“Kiss me in a graveyard,” she says. Her white dress flutters. Chloe Hirschman wanders alone through Grahamstown’s graveyards a few times a year to pick up litter and walk among the monuments to people she has never met.
“Kiss me in a graveyard,” she says. Her white dress flutters. Chloe Hirschman wanders alone through Grahamstown’s graveyards a few times a year to pick up litter and walk among the monuments to people she has never met.
It’s a long walk from Rhodes University where she studies the breeze follows her past the daunting spire of the Cathedral, swirls with her hips at the Winged Figure of Peace, caresses Rudyard Kipling’s inscription at its base and swoops to tickle her stockings as she strides in the direction of the township.
Usually this is a private pilgrimage. “I’m selfish” she says self consciously, reaching for my hand but today Mr William Haw (1822- 1883) and his family have their first two visitors in a very long time.
The gravestone next to them is less lucky fallen and inscrutable like many here, grass pushes up unconcernedly between gravity’s gentle fractures in the stone.
Chloe’s eyes are soft. “It’s so peaceful,” she murmurs, her head on my shoulder. But the hard rubble edges seem to disturb her. “Oh I don’t want them to become obsolete!” she cries suddenly, gesturing at the memorials.
She’s right: the charm of Grahamstown is that, as Chloe secretly desires, it wants to remember and if you listen closely, it whispers the past to you in every Victorian façade or Settler’s cottage in its streets.
And like Chloe, you too may be seduced. The history of this area has a cultivated intimacy. The Observatory Museum on Bathurst Street for example is the sort of resting place that you that you can lose yourself in.
Gramophones yearn forward silently like wooden flowers, grown beyond usefulness. The dull stiletto machineries of typewriters have outlived their distinctive clacking and now record themselves as ornaments of a defunct culture.
It’s old and beautiful in a way modern people don’t have patience for these days like the dried flower arrangements preserved upside down in bell jars on the mantelpiece.
A stroll through Grahamstown is a bit like that. The so-called City of Saints is attractive to those with a romantic disposition, like Chloe Hirschman who stands before me in the cemetery with some rubbish in her hand and a reverential grin.
“Oh look! A dandelion!” she bursts out, “Make a wish!” I look but I can only see Mr and Mrs Haw, their faded family crest and a field of other former Grahamstonians.
“That’s easy,” I say, hoping the ghosts will approve, “I wish to kiss a girl in a graveyard.” Our smiles are dispersed by the wind’s change of direction: it’s now blowing back into town.
