AT GUNNERSBURY CEMETERY

Gunnersbury Cemetery, in the west London borough of Hounslow, is a perfectly pleasant spot to spend eternity. Not a quiet spot, certainly, since it’s wedged between the A406 and the Chiswick Flyover (part of the M4), and the rumble of traffic is unstinting day and night, accompanied during the day by clanging and banging from the sempiternal construction works around the motorway. No quiet country churchyard, this, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. Nor does it have the grandeur or eccentricity of some of London’s other cemeteries—Brompton, say, or Highgate—with their weeping angels, winged Sphinxes and dilapidated mausolea, raised by whiskered patriarchs to honour their pallid, tubercular wives. The word municipal always comes to mind when I visit, which is often these days. In this respect, Gunnersbury Cemetery—neither gothic nor romantic, picturesque or sublime—fits perfectly into its surroundings, for it is in a part of London dedicated to utility, surrounded by car dealerships and DIY superstores. Just a little further South, across the river, is leafy Kew; a little further North the reassuring redbrick villas of Ealing; a little further east is Turnham Green, with its gluten-free bakeries. On three sides, Gunnersbury is swaddled by affluent suburbia, solid places, comfortable places; the leeward side of life, where safe anchorage is assured.

On the fourth side, however…Ten minutes’ drive westwards outside rush hour and you find yourself in J. G. Ballard territory, the tangle of roads around Heathrow. More often than not, I come to Gunnersbury on a bus that takes me through Turnham Green and leaves me on the eastern side of Chiswick Roundabout, which I have to cross over to get to the cemetery, and as a result of this, Chiswick Roundabout, in my personal mythology of London, has always served as the gateway to the land of the dead, the A406 (along the verge of which, oddly, grow poppies in profusion) my River Styx. Purely subjective associations merge here with objective ones, for Chiswick Roundabout has a macabre history, and on a bad day, with a hangover, say, and a west wind blowing, anyone might find it positively dystopian. Connoisseurs of morbid sensations, should they ever find themselves in the area—and even connoisseurs of morbid sensations sometimes need to pop down to Halfords for some locking wheel nuts—are advised to visit the traffic island, with its plaque commemorating Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield’s unlikely appearance there in September 1959, when she cut a ribbon with a pair of scissors and declared the ‘sweet little flyover’ open. I imagined the ribbon to be gold and the scissors of the oversized, novelty variety, but watching newsreel footage on YouTube, I see that the ribbon was black and the scissors ordinary kitchen ones, even Mansfield’s bombshell glamour managing only feebly to irradiate a Britain still emerging from post-war austerity.

The footage is eerie, though, unsettling: at the start we see Mansfield being driven up towards the black ribbon in an open-top car, perched on top of the front passenger seat, waving to assorted dignitaries and gentleman of the press. The camera is on the other side of the ribbon, so that it bisects the frame and Mansfield’s torso. As the car moves towards the ribbon, the black line moves upwards and you anticipate the moment it will cover her neck, and neatly cleave her head from her body. That moment never arrives, the footage is cut before it comes, but how to repress a shudder watching this prefiguration, eight years early, of her 1967 death in an automobile accident just outside New Orleans, when the Buick her husband was driving crashed into the back of a tractor? She was riding shotgun and was killed on impact. Newspaper reports at the time insisted she had been decapitated. Two years after Mansfield had met her gruesome end, when J. G. Ballard was penning The Atrocity Exhibition, in part about a man restaging notorious automobile accidents for sexual-aesthetic pleasure, the ‘sweet little flyover’ she opened had become the most dangerous road in Britain.

In truth, though, you have to try really quite hard to look around Chiswick Roundabout and see a concrete hellscape, as opposed to a slightly dull, workaday spot which municipal workers work zealously to beautify through keeping the greenery watered. Nonetheless, Gunnersbury is undoubtedly a place for passing through, rather than stopping in. The many travel taverns studded around the area do not encourage one to feel at home. Something of the general air of transience attaches to Gunnersbury Cemetery, too, even though nobody is moving out anytime soon. The sign at the entrance reads ‘Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’, which is confusing because the cemetery is not in either Kensington or Chelsea. It was founded in 1929 when Kensington ran out of space to bury its dead, so acquired some land further out west, where there was still room to expand. It is essentially an overspill facility. The people buried there may never have stopped in Gunnersbury before, although they probably passed through it at some point, on their way to Heathrow most likely, or Kew Gardens. If they did spend any time there, it was probably no longer than it takes to buy some paint, or a second-hand Peugeot.   

There is another reason, too, that Gunnersbury Cemetery seems full of people who have ended up there by accident, eternally displaced, which is that a very large proportion of the graves belong to Polish war refugees, among them my grandfather and father. The names on the tombstones—the Zbigniews and Wojciechs, the Przemysławas, and Zdzisławas—are hard to pronounce for some of us; many of the inscriptions are in Polish. Some have engraved on them the White Eagle of Poland, some a monogram combining the letter w and the letter p to look like an anchor. It was a symbol used by the Polish Resistance during the war, signifying hope, of course (‘which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast’), and designed to be able to be graffitied on the side of a building as quickly as possible, since doing so was a high-risk activity. The initials originally for Pomścimy Wawer (‘we shall avenge Wawer’), a reference to a massacre of Polish civilians by the occupying forces in 1939; then it came to stand for Polska Walcząca (‘fighting Poland’). On a grave, though, it stands for powstanie warszawskie and identifies veterans of the Warsaw Uprising, so should you ever see it on a tombstone, pause for a moment and think of the men and women of that brave city, more than 150,000 of whom died in the action. Did they die of a dearth of hope, or a glut of it?

Some of the graves in the cemetery have information boards by them, for among the residents are senior officers of the Polish forces during the Second World War and members of the government-in-exile based in South Kensington, men known to history. One of the graves, planted with red and white flowers, the colours of the Polish flag, belongs to Kazimierz Sabbat, described on his headstone as Prezydent Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, President of the Polish Republic, from 1986-1989. This is a puzzle: Gunnersbury Cemetery, pleasant as it is, is not an obvious final resting place for a head of state, and the history books tell us that the Polish Republic fell in 1939 and would not be resurrected until 1990, following the collapse of the post-war Polish People’s Republic. In fact, Sabbat was a president-in-exile, although those words do not appear on the gravestone. He was the leader of a polity without a territory, a place that did not exist outside the minds of an ever-dwindling band of émigrés, dislocated in time and space.

Sabbat’s grave is close to the centre of the cemetery, where looms a black obelisk he, along with the other members of the Polish government-in-exile, was instrumental in erecting. It was unveiled in 1976 to honour the victims of the Katyń Massacre of Spring 1940, in which 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet security forces in the forest to the West of Smolensk, near the Russian-Belarus border. The massacre first came to light when German soldiers stumbled on mass graves in 1943; the Soviets immediately denied responsibility, blaming Nazi forces in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and they would continue to deny responsibility until 1990. This is why controversy attended the opening of the memorial in Gunnersbury in 1976 (the first such in the world), with an inscription that, while not naming names, clearly indicated where the suspicions of the Polish community fell: Sumienie świata woła o świadectwo prawdzie (‘the conscience of the world calls out for a testimony of truth’). The British government feared a diplomatic incident and refused to send any representative to the ceremony. In 1990, following the Soviet government’s admission of culpability, a casket of soil from the mass graves was laid there, so the tomb is no longer completely empty. Soil from the Katyń graves has been interred in other memorials around the world, in a gesture of laying to rest that is not a homecoming but a dispersal, a scattering.

When I was a child, the visit to see my grandfather in the ‘cementery’, as my Dad always pronounced it, dragging in a rogue ‘n’ from the Polish word ‘cementarz’, was an annual event, always around the first week in November when Roman Catholics remember their dead and candles would appear on all the graves, lit by some mysterious agency (members, I think, of the local Roman Catholic congregation). My grandfather had died long before I was born, and I knew (and still know) very little about him, so these visits were an opportunity for rumination: what was he like? How did he die? With childish egoism, however, the main question that preoccupied me when we used to visit the cemetery was more self-centred: where would I end up buried? Would it be Père Lachaise? Would it be somewhere even further flung, somewhere I had yet even to hear of? Under what sun, what sky? What strange journeys did destiny reserve for me? The people in Gunnersbury had come from far and wide; having been born myself in Hammersmith, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t end up somewhere far from West London, in an exile of my own, albeit one I assumed would be voluntary.

Since my father died, I have come to the cemetery much more often, in all seasons, and I notice that I take a very different kind of interest in it from when I was younger. Then, in the chill of a November morning, at that time of the year when the leaves fall from the trees, the nights grow long, and the border between the worlds of the living and of the dead grows thinner and more porous, it was a place for procuring a sense of the uncanny. Good old West London was suddenly peopled with foreign ghosts, the restless dead of Katyń and Warsaw, of all the battlefields of Europe, the dead of a disastrous century. It was a place to think about the terror and confusion of people’s lives, exile and loss, flight and escape… A place, too, then, to speculate about the unknown future. My thoughts divided between past and future, I never could feel at home in the extant moment in Gunnersbury. Now, when I visit, the extant moment absorbs me. I am cheered by the sight of the parakeets that sometimes settle in the trees. I note with satisfaction that the roses and camellias are thriving, and with consternation that some of the headstones have been removed, pointing to a subsidence problem. I take, in other words, a proprietorial interest in Gunnersbury Cemetery, since I now suspect, now hope in fact, that it will be where I am buried, and the place I will finally be at home.