The Holly Tree

The Holly Tree

It must have been about the time of the Coronation, sometime in the early Fifties, when I went with my Gran to put some flowers on her husband’s grave in Tewkesbury Cemetery.  I had never known him, because he had died in 1940, from the after effects of a World War One gas attack, six years before I was born.

My grandmother died in 1980, and I moved to Australia.  Nobody visited the grave.

I returned in 2005 and I was shocked to see that the grave had become so neglected that a sizeable holly tree had grown upwards out of my grandfather’s last resting place.  

I looked around at the other graves.  Many of the Tewkesbury families’ names I recognised.  The Sircombes, the Sallises, a Hathaway – even a Shakespeare lay by some Tustins, who were buried near some Hoptons and Warners.  

They were all Tewkesbury people, (I recognised their family names) but I knew none of them, because they had all died before I was born.  It was then that I realised that my grandfather would have known almost every one of them.  He’d known where they worked, where they lived, who he would have met up with in a local pub.  They might have been in the Abbey Choir, or played in a made-up cricket match in a local street.
Many of his friends left Tewkesbury by train to fight in the Great War.

The holly tree was growing out of my grandfather’s grave.  
It had grown from my grandfather.  It was my grandfather.

It was then that I realised that he was sheltering his friends from the storms of winter and shading them from the summer sun.  Who could say his grave was neglected?
May he live on for generations to come.