Simon Clark - Humpty's bones

Humptys Bones And Other Skeletal Fragments

Were in the graveyard. A cold November day. The ancient tower of St Lawrences Church looms over us. Centuries of burials have raised the ground immediately around the church by four feet or so. The soil is dark; so very, very dark. Meandering amongst the tombs, we read inscriptions: William Tobias Wrelter, drowned at sea in Scarborough Bay, 1863. That makes for a salty grave I tell myself. Kathleen Prior, died in her one hundredth year. After much pain there is peace. And on the back of one headstone, visible from the road, is engraved a mischievous reminder of our mortality: Until you follow me: Peace be unto you.

My daughter, Helen, then aged seven, is interested in a patch of freshly turned soil where someone has planted pansies.

Cornflakes, she announces. Why has someone left cornflakes in the graveyard?

Maybe someone lost their breakfast.

Dad!

Okay, I admit it. The typically bad Dad joke. Usually, finished off with a tickle, or a playful throttle, to distract the child from a lack of parental wit.

Choking with laughter, Helen cries, The cornflakes! Where do all the cornflakes come from?

Ah Serious now, I examine the disturbed earth. They arent cornflakes, theyre pieces of bone.

Bone. How did bone get here?

It is a graveyard.

Helens too smart to be patronised. So I explain that these grey flakes are the bones of our villages ancient dead. The church is built on a pagan temple site, so burials here, of some sort or other, stretch back into prehistory. Nothing dramatic happened to the old tombs as far as I know. Nobody dug up the skeletons and smashed them to pieces in a frenzied orgy of post mortem destruction. Instead, down through the centuries, the old, forgotten burial plots were accidentally recycled in what is, after all, a restricted tract of hallowed ground. Old bones got mixed with the soil-fill. Gradually, these, in some semblance of resurrection, worked their way to the surface to rest in the light of that cold November day.

Helen, being inquisitive, immediately picks them up to examine them. The fragments do resemble cornflakes although a bony, pale grey in colour. And if youve just eaten cornflake cereal, or are just about to, I apologise for the comparison. So whatever you do, when you spoon those crunchy morsels into your mouth, dont think about crispy fragments of human skull. Remember: cornflakes are nice to eat. Pieces of ancient skeleton though they resemble cornflakes are not!

The bygone people of my village buried their deceased relatives in the churchyard. Back then, the proper Christian thing to do, of course. They had no idea that subsequent burials would bring the bones of the beloved to the surface.

And heres the notion that fascinates me, and which neatly nudged me into writing Humptys Bones: whatever we dispose of by burying underground, it has a habit of returning. Which could be a metaphor for the revenant returning to haunt a house. However, its important to appreciate that whatever we bury is not only likely to creep back to the surface, it also returns in an altered stated. When objects are buried whether corpses, coins, chemicals, or secret stuff we dont want people to know about it has this knack of undergoing a transformation.

The cornflake-look-alike skull shards were fleshless after all these centuries. They were also uncannily insubstantial. As if the bones density had altered, leaving them as light and as crisp as well flakes of toasted corn. In my garden I found a musket ball; salts in the soil have leeched metal from it, too, so it is peculiarly weightless. A Roman cloak pin made of bronze came to my notice a while ago, poking from a flower bed. Again, the earth had sucked some of the ore from it, leaving it almost porous. These artefacts are ghostly versions of their former selves.

Perhaps the ancients got it right. They often buried their dead in womb-like tombs to prepare the deceased for rebirth. Perhaps some race memory acted on me when I wrote Humptys Bones. I imagined what it would be like to find an ancient burial in a supposedly ordinary garden. Yet it couldnt just be some inert skeleton, could it? Those buried instincts that I (and you) share with our prehistoric ancestors couldnt permit a persons skeleton to be entirely lifeless. Deep down, we suspect that interred bones are merely resting. That they will have a future, and a life of sorts. Yet after so long in the earth an alchemy must have taken place, and they will possess a power to touch our lives in some uncanny way.

So: welcome to my world a world where there is a pleasant garden. Near the garden wall there are fruit trees. Concealed in their roots, mysterious bones. One by one they are rising to the surface. Now, push aside that bowl of cornflakes (not that you have an appetite for them anyway now); walk into the garden with me. And well recite these words as we go:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

Simon Clark

Yorkshire, 4th December, 2009

Poem

Humptys Bones

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the kings horses,

And all the kings men,

Couldnt put Humpty together again.

So, if they cant, who can?

The train doesnt want me to go there.

Shed murmured the words under her breath. Yet an old man in a turban, dozing in a nearby carriage seat, must have thought shed intended him to hear.

Then you should go back home.

Slightly flustered by having the stranger talk to her, Eden Page smiled. Pardon?

Go home.

His dark brown eyes regarded hers such wise, old eyes, she thought. And he sat there with such quiet dignity.

I cant go home, she replied. Its just not possible.

Oh.

I wish I could.

Then find somewhere else to go. You should always respect omens. If we are sent a warning that we should cease our course of action then we must take heed. His accent was pure Yorkshire, yet his Asian ancestry gifted him a melodic way of stressing certain words: Home omens warning I bought a power saw, he continued. Its so hard to cut wood straight without one. My brother borrowed it before I could use it. Give me it back, its mine, I told him every time I saw him. He always forgot. This went on for six months. Then I needed the power saw to fit a kitchen worktop. I drove to his house. The car got a puncture. It never stopped raining. My brother wasnt there when I arrived. I had to wait one hour. When I got the saw home I saw the plug had been smashed. I had to fix that first. So frustrating so annoying. However! At last I could switch on my expensive power tool and He held up his deep brown hand. His first finger ended at the second joint. I only went and cut the thing off. His face remained impassive. Blood everywhere. Dripping down the walls. Turned the kitchen sink bright red. Eight hours in hospital. Six stitches. Arm in a sling for a month, so If you see omens. He held up the ruined finger. Beware, beware, beware. He appeared satisfied hed offered his advice, because he turned to gaze out at the flat landscape that rolled past the carriage window. The train clickety-clacked along the line. A slow heart-beat of a sound.

For a moment Eden wasnt sure whether to thank the man for the advice, or elaborate on why she couldnt go home, or even enquire if his finger still hurt him, but within seconds his eyelids drooped shut as he drifted off to sleep.

The leg space between seats had been judged adequate by a midget. Her knees pressed into the seat in front of her until her toes went numb. The trains temperature had been regulated by someone with the biology of a reptile. From vents hot air beat into her face. To add to her discomfort a promised one hour train ride had turned into more than two. Torrential rain had flooded the tracks overnight, so the machine could only creep along at a dozen miles an hour. Even then it had to slow to a tortoise crawl when it encountered tracks covered with water. On occasions, it seemed as if Edens train was more boat than land vehicle, as it inched its way through entire lagoons that engulfed these flatlands with a pale brown liquid. It seemed more primeval swamp than ploughed cornfields. The branches of trees clutched at thin air, as if desperately trying to prevent themselves from drowning in all that muddy goo.