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I came across this grave in Hitchin Cemetery this lunchtime. It's Margaret Callander Todd who died at Alma Villa, Old Park Road, Hitchin on 28th March 1876. I was so distracted by the unusual detail of the address that I didn't notice until now that she was only 16 months old. Sadly the cemetery has many graves to babies and toddlers, especially of course from the time before vaccines and modern medicine.
I had never seen a grave with an address on. As you may know from my stand up I feel gravestones do miss out a lot of info about the person buried there. Usually just their name, dates and maybe one bit of vague info about how good a person they were.
I like this gravestone as it attempts to give more info than usual, though only about the people involved deaths and not their lives, which seems a waste of words. Though interesting to know that Thomas (presumably Margaret's brother) was killed by a fall from his horse at Grahamstown, South Africa in 1891 (it also lets us know where his body is - if anyone in Grahamstown wants to go and have a look). It gives a glimpse into his life, his travels, his love of horse-riding (or maybe it was his first go).
If you're going to pay for that many words then maybe give us some info about his life, not his death, but I don't want to criticise the Todds who lost three children at the ages of 36,25 and 1.
It made me decide to celebrate my life, rather than the tragic and bizarre way I am going to die, on my gravestone. Which will just read
richardherring.com/warmingup so people can go and read all about what I did and thought, rather than just my dates, birth and death weights and how much I loved Jesus. I will have to leave some money to keep my website going after my death. And it relies on the internet still being a thing in the coming centuries. It will at least be fun for people to look at and find out that the internet was once a thing. And laugh at me for thinking they'd still be able to look me up. The joke's on them because I knew the truth.
Anyway, I looked up Old Park Road on my phone and it was only 15 minutes walk away, so I decided to go and find Alma Villa, if it was still there, to see where Margaret died. I was thinking she would have been an old woman. I don't know if seeking out the house of a dead child is any less creepy than seeking out the house of a dead old woman, but in my mind I was doing the latter. It felt like the Universe had given me an address for a reason. I didn't know anything else about Margaret. I could at least see where she lived.
It did extend my lunchtime walk. I fancied I was heading for the old bit of town that is largely still intact, but actually I was going beyond that, past the roundabout next to the library and the road I was heading to was home to Waitrose. I realised there was a good chance that Alma Villa was gone. Maybe it was situated in the vegetable aisle of the supermarket.
Alma Villa might also have been renamed and though a few houses from that time survive, there are several newer buildings, including a complex called the Old Bakery, where I imagined Margaret had probably bought some bread (obviously that is now fanciful, but maybe her mum did). None of the older houses were called Alma Villas and a search of that address online only brought up the grave I'd found and a reference to a meeting where a later resident iof the house had attended.
It was slightly disappointing, but I enjoyed letting chance and fate take control of my life for half an hour. Of course had I been run over on the roundabout and been able to tell the paramedics what I was doing before I passed, then my grave could have read, "who died searching for Alma Villa, Old Park Road, Hitchin, which did not even exist."
I looked up some old maps when I got home and it was interesting to see how few homes there were in Hitchin in the 1800s. It looks like there was no home on the site of Waitrose back then, but it doesn't say which house on the road is Alma Villa. I suspect it would be possible to find out somewhere, but even though I was on a fool's errand trying to find the building where (unbeknownst to me) a baby had died, I still liked the fact that I'd allowed a chance encounter with a grave alter my day and thus my whole life. It meant my dog walk lasted for over an hour, which made me slightly fitter, so the deaths of the Todds had possibly extended my life very slightly.
And it shows that by including some unusual info on your gravestone, you can influence the lives of people 150 years in the future. That gravestone has now very slightly influenced your life too, because you've wasted valuable minutes reading it (and some of you will now go and try and find out more details).
