Regrets Éterneles: Elegy in a Norman Churchyard Pt. 1

August 8th, the morning mellowing into its unremarkable late hours, and I am standing in gravel and weeds amongst the Norman dead, in the churchyard of St Nicholas-de-Pierrepont, in the Manche region of Normandy, France. I have visited this village every summer for two decades, coming back and back and back like a swallow. This is a part of the world where the Angelus still rings, at 6am, at noon, at 6pm, warm metallic bands of sound that float across fields of solemn dairy cattle and towards the coast, calling the faithful – of which there are few – to services which no longer take place. The bell chimes the hours and the half hours. Sonerous and implacable, the tones hang in the trees like decorations. Five gold rings. Time slows, us with it. Let us go and make our visit

The churchyard is enclosed by a high wall of pale grey stone, hung with the same lichen tapestry as the church building. The wall is neither forbidding nor welcoming but stoical in its solidity except in the high summer months when irreverent arrangements of petunias are given license to cascade down the walls, giving the impression of a carnival float. A monk in fancy dress. Such is the case today. From the churchyard you can hear the regular raking of gravel. Concealed behind the high grey wall someone is tending a grave. In the gaps between headstones little white stakes like baby teeth erupt, painted with black numbers to identify the plot. There is still plenty of room. Sometimes I think I remember seeing the Curé disappearing in his black soutane around the corner of the building and away, black wings flapping. Other times I suspect this is a scene from a book, several books, which I overlay on top of my own memory. Sometimes, at night, we hear something dragged beneath the windowsill but do not investigate.

Today it has boiled up by 9am and the semi-tarmacked roads heave and shift in the heat. The weathered white gate has been left propped open (‘shaped to the comfort of the last to leave as if to win them back’) and two faded petrol cans sit neatly underneath a tap. Alongside them a mess of plucked weeds, as if the weeding itself was as much as could be borne. Or perhaps you cannot, should not, remove things from churchyards that cannot walk on their own two legs. Graveyard compost. What would grow in it. I begin my rounds.

Turning right along the perimeter of the church I come to the plot of famille Aubert-Marion. This is standard here, where families tend to remain living within five kilometers of each other, where those that don’t flee home, like salmon, should trouble or disaster fall. Death is a family affair. Notre oncle. Notre Tante. Notre Soeur. Where they exist, the rectangular grave markers are adorned by little upright plaques. Some with glazed ceramic flowers, images of Christ in sepia bass relief. Some monuments depict the deceased’s hobbies or occupation. The grave of a benignly smiling eighty-year old in a turquoise and black checked shirt is decorated with a plaque featuring a copper milk churn and monochrome dairy cattle. In the picture the cows are moving away from the viewer across their pasture to a field beyond. Another grave displays a painted image of a tractor in lurid technicolour. Graveside pastoral. Not so the grave of Hyppolite Aubert - instead of agricultural icons, here we find a black and white photograph of a man in French military uniform. Born on the 9th of January 1890, the crowning glory of Hippolyt’s life seems to have been his military service. Beneath the span of his years is written ‘Soldat de 14-18’. ‘Bon Soldat. Brave au feu. Tres Courage’. Not a little life, Hippolyt’s, who died aged fifty-five in the mid-nineteen forties, but what he leaves seems so small. The four years of his military service define the rest of his time. The church bell tolls, and I feel self-conscious, aware suddenly of the noise of the crickets and the heat of the sun. Unlike many English churchyards, hemmed in by mature trees, poisonous yew perhaps, to discourage sacrilegious browsing by livestock, St Nicolas is exposed on all sides, raised up a foot from the road. No shelter and all prospect. It makes you feel looked at, makes you admit to your anonymous pilgrimage to these strangers who you never knew.

I leave Hippolyte in peace. Passing by les familles Lecuriot-Marion (1894-1953) and the vault containing three generations of les familles Lefol-Lesage-Normant (Norman dynasties piling up on top of each other like haybales), I arrive at the tomb of the Renouf family. Here lies Charles Renouf, who dies at two years old, seeing through the first two years of the First World War, and here he lies again, a namesake born in 1918 who lives to see in the new millennium but no further. Desiré, Eugenie and Marie (a Renouf by marriage) live long lives and their names listed together bring an image of women sitting around a kitchen table at dusk, gazing down the long tunnel of their future. I feel stared at by them, appraised.

Many of the graves are entirely overgrown, the stone surrounds giving the plots the quality of a madcap garden, cultivating only weeds. Grasses, their seed heads already desiccated, support the equally calcified shells of tiny snails, cream and brown and smooth like toffees. Ox-eye daisies, cow parsley and dandelions quiver in the light breeze and deep inside the thicket of stalks crickets sing a funeral mass. You wonder what happened to the Famille Lebourgeois, their resting place in the process of re-wilding.  To the right of this: another grave, this one a mound of bare earth marked only by a shattered crucifix bereft of a head and one leg, its arms shattered from its torso and implying the missing cross. The metal glows against the soil. The name on the carved granite cross is illegible. These forgotten plots recur throughout the cemetery like holes in the weave of a fabric, dropped communal stitches. I trip over a grave which has no headstone, the grass slumping over it as if to cover a shame. The lilac tufts of thistles and a faded blue and white plastic bag mark the spot where ‘notre oncle’ now lies, and little else.