Author Peter Ross on the stories of the people behind the gravestones

IGREW up in graveyards. The dead were my babysitters, my quiet companions. Not silent, though. They announced themselves with great formality. You only had to read the stones.

Here Lays

The Corps Of Mary Dickie Who Died Dec 18th 1740 Aged 3 Years & 9 Months Suffer The Little Children To Come Unto Me

That’s one I remember from the Old Town Cemetery in Stirling. I’d spend whole summers there, a little-ish child myself, trying to catch tadpoles, those living commas, in the small pond called the Pithy Mary, or taking a poke of penny sweets up on to the Ladies Rock, a steep outcrop in the centre of the cemetery, where one could enjoy flying saucers and foam shrimps while looking out over the panorama of graves.

Those graves. Laid out in rows, they were shelves full of stories. I was a shy boy; wary, watchful, living inside myself, living in books. Treasure Island, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, adventures from an earlier age. Headstones, in that company, were just more tales.

I would wander among the headstones, reading the inscriptions, gawping at the 18th century carvings, poking a soft finger into the sockets of stone skulls.

It never felt frightening to be surrounded by dead people. In those days – the late Seventies, early Eighties – the living seemed much more of a threat.

The cemetery was in poor repair. Lots of vandalism. Worst of all was the monument to a pair of women, Margaret McLachlan and Margaret Wilson, put to death in Wigtown in 1685 for refusing to give up their

Protestant religion. They had been tied to stakes and drowned in the rising tide of the Solway Firth. Now, here in Stirling, they had suffered a second martyrdom, the glass of their memorial smashed, the heads and hands of the marble statues broken off and stolen.

Who would do that? The sad truth is it could have been anyone. The cemetery was haunted by ne’er-dowells: junkies, punk dafties, solventhuffers with fairy rings of plooks around chafed lips.

I lived in mortal fear of a lad known as Tommy Gluebag who was rumoured to have inhaled so much solvent that a pouch of the stuff had mushroomed on the back of his head, pushing tight and milky through his short ginger hair. Nobody wanted to get close enough to verify this. Tommy had a reputation for recreational violence.

One day, while I was playing alone on Ladies Rock, he saw me and began, cursing, to climb. But his legs were rubbery beneath him, and about halfway up, he became – rather appropriately for a gluesniffer – stuck. Still, it was a bad moment. I felt like Jim Hawkins in the rigging, looking down in terror as Israel Hands climbed, dirk in teeth, towards him.

That was the thing about graveyards, though: they felt like – feel like – treasure-houses of stories. Some of these stories are international bestsellers. George Eliot and George Michael in Highgate, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise.

Others, though, are known only locally, if at all.

Sometimes you need only walk out your door. Cathcart Cemetery is just at the back of my house. One day, walking there, I chanced instead upon a pink granite stone marked with these words: “Mark Sheridan, Comedian.”

Sheridan was a music hall star. His real name was Frederick Shaw and he came from County Durham. A faded photograph shows a man in heavy make-up wearing bell bottoms and a comically oversized bowler hat. That we all know I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside is because of the popularity of his 1909 recording. Nine years later he was dead, taking his own life in Kelvingrove Park while on tour in Glasgow. He was buried two days later.

Cathcart is the least celebrated of Glasgow’s historic cemeteries. It doesn’t look as dramatic as the Necropolis with its huge glowering effigy of John Knox. And it doesn’t