Down Cemetery Road
WILLIAM JOLL
The End of the Road By Jack Cooke Mudlark £14.99
At 33, Jack Cooke, resident in coastal Suffolk, found himself thinking about death, the monuments associated with it and his mortality.
‘I’m already in decline,’ he writes. ‘My physical peak has come and gone, and I failed to notice. In another decade, my brain cells will start to die in droves. After a certain age, we are all in the process of dying… It was high time that I took the process seriously.’
Jack Cooke’s approach to this Hamlet moment in his life takes the unusual form of his buying an 18-foot Daimler hearse from an undertaker in Bristol, carrying out essential repairs – it has no floor and he is intending to sleep in it – and visiting burial locations around the UK that have attracted his attention.
And quite a journey it turns out to be: some 2,000 miles, starting at Dunwich in Suffolk (with its eight churches), ending only when the hearse expires in north Scotland, fortunately for us after Cooke has visited Orkney.
The hearse takes him and Enfield, an uncomplaining spider who is his only companion, from Suffolk through Essex and Herts to London. Use of the M25 sounds stressful.
In London, despite his cumbersome and presumably non-eco vehicle, he visits several cemeteries and churchyards, including Highgate where he has to break in by night, outwitting the cameras. He moves down to Lewes, on to Portsmouth, into the South West, up to the Cotswolds, on to Tewkesbury and into Wales, criss-crossing the Midlands, up into Derbyshire, and then north to the Lakes, Carlisle and Scotland.
Cooke skilfully transmits the associations surrounding his chosen sites, along with the instinct that led him to those places in the first place.
At Golders Green crematorium, he is greeted enthusiastically by the custodian, Eric Willis. He takes him on a tour which encompasses Marc Bolan’s memorabilia. The items are brought out once a year for a service of remembrance on the anniversary of Bolan’s death at the hands of a tree near Barnes Common in September 1977. There are also urns containing the ashes of Bram Stoker and Freud, and a hall dedicated to RAF pilots who died in the Battle of Britain.
At Theberton in Suffolk, Cooke encounters the remains of the Zeppelin shot down in June 1917, with only two of the 18-strong crew surviving.
‘The Zeppelin’s commander, Franz Eichler, threw himself from the front of the burning gondola with four others, and their bodies were found in a neat line stretched out across a cornfield, like toy soldiers discarded by a child,’ he writes.
At Peak Cavern near Castleton, Derbyshire, Cooke visits the cave system. There, Neil Moss, an Oxford undergraduate aged 20, became trapped during a descent in March 1959 and suffocated, despite massive attempts to save him, after 35 hours had passed. His father requested that his body be left in situ, not wishing to risk further loss of life.
My favourite was the Bullough Mausoleum on the Island of Rum, in the Hebrides, bought in 1888 by John Bullough, a very rich Lancashire industrialist. His son George really went to town, planting 80,000 trees and importing 250,000 tons of topsoil from Lancashire in puffers.
The Mausoleum is a considerable
distance from Kinloch Castle where the Bulloughs led a life of extraordinary opulence. Cooke’s account of his visit to it, together with the following journey to Orkney, is utterly compelling. When we can go nowhere, this book lets us travel freely.