Last summer, I got a call from a nonagenarian who lives in our village. She was in considerable distress and asked if I would speak to the vicar on her behalf. What was the matter? She’d been up to the churchyard, she told me, where her sister and parents are buried. ‘The sight that met my eyes, I’ll never forget it as long as I live,’ she said darkly. I had visions of claw-like hands emerging from the earth, bones strewn. I asked her what she had seen. ‘Grass,’ she said. ‘Long grass.’ Middle-class villagers – younger folk, in their sixties – had decided that it would be a good idea to rewild the graveyard, but to my friend such a measure showed nothing but disrespect to the dead. 

This conversation came to mind as I was reading Molly Conisbee’s comprehensive history of mortality among ordinary Britons. In class-delineated Britain, notions of the best ways to memorialise our dead have always been divisive. As the author notes, there is ‘an underlying condescension and snobbery’ around the ways people mark the burial of their loved ones. 

Indeed. The swankiest burials I have ever seen are those of the Traveller community, who make it a point of honour to have enormous floral tributes, often in the shape of the deceased’s favourite things: a giant teapot, a motorbike. Traveller funerals may be attended by many hundreds of