In Highgate East Cemetery

 Highgate Eastern Cemetery

 

 

I’ve become a regular visitor to Highgate Cemetery. By “regular”, I don’t mean frequent – rather, every two months or so. And by “Highgate Cemetery”, I mean the lower side (Eastern). I’ve yet to wander round the older, more gothic upper side (Western). Until recently access was only permitted by guided tour.

 

Places get smaller as you know them better. The Cemetery at first seems larger than it is because trees and bushes and tumbled neglected graves obscure sightlines. But if you trudge the paths through all of this, you soon reach boundaries. In recent months there has been much clearance of vegetation, and cutting down of rogue trees. This has increased spaciousness at the same time as shrinking it (you can see through to the boundary railings).

 

There’s also going to be an assault on neglected or unused plots (purchased but never buried in). The Cemetery is now owned by a Friends’ Trust, which has rescued it from decades of neglect. It makes the bulk of the income necessary to maintain the place from selling grave plots (not, as in more notorious times and places, bodies).

 

It is proposed to obtain a private Act of Parliament to allow for the recycling of graves whose owners (families of the deceased) have not been in touch for 75 years and have not been traced. (Recycling means burying remains deeper in the same grave and putting new arrivals on top.) The same goes for plots purchased long ago and never used. 

 

Gradually, therefore, the Cemetery will be transformed from the melange of the recent and cared-for graves and neglected and ruined ones into a more homogenously kept-up graveyard.

 

It will lose much thereby. Neglect is part of the message… Time inevitably brings an end to lives, and on the evidence of much of the cemetery, Time brings an end to many attempts to perpetuate memories. We die, and then our memorials die.

 

We living are drawn to this. There is a morbid fascination that, in the words of Dante (borrowed by TS Eliot), “Death has undone so many” – and their monuments. After reaching a certain age yourself, you peer at dates – who died younger, who older, who at about your age. You search for interesting inscriptions, going beyond the pious or the phrase “much beloved”. Brief recaps of a life are interesting, along the lines of ‘Scholar, sportsman, businessman, philanthropist” (that’s my invention) and of course the recently deceased famous. My favourites are the ironic ones, including this:

 

And this:

 

 

There is gentle communication between living and dead, mostly (but not always) low key. The flowers and other plants, of course. But also, for the graves of writers, pencils or pens pushed into the earth.

 

The great exception to the rule of Time’s decay is the grave of Karl Marx. His gargantuan tomb stands in massive disproportion to its surroundings.

 

If it seems like a Soviet-era monument among all the decayed Victoriana, that impression is partially correct. The tomb was commissioned in the mid 1950s by the resolutely Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain and created by a CPGB sculptor. Marx was exhumed from his original grave and reburied.

 

It is a place of pilgrimage for many admirers, and its environs are also a place of burial for many admirers.

 

The monument has been vandalised on occasions, and bombed, clearly without lasting effect, a couple of times in the 1970s.

 

The most savage assault on Marx in the Cemetery is fictional. Len Deighton’s SS GB is a counterfactual novel imagining a German victory in WW2 and the subsequent Nazi regime in the UK. The Germans and the Soviets, still allies in the fiction, hold a large VIP ceremony in the Cemetery to exhume Marx in order to confer a Soviet reburial. But the British Resistance has planted a huge bomb in the grave . It detonates, causing carnage and the destruction of the grave and the remains of Marx (the great monument would not have been built yet). 

 

Marx’s tomb is unique in being essentially a colossus erected in honour of one man. There’s another monumental type of tomb – the family mausoleum, of which there are a few examples in the East Cemetery. They are mainly of neo-classical design, hallowed by tradition. From the outside, the individuals entombed within are anonymous, unlike Marx.

 

Foxes live or hunt in the Cemetery. There are many inviting cracks or hollows for them or their smaller prey. Like all urban foxes, they are pretty oblivious to human visitors ,as they pick their way around or over the sunken or broken graves. They are oblivious to the dead, as well as to the living.

 

April 2021