Falafel with William Blake

Every Friday for the last few weeks I have battled with an intermittent Tube system that flickers between on and off worse than any dodgy light bulb in a cheap motel. My destination has been Moorgate and the clinician who is helping me regain my old superhero powers. In news that should strike fear in scary monsters everywhere, I can report that after each session my eyes blaze Robert Redford blue.

Aside from returning from the White Hot Room faster, smarter and more focussed, one benefit of the visits are they land me on Surreal Girl’s patch during lunchtime. This gives us the chance to meet up and walk the short distance to Bunhill Fields. Once ensconced on my favourite bench, we eat falafel with William Blake.

Bunhill Fields can claim to be the oldest recorded boneyard in London. Used since Saxon dominion, the name Bunhill derives from ‘Bone Hill’. It has been a constant backdrop for London’s apocrypha of death. Its unconsecrated soil always attracted the planting of all manner of dissenter and nonconformist bodies. In the 16th century, so many cart-loads of bones were removed from London’s charnel houses to make way for new internments that a hill supporting at least one windmill grew from the moor. Defoe told of plague victims making their way to Bunhill to throw themselves into pits already deep with corpses. Years later he was buried at the site himself.

Now death is seen only in the headstones and monuments. Avenues of Plane thrive, the City’s traffic drone is silenced and off path, everywhere is a carpet of grass, ferns and lichens. As we eat, a chattering crocodile of Montessori pupils in their smart, time warp uniforms walks by with timid waves and smiles of distilled sunshine.

Trees are often living scaffolds over which history is draped. Trunks become solid spines growing through time. Here in Bunhill Fields, they are as diverse as the dead who have fed them. Oak, ash, sycamore, fig and mulberry all entangle and push aside bone to rise through the years. My favourite witness to past, present and days yet to come in the boneyard is a Norway Maple. This week it is a slow motion explosion, falling tongues of red and gold fire held together by a flickering pause mode.

As we eat, figs drop onto flagstones and the playing Montessori children whoop. This seems to be the universal childhood soundtrack to the simple joy of running about. The song of innocence.

Of all the non-conformist champions and villains in the boneyard – from Thomas Bayes and Charles Fleetwood to two Cromwells and the lightning struck tomb of Thomas Godwin – none shows signs of a living tradition of love and veneration apart from Blake. Albion’s favourite visionary saint is always remembered with fresh flowers in a jam jar. Offerings of figs and rose petals loop around the memorial stone he shares with his beloved Catherine. Their bones may wait here for resurrection, but if their bones are haunting Bunhill it is only to Dervish whirl with the Montessori.