Walking with Helen on Thursday. We start in Woodvale, my favourite of Brighton's cemeteries, through the Lewes Road gate next to the Gladstone pub. Helen leads us up the path on the right hand border of the cemetery because she wants to show me the grave of Thomas Highflyer, a child slave. Helen cleans the gravestone regularly and we talk about how many other slaves there must have been in Brighton, whose histories are unknown. We tramp up to the top and Bear Road, crossing into the City Cemetery which I never visit, but there's a growing copse there and a tree commemorating a friend of Helen's. It's high up, we drink coffee and eat coconut rock cakes, look out towards the sea. The windfarm turbines are hidden in mist. As we do a circuit, she shows me the immaculately looked after graves of young German men, all of them dead in 1918 and we wander back towards the road. Two couples are sitting by a grave with champagne - the women are twin daughters of a mother who died two years short of a century. It's her birthday.
Across the road again, back to Woodvale and down to my favourite spot, where the stones are overtaken by tree roots, where mausolea are like play houses, where my children used to marvel at stone angels, swords, lilies. Here we find Thomas Trusty Trickey and wonder at his name. We pass Mathildas and Marthas, sons and daughters, overblown and excessive memorials, others whose names are covered in ivy, down to the small mausoleum whose stained glass has been stolen and Helen tells me to stand on a fallen stone to look inside.
The ceiling shines with mosaic and in the curve is a lamb. I'm back in Ravenna with Jane, looking at a Byzantine ceiling to love. I would never have seen it if the stained glass had remained.
Up the hill again, onto Bear Road and into Downs Cemetery, the one that backs onto my house. Helen shows me the memorial to a young boy she knew, killed in a car crash. We walk around the rose garden, up towards the top corner, near the allotments. Mine's just over the fence.
Here there are new graves, many with photos, ornaments. The Irish flag flies over polished marble. Into the quiet, a strimmer. We gape at it, the need for it now, as winter blows in. Behind us, a fox stops and stares at the strimming man too, all of us interrupted in our silence. The fox, eyes on the noise, wanders towards a trio of crows and stops for a scratch. Shortly afterwards, it makes its way back up the slope.
The next morning I'm talking via Zoom to another friend about lambs to the slaughter, the chasm between us and them. The news is of another trickster leaving with his cardboard box. We talk about worlds of the rich, dead, fox. The times when we could travel, our separation from the continent we thought we belonged to, that name Thomas Trusty Trickey and the other Thomas on the other side of the cemetery valley, a child slave.
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