The great leveller

I spent much of my early boyhood in a disused cemetery — a Gothic beginning to my adolescence which was the result of nothing more romantic than the fact that only a high wall, over which I could climb with the help of an elderberry tree, divided our back garden from the overgrown graves.

I spent much of my early boyhood in a disused cemetery — a Gothic beginning to my adolescence which was the result of nothing more romantic than the fact that only a high wall, over which I could climb with the help of an elderberry tree, divided our back garden from the overgrown graves. It was wartime and the fetid jamjars — green with the slime of rotted flowers — smashed against weeping angels and shrouded urns with a noise that was near enough to an explosion to fuel my fantasies. I thought of the jamjars as hand grenades and of the weeping angels as German paratroops in disguise.