Ana Thema by Alan Howard

Author:Alan Howard [Alan Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780955548659
Publisher: Raven's Quill
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

Kate Pegler and her father stood arm in arm beside the simple gravestone in the tiny churchyard of her mother’s childhood home. They looked out over the Wildbrooks towards the downs as the clouds in the east turned pink and mauve, reflecting the sunset behind them.

Refusing cremation, Amelia had wanted to be buried here, in spite of the fact that she was not religious, because these wild meadows, so often flooded, saw the autumn transit of immense flocks of birds in migration from the cold north where they bred, to the warm south in winter, and their return passage in the spring.

She had always regarded these water meadows as a sort of spiritual nexus, a symbol of the passing from one existence to another. She had told her ‘darling Katie’, that the flight of the birds through this place somehow embodied for her the endless cyclical transformations of the universe. She had told her that she felt more in harmony with the idea of an eternal recurrence than with the hard arrow of time that epitomized the idea of the irreversible progress of man.

She had told them she wanted to be able to look out over this scene for eternity and feel herself a part of this great rhythm of renewal and rebirth.

“Ironic, isn’t it,” she had said, “that I should be buried in a Christian churchyard in order to enjoy a very unchristian eternity. But beggars can’t be choosers, and I can’t just go demanding to be buried anywhere. This is the nearest I’ll get to where I want to be.”

Kate and her father had travelled down from their two-story flat on the tree-lined square in a once well-heeled part of London that morning, after seeing off the removals men and locking up. She had gone back in for one final look round, straight to her mother’s room to fix in her mind that vista that was her mother’s last, from the balcony of her bedroom.

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