A Stroll in the Cemetery

Through the insignificant looking alleyway above lies the path from Birmingham's historic jewellery quarter to one of the city's oldest, and least visited landmarks: Key Hill cemetery, which opened in 1836. Often, throughout the past winter, I have found myself looking down on it from the elevated track of the metro tram as it pulls up at the jewellery quarter stop. It was, invariably, deserted; bleak and lonely looking under the dripping trees.It looked so desolate I made a resolution to visit it once the weather improved, and a couple of days ago I finally made it.
It was a sunny day, though little of the light made it through the overarching canopy of trees: but above the countless graves hundreds of thousands of bluebells had bloomed,floating above the ground like a layer of azure mist. Over everything brooded a great silence, which even the brawl of traffic along Icknield Road failed to penetrate.


At intervals in the wall bounding the cemetery are stone doorways, now blocked with concrete; these were originallly the entrances to a system of catacombs (a leakage of 'noxious effluvia' from which, in Victorian times, lead to a tightening of municipal byelaws covering the sealing of coffins).

I had hoped to spot the graves of some of Birmingham's Victorian worthies,but the graves are so many, and so thickly stubbled together, that I had no hope.
Somewhere here, for example, is Harriet Martineau, that formidable nineteenth-century bluestocking considered the first woman sociologist. Here, too, is Alfred Bird. Who? I hear you ask. Well, Alfred was a chemist whose wife suffered from an allergy to eggs and yeast. He therefore invented a custard which contained neither, purely for his wife's use. Only when the stuff was accidentally fed to guests did he realise that it had a wider appeal. Yes, Alfred was the Bird in Bird's Custard.