Seeing Them In
The awkward bit was the funeral, known as a ‘seeing in’. You’d start your day measuring up, then morning break, then a dig maybe and usually a seeing in around lunch time. After we’d said hello to the funeral company and confirmed the plaque on the coffin had the same name as the paperwork, me and the other gravediggers would wait a distance away, in the buggy or on a bench, with our kit ready. We had to ‘see them in’, make sure the coffin was assuredly lowered and all the rest. Sometimes we’d have to step up and assist with the pallbearing and lowering. Usually it would be us with the putlocks, the bars that held a coffin above the hole, ready to drag them out for the lowering. Some sites you’d dig the hole and the water table was so high it would fill, fresh with a rainbow-oil top from all the dissolving lipids in the graves all around. We’d pump it out onto the grass or the gutter and bung a load of shredded paper (‘shreddies’ as we called them) or woodchips to keep it relatively dry for the lowering.
Different cultures would approach the filling in in different ways. Some left immediately after the coffin was lowered, and some stayed to see the entire process complete, or even backfill themselves, the congregation all having a go with shovels to get the red earth back in the hole. If they left, the messy work would go. Pulling out the shoring with chains on a digger, sometimes causing a little cave in on the sides. Sometimes before this, you’d have to get in, straddling the coffin, to sort something out like the shoring, or the ropes from lowering. You have to get in graves for the digging, even if you do it by machine, for the finishing up; squaring off the sides and corners so a coffin will rest easy and so that metal shoring for safely holding the sides up will fit, and also for presentation. Bent down scraping away at the subsoil with a flat edged spade the world would go nice and quiet. The whole Earth around you keeping it at bay. Almost cosy. A mineral-rich smell too; salty clay.
If we were back-filling by machine the dumper would drop claggy loads of clay soil back into the hole and often you’d hear the coffin lid bust in. A great brick-red weight just thumped down upon them. You’d churn up the mud with the digger tracks and dumper wheels. Shouting so as to be heard by the guys operating the machines. All the while underneath us were hundreds of people curled in their coffins. Named yet anonymous. Working this job you fast forget what it all means and what’s going on, it’s all mud and weather and machinery; British people can be so stiff at funerals that you barely register the occasion until someone’s emotions overcome them, pulling you from your workplace chit-chat to see the face of it. And then it’d be time to go home, and you leave it all there, to get rained on and the fresher graves to sink and change shape, waiting a year before they can be dressed with their stones. But I’d get to leave.
Gardener and writer based in Bristol, UK, Tom Stevens has been previously published in print by Lumpen, Backlash, and Millenial Pulp. Poetry about environment, class and work, occasional environmental & literary nonfiction, and speculative short fiction.