Society

Social distancing among the dead

Counterintuitive as it may seem, I take solace in my local graveyard as the pandemic grips Scotland

April 02, 2020
Christian Charisius/DPA/PA Images
Christian Charisius/DPA/PA Images

Every day, when I take my hour of state-sanctioned exercise, I walk out of my back gate, squeeze through a gap in the railings, a hollow in the hedge, and am soon saying hello to my neighbours—none of whom, having lived and died long ago, are in any position to return the greeting. I am social distancing among the dead.

Glasgow is known as the dear green place on account of its many parks. However, these are so busy at the moment that it is very difficult to keep the regulation two metres apart. A tumbledown cemetery, though? Much better. It doesn’t matter that many thousands have got here first; there is no chance of them giving coronavirus to me, or me to them. It is likely, in fact, that a good few of the men, women and children who comprise the citizenry of the graveyard succumbed to Spanish flu, which is thought to have arrived in Britain in the summer of 1918 via the ports of the Clyde. They have been through this all before, and so I feel safe—soothed even—in their company.

The cemetery I have come to regard as a sanctuary is on a hill behind my house. It opened in 1878 and has, like all of us at the moment, seen better days. From the highest point, where some of the grandest stones still stand, though many have been toppled, one has a view of the city centre a few miles north. Just visible is the huge pink sign overlooking George Square, and the words: People Make Glasgow. This is a marketing slogan that happens to be true. So, too, does the reverse: Glasgow makes people. It makes them funny, often, and brassy, and, most of all, resilient. That cheery resilience is on full display in the graveyard.

Joggers, dog-walkers, amblers, we nod and wave from safe removes, glad to feel the sun and wind on our faces. A young woman, bike laid in leaf-litter, sketches a stone angel. An older lady, sitting on a fallen trunk, catches up with Line Of Duty. For years the cemetery felt almost entirely abandoned, the haunt of users and boozers, vandals with spray-paint and hammers, but now it is experiencing a new life. Covid’s metamorphosis—the place is transformed.

Mums and dads, escaping confinement, have started to use the cemetery for home-school field trips. I do this, too. My son's small hot hand in mine, we read the stones. He sounds out unfamiliar words—remembrance, unto, surpasseth. War graves offer a history lesson: this man was in the Arctic convoys; this one came home from Flanders with lungs full of death. There is time for literature and nature study, too. The white flash of rabbit tail suggests Hazel and Bigwig. A woodpecker beats its beak on wood just like, we agree, Gandalf on Bilbo’s door.

We have our favourite spots. Shading a forking path there is a huge old beech. Its roots have tentacled around a headstone, tipping it back against its trunk, and the tree has grown around the stone, devouring it. The top is gone, swallowed by the hungry wood, bark and bite as bad as each other. Lower down, the carved name, though worn, is still visible in good light: a woman called Agnes who died in 1927 at the age of 82. My boy loves this grave. He feels, I think, the same delightful shiver of horror and wonder as I do at the sight.

Not that the cemetery is bleak. It might seem counterintuitive to seek escape, and escapism, from a killer disease in a graveyard, but I find such places are a vaccine against gloom; exposure to a particle of darkness means one does not sicken with it.

A number of UK cemeteries have closed their gates, except for funerals, in response to the coronavirus outbreak. This is a shame. There is surely plenty of room; graveyards can function as an important overflow, relieving the pressure on parks. More than that, though, there is a comforting feeling of arm-around-the-shoulder solidarity with those who have gone before. All these folk had delights and troubles of their own. They lived through world wars, through depressions economic and personal. They were made by Glasgow, and remade it in their turn, and now they are fading names on cracked stones.

Those that had money lie beneath great tombs, but wealth is no shield against time. The statues of Anubis and God’s angels have had their heads smashed off, and some of the grandest crosses lie in the dirt. The desecration is terrible, but the decay, on the whole, feels right. Just as we have a lifespan, gravestones have a deathspan; they last with our grief and crumble thereafter. That, really, is the message of this and every cemetery: all things must pass; everybody hurts; so, hold on.

This cemetery: it is in me as, one day, I may be in it. For the meantime, it is a place to stroll with my son, to talk of rabbits and hobbits and what’s for tea and how to calculate the area of a triangle, although on that last point his understanding far surpasseth mine. Our relationship has deepened, been dug deeper, by these lockdown walks. And that, as we like to say in Glasgow, is pure dead brilliant.

Peter Ross’s “A Tomb With A View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards” will be published by Headline in September