Remembrance

There’s a Pauper’s Burial Ground within Church (Rock) Cemetery, deep down a spiral track into the shaft-like base of the Churchyard. It’s a little dark and dank and subterranean feeling, enclosed and slightly melancholy. There’s a simple stone for each year it was in operation, set in the ground and partially overgrown by turf, carved with just the year in question and a list of names and ages. But then there’s a slightly incongruous flash of pristine white, a Commonwealth War Graves stone, set at the head of the slab for 1915. It’s for Gunner A. A. Atkin - Albert – who came home wounded from the conflict and died in penury, obviously escaping one set of terrible circumstances just to fall into another. The War Graves people caught up with him later, me later still - I think, for all the seas of poppies and buildings lit up red, it's porbably still the individual stories that are actually the most moving...