Unlike
Ebenezer my employer allows us to put down our quills, stopper the ink wells,
switch off our laptops and knock off work early on Christmas Eve. Instead of
heading back home into the bosom of my family I normally, if the weather is halfway
decent, head off to a cemetery instead. It’s a traditional thing to do at
Christmas after all, ask Dickens; Ebenezer visited one with the ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come and found the experience transformative. When I worked in
Vauxhall Brompton Cemetery was my preferred spot but now I work in Kings Cross
Kensal Green is just a few stops away via the Metropolitan and Bakerloo lines. You
can’t loiter for hours on a December afternoon just a few days after the winter
solstice, the sun sets at just before 4.00 and the cemeteries close their gates
at 4.30.
The
cemetery was busier than I had ever seen it before on a weekday. Christmas is the closest we get to having a
day of the dead in the UK. Many people
feel the urge to visit departed relatives, even if they have ignored them all
year. Many cemeteries, including Kensal
Green, even open on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, though generally only in the
mornings. There was a steady stream of visitors, generally arriving by car,
almost always clutching some floral tribute and never staying more than 10 or
15 minutes. I noticed a middle aged man
and a couple of young women lurking in the gloom behind John St John Long’s
tomb on Central Avenue where Harold Pinter’s grave is to be found. Pinter died of
cancer ten years previously to the day, 24 December 2008 and his visitors could
have been relatives, friends or admirers. After standing in respectful silence
for a few minutes they left, picking their way through the mud and puddles, in the
direction of the exit.
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| Ring necked parakeets |
As
the sun began to set the other visitors gradually melted away leaving me in the
company of the crows. I stood watching a
half dozen of them bounding across the turf, pausing from occasionally to cock their heads from
side to side, minutely examining the ground first with one eye then the other, in
the perpetual pursuit of something edible. When I left the crows a fox crossed
the path in front of me, turning its head momentarily to glance in my direction
before disappearing into a thicket of gravestones. In the Scotsman of December
1945 a reader recalled spotting a deer here in the closing months of the war, near
to the Robert Owen monument. The cemetery authorities apparently knew about the
deer and assumed it was a stray from a park; nowadays the nearest deer would be
in Richmond Park which is quite a distance for a deer to stray. In the bare
trees some increasingly loud squawking began to drown out the cawing of the
crows and marked the presence of something far more exotic than a deer. With
the sun halfway below the horizon the trees were already in shadow and it was
hard to make out any details of the dozens of birds screeching in the leafless
branches. But then another wave of them arrived, flying above the crown of the trees
and high enough for their vermilion beaks and coral green plumage to catch the
dying sunlight; ring necked parakeets. At dusk in autumn and winter these avian
invaders from the Indian subcontinent gather in large flocks, known as ‘pandemoniums’,
to roost together in noisy conviviality. These roosts can be up to a thousand
birds strong but the one in the cemetery wasn’t as large as that. There were
easily a couple of hundred though, arriving in waves 30 seconds to a minute
apart, each new group of arrivals setting off more ear splitting screeching. A breeding colony of Psittacula krameri were
first reported in Surrey in the 1960’s and since then their range and density
has spread to include almost the whole of London. The London population is
supposedly increasing by 30% a year and they are so common now in fact that
they are often referred to as ‘posh pigeons’. They love cemeteries; I’ve
spotted them in Lewisham, Abney Park in Hackney, and the City of London
Cemetery in Ilford as well as Kensal Green. But I’d never seen quite so many
together in one place or been subjected to so many of them making their raucous
racket at the same time.
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| The memorial of HRH Princess Sophia (1777-1848), the twelfth child of George III and Queen Charlotte |
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