No sound is dissonant

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. Dad was on a police scooter this day in 1963 when a man came out of a house to shout the news. . . .

We didn’t rise from our beds until two and the stark shadows were already beginning to lengthen outside. Del had stayed up all night on speed, borrowed Wordsworth, Plath and Eliot from me and driven off into Watermouth. He said he was feeling very emotional and later told us he sat all morning at a table in Green’s, a bundle of nervous energy . . . He was out when we got up but eventually turned up mid-afternoon, looking none the worse for wear.

Lee, Barry and I walked down to Wickbourne Road and spent a couple of hours looking for a sturdy torch, wandering to and fro to the numerous second-hand and electrical shops that line the street. We got back at four. It was dark when we all piled into Del’s Hillman Imp and set off for Smith Square. We parked the car outside Ian’s flat in Blenheim Place; the doors were open but no one was in, so we left a message in the typewriter standing on the table and walked to Smith Square, John and Del in a very frivolous mood, jokes and repartee flying left, right and centre.

The entrance to the crypt was in the middle of a wasteland of rubble and broken bricks, a simple metal cover beneath which steps descended into impenetrable blackness. One by one we vanished into the earth; the blackness and silence was total. We bunched together and spoke in hoarse whispers, John and Del nervously joking and laughing as materialists are apt to do in the face of unnecessary mystery.

At the bottom of the steps was a passageway off which ran small side chambers, each with a compliment of brick boxes piled in twos and threes nearly to the ceiling. There were several similar rooms on either side of the passageway, each filled with identical brick boxes capped with stone lids, although some rooms were empty. Although each room had originally been blocked off with breeze blocks, these had recently been broken through, leaving the ends of each sarcophagus visible from the passageway. On these were carved the names of the occupant of each box and his or her date of death and age.

We climbed through the hole in the breeze block wall of the first room on the left; here lay the sarcophagus of Emily Newburgh, who was born in 1770 and died 15th April 1806. The heavy stone lid was split into three sections and the coffin had rotted away and lay in pieces. Lee shone the torch down on the fragments . . . the hair . . . it was the only human thing there, coiled in a plenteous brown river among the spars of broken wood and what was left of the rest of the body, a last pathetic reminder of this woman’s life and her brief flirtation in this world of vanities. In parts, the thick matted strands had come apart to release individual hairs, long and wispy, glittering in the torch-beam with the sheen of life. Poor Emily Newburgh, lying dead and scattered to the world, now in the thoughts of the living for perhaps the first time in decades; I wonder who she was, what she liked and disliked, what little personal eccentricities she had?

The other sarcophagi all dated back to the late 1700s/early 1800s and seemed to be those of fairly wealthy people and their children; I presumed this was why they had been interred in the bowels of this crypt, not left in the (now-vanished) graveyard outside, at the mercy of future development. “No sound is dissonant / which tells of Life” (Coleridge).

After a half-an-hour or so we emerged thankful back into the cold night air. We went for a drink at a pub across the road and we all, everyone one of us, felt affected by what had gone before; Lee was silent and unresponsive and none of us felt very disposed to laughter or light hearted talk. Del offered John £20 if he’d go back down the crypt alone and without a torch—he almost did, but he bottled out at the last minute. I don’t blame him.

Ian and co. were still out so we drove home. It was Mo’s birthday and she and Pete were drunk, Pete whining because he didn’t want us in his room watching TV. Comments and slammed doors . . . Ade had come round too after spending a couple of nights alone in front of the TV in his new place; we’ve heard of a house for five which should be available around Christmastime.