Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Ashby Parish ·
My Stone Recut to Agree
A parish mason finds one memorial in the yard recut to a name no ledger assigned, its initials set one letter along from the man buried nearest.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Harold Trennick, stonemason"
I am the parish mason at Ashby and I was asked to recut nothing, which is how the trouble started.
On the twelfth of March I went up the yard to true the footings of the Watterson stone, which had settled after the January frosts, and while I was at the level I read the lettering, as any mason does, the way a fine joiner reads another man's plane marks. The Watterson stone carried a line beneath the soil line that I did not expect, because it was not in the ledger.
Read that plainly. I keep the parish's cutting ledger along with the sexton keeping his burials, and between us we account for every stone in that yard. Every name, every date, every fee. The line on the Watterson stone read JEMIMA HOLT, 1899–1934, in good capitals, cleanly cut, and no Holt of any Christian name is assigned to any grave at Ashby, and no Jemima appears in the register, and no fee for cutting the name was ever struck, and the ledger gives no commission date, and a stone that is not in the ledger is not supposed to be in the yard.
I went that afternoon with the sexton, Cyril Payne, and a rubbing sheet, and the burial lots ran thus: Jemima Holt's line was cut not on her own plot — there being no plot of hers — but along the top edge of the Watterson stone, and the Watterson grave held a man, Reginald Watterson, 1898–1934, one year of birth off and one initial off along the alphabet from the JEMIMA HOLT line, H beside J, beside R. The initials of the two names sit one letter apart, end to end, like a setting of type that slipped one case along.
Cyril corroborates the lots and the register. Cyril corroborates that his predecessor's burial books give no Jemima Holt, and that the Ashby Parish duplicate register at the county office gives none either, because I wrote and asked, and the county's clerk answered by office roundel, NO ENTRY. That is corroboration I can put on a table.
What I cannot corroborate is the cutting. Here is my difficulty and I will state it like a tradesman. The lettering was proper work. It was my cut, or as near as my hand and mine need be — the spacing, the V of the H, the serif on the termination of the 9 — and I did not cut it. I have not cut a Jemima at Ashby. The next Tuesday I went up with a rake and a spring, since frost lifts what the ledger does not know, and found the line recut. Deeper. Not cut over — recut, the old incision taken out and a new one set in the same place, cleaner, as if a first attempt had been judged insufficient and redone, and no man in that yard could say when.
And the Watterson lot ran level below it, and I probed it with the sexton's leave, the ground opened to the plate only, and the plate read the R name — I stop it at the initial, being parish business — and above it, in the stone, stood the name that was in no ledger, cut one letter off along.
Cyril has since had the line dressed out on the parish's instruction — cut back, filled, voled over, done properly and receipted — and the receipt is in the ledger now, which pleased me far more than it should have.
Whether anyone else has been up that yard between the frosts and found the line come back, I cannot say. Nobody has told me they have. The Watterson relatives phone at Christmas and say nothing of stone. But the county roundel replying NO ENTRY to a name, and my own ledger holding a fee for cutting it out, and the plate agreeing with the R name and the line agreeing one letter off — those three sit on my table, and the fourth, the hand, is not on it. If you cut in that yard, ever, at any hour, I would be told. That may be the question rather than the comfort.