dessert gooseberries

About two weeks ago I was having my lunch in Norwich cemetery, as I have done every day for the past couple of months. It’s a great cemetery, large but not crudely so, quiet, and there are sometimes foxes running amongst the graves. I like to sit there amongst the dead and the blackberries, eating my lunch and reading. I find it a pleasing place to be, and it takes my mind off of the living in the kind of way you need to during a day at work. It makes me think of the film “Night of the Living Dead” and the graveyard in the first scene, although with the exception of the graves themselves the two graveyards share no real similarities. It achieves most of the handful of criteria I would probably list, off the top of my head, as provisional prerequisites for a good cemetery, although it does – to the best of my investigation – lack any mausoleums, which detracts somewhat from its quality.

It’s really the presence of mausoleums, those catacombs that circle the centre, that make Brompton Cemetery, in London, such an excellent place to eat lunch.

There used to be a London Necropolis Company, which was responsible for London’s City of the Dead, the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. It was once the largest cemetery in the world, built to accommodate the increasingly vast amount of dead Londoners who were spewing out of the inner city cemeteries. The best thing is that it even had its own exclusive cemetery railway station: The London Necropolis Railway Station. It was near Waterloo, and sent bodies and their associated mourners to Brookwood on special funeral trains. The face of the building is still there, 121 Waterloo Bridge Road. I thought this was fact of the most fantastic and seemingly fictional order, trains run solely for the dead from a regular looking Underground station in the heart of the capital. There’s something so wonderfully clandestine about it all. Once I saw a train being run exclusively for Millwall fans, chaperoned by dozens of police and all shouting. It isn’t the same somehow.

Makes me think of those fake houses built in terraced streets in the old cities with an underground rail network, made up to look like the rest of the street with windows, and doors, and curtains, and a good paintjob, when behind that two dimensional façade is nothing but a huge air vent letting the smoke and steam out from the transportation shafts below. There’s one in Paddington, I think. Looks just like the rest of the street, but if you look at it right you can see the windows are blacked out, and then when you see it from behind it is like a film set, and where the rest of the street has rooms and gardens this house has iron struts and a hole down into the tracks.

Whatever the case, a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in Norwich cemetery and eating my lunch. A car pulled up in front of me. Sometimes they do. A silver car. People come to visit dead relatives, with flowers and memories. It’s always odd walking past the children’s section, the headstones all being tiny and flanked with stuffed animals and colourful windmills and cute picket fences. I looked up and saw that it was an old man who looked in pretty good shape, and he stepped out of the driver’s door and walked round to the boot, which he opened. He was looking at me as he moved. He got out some Wellington boots, which he stood into slowly and awkwardly, betraying his age. I wondered if I should help him, but it seemed inappropriate. I guessed that visiting a grave must be a pretty personal affair and I didn’t think he’d want me to interfere with it.

Eyes flicking up from the book I saw him peering, as if weighing me up. In his boot he had blankets and a plastic bag, which I could see contained a watering can from the long nozzle that protruded from the opening. I felt nervous, for some reason, more so when he approached me. He had two green objects in his hand, about the size of testes. I swallowed, perhaps in panicked, and looked at him in silence, putting the book mark into my book in case something happened.

He held out his hands steadily and offered me the green things.

“Here you go,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. They looked like gooseberries, but really big gooseberries, without hair.

“Bet you don’t know what they are,” he said, an almost childish smile on his face.

“Well they look like gooseberries,” I said, “but big.”

He nodded, quietly impressed by my horticultural acumen.

“Dessert gooseberries,” he said in that kind of conspiratorial half-whisper you sometimes playfully use with people you don’t know in order to break the ice.

My turn to nod. I had never had a dessert gooseberry and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat them like this. Usually gooseberries are sour little bastards that require stewing and sugar. I held them in front of me as if they were fragile.

“Eat them,” he said. Too proud to ask if there was a particular technique I took a bite out of the bigger one. It tasted incredible. I can already barely remember it, but I know it was incredible. The man wandered back to his car, and I hungrily finished it and ate the other one. We spoke a little more, meandering questions about gooseberries, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was the green of the gooseberries, the fragrance of the flesh, the fact that he had them in the boot of his car and gave one to me in the cemetery. It felt like something very special had happened, but it was only two gooseberries.

We went our separate ways without goodbyes. He looked like the kind of man who grew his own gooseberries. I feel a bit nervous in the cemetery now, in case he comes back. It’s an awkward nervousness because I’d like to see him and eat some more of his fruit, but I desperately dislike seeing the same people twice.

He hasn’t been back, and I am left with the braeburn, the bananas, the memory of another week’s fruit.