Telling Stories

The more time I spend in the crypt, the greater the emotional impact the space has on me.

I am aware that I feel a superstitious fear about sitting in the burial site, in the actual space where bodies lay before being exhumed and moved to a room alongside this space in St Mary-In-The-Castle Crypt.

Aside from that fear though is a palpable sense of sadness, which grows and blooms the longer I stay here. At times I almost feel like I have summoned the spirits of the young women and girls whose anonymous stories I am collecting and recording.

I have drawn on the knowledge of a local historian – who tells me the predominance of young women’s bodies in this crypt was due to the girls being brought here at the start of the 19th century for the ‘sea cure’. Suffering from consumption (TB), these poor souls lasted little time and died here, in Hastings, many miles from their homes and families.

Whether it is the unlived lives of these girls, or whether it is some trace of the emotional stains of loneliness and loss, I cannot say. But the feeling grows stronger and more intense as the hours pass.

I don’t feel spooked by it. Instead, I feel a deep pathos. The first night I came home and sat in a steaming bath, weeping hot, fat tears for them all. For all the names and dates of birth and death which is really all there is of these women’s lives.

Most of them were unmarried, so lived and died without the social status or respectability marriage conferred, and so are remembered as the daughters of their father. There are scant details about them themselves.

I sit, in my small alcove, with a rather charming (borrowed) standing lamp casting a soft orange light by which I can see well enough to type. I am writing on a vintage Underwood typewriter (again borrowed from a friend) and somehow the sounds of the clacking keys and the orangey glow bring some comfort and warmth to the cold, damp space.

Maybe this corner is my refuge. Or maybe it’s the place where I call up the lost souls of the women and girls who died so young, and so alone. Maybe I am surrounded by them as I write their names, invoking them into my emotional, spiritual and physical space. Or maybe, as I was once a lost young woman myself, I connect into the yearning which, for me, was always the yearning to come home.

I have spent almost the whole of July sat in a crypt, in the places where exhumed bodies once lay.

People keep asking me, can I feel the presence of any of the poor creatures who died and were buried here at the turn of the 19th Century? I have an answer to the question but it is important to know first how these long-departed souls came to be here, in Hastings in the cold crypt of St Mary-In-The-Castle.

Many young unmarried women were buried here – far from their families and friends after being brought to the Sussex coast for the ‘sea cure’. For most it was a last-ditch attempt to save their young lives which were in the grip of consumption (TB).

With help from local historian Brion Purdey I have started gently piecing together the small details of the anonymous lives of these girls and young women.

There is scant information – usually only relating to who their father was, or their birth and death dates. The more I dig, and the less I find about them, the sadder the process feels.

It may be romantic to say that in some tiny way, I want to remember the women, none of whom attained the social status and financial standing that marriage conferred.

Using a friend’s 1928 Underwood typewriter, I sit in the crypt typing out what little I can exhume of these buried lives, and as I write the sense of sadness is palpable.

It may be fanciful imagination – but, for me, the crypt is a place of yearning and loss, of fading memory of the lives that remain unlived, unloved and far from home.

And in that feeling lies my answer to the question. It may be may be strange or grotesque, but it is a profound sense of place combined with a longing I can only equate to homesickness.

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