The rain had stopped, but the sky was the colour of greying linen. As we left the coastal path and cut across the cattle field to the cemetery, our wellington boots became daubed with mud and manure. In the neighbouring pasture a large flock of brent geese were hunkered down against the wind as they cropped the grass. Overhead, crows and jackdaws wheeled through the air like ragged scraps of black polythene.
Pots of plastic poinsettias lay toppled and weatherworn, and wizened holly berries clung to the wreaths that had been placed on graves at Christmas. But amid the dead sprang new life. Beside the kissing gate, daffodils were in full bloom and a blackbird scuffing his feet in a drift of dried leaves had unearthed a clump of nodding, pearly white snowdrops.
Wandering over to admire the first flush of blossom on a flowering cherry, we were overwhelmed by a pungent odour of garlic and burnt rubber, a calling card left by the fox who haunts the oldest section of the burial ground. We glimpsed a glow of ginger fur at the end of a row of lichen-crusted headstones, but it was the cemetery’s de facto guardian, resident cat Cemmy, who lay curled in a comma on the patchwork of cremation plot tablets.
Feral cats are a contentious issue. Most are unsuited to living as household pets, so “trap-neuter-return” is the most humane and logical method of managing these free-living felines. As nature abhors a vacuum, the presence of spayed Cemmy discourages un-neutered cats from moving in to exploit the cemetery’s resources and forming a breeding colony.
As we approached, Cemmy’s whiskers quivered and her paws began to twitch. Sensing our presence she awoke and sprang up. Belly crawling, commando-style, towards the yew hedge, she showed only the fuzzy tip of her tail as it hovered above the floral tributes like a large bumble bee. Slipping under the hedge, she climbed up the skeleton of branches and perched in the centre, her owlish eyes gazing in quiet contemplation from behind the lattice of evergreen leaves.
