“Oh, this is in the paupers’ section. You’ll Never Find It. I’ll Take You There.”
This photo is of a portion of Hampstead cemetery located in the north side of London, that I took during my visit to the UK in 2008. I’ve always liked cemeteries. For me they have always been a place of quiet and peace and reflection. I took this photo for its aesthetic and artistic value – the tombstones, black in the late afternoon sun, casting their shadows across the vibrant green slightly unmown grass – so English, so appealing to me. I also took this photo as a memento of my visit, an image of how nice and even beautiful an old cemetery can be.
Yet this portion of the cemetery had nothing to do with the reason for my visit. For where I was directed, where I was escorted to, was not park like, nor a pleasant landscaped and well-maintained visit-worthy portion of the cemetery. And perhaps this was very appropriate for the “clientele”, those whose bodies were buried in the dirt there – the bodies in simple coffins, I assume – stacked twelve from the bottom up within each individual burial pit in this portion of the cemetery – in a pauper’s grave. This was where my mom’s sister, June, born before her and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in this cemetery, at what level I do not know, after she died three days after she was born, a small thing, surely not taking up too much space among the twelve.
From my interview notes with my mom: My mom was born Southampton in a nursing home, only one of the children (four) born in a nursing home because a child had died between Bruno (my uncle) and Hazel (my mom). This was June, baptized June, but was supposed to be Yolanda June, but Alice (my grandmother) only had time to baptize her June. June only lived 3 days after a 3 day labor. Alice felt that the drugs they gave her during the labor affected the baby. The baby was born very healthy looking, nothing wrong with her. Too much drugs in her. Baby buried? – mom thinks yes.
I arrived at the cemetery later than I had wanted, the trip on the underground longer than I had anticipated. When I arrived, I quickly looked around for the cemetery office and hurried to it, entering just a few minutes before it closed for the day. A young man, obviously getting ready to close the office and leave for the day, greeted me, and when I showed him the information I had received on the location of the grave of my mom’s sister – my aunt – he said, “Oh, this is in the paupers’ section. You’ll ever find it. I’ll take you there.” I was so thankful for his assistance and his courtesy towards me.
We left the office and walked a distance on one of the cemetery roads and then we came to what I thought was an empty field, a large grassy area with very few tombstones. He walked on with some determination towards a spot in the empty grass, glancing at a map of the cemetery he had brought along, paused, moved one way, looked at the map again, moved again, a smaller distance, then maybe twice more and came to a stop at an empty space of grass and said, “Here, it’s about here. There are no markers, but this is really just about the area where she is buried, where the baby is buried”.
I put my backpack down where he pointed and thanked him profusely. He had been right. I never would have found this grave, this spot, on my own, as there were no markers anywhere, and no tombstone on the spot.
He said goodbye and then hurried away. When I had thanked him for taking me to the grave, he had mentioned that it was good that I had arrived when I did, as he lived a distance away east, and that he had driven in and was hurrying to beat the traffic out of the city. I also now seem to remember him speaking of his wife and that she was pregnant with their first child. I again thought what a nice young man and thanked him again as he hurried off.
I stood for a moment looking down at the grass, in essence looking at nothing. The grass here had been mown but apparently after the grass was high and probably unkept looking and some time ago, for the mown grass was now dry and brown, and left in small wavy piles all around. All this somehow appropriate for a pauper’s field, I thought without judgement, as the field was now endued with a simple quiet peace. Then, after taking a few photos of the site and the area around, I decided to sit down and enjoy resting out of the sun in the shade of the trees that sheltered me from the heat of the bright June sun.
I sat there for a while – I had taken the tube ride specifically to be here – or somewhere about where I sat – and I wanted to make the most of my time – and so I just sat quietly and took in the ambience all around me, allowing my thoughts and feelings to gather and coalesce.
The cemetery was quiet, and I was the only one within sight. I was alone. There seemed to be a playing field nearby, perhaps on the other side of the trees and hedge not far from where I sat, as I heard voices and shouting – sounds of play and life – as if from a sports field. And these voices from a distance, made the stillness and peace seem to deepen all around me, descending upon the cemetery as a blessing, as a homage and prayer, in remembrance of the lives of so many who did not even have the honor of a tombstone with which to mark their presence as a person once living within the light of the same sun enjoyed by those on the playing field, and by those who might pass by or just pause and sit and ponder, such as I.
My thoughts began to center on the life around me that I could hear, and the fact that hundreds of dead were also probably underground all around me. For if they were buried in stacks of twelve, with the plots probably as close to each other as possible for efficiency and order and maximum financial gain, then it was not hundreds, but it was more likely that I was literally sitting atop a field of thousands, thousands of others, of persons once alive, who surely at times enjoyed a quiet day such as the warm June day I was experiencing at the moment.
And one of those whose remains were near, if not right below me, was a baby of only three days life, my mother’s sister she never knew, a baby girl, whose only faint whispers of her very brief breath of life, of her existence, is her name – actually only half of her intended name – listed in a 100 year-old register of her burial in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and a few lines of notes, written in ink from a page of my interview with my mother, retelling her mother’s few words of the sadness of losing a very healthy-looking little baby girl. And the baby’s name was June, just like the month of my visit, and just June, and not Yolanda June as intended, because my grandmother only had time to baptize her as June before she died, before her infant daughter probably died in Alice’s arms as she held her tenderly, after baptizing her sweet little baby girl as best she could, before the baby, June, died.
That is what my mind and soul reflected upon as I sat amid the wavy piles of dry brown grass in the shade of the trees that provided cover and shelter from the late afternoon sun, as I rested on the grass, in a cemetery, on a space unmarked by a tombstone, a spot where twelve persons are buried, and among them, the probable resting place of a baby girl, who would have been one of my mom’s older sisters, and my aunt June.
After a while, I got up and wandered about the cemetery for a while, the gates were eventually going to close. I took some photos. One was the featured photo of this posting, a more appealing and artistic photo than the one of where baby June was buried, but it was not the area or the gravesite of what I had really come to see.
And now fifteen years after my visit to Hampstead cemetery to find the grave of my mom’s infant sister, and ten years after my mom died, I add to the whispers of baby June’s brief life with this posting on my website. Is there much to say? Well, I have written that she lived three days, that she was baptized by my grandmother probably when she sensed the baby was dying, only having time to baptize her with one of her intended names. I wrote that she was loved and mourned and missed and spoken of by her mother, Alice, my grandmother, to her daughter, my mother, who told the story to me, Alice’s grandson, who was not yet born in California when Alice died in London. That’s a lot to know, and write about, especially when half-named baby June was born 100 years or so ago and lived only three days. But she was loved and missed, and that, indeed, is a lot to say and remember and write about for any person, for her life is a good story to tell in remembrance of her, and in honor of my grandmother in whose arms she died.
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I did not know this story. How sad for our grandmother! Why was she buried in a paupers grave?