this chapel preacher stood there by the hole I had got ready for Jed and was as near as damn‐it saying that Jed wasn’t saved although he hoped he was. So after the funeral I went up to him and said, ‘My God, you’ve had some talk about Jed, haven’t you? I know you’re here to say a few words – but you’ve said too much!’ I said, ‘Do you reckon that you are saved?’ He said, ‘I hope so.’ ‘Very well then,’ I said, ‘but do you remember when you get in front of your Maker he won’t ask you what Jed has done – he’ll ask what you’ve been up to.’ You could see he didn’t like it.
The parsons aren’t much better. But there, you don’t find many parsons now. Only men who have done their life’s work serving as a colonel or a schoolmaster and then get themselves ordained. I don’t really call these people parsons. I don’t mince my words with them. When you bury between 180–200 people a year you can afford to be honest.
Dust to dust they say. It makes me laugh. Mud to mud, more like. Half the graves round here are waterlogged. Foxton is a terrible wet place; the moment you get the grass off, you’re in the water. I float grass on the water so the mourners can’t see it but when the coffin is lowered it has to be held under with a pole until you can get a bit of heavy soil on top of it. At Dearburgh the graves fill up to within eight inches of the top. I’ve drawn as much as fifty pails of water out of a grave at Dearburgh, the last when the funeral was coming up the path. And still the coffin had to be held under three feet of it. It all comes down from the cricket pitch.
The bodies are washed and dressed in shrouds. Except for a parson, and he’s buried in his robes. When you bury a parson you always bury him ‘re incumbent’ – the opposite way to everybody else. Everybody lies with their feet to the east so that when they rise they face the Lord. But a parson, you see, you bury him with his feet to the west, so that when he rises he faces his flock. And serve him right, I say. I had a bit of bother about this once.
An old canon had died and was cremated, and the ashes were kept until his wife passed on. I put the jar of ashes on the wife’s coffin and lowered the two together. Well, of course, as everybody knows, all that family, particularly the daughters, were over‐educated. They were old maids. They weren’t cranky because they hadn’t had a man but because they’d had too many old books. Their brains were strained. Well, a month after I had buried her mother’s corpse and her father’s ashes, along comes Miss Bolt to my house to kick up hell. ‘You haven’t buried Father right,’ she says. ‘Oh?’ I says. ‘You knew he should have been buried re incumbent,’ she says. ‘What are you talking about, Miss Bolt?’ I say. ‘I put your Father’s urn on your Mother’s coffin, and if you can tell me the difference between the way I put him and the way you want him, I’ll dig him up and turn him round.’ So then she says that I should have turned her mother the other way round as the reverend was on top of her! I mean if parsons’ wives are going to get themselves buried re incumbent, where’s it going to stop?
We’ve got a man in the churchyard named Tyler. He used to be secretary to the golf club. When he died he was buried facing south so that when he rises he can see the links. And it was done! I told the parson, ‘If a person of my walk of life expressed a wish like that, you’d say I was qualified for the tall chimney’ [St Audrey’s Mental Hospital].
I never had any qualms about my work. When I was young I delighted in death. The funerals were big and grand and slow. You learnt a lot about everybody. They crept about in the deepest black – now they come to a funeral in all the colours of the rainbow. And afterwards they don’t even walk up to the churchyard to cart the dead flowers away. They have one word for the dead when they have got them into the ground, and that is ‘forgotten’. I tell them, too. They’re upset, but it’s the truth. They’ll put a stone up with a ‘There you are, we’ve done all we can for you, now bugger you!’ They’ll even put crazy paving on top of the grave so they don’t have to pay me to clip the grass. And the price of it all! When I started you could get coffin, wreaths and everything for £5 – you could actually get a coffin for 30s. Now you wouldn’t buy a coffin for a stillborn for under three quid. As for an adult’s, it will cost you between £40–50.
And talking of money, I must mention the Table of Fees. Each church has got a Table of Fees which says where the money should go at a funeral. There is the incumbent with his price, there is the clerk with his price and there is the sexton with his price. You would think it was plain enough but I have to read the damn thing aloud to half the parsons or they’d diddle me out of a mint of money. When I do a funeral I’m entitled to 10s. for the service in the church – any church. I don’t often get this because the parson takes it. Of course you could argue around this because the Table of Fees says, ‘Where no clerk or sexton is employed the incumbent can take the money’ – which of course is fair enough up to a point. But believe me when it comes to little money matters, parsons are the biggest swindlers on earth. They are. They’re that quick on the small change you don’t see the passing of it. The burial fees are terrible. It costs a £10 church fee for a parishioner to be buried at Weston – in his own churchyard!
Every parson you come into contact with will have different ways about death. You can’t keep ’em in order, you know, these damned parsons! They’ll all think different if they can. They’ll either cut things out of the Burial Service or stuff things in. It’s no use giving the mourners a book so they can follow what is going on. Now old Canon Watson, he’d give you the Service, no more and no less. But the majority of parsons use the 1928 version – which, I agree, is much more cheerful. There’s nothing in it like that bit of Job where it talks about the skin worms destroying the body, for instance. Nor that bit about corruption from Corinthians. They say these things are morbid. Well they are morbid. It is what people need when they are staring down at the grave‐dirt.
It’s the same with the Litany. I said to the old Bishop, ‘How often could you walk into a church
now and hear the Litany read? Or the Athanasian Creed – and that should be said at least three times a year!’ ‘Ho! ho!’ says he, ‘it’s all out of date.’ I said, ‘What was good enough for your forefathers should be good enough for you.’ ‘Ho! ho!’ he says.
The clergy don’t stick to religion as we knew it. They do things that are forbidden. They are pulling the Bible to pieces. Altering, altering… I said to the Bishop, ‘What do you think of parsons, my lord?’ He said, ‘What do you?’ I said, ‘Well they don’t preach hellfire. They used to, why don’t they now?’ He said, ‘What, are you blaming the parsons?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘All these parsons preach is the love of God. But they leave out the wrath. What is the use of love without wrath? Tell me that.’ I said, ‘You are told what will happen to you if you obey His will, so it is only fair that you should know what will happen to you if you don’t.’ People aren’t frightened any more, that is the trouble. If they had to do my work they would know that life is a frightening business. I had a parson say to me the other day, as I was digging a grave, ‘Do you think these people will ever come out there again, Tender?’ I said, ‘They’ll have a damned job after I’ve finished with them!’ He said, seriously, ‘Once you’re in there, you’re finished.’ ‘Never!’ I said. But we don’t know, do we? We’ve just got to leave the body after it has been covered up. The people I’ve accidentally smashed to pieces in my time, they’re going to have a rum time of it.
I’ll tell you what I think. In the Burial Service it tells you that when you are dead you go into the earth like a grain but it doesn’t say anything about your coming out in the same form as you went in. You might come back as a cat! I love cats. I have a family of ten cats in the churchyard. They used to sleep cold among the tombs but I’ve made a little hole in the charnel door and now they’re very comfortable indeed. They cost me 10s. a week to feed and they don’t even belong to me. They don’t belong to anybody. They watch the funerals from afar off. It’s a healthy life for them. There are worse things than coming back as a cat.
I’m not a Christian. I do a lot of things I shouldn’t do, so I can’t count myself as one. Life isn’t as comfortable as it used to be. Nobody wants to know you. I have been widowed for ten years. I go to church every Sunday but nobody speaks to me unless they want something. Snobbish. They’re all snobs now. I’m not blowing my own trumpet, but almost ever since I was born I have been at everybody’s beck and call. I have no family, none at all. No one in all the world is my relation. I never did read a lot. I never could give my mind to it. I talk too much, that is my failing. I come into contact with many people at a serious time, so I have picked up serious conversation. What most folk have once or twice in a lifetime, I have every day. I want to be cremated and my ashes thrown in the air. Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.
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Voices of Akenfield Page 11