A Tale of Two Plaques -- The Prologue

It was the best of rhymes, it was the worst of rhymes but mostly it was the latter.

There was a poor jester named Yorick,
Whose skull became somewhat historic;
It lay in the ground
Till Hamlet it found;
'Alas' quoth he, scarcely euphoric.

Shakespeare was quite good at several things and he certainly knew his onions when it came to death, tombs, graves, epitaphs and the like. We have all journeyed with him to the vault where life reached something of a full stop for Juliet and Romeo; we've gathered in a similar environment at the monument for Cleopatra's demise; like Peter Quince, we have struggled more than a little to find Old Ninny's tomb and we have made pilgrimage to the bard's own final resting place under the stone slabs of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford with an adjacent epitaph believed to have been written by the man himself:
Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Hardly ' Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ' but we all get a bit tired in or at the end. A few years ago curiosity plus science delved into the secret death of Shakespeare by using special X-ray cameras [ exhumation was quite rightly not allowed ] to test if the myths of his being buried standing up or lying on Anne Hathaway were correct. They were not but confirmation came that his skeleton was without a head; this having possibly been removed by necromancers at the end of the eighteenth century. I prefer to think that Yorick pinched it and is currently touring the southern seas with his own production of Tremlet, emphasising the line ' Alas, poor William, I knew him well '.

Incidentally Cleopatra brings back memories of North Wales where in 1965, when I was not only young and charming but physically quite fit too, a good friend, Adrian Bligh, and I ran to the top of  Snowdon. This we did up the old rack and pinion railway line without stopping and breathing only occasionally. In the evening we went to the local cinema to see the supposedly gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor but we both suffered from such severe cramp in the narrow seats of the Llandudno flea pit that we writhed and wept with pain while our fellow cinema goers thought with embarrassment that we were displaying excitement of a different kind.

While we're talking tombs and graves, we must visit Stoke Poges where in 1751 Thomas Gray wrote his ' Elegy in a Country Churchyard '. It is a favourite poem of mine, recognisable quotations drifting out to meet you in almost every verse. His theme of human equality and what the many unknown corpses in unmarked graves might have achieved had they been blessed with the advantages of the privileged few, does go on a bit even to the point of anti-climax after the first two verses, surely some of the most beautiful lines written in the English language:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the site,
And all the world a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

The poem in turn reminds me of Stoke House School, Seaford, Sussex, where I was born, the school having moved there from Stoke Poges in the early twentieth century. The annual school magazine had at its end two quotations. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit which you will know comes from Vergil Aeneid 1 and translates ' Perhaps it will please us one day to remember these things ', followed by The short and simple annals  --  Gray; this being the final line of another memorable verse:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

When my father lost his sight completely in 1973 at the age of 57, he continued to teach classics both in local schools and to private students. Amongst the latter was a group of three senior ladies who wished to learn Latin in order to enable them to translate epitaphs on gravestones. How wise they were; there is so much to learn and appreciate inscribed thereon. I know fairly well the graves that surround the Michael Kirk at Gordonstoun  --  recent teachers, more distant members of the Gordon Cumming family and local people from three hundred years ago, about whose lives one could only conjecture. Going west, beyond the other end of the campus lie the ruins of the Peter Kirk, the local church for the village of Duffus until the middle of the nineteenth century. Here the surprise, shock even, was the mass of graves that relate to the final fifty years of the church's history. Here are buried whole families, large families, cut down before their prime; a catalogue of children not surviving to or through their teenage years. We should think carefully before we criticise modern day health care and the advances made in medicine and allied sciences in our own lifetimes.

If you are not too keen on death, you may have given up by now but for others the same trends are visible in Oxford where, in the early nineteenth century the local authorities commandeered three large pieces of land within the city for use as cemeteries, primarily to deal with an explosion in premature deaths as industrialisation ran ahead of the means to ensure sound quality of life. I find St Sepulchre's in Jericho particularly peaceful and, after you have lingered awhile, you can enjoy a large slice of Pineapple and Coconut cake in the Barefoot tearoom not far away. Among those whose graves I found there was that of Benjamin Jowett, one of Oxford's most noted academics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Master of Balliol College, he said about himself or others said sardonically of him:
First come I, Benjamin Jowett,
All there is to know, I know it;
I am the Master of this college,
What I know not is not knowledge.

Fifteen years ago I found myself in Cambridge and travelled the short distance to Granchester to see if Rupert Brookes's romantic memory from a First World War battlefield was recognisable ninety years later. Avoiding Jeffrey Archer's palace and failing to find any honey or other delicacies fit for tea, I came to the church of St Andrew and St Mary. Sadly none of the faces on the clock tower showed ten to three so I wandered into the churchyard and suddenly there he was. I looked down and I was standing at the foot of the grave of Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee (1908-1993), an eminent classical scholar and Headmaster of Winchester College during my time there. I had had a bit of an up and down relationship with him, with the down element being entirely my responsibility. When he encountered me in naughty vein, he gave me something responsible to do, a most valuable lesson for me in later years. My problem was that I tended to fulfil the task and then go straight back to sinning.

One Sunday in the summer of 1965 I was invited to lunch at the Headmaster's House. It was highly proper and very formal, with Lady Lee strengthened by a sufficiently potent dose of austerity to see us all through posterity, presiding in regal fashion. Wine was not offered to young men then but beer in the shape of Tolly Cobbold was an acceptable order of the day, provided one did not accidentally scrape or mar the highly polished surface of the walnut table. I was just in the process of taking a healthy swig of the said beverage when Lady Lee, with all the graciousness of a Thomson machine gun, fired a question at me. I cannot remember the subject but I do recall not having a clue how to reply. My mouth seemed to fall open of its own accord and out came a great big enormous burp, echoing eternally in the medieval hall. The rest, as Fortinbras said, was silence and the embarrassment is undimmed fifty four years later.

So when I came across Desmond again [ I cannot remember if Lady Lee was keeping him company 'neath the turf ], I was able to apologise  on bended knee not only for the merry dance which I had led him but also for the involuntary release of gas from my digestive tract which shocked his good lady so awfully.

And in this increasingly secular age, do bones matter anyway? As Crossrail snakes its way across London and HS2 flies like a crossbow bolt from wherever to wherever, bats and buttercups are of course religiously preserved but scant regard is paid to human remains. Shakespeare might be OK but what about one of his favourite anti-heroes, Richard III? Nestling peacefully under a car park in Leicester, he is unceremoniously dug up and carted off to a museum  --  and still without a horse.

Or perhaps the memorial is more important than the bones themselves. The eminent seventeenth century  Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Ken, author of such beautiful hymns as Awake my soul and Glory to thee my God, this night, had carved his name [ quite neatly ] on a sacred pillar in the cloisters of Winchester College when he was a boy, still to be seen three hundred and fifty years later. When I first ascended the dome of St Peter's in Rome, I was shocked by the ubiquitous graffiti, noticing it was not an imitation of antique Roman ribaldry but thousand upon thousand of modern names. But then perhaps climbing almost to the roof and leaving your mark behind is perhaps in itself a sort of act of spiritual commitment. After all the local Archdeacon here in Oxford recently made a tour of local churches, daubing unintelligible hieroglyphs in blue chalk on doorways. What a topsy turvy world it is. The good book says And some there be that have no memorial; lucky old them perhaps.

War memorials are in a different category and how important it is for us all to remember those who made an ultimate sacrifice for others. I have always preferred the straightforward statement ' They died for their country ' than the slightly more complex biblical quotation ' Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends '. Perhaps laying down a life for an ideal or for people unknown is a demonstration of even greater love and commitment than if the beneficiaries are known and dear to you. Or perhaps it depends on your definition of a ' friend ' and that's certainly a topic for another day. In any event war memorials, reflecting love, courage and selflessness should stay in the forefront of our minds. I am particularly drawn to the boards at Gordonstoun School and Balliol College, Oxford, both of which name serving people of both British and German origin side by side.

And if you want to feel the peace that comes after war and reflect on the turmoil that preceded that peace, go to the War Cloister at Winchester College, the largest private memorial of its kind in Europe. I am not an expert in architecture and I now regret passing through it several times a day for five years [ although I always observed the tradition of raising my straw hat on entry ] without fully appreciating its dignified and elegant serenity but I have made up for this in recent years. In the unlikely event of my making it some day to the celestial city, I hope to find myself eternally lodged in a replica of Winchester's War Cloister.

Round the outer wall of the cloister is a message for all of us. The final part reads thus: Strong in this threefold faith they went forth from home and kindred to the battlefields of the world and, treading the path of duty and sacrifice, laid down their lives for mankind. Thou, therefore, for whom they died, seek not thine own but serve as they served, and in peace and in war bear thyself  ever as Christ's soldier, gentle in all things, valiant in action, steadfast in adversity.

3rd March 2019