MEET THE AUTHOR

The poet and writer JEAN SPRACKLAND discusses her latest book These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards

How did you become interested in graveyards? I’ve always felt comfortable in them, and I’ve always felt that they were places where I was able and allowed to go and be free to think my own thoughts. There’s also this sense that a graveyard is a kind of archive. It’s a place where you have access to stories that aren’t really available or documented anywhere else, so I’ve always been interested in the inscriptions that I’ve read. Some of those names have stayed with me, and haunted me over many years. The book is partly about going back and following those leads, and finding out about those forgotten individuals.

That’s an approach many of our readers will be familiar with from researching family history.

I know that going round the graveyard looking for the memorial to some long-lost ancestor is one of the ways that people find out about their own past. That’s actually not true for me. We don’t really have any family graves anywhere, and this is another area that I’m exploring in the book – this sense that the history that you’re able to find by looking at gravestones in a churchyard or wherever is actually a very partial history. Until relatively recently having an individual grave with a carved stone with your name on it was something that only wealthy people could do. The vast majority of people didn’t have that, and their names are not memorialised in the same way in stones in the churchyard.

Are burial places important for communities?

I think that’s been true throughout history and in different parts of the country – the village churchyard is a place where community is represented through the burial of all the local people over a number of generations. I write about a churchyard that is very local to me here in North London. When you visit you go back to a time when Stoke Newington was a small country village, and you see that community represented.

What’s the main thing you learnt while you were writing the book?

That no story is entirely reliable. Although the graveyard is this incredible repository of stories, story is shaped into myth, our memories are only ever partial, and memory – collective memory particularly – is something that we can never be absolutely sure of. So it’s a book of stories, but it’s also a book about story itself.