Two Past Diggings

Prompt: Write a story that includes the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night,” “Skeletons in the closet,” or “Digging up the past.”

Two Past Diggings

I have the good fortune to be able to recall pleasant work and events from over 50 years ago. I can easily dig up the past both literally and metaphorically. I often think how enjoyable my life has been, so it could be said that I really dig (sic) my past. There are a few other kinds of memory here along with the good times. I hope from reading this “story” you can appreciate them, too.

In order to do the literal “dig up” I have to be able to remember that kind of thing. This is easily supported by my job as a gravedigger in the summer holidays from university. It was an amazing outdoor job that gave my friend, a medical student, and me great pleasure and good health, as well as a handy pay packet each week.

We were taken every day by Jock, the head gravedigger to quiet country cemeteries in Perthshire, Scotland. It was essential work, cemeteries there having to be kept neat for 50 years since the last burial. We were left to our own devices to cut the grass with Flymos, mowers with flat bases, and we occasionally did a dig.

On one occasion, the dig proved very tough going down through tough clay. It was also a deep dig, over two metres down, (or “six-feet” pre-decimalisation) a first layer job. A later layer would be about a metre down, a family member coming in on top. Jock in his mid-50s would manfully take over the dig to get it done in time for the funeral! We lads weren’t quite up to six feet down (or “under”!) and having to toss shovelfuls of earth up and out. He told us that some gravediggers didn’t allow enough time to do a proper job before the hearse arrived. Then everything had to be covered up to look decent, and the dig completed later. I suppose they had to get used to working to deadlines!

Now let me dredge deep into an oddity in my grave-digging past. One burial was in remote countryside and just before the mourners arrived, led in by a bagpipe player, we managed to slip into special plastic coats to cover our unseemly work attire. Unfortunately, my friend decided this was a funny situation, probably the contrast between us and the well-dressed mourners, the women in veils, the men in white shirts and ties. Anyway, my friend started to have a fit of the giggles. Fortunately, he got himself back under control before the bagpipes stopped and the sad group encircled the grave.

In keeping with his name, Jock was very Scottish, a bit dour and a man of few words at times. When he did speak, often telling some risqué joke, it was with a broad brogue. Once while we filled a “hole” for a dead woman, Jock said, “Aye, tramp that earth doon weel, so she cannae get oot!”

This reminds me of what he said, knowing the next coffin was only a few centimetres away from the latest one:

“Aye, afore lang, her husband’ll be stickin’ oot his hand tae grab her.”

Writing of a nearby coffin puts me in mind of Jock telling us one time he had come upon a coffin that had moved sideways blocking the hole he was digging. He had to cut down through it. Fortunately, it had been put in back in 1926, about 40 years before, so there were just a few bones, some ribs and bits of cloth. Then there was the time they were digging at Old Scone – the famous palace there has one of Scotland’s oldest cemeteries with stones dating back to the start of the 1600s. Jock recalled they hit a six-week old coffin. He said there were “fumes” rising out of it, the smell so bad that he had to get strong disinfectant to pour on it, then cover everything with grass.

I said that Jock had a dry sense of humour. He loved telling us a joke or three en route to a graveyard or coming home. Here’s one I can recall of the many about which he would say afterwards, “Aye, that’s a guid yin, eh?”

We were in Jock’s van as we passed a pretty park in Crieff, full of bushes, trees and clumps of rhododendrons, and he said, “Aye, plenty o’ hidey places doon there for smoochin’, eh?”

He went on with a dodgy joke: “Ahm minded o’ the boy and his girl. She wouldnae let him hae a go unless she thocht it was the will o’ God. So the lad got his friend to hide up a tree, and when he started to get stuck in and the lass said,

“Oh no! Stop! I must hear that it’s a’right fae the Lord.”

So he says, “Oh Lord above, oh Lord above, can ah hae a go at my lady love?”

His friend in the tree calls down, “Yes!”

So he’s awa’ an’ awa’ and gettin’ oan a’richt, an’ after a while a voice comes from up in the tree:

“Oh pal below, oh pal below, when will you stop and let me have a go?”

Wow! I had to dig deep for that one so long ago! All right, I know I’m getting a wee bit side-tracked here. I’m supposed to be on about digging up the past, a metaphor for what I can remember well, so I’ll stop heaping up cemetery memories – one could say unearthing for that, maybe a bit too literal perhaps. Let’s bury that topic for now!

I said at the start that I have many fine memories. I think though “digging up the past” has got a somewhat shady atmosphere, some deep and perhaps painful memories perhaps put well aside, my not wishing to visit them. No worries, I’ll be careful here to maintain a sense of decorum for the reader.

From time to time I remember a week of penicillin injections when I was a child, a painful jab in the hip with the thick needles of yesteryear. I was only about eight years old, and it was one of the longest weeks of my life, every evening five miles into the local hospital to get rid of a very bad pain in my ears. I think it gave me a life-long trust of medication, fixing the excruciating pain, caused by catarrh invading my ear drums.

Later in my first years of high school teaching in New Zealand there was an incident I now call, “All hands on decks, I mean desks!”

Teaching and classrooms are ripe for awful incidents, whether they’re what students said to you, or worse – what you wish you hadn’t said to them. An example of such was in a class relieving for a teacher who was off sick. I felt the need for a mild disciplining action by asking all the students to put hands flat on their desks. After a brief check I noticed one student at the back had only one hand on the desk. I asked him to put both hands out, and when he remained motionless, I went up and asked him again. I knew almost before I said it, call it a premonition of awfulness, that I should not have insisted but just left well alone. He slowly brought up his arm, and there it was, a stump, a shiny bit where the hand used to be attached at the wrist. All I could hear was the loud echo of me almost shouting, “Come on! Both hands! Both hands out! Come on!” The sharp and instant memory of my command was like a punishment. I stuttered an apology and managed to shake his one hand by way of a friendly gesture. We got through the lesson but I cringed every time I saw the handless student after that, and for sure I have never in all my teaching career, ever again asked for all hands on desks.

After high school teaching I was fortunate to get a job at Wellington Polytechnic. It was full of interesting students and tutors. There were yoga classes and other self-help avenues. I would tell people about meditation, suggesting that because it helped me, it would do the same for them – I even organised a meditation teacher to come and talk to a class, a group of interested trainee chefs. That’s probably all right, the students having been consulted and having shown their interest.

However, there were other individuals, and I hope that I’ve learned the error of those enthusiastic ways, that I’ve become more guarded in life with what I put on to others, trying to curb any expectation that people might want to join in my interest, or that I might need them to do so. I know now that I try hard, and largely succeed, never to mention that I meditate. I also know that if I do mention any of my enthusiasms now, I leave it entirely up to listeners what they think or do.

My sister-in-law, Sarah was great a few years ago when I told her briefly about this stuff in my past. She simply said it’s nothing much, that she wouldn’t worry about past actions like that, better just to let them go.

I should have taken a leaf out of the book of one of the secretaries at my work. She was into some Indian religion with a guru or some such. When I asked her for more details, she refused to say anything, excusing herself with, “It’s private.”

I really try to tell myself that these kinds of embarrassments are past, never to be repeated. A lot of the people are dead now, but the incidents are alive in my imagination, memory and consciousness. How to truly forgive myself? It’s not really enough to say, “ Let it go”, to recognise that it doesn’t matter. The simple act of dismissal isn’t enough. I try to say it was my weakness at the time, and find the wherewithal to exonerate myself.

Once after a visit to see my mother in Edinburgh, we were saying goodbye to her at the station. My last words from the train window were, “Even the bad times were good.” I meant it positively but I could see from her frown, she didn’t like me thinking that there had been any rough patches, or better just to let them be. She could be quite forceful in how I should behave, the curse of an only child perhaps. I wrote later from Japan where we were working, just to say sorry for mentioning anything untoward. With regret I can still hear me uttering my unfortunate departing words to her.

On a happier note nearing the end, back to Jock. Yes, a Jock joke! The council buildings and the cemetery offices in Perth weren’t far from the crematorium. We would pass it occasionally, and Jock would say, “Aye, that’s the competition!”

We’d ask him if he’d ever been inside for a funeral or whatever. He would say, “Naw, I wouldnae be found dead in one those.”

In much later life, my graveyard digging friend was dying. We had an agreement from decades before that we wouldn’t go to each other’s funeral. I said to him, “That’ll be easy for you!” And so it has proved to be, but there are many happy memories of diggings, mowings, travels with Jock to graveyards and lots of laughs. Jock will be long gone many decades ago now, pushing up the daisies and possibly meeting his maker, for sure in some lovely country cemetery. I hope he’s chortling from the depths. For my “digger” friend I can only wish that he is resting in peace, possibly thinking of the diggings of the past. For myself, I hope that I can forget some of my past indignities and peccadilloes.

I tried here in the story to fit in Robert Burns’s great lines from “To a Mouse”, where he describes accidentally digging up a mouse’s home. Unable to find a fitting place in the story, I’ll simply end with them.

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis'd joy! …

… But och! I backward cast my e’e,

On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

I guess an’ fear!