Another small piece by Jeremy Hooker from his journal, Openings*
In June 1986 he was staying in the Northern Netherlands near the coast:
Cemetery in a sheltered hollow among dunes, with Scots pines on either side. Well-tended, with roses not yet out, dead daffodils, bluebells & buttercups among low-growing cypresses, and a scattering of hawthorns & birches. A compact, oblong cemetery, with a stone cross at either end, and between one hundred and two hundred graves arranged in rows, each plot filled with blue and white cockleshells. At first it was very quiet as we looked at the small headstones in that sheltered place, only a faint bee hum in the stillness, but as we walked about reading the stones we heard seabirds crying, piping and shrilling, shelducks flew over, and a large harrier scoured marsh beyond the dunes. Graves of the dead in both world wars and of several nations, ally and enemy, known and unknown, lay side by side. All were bare, with the same beautiful covering of shells, except one, a German soldier’s, which had a wreath of lichen & fir cones lying under the headstone. Returning with Joe after lunch, down a green track yards from the war cemetery, we came on another burial ground. Here were white, steel crosses, askew, among the lowest branches of a large birch tree, which must have been a sprig, or perhaps not even a seed, when they were first put there. A plaque on a large wooden cross informed us that, according to old inhabitants, these were the graves of the crew of a Swedish sailing ship, wrecked in a storm. The bodies of those killed in the Great War buried in the cemetery must also have come from the sea, washed up on the sands, as also must a number of those—seamen and airmen—killed in the Second World War. The soldiers of the Great War must have been drowned when troopships went down, and so came ashore in neutral Holland. This is a place to haunt the mind…
I suggest that the atmospheric quality of this writing, its awareness of atmosphere, would make it an ideal accompaniment to the teaching of Wilfred Owen’s late poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, with its eerie sense of the dead conversing with the dead.
*See Georgian Poetry
Ian Brinton