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.
