A REMINDER THAT I will one day die came yesterday in a spooky way. My readers may remember that in a previous post I promised to find out whose memorial in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, has the striking skull which stares balefully down at the congregation, sometimes including me. I popped into the cathedral yesterday to find out.
Not as easy as it might seem since, unlike any other cathedral that I know in the British Isles, this one is protected by bowler-hatted proctors who firmly direct would-be visitors away from the main gate to a far distant one where they must pay an entrance fee. I explained I was Oxford-born, carried a Bodleian Library Readers ticket and that cathedrals are public access. The proctor said it meant my crossing the private ground of the college and what was my business? Unless, he added rather darkly when I stayed silent, I was going in to pray? He let me through.
The skull, which is halfway down the nave on the right, proved to be a momento mori or reminder we all die, in the form of an Angel of Death. It was part of an early 18th century memorial to Henry Aldrich (1647 – 1710) who was Vice Chancellor of the University in 1692 and died in the city in 1710.
I LOOKED AT the angel and he looked at me and I thought that was the end of it, photograph taken, inscription noted down, mission accomplished. I was wrong, someone had decided I hadn’t got the message: maybe the proctor, maybe the Angel, maybe they were one and the same. Because, wandering on, I reached a chapel devoted to military memorials. In a mahogany case was the Book of Remembrance of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, whose pages are turned daily in memory of the fallen. I rarely look at such books because one doesn’t know or have connection with the people listed. But on this occasion I felt very strongly drawn to do so by a feeling as powerful as an unseen iron hand gripping my arm and leading me there.
I somehow knew before I looked that my surname would be there, and it was, the first on the page: HORWOOD, Albert Dennis, killed in Germany on 24th March 1945. These days it does not take long to follow up such clues on the internet. Within moments of getting home I found that Albert’s brother was… William J Horwood. I was christened Julian William but because I write as William my initials are often reversed by others in official documents and I become William J Horwood, like Albert’s brother… The second unsettling thing was that Albert was killed in action in the Reichswald Forest, very near a place I had been looking at in my Times Atlas earlier in the day as a location for use in Hyddenworld: Summer.
People may shrug their shoulders at such coincidences and dismiss them as chance. Until it happens to them, with the Angel of Death close up and personal. Then they, too, might feel that they have just experienced their own strange momento mori.