I spent a lot of time in graveyards when I was a child.
Well, I guess it wasn’t a lot of time, but my mum had a thing about stopping at old cemeteries and walking along reading the headstones out loud to us, with suitable asides about the names, the dates and the mundane tragedy of death as experienced by complete strangers a century before.
So there are graveyards in the story I’m writing, and I added in another one when I was writing a scene today. Despite working on historical fiction, I was aided by Google maps – I knew exactly where I wanted the event to take place, around 300 years ago. I had a look at the street view of Duns to get a sense of the layout, and there directly across the road is a fabulous old cemetery, raised up above the road. What a perfect stage for a dramatic declaration.
Recently my seven year old grandson wanted to see where his ‘grand-cestors’ were buried. We visited the old Tweed Heads graveyard in Florence street and had a pleasant afternoon walking the rows until we found them. We read each stone and marveled at the tiny ones who had passed before they were his age. One, on his father’s side, was the first white woman to be born in the Murwillumbah hospital. He was fascinated but a little disappointed they were not (yet) zombies.
I love creepy graveyards too… but no-one in my family seems to share my passion.
Sad, isn’t it? We’re not being ghoulish or gothic. Graveyards are interesting places, and every headstone is a story. Not that I could read any of the stories on the headstones in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, in the photo, but there was information in the museum about the history of the cemetery and the often difficult life of Jews in that extraordinary city.