Deep within the sylvan swathes of what Hampstead-dwellers fancifully term Middle Heath, lies a bench. Shielded by a prehistoric oak with claw-like roots, it’s fingered by moss and dirt and birdshit. On the bench, however, is a remarkable inscription: ‘For Mr Jo and His Dogs. Dead Gloriously Dead.’

 

Which got me thinking, during a damp walk on the Heath with the mutt, about these memorials: how can a line on a bench – attributed, after all, to a dead person – be so, well, joyous? How can it provide a snapshot of a character; of a life?

Take the above example. Who calls themselves ‘Mr Jo’, for a start? And what about the dogs? Did they all pop their clogs together? Maybe his death was a release, its benign nature resounding across the heavens. Or were he and his canine companions actually hated? Dead, gloriously dead, indeed.
Bench inscriptions are, like the best things in life, rather addictive, their power resting in what they hint at, rather than state. Get hooked and you’ll read them all, in every park, along every clifftop. Most of the time, however, your eyes will glaze over the roll call of names and dates, what I call the ‘remembered with affection’ school of memorial. But occasionally a pithy dedication shines, like a buckle in the sun. ‘They Could Do With a Bench Here’, suggests a fine specimen (pictured below), hidden by brambles, near Kenwood House in Hampstead, its seven one-syllable words, dedicated to the renowned TV scriptwriter Lewis Greifer, conveying character, humour and utility. In its reduction of a life to a line, it’s almost a haiku.

‘Happy Years at the Beach’, on the promenade in Deal, Kent, is another good one, painting a lively canvas of barbecues, hot summer swims and wet dogs; whilst by the castle of Llanstephan in Carmarthen, Wales, a darker dedication, no less vivid, states simply: ‘He Loved the Sea, and It Claimed Him’. Back on the Heath, one bench says, witheringly – yet invitingly – ‘I Don’t Do Walks, Please Be Seated’, whilst another evokes poignancy by parenthesis: ‘She (Simply) Ran Out of Time’, it purrs, surely a twist on a favourite saying of the deceased. The opposite to all this is, of course, verbosity – some people just can’t seem to mourn their loved ones without reeling off a list of worthy achievements. One is helpful (‘Richard Spilsbury, Philosopher’), but three seems greedy (‘Vegetarian, Socialist, Pacifist’), and any more than that downright absurd: relax, you multi-tasking ‘Artist, Dancer, Potter, Traveller, Analyst and Lover of Trees’!

There’s verbosity, and there’s using the exact quantity of words required to tell one’s tale, as this bleak poem on a bench near Sandown Castle in Deal neatly testifies: ‘Seagull, seagull, how do you float?/Upon the water without a boat?/He thought to himself and then he frowned/Turned on his side and slowly drowned. – Leslie Noaks, 1914–2000’.

I wouldn’t like to say, but I think Mr Jo and Mr Noaks would have got along just fine.