Monthly Archives: August 2021

St Sepulchres

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On an impulse, I stopped and locked my bike to the old iron gate, stuck open for many years. I went down the stony track, passing the flower filled gardens of the flats to the right and under the gloomy arch of the mortuary chapel, with its signs and dark doorways. The cemetery, filled with still trees, opened up ahead of me.

In August, most of the birds are moulting and quiet, and many of the wild flowers are past their peak. Leaves remain in abundance, from the grass stems knotting around the foot of the gravestones to the great cumuli of foliage on the copper beeches.

I’ve been to St Sepulchre’s in all seasons, from grey, sparse-stalked winter to ebullient bluebell spring, but rarely in fattened August. The signs of summer’s party are everywhere, but the plants and the insects look a bit worn out. The edges of the gravestones and their stark lettering stand out among the sprawl.

I was on my way to the wide open spaces of Port Meadow when I stopped. The cemetery is almost the complete opposite, hemmed in by buildings, but somehow it too has this sense of going at its own pace. There was just a hint of winter in the damp under the ash trees.

Not much sound squeezed through from Walton Street outside, no cars or voices, but it wasn’t quiet. A wind took the branches of the beeches and shook them hard. A look up showed purple leaves straining for flight into the white sky, and my ears were filled with the one sound of all of them rushing together.

Down where I stood in the long, tumbled grass the trunks were quite unmoved. Thick and dusted with lichen, they had clearly aged very patiently in the years since some unknown hand placed their seeds in careful line across the heart of the churchyard. I went between them, laying my hands on their bark, resting my ear against one or two, as if to hear another kind of time. I was there by impulse, they by endurance.

And then I walked away, threading my way out among the graves and brambles, back to bike, road and the rest of the evening.

See also “Beech Lines”