Down among the dead men

21 April, 2014 (19:29) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I have been down among the dead men and women today, cruising graveyards looking for family history relics for customers. Strange job, writing about history, isn’t it?

I quite like communing with the dead. In Cornwall and West Devon, churches can still be quite remote. In Calstock, the only sound was the birdsong. In Bere Ferrers, I could smell the tang of tide, the salty ooze of the mudflats – but no petrol or diesel.

I find graveyards are much more about the living than the dead. There is more genuine, uplifting drama and emotion to be found in these places than in a single second of the hateful EastEnders.

In Calstock, I remembered old Pop Courtis, a Tamar Valley-man whose funeral was held there. From the pulpit, the vicar quoted the obituary I wrote, itself quoting Pop talking about his beloved Guinness: “Puts cockles in your heart and wrinkles in your willie!”

In one churchyard today, a red Rudolph, left over from Christmas, planted firmly in the grave of a 12-year-old boy who died in 1946, unmanned me utterly. What will survive of us is love: so movingly almost true.

I discussed this just now with the good Captain Kay, long my spiritual guru, as you know, and a fellow follower of the malevolent deity that rules our misfortunes on this rock, the Coconut-Eating Crab.

Some years ago the Captain (a photojournalist by trade, for those of you who have forgotten) took a stunning black-and-white photograph in a South Devon churchyard, empty but for an absorbed, headscarfed woman, on her knees, tending a grave beneath a heavy, grey wind-blown sky.

Everybody said to the Captain: “What a miserable picture!” He said to me just now: “I could never understand that. To me, it was a photograph about life, not death, about faithfulness, even love. I thought it was rather lovely.”

I did too, and I’ve reminded him that he is to leave the print to me in his will if he is called to the Crab before me.

Anyway, enough death, even if it is actually about life. On to hope.

Hope springs eternal

There are slivers of hope, always. There are good people still.

On Easter Sunday, the disgusting filth that is the Mail on Sunday published one of its classically little-England snivels of an ‘article’ about food banks. A brave reporter infiltrated a food bank and received aid even though he didn’t need it, proving that, um, well I’m not quite sure what it proved but being the Mail it was probably something like: “We shouldn’t bother with food banks because anybody who’s hungry is a Romanian gypsy lowering our property prices and importing cannibal rats so they should die anyway and here are some pictures of the lovely William and Kate and ooooohhhhhhhh Baby George.”

Something like that. I don’t know. I can rarely stomach the vileness.

Anyway, there is a healthy community on Twitter that rounds on the Mail’s thinly disguised fascism when it is unveiled, and within hours of the papers hitting the shops, the Trussell Trust, the charity that administers food banks all over this benighted country, had received more than £20,000 in donations to its Easter appeal from people repelled by the stench from the Mail’s sewers. The total is growing even as I write. In attacking those who help people in need, in trying to rubbish the need for food banks in the Britain for which they voted, in supporting the latest lies of the lying liar Iain Duncan Smith about winning the war on benefits, the Mail’s readers have contributed enormously to aid to those who need it

The New Statesman listed some of the paper’s other recent lies:

“This year the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had ‘targeted’ Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming ‘rather than face a fresh medical’; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by wind farms was discarded. All these reports were false.”

What’s so depressing is that the Mail’s lies reinforce prejudice, a casual, lazy process. I remember, so painfully, being told last year there was no need for food banks by people who would presumably cheerfully believe the Mail over the statistic that 1 million people are now dependent on food aid.

Everybody who pours scorn on people who are genuinely in need, rather than help first and sneer later, reinforces the hatred and bigotry of filth like the Daily Mail.

Write a comment

You need to login to post comments!