I’d like to spend some time forgetting about time.
Cemeteries and Me
Maybe they suit my inner death wish? Not that I wish to be buried, not at all. Burnt is what I’ll be on some value deal. A job lot with some other dolies that have died that week. That’ll be the next move in the corporate world of death and funerals. Since no-one is allowed at these cut-price cremations, why not do fifteen at once, or twenty? Environmentally sound and would save on having to cart single corpses back and forth all day.
No, I like cemeteries for their bucolic qualities: trees, headstones, lush well-groomed grass and comparative quiet. Even though you can perhaps hear the traffic it seems somehow removed and in a separate world. Cemeteries offer sanctuary and the dead never argue with you or try to sell you a TalkTalk contract.
Also, the headstones always tell a story.
They are laying tar on the roads. In Edinburgh they are always laying tar on the roads. That now redundant story about painting the Forth Rail Bridge seems to still apply to Edinburgh roads. If you get on a Lothian bus and you’re not held up by roadworks of some sort, then either the roadworkers are on strike or the world has ended in the night and no-one told you.
I meander up Portobello Road quite happy to imbibe the tarry aroma. It takes me back to my childhood and, pleasingly to the old Glasgow Underground of the sixties and seventies when it was the wee red caurs and before the ‘clockwork orange’. A mixture of tar and gasoline with just a hint of chip vinegar. But then, to me as a bairn, all of Glasgow smelled of chip vinegar whether from the countless ‘chippies’ or where Gold Star vinegar was actually manufactured under a railway bridge just off Glasgow Cross. As a family going to ‘The Barras’ we’d deliberately take that route to experience the heady tang. It was not unknown for some men in Glasgow to drink chip vinegar straight from the bottle as if it was some sort of soft drink. My own father claimed he did this but then, my auld man’s heid was just full of stories, there was truth in them but also wild exaggeration.
He'd tell us his mother patched his school trews with pieces of carpet, a bizarre notion and also hugely impractical (carpet would be so much heavier than whatever my da's shorts were made of and gravity would surely play a part in furthering the incongruity) but then, if you'd ever met my Granny...!
Enter the gates of Piershill Cemetery in the north-east of Edinburgh a mile from the coast and the first thing you’ll notice is a white stone standing tall on a grassy mound. This denotes the final resting place of Sigmund Neuberger or The Great Lafayette as he was internationally known. TGL was the David Copperfield of his time, a celebrated illusionist and magician who could command huge fees for his mesmeric skills. At a show in 1911 at the Empire Palace Theatre on Nicolson Street a fire broke out and the great man perished. There were forty thousand souls lining the roads to Piershill and he was buried along side his beloved pooch, Beauty who had predeceased him by four days. *
Piershill cemetery is a working cemetery in that folk are still buried in it. Indeed, an ex-client of mine from when I was an advice worker up in Craigmillar is buried here and I’m glad to see they now have a stone for the bonny, unfortunate lass.
Elizabeth Byrne ‘Lizzy’ died 12th FEB 2014 aged 47
On your right as you enter,
you’ll be privileged to visit Scotland’s first pet cemetery, in fact the only
one in Edinburgh. Must be at least a couple of hundred little
eighteen-inch-high headstones and plaques: ‘Samson- Golden cat gone to
Summerland’ ‘My best friend’ and ‘My wee pal’, all very touching. And what
about ‘Mosaique’ and ‘Joob-Joob’, ‘Zappa’ and ‘Pieter van Helder’. What a name
to be shouting in the park! I lived with a girl once (honest!) and we were
looking after the family dog which was named ‘Bumbles’. The looks I got from
the scallies in Birkenhead Park shouting that!
It is true, and I use the evidence of graveyards as proof, that we treat the dead often with more respect and care than we treat the living. Piershill is no Arlington National or even Highgate Cemetery but it is prim and neat and well-ordered, the grass is mown, and due repairs and renovations are made. Although this is not wholly the case. There’s a small area down in the north-east corner where there are a few graves over-run by weeds and scattered all around is litter. Why they don’t keep this area as properly as they do the rest of the cemetery, I have no idea. I have complained to the relevant authorities but received no response. It doesn’t seem a huge deal but I feel it is disrespectful to those individuals buried there who don’t seem to have relatives to tend to their plots so it should be the cemetery that does so. Little things like this come to haunt me.
There’s Codona’s buried here, the circus family. The Codona’s were Italian immigrants who brought the first amusement park to Scotland. ‘The Flying Codona’s, trapeze artists and entrepreneurs of fun for all the family. Fun City in Portobello where Glaswegians came for their holidays to laugh at Tommy Morgan, one of their own, and slurp pokey-hats on the beach and run away into Woolworth’s when it rained (or am I just conflating my own family memories of holidays in Helensburgh on the opposite coast?). The Codona’s brought ‘Travelling Picture Shows’ to the east coast.
The Codona’s are in a small row opposite the pet corner (except for the odd stray elsewhere) but in their midst is another notable circus performer, Harry ‘Koko’ Salvona aka Koko the Clown. I was never much enamoured by clowns even as a child. As far back as I can remember I was more in tune with humourists and the art of the spoken word. Just not a slapstick kind of guy despite folk like Harry knocking his pan in cavorting and grimacing and getting covered in sludge for a living.
Mary and William Pollock died October 1951 and their son Billy died December 1930.
Capt. David Wyllie - died at Piershill 1898 aged 79
There’s a large Jewish section
in Piershill Cemetery which was sadly defaced some years back no doubt for
reasons of bigotry. There’s something deeply wounding yet pathetic about
abusing. The double hurt. The insult to the dear departed and to a whole race
that some folk seem determined to despise.
As I wander around the Jewish area of maybe five hundred graves I’m taken by the names – Noah, Tobias, Zelda and Flora Goldberg and Peshy Levinson. They’re like characters from a Philip Roth novel or a Woody Allen script; ‘Broadway Harris Edelman’!. The Reverend Jacob Mendel Teitelman, Solomon Rosenberg, Isaac Saltman. These names are poetry.
These tranquil acres where relatives pay yearly or monthly tribute (depending on how recent the passing I suppose), where folk take a stroll and ponder mortality or the lives that people led. What was Koko really like? A man driven to be a clown, but you know what they say about the tears of a clown. All that make-up, all that forced merriment. Can you be an elderly clown behind all the face-paint or are there younger clowns waiting for you to fail? Folk walk their dogs in graveyards I’ve noticed and I’m not sure I like that despite the fact that they pick up after them.
I take a photo of the resident magician’s famous stone just as a couple of ladies wander up.
“Did you know about this guy?” I ask.
“Only just read about it on a website. Lived around here all my life and hadn’t a clue this was here”.
I fill them in on a wee bit of the folklore and facts and direct them towards Pets Corner. They hadn’t heard of the Codona’s, either.
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