The Roots of the Tree by Amanda Roberts

Author:Amanda Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Guild Publishing

10

All About Lily

The next morning, after dropping Daniel at school, Suzie drove to Upper Chaddington instead of going straight to work. She parked in the church car park and gazed out at the Norman church with its square tower and the crumbling stone walls surrounding the church yard. It was only a small church, serving just the local village and these days sharing a vicar with several of the surrounding villages. Services, she knew, were infrequent and as was the case with many small village churches, poorly attended.

She turned off the ignition and climbed out of the car. The morning was cool; the sun had yet to fight its way through the thin veneer of cloud. The grass beneath her feet was damp with dew and soggy from the soaking of yesterday’s heavy rain. She pushed open the gate to the churchyard and climbed the stone steps up to the gravel path. The most recent graves were easy to identify; they were the well-kept ones with fresh flowers, the ones where loved ones still lived and were able to cut the grass back from the headstones and replace the flowers. But these were in the minority as by far the greater proportion were overgrown, headstones worn by decades of rain, snow and wind so the inscriptions were difficult to read. Suzie started at one end of the churchyard and worked her way methodically up and down the rows of graves, pushing the long grasses to one side to reveal the inscriptions. She remembered a friend she had once had who had been obsessed with graveyards. Wherever she went she would visit the local churches and tour the graveyards reading about the long-dead and mostly forgotten people who rested there. Suzie had never been able to understand this morbid fascination with the dead, but on this cool summer morning, as she read inscription after worn inscription, each paying tribute to their much-loved mother, father, son, daughter, some living to a ripe old age and others heartbreakingly young, she felt these unknown people becoming real somehow. They had once walked this earth, breathed this air and lived this life, but now their only memorial was a carved piece of weather-beaten stone in a small village churchyard. What was it all for?

Suzie kept moving along the rows of graves and eventually found the one she was looking for. As she expected, it was among the overgrown and long-forgotten. She knelt down on the damp grass in front of it and ran her fingers along the lettering.

In loving memory of our dear daughter,

Lily Williams

Your life was tragically short,

but every day we shared with you

brought us pleasure beyond measure

February 21st 1922–September 30th 1931

‘Poor Lily,’ muttered Suzie. ‘Your parents loved you so much they could not come to terms with losing you. They were so full of grief they refused to talk about what happened, even to your brothers and sisters. You would have been my great aunt, but I had never even heard your name until yesterday.

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