There are several churchyards I can draw into my Beating the Bounds Parish walkabout and I have posted pictures of this one before, St Mary's Church, Sydenham Damerel. A tiny Adam-Bede-like church that we can see from our kitchen window, the church rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1953, and even on the dullest grey day still bathed in reflected light inside as I walked across to it recently.
With a beautiful yew avenue through which I can look across to home, and a churchyard steeped in history and back-story it is a truly atmospheric place.
Yew incidentally I gather (from the book about hedges I have borrowed from the library) was often planted in churchyards because it was thought to keep out the plague.
I usually invent the back-story as the fancy takes me but for the purposes of Beating the Bounds I am hoping to find out something much more accurate, and as I walked around the churchyard in the rain on a quiet Sunday morning, I spotted something I hadn't noticed before.
How I had missed this war grave right by the path in the past I really don't know, or perhaps it is just that after all that Edward Thomas reading I am more keenly tuned into it all...
27th January 1944 and of course, in this case, I don't need to invent a back story because sites like this one make it very easy to find out ...
RAF Bomber Command sends 515 aircraft to attack Berlin overnight
Perhaps J.F. Richards was on one of those sorties, but delving a little further I find connections to Shropshire, a full name of John Francis (via that service number) and a war record I can't access without joining something and paying a fee, so at that point my inquisitiveness for what really may have happened grinds to a halt.
But I will pursue it with the microfiche for the local paper in the library and see what more I can discover because I suddenly feel the enormity of it all...that I can stand in a tiny Devon churchyard and make that connection with history, and a young pilot who lost his life in the same week that Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg wrote this from Germany...
'Thousands sleep in the bunkers every night, not having a roof over their heads. It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest materials...the siren starts its howling and now everybody is pushing, stumbling, squeezing through the narrow entrance into the bunker...'
And that could have been written from anywhere...Coventry, Cologne, Exeter, Liverpool, Berlin or in Mathilde's case Hamburg in On the Other Side : Letters to my Children From Germany 1940-1946 published by Persephone Books.
As Peter Beacham suggests in Down the Deep Lanes, (the book I borrowed from the library and then had to buy) the churchyard so often taken for granted as the space to pass through on the way to the church, but dealing with continuity as much as finality...
'Left to their own devices older headstones come to rest at various improbable angles, cocking a snook at the last enemy but also nicely mirroring life's relationships...some headstones even look like families or groups of friends talking to each other... they look miserable when forced to stand to attention in ordered ranks...left alone they testify to the diversity of the human spirit.'
So true, and I reckon this little huddle are having themselves a really good yarn.
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