It’s early spring. The trees still mostly bare, the clouds heavy and dark. Small clumps of yellow primrose flowers pop up between the unruly graves. Arnos Vale, a cemetery built in Bristol in 1837, is a place now filled with headstones swallowed by ivy, where thick roots lift grave markers and topple them sideways so they lean on their neighbours. I like this about old Victorian graveyards: they are not the obsessively tidy visions of Los Angeles cemetery parks, with lawns mowed to golfing-green perfection and marble headstones shining and white. Those are a display of constant battle against the encroachment of nature, while cemeteries like this are places of death overtaken by the relentless force of life, and moss. Graves are engulfed by vines and leaves as if in an embrace of ownership. Death is part of life, they say. Death is part of all of it.
I flinch a bit as I pass a teddy bear with its head pulled off, its back slumped against a cross that has fallen off its base, and walk further up the steep hill. This will be a much easier interview than the autopsies and the bereavement midwife, I hope. I’m still feeling raw. Being outside, instead of in a hospital ward or basement mortuary, helps.
At the uppermost point of the cemetery, by the Cross of Sacrifice and Soldier’s Corner, where forty sailors have lain since they lost their lives in World War Two, all I can hear is birds. There I find Mike and Bob looking out through the windscreen of the muddiest van that ever existed. Bob is sixty, with few teeth and straggly dark hair that hangs down as if his head sprouted it from one central point. His face is disappearing into his shoulders and hoodie, like an egg in an egg cup. Mike, seventy-two, the speaker for the both of them, hops out of the van and waves me up the brow of the hill, shouting in his strong Bristolian accent that I was mad and I should have driven. His neat white hair is shaved at the sides, and the closer I get, the more visible the dusting of dirt on his jeans and navy blue fleece becomes. ‘Do you want to see what we’ve done, then?’ He’s smiling, instantly friendly. Bob waves sweetly from his seat in the van and mimes that he wants to stay where it’s warm. Mike walks me over uneven ground to the open grave.
Thick, green fabric has been laid around its grassy edges. Two long planks of wood lie at the sides of the hole for stability when the pallbearers come to stand there. More green fabric is laid on top of those, draping into the hole, lining walls that are so crisp that the cut planes of roots align with the clay as if sliced by a machine. Two thinner pieces of wood are placed across the grave in a V shape, waiting to bear the coffin while the vicar reads the words of committal before it is lowered, on woven canvas straps looped around the handles, into the dirt. The mound of excavated soil is piled next to the hole, covered with more green fabric. There is no visible loose soil, apart from right at the bottom – a thin buffer between the husband who’s already in there and the wife whose funeral is currently happening a little way down the road. Mike says you can tell when you’re getting close to the existing coffin in a family plot – the soil tends to be a bit wetter, or if it’s a particularly old grave, the lid can cave in.
I look down. There, past my coat flapping around my knees, my boots an inch from the edge, is the void. I’ve stood here before, under a strung-up tarpaulin in a flat, treeless Australian cemetery, holding my grandfather’s hand as I watched my grandmother’s coffin being sealed into a cement vault above ground. She had always been vocally and specifically scared of decaying six feet below – something about the worms frightened her more than oblivion (she was a Catholic). Standing there then, I had wondered if she would bake in the summer heat, locked in her cement box.
It turns out there is a strange disconnect standing over the open grave of someone I don’t know. I’m not holding someone’s hand trying to process news. My thoughts are not clouded with the loss of a person in my life, there are no memories shooting through the projector in my mind of things that won’t happen again, and I cannot imagine the person as they might look now, or as they might look six months from now, because I’ve never seen their face. I look into that grave and all I think about is me: what it would feel like to lie there and look up, to see myself looking down from the lip of it.
Mostly I think it looks cold down there. I remember another thing Ron Troyer told me, that when you die in the American Midwest in winter, your body won’t be buried until the spring, when the ground has thawed enough to dig – until then, you take up space in a mausoleum, beside temporary neighbours. But occasionally, he said, farmers would insist on a winter burial: they worked in the mills and knew exactly how cold a building above ground could get, and how much warmer it was six feet down. The gravediggers, lured by Ron’s promises of bourbon, would drag out their charcoal cookers – a sort of grave-length metal dome – and leave them there for twenty-four hours, defrosting the frozen ground so they wouldn’t break their mechanical diggers. Opening a grave in a Midwestern winter is like trying to dig in cement.
The soil here, below me, is mostly clay, and Mike says it’s one of the best places to dig; the clay provides a natural structural integrity that thinner soils don’t, so it won’t cave in when you’re halfway down. He and Bob cover most of the burial grounds in this area and have done since they left school. He says the locals call them Burke and Hare.
Tucked behind the mound of excavated earth, sitting on the corner of the green fabric, is a small, brown, urn-shaped pot with a cork lid. It’s battered with indents of wear and age, and covered in muddy fingerprints that have been haphazardly wiped away. Mike uncorks it and holds it up for me to see, explaining that it’s the soil for the vicar to throw as he’s committing the body to the ground, doing the ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ bit. I notice that it’s a different soil to the kind inside the grave or heaped beside it – it’s drier, but it’s also finer. It’s closer to sand than the clay that came out of the hole. I ask him if it came from here, or if he got it elsewhere. ‘Molehills,’ says Mike, pushing the cork back in. He collects them in his garden, scoops them into the pot to have on hand for the vicar: the finer soil kicked up by the feet of moles lands softer on the lid of a coffin than a lump of clay. ‘It’s always nice soil in a molehill,’ he says, tucking it back behind a headstone.
Some of the world’s most famous architecture, our most beloved wonders, are graves. The pyramids of Egypt. India’s Taj Mahal. Monuments built to house the dead. There are few things that I can think of where the difference between basic and luxury is so great than in what you do with a dead body. What could be more basic than a hole in the ground? More grand than the Taj Mahal?
We’re in the formerly white van now, eating the wine gums that Mike keeps in a freezer bag on the dashboard for the pallbearers. He cracked them open when he asked me to guess how old I thought he was and I landed on a number twelve years younger than he actually is, which tickled him so much he keeps bringing it up, even to Bob, who was there when I said it. We haven’t moved since. He’s in the driver’s seat, I’m in the passenger seat, and Bob’s squashed between us, shoulder to shoulder, forming one multiheaded mass, a wine gum-eating hydra. The footwell is caked with thick mud that I’m assured is less of a problem in summer. We’re staring out, chewing, waiting for the funeral cortege. Mike and Bob do this with every funeral: the grave is not finished until you fill it, and they want to make sure everything goes right. They won’t make themselves obvious, but they will linger in the surroundings until they are needed, which can be earlier than usual if an overzealous pallbearer lowers the coffin like a submarine diving below. Mike will step in, briefly, to even out the angle.
While we wait, Mike tells me how to dig a grave. Bob adds mostly unintelligible giggles that Mike translates, and when he laughs we feel it, so squashed are we in the cabin. Mike says you need to know the dimensions of the person before you break the ground, but people tend to underestimate out of politeness, so they habitually dig it wider than suggested so nobody gets wedged or stuck – it’s happened in the past, when coffin handles have jutted out a little further than expected and more digging was required while the family milled around in shoes not made for marshy ground. A family plot for six people needs to be ten feet deep, while a smaller one for three or less only needs to go down six, and the coffin at the top of the stack is covered with a paving slab to keep animals out. If the area isn’t too overgrown or crowded with headstones, they use a mini mechanical digger for most of the job – a sort of mobility scooter with a long arm that lives on a small trailer behind the van. Bob operates the digger while Mike directs, running out ahead of the machine to lay wooden boards like railway tracks to protect the grass. But if they can’t get the digger into the area, they do it all by hand: just men and shovels and physical labour. It can take a whole day to dig a grave by hand. In old churchyards, they occasionally find bones where there are no markers, where the coffin has disappeared around the body. They bag up the bones and put them back in the ground. Nobody leaves the place they were buried.
There comes a point in the digging process when you have to get inside the grave to finish it. For that, they have a rotating cast of young men, students who pass the job onto others as they find new ones, or when summer holidays end. The walls of the grave that I noticed were so neat, with the roots trimmed so deliberately, are only that way because some young guy got in and straightened the walls that surrounded him. It’s his feet that occasionally feel the lid of the coffin give way.
Mike and Bob have buried friends, babies, murder victims that later needed to be exhumed, and both of them have buried their mothers – they helped each other dig them, like they would any other grave. When they themselves die, those graves will be reopened and their coffins placed a couple of inches above the lids of their mothers’. They have both, already, dug and stood inside their own graves. When I ask what that feels like, they glance at each other. They don’t think about it too much. Mike says that death, like a grave, is just a practical thing: you’re an outsider looking in, even if you’re standing in it. And why would anyone else dig the grave when they’re the local gravediggers? They’d do the same job for anyone, whether it’s a mother or a stranger. Bob says he’s just looking forward to being with his mum again, having lived with her all his life until she died two years ago. But he’s frightened of the graveyard at night. ‘She’ll look after me,’ he mumbles, smiling shyly.
The wine gums are passed around again. We hear the horses first – the clip-clop of their hooves – and then, through the dirty windscreen, we can see their plumes in the distance.
The coachman in his top hat pulls the ornate black carriage to the side of the road, the coffin of the wife half obscured by the abundance of wreaths in the back. Mike has jumped out of the van to help direct the pallbearers where to go, the only man not in a suit yet somehow making himself almost invisible. He stands among the graves, head bowed, hands clasped in front of his muddy fleece, waiting. He says that sometimes mourners notice him and ask questions. How long will the coffin last? Will worms eat my father? He tells them worms don’t go down that far: they’re physically able to, but generally they stay closer to the surface – six feet is too deep for them to bother. Mostly everything mourners want to know is worm-related. I think of my grandmother in her above-ground grave and I believe him.
I loiter behind the vicar’s bright red Vauxhall, away from the family. Bob stays in the van. Four pallbearers carry the coffin to the wooden stand at the foot of the grave, take a moment to reconfigure themselves, then move it to the planks that suspend it above the opening. Mike is behind the vicar now, a few graves over, hands clasped again, head bowed. His small pot of soft, dry molehills is beside the vicar’s feet. He stands there for the whole ceremony, always watchful of when he might need to leap in and help, and eventually he does: standing between the suits, grabbing a strap, lowering the coffin into the ground, slowly, then retreating again.
It’s 3.45 p.m., and children are walking home from school through the cemetery. Over the monotone of the vicar reading the final words of committal, children scream at each other that someone has died. The coachman, still clutching the reins of the horses, grimaces awkwardly.
The mourners leave, holding each other’s arms as they pick their way through the old graves, and the gravediggers get to work. Bob slides out of the van, and Ewan – today’s young help – appears from wherever it is he’s been all this time. Planks are picked up, fabric is folded and stacked in a wheelbarrow. Bob unloads the mini digger from the trailer while Mike re-lays the boards over the imprints in the grass. Ewan shovels in a layer of dirt by hand so that when the digger comes there will be a cushion between the heavy, falling clay and the wooden lid of the coffin. Bob scoots over in his fun-size machine and pushes the mound of earth back into the hole while the other two tidy the edges and place the wreaths on top of the grave. Holly, pink roses, daffodils. Shovels, left to the side while other work is going on, stick into the ground and lean against each other for support.
The diggers stand back and consider their work. They’re disappointed there’s no marker to put back at the head of the grave to finish it off. Mike figures that maybe the family was waiting until the death of the next person before having one made. The man had lain in an unmarked grave for years, waiting for his wife.
Soil subsides and changes with seasons and rain, so any leftover earth is used to top up uneven graves in the area. Mike collects the clumps of clay that have rolled into the nearby sailors’ headstones and looks around for graves whose surfaces could do with evening out, filling the hollow parts with what he has to hand. All the tools and equipment are tidied and packed up in less than half an hour. The gravediggers are back in their van, waving from the window as they head out, Bob once again shrinking into his hoodie.
There is so much trust in a burial. You are entering a piece of land outside of your control. What happens to it after you are buried depends on other people. Whether the grass is trimmed, the ground above you sinks or headstones are left to topple. Whether the entire acre of land is sold or transformed, or your bones moved to make way for a railway tunnel. Being buried is an act of blind faith. You have no idea. You are just being left there, in a box, with no minders. But here there is someone keeping an eye on you as they pass, topping up the sunken bits, wondering where your headstone is. And when the vicar threw the molehills from the pot, it was true they landed like feathers.