The Raising Of The Nicholas Clay Memorial Stone At Sibton, May 25th 2001 
By Clive Merrison - Part 2
I’d like you to imagine the island of Ireland. Forget green and rolling countryside, leprechauns, shillalleys and Guinness. 370 million years ago the country we now call Ireland was part of the floor of a shallow inlet to the sea. It lay on the southern edge of a gigantic landmass that comprised the present day North America, Europe and Asia. It was 5 degrees north of the equator and provided the ideal conditions for the precipitation of lime mud. 40 million years later and these muds continued to form and they were largely barren – just mud, mud, glorious mud. Except ! In a number of benighted places colonies of "Crinoids" developed and joined the madrepores, turbinites, pectinites, tellinites, tubiporites, nautilites. All playing their part in the primordial soup. The scientific term for them is "an enigmatic group". I like that. Nick would have liked that. They were good casting these crinoids. Armour plated little chums of crystalline structure, with not much need for muscle or tissue. You could say they were all bone and no skin. When they died they clubbed together to form massive impregnable reefs. Another 30 million years and the waters become shallower and Tropical forests sprang up. The Dinatian period of the carboniferous era, when the most important Irish Limestone’s were deposited had come to an end.
Fast forward two million, nine hundred, ninety nine thousand and eighty years and Nick is charging out of that mediaeval forest in County Wicklow at full gallop on his white stallion, full silver armour, the blue pennant of Launcelot unfurling from his helmet towards the solitary and, for once in her life, indecisive figure of Lorna Heilbron in the clearing – bowing to the inevitable. "What are you waiting for Lorna!?!" You know the story. What Nick couldn’t know, though I wouldn’t bet on it, was that below his feet and the hooves. Below the compacted, composted humus that the tropical forests had been reduced to. Below twenty feet of clay and gravel, lay the first strata of the nine that comprise the limestone marble that 90 miles west finds it’s black apotheosis around Kilkenny – "City of Marble". What he certainly wouldn’t have known was that 21 years later in January 2001 – the Feeley brothers, Colin and Finbarr, would extract an ashlar block of this marble from their Kellymount Quarry that would be the raw material for his memorial stone that we are raising here today.
When Sophie Behrens died in 1985, her stepmother Harriet Frazer and the family experienced profound difficulties in finding someone who would design and carve a memorial stone to her. They knew what they didn’t want. They didn’t want some assembly line block, ordered from a catalogue and cut by computer. They didn’t know that if they wanted anything unusual in the wording or carving, any "flourish", they could encounter opposition from the church authorities. They also knew that they couldn’t be the only family experiencing these difficulties. By the time Sophies’ stone was raised in Salle churchyard in Norfolk, the idea for "Memorials By Artists" had been born.
In early May of last year, as Nick lay dying, I paid my first visit to Snape Priory and met up with the luminous and indefatigable Harriet. Studded throughout the acre or so of her wonderful wild gardens are samples from the exhibition Harriet curated at Blickling Hall in Norfolk in 1998 on the 10th anniversary of the founding of the charity, "Memorials by Artists".
Stones to die for – Purbeck, Portland, Griffeton, York, White Mansfield. Limestone’s from Ancaster and Hornton. Yorkshire Sandstone. The slates of Westmoreland and Kirkstone. I remember a huge piece of riven Welsh slate, bible black, that seemed to have forced its’ way through the earth rather than been set in it. All this wonderful stone – sculpted, fashioned and lettered by craftsmen and women descended in a fine chiselled line from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, the dominant and revolutionary figure of Eric Gill through to the present day workshops of the likes of Richard Kindersley. It was a sort of revelation. A grave wrong was being put right.
From about the eighteen thirties to the present day we’ve seen a sad decline in the aesthetic nature of our burial grounds. They’ve been deprived of their sensual glory. If in the nineteenth century there was overconcern with the trappings of death, in the twentieth century there was difficulty in confronting it. A shying away from emotion, if you like. Sets of regulations for churchyard memorials are drawn up by the Chancellor of each diocese and what sorry and dispiriting reading they can make. Chelmsford reads, "No stone should be higher than four feet nor lower than two.No more than six inches thick, nor less than three. The headstone is to have no decorative motif other than vertical lines or a small cross or a small flower if so desired." Then the chilling dictum from another diocese that inscriptions should, "be neither presumptive nor laudatory".
These pettifogging, pharasaical and often Byzantine rules, encoded by an entirely negative and restrictive tradition of "propriety" have led to the bleakness and banality of so many of our churchyards. Places which should be healing and redemptive. Where grief can be objectified and made beautiful have become soulless legolands of uniform grey dominoes. Cooked up by machines. Signed by robots.
Of his first encounter with Edward Johnson, his teacher in lettering, Eric Gill wrote that "It was as though a secret of heaven was being revealed." Lettering was seen, historically, as the divine calling of the craftsman. A sacred art. It’s a risky business. The letterer with his/her chisel has only one chance to get it right. He must enter, when working, into a state of concentration akin to contemplation. Not for nothing did the old craftsmen believe that to work is to pray. "Laborare est orare". He not only holds a chisel in his hand but an idea in his head. Individuality is celebrated. Memory and loss confronted with living response. "The Living Letter."
Nick had beautiful writing. A wonderful hand. Italic, flowing, stylish. Beautifully executed "flourishes". He treasured the pens he wrote with. Tools again. Look at the stone!
Lorna visited Snape Priory after Nicks’ death and commissioned his stone on the spot.
Go To Page 2 