A small person in a big cemetery

Family trees, family roots

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I wrote, in my last post, about my burgeoning interest in trees. A couple of posts before that, I wrote about my burgeoning interest in genealogy. When I stop to consider this, I find it curious that I’ve developed an interest in these two things at the same time. Perhaps it’s a simple matter of reaching my mid-thirties and suddenly finding the merit in pursuits I once dismissed as boring and middle-aged. But perhaps, given the importance of trees as a metaphor for genealogy, there is also a subconscious logic to these two new hobbies arising simultaneously.

We speak of ‘branches’ of our families, of having ‘roots’ in the places our ancestors lived, and of course, of the ‘family tree’. We are the new growth on this tree: the little twigs and buds and leaves emerging at the outer extremity of something vast and ancient.

And occasionally there are actual, non-metaphorical family trees. Here I am with my father in 1994, planting one for my maternal grandfather, who had recently died:

I love this photo for its layers — the sort that accumulate across generations like tree rings. There’s my absent grandfather, an expert woodworker: the reason we are there, planting the tree. There’s the new life in the photo — the baby tree, there because he’d died, and baby me, there because he’d lived. There’s my dad, who lost his own father in his early twenties and for whom my Grandpa became something of a father figure. There’s my mum behind the camera, experiencing the loss of a parent for the first time. There’s the fact that my father is gone now too, and that at his funeral, this record of a moment of commemoration became an object of commemoration itself, one of a series of photos that we projected onto the wall after the service. There’s the fact that I am that child and that child is me, and yet I’m now approaching the age my parents were on the day the tree was planted.

I continually go back and forth about whether or not to have children of my own, and arguments in favour of the idea usually present themselves in the form of photos like this. I don’t much like the idea of childbirth or sleepless nights or nappy changing or parenting in the digital age with the shadow of climate breakdown hanging over me. But I like the idea of taking my hypothetical future child to find this tree, which I hope is looking pretty sturdy and respectable these days, and which, with my newfound interest in trees, I might even be able to identify. I like the idea of adding another layer, of contributing something of my own to the cycles of joy and sorrow and poetry that accompany and outlive us.

But first, I’m looking back. In an attempt to excavate some deeper, older layers, I spent a recent rainy Sunday seeking out some of the places my ancestors once frequented. As I wrote in this post, multiple generations of my father’s family were from South London, which, since I also live in London, makes it easy for me to go on little genealogical pilgrimages. Many of the buildings they knew have been lost, either to the Blitz or to the ravages of post-war town planning (the church where my great-grandparents got married has been replaced by what might be the ugliest construction I’ve ever laid eyes on) but I still managed to find the one building that remains of the hospital where my great-grandfather died (the gatehouse) and the church where my great-great grandparents got married, now divided up and converted into expensive flats.

I also found the street my Grandma Betty lived in as a little girl, before she was evacuated to the countryside in 1939. I doubt she would have recognised it; most of it was destroyed in the war, including the house her family lived in. But still, I found some traces. There was a short row of squat Victorian two-up-two-downs, which if I narrowed my eyes I could almost imagine proliferating, lining the whole street and the adjoining streets, filled with dockworkers and their families. As I stood there I noticed a big old plane tree across the street. It looked old enough to have survived the Blitz, and I was struck by the idea that my Grandma might have known this tree. Perhaps she had walked beneath it. Perhaps she and her younger sister, my Auntie Olive, had kicked up its leaves in the autumn on their way to school. Perhaps the tree remembered her. I stood for a long time, trying to listen for this history, to tune in to its frequency.

Afterwards I went further south, to Nunhead Cemetery, because I knew that Grandma Betty’s own great-grandmother — which is to say my great-great-great grandmother — was buried there. Nunhead is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries, a group of Victorian burial grounds inspired by Père Lachaise in Paris and built on what was then the perimeter of the capital to alleviate the toxic overcrowding of inner city churchyards. Several of them, having been disused for decades and reclaimed by nature, are now dominated by woodland and considered important sites for urban wildlife. Nunhead, a sprawling gothic wooded wilderness, might well be the most magnificent of them all.

My great-great-great-grandmother was called Jane Emily. She had fifteen children, of whom six died in infancy. She worked in a laundry into her old age, notwithstanding the physical and emotional traumas that had punctuated her life, and when she herself died, she was buried in a common grave with no headstone. Despite this, I managed to find a record that showed which area of the cemetery she was in, and when I located it, the lack of headstone no longer seemed sad or unjust. You’d be hard-pressed to find more tranquil resting place.

I left the main path to follow a barely-there trail into the trees, their foliage so thick that within a few seconds the main path was no longer visible. The late afternoon sun had come out, filtered greenish through the canopy. Old gravestones peeped out of the understory, a thick carpet of ivy, bramble, cow parsley and wild garlic, covering the earth and, beneath it, the worms and the roots and the fungi and the bones.

As I was practising my tree-recognising skills — elder, hawthorn, sycamore, hornbeam — I heard children’s voices. I assumed a family was coming down the main pathway, but they never seemed to get any closer. I carried on walking. Soon I came to a clearing where a recently-vacated rope-swing hung from the branch of an old tree, and I realised that some of the houses bordering the cemetery had gates in their back fences. The voices I’d heard belonged to children who lived in those houses, and this wilderness was their playground.

How magical it must be to play here, I thought. What wondrous, grandiose dimensions this place would take on in the imagination of a child; how mysterious it would seem. The small space taken up by their games must appear huge, endless.

And then I thought: but it is huge. It is endless. They probably don’t cover very much ground when they play here, but to see anything like smallness in this place isn’t a mark of maturity but a reflection of smallness, closed-ness, in oneself. The life that’s here; the death; the two in harmony. The forgotten stories, now beyond our reach. The networks and entanglements. The cycles and the layers. It is all enormous.

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