A Tomb with a View
Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.
It was January, and I was off to meet the man from Valhalla. Bob Reinhardt, an art teacher, has for almost twenty years spent the school holidays visiting Scotland from his home in the United States, an annual pilgrimage made in order to explore Edinburgh’s historic burial grounds. Today, he has promised to show me around the one he loves above all others: Warriston Cemetery.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Reinhardt, who is in his mid- sixties with a silver beard and affable manner, would have a taste for graveyards. He grew up in Valhalla, New York, a small town notable for being surrounded by six major cemeteries, the best known of which, Kensico, is the last resting place of Billie Burke, who played Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in The Wizard of Oz. Reinhardt cannot agree with Glinda’s sentiment that “there’s no place like home”. He has discovered, amid the ivy and old tombs of Warriston, a sort of spiritual homeland that has cast an unbreakable spell upon him.
The January sun was low and strong, melting the frost from the grass; yet, in the cold shade of crosses and obelisks, ice persisted unthawed in long streaks of white – bridal trains flowing behind stone- faced brides. Frost gleamed on fallen headstones, turning mossy memorials into illuminated manuscripts. Ladybirds, I shuddered to notice, were wintering in the eyes, nostrils and puckered lips of a fat granite cherub.
As we walked Reinhardt took pictures on his phone: leaf- litter obscuring names and dates; fallen stones, dropped in moss. The artist in him is drawn to decay, but it saddens that part of him which sees Warriston as a historic resource where people can seek out their ancestors. Yet Warriston is pretty in its own way. In the absence of people, nature has flourished. A heron, more building than bird, a humpback bridge in flight, lifted from the Water of Leith.
“I feel a strange satisfaction coming here,” Reinhardt said, sweeping an arm with a proprietary air.
“When I’m home in Philadelphia, I close my eyes and I can see every bit of this place.” ■