A few weeks ago we all travelled to Teucers’ workshop in Norfolk to view the completed Headstone. He handed over his chisel to Lorna and the girls and three marks were made at the stones’ base. An "L", an "Ella", an "M" with a star. You won’t see these marks, they’re in the earth with Nick.
Some time later I asked Gilly what meaning the stone had for her. This day. She said that to her "The stone is a door between the past and the future. A meeting of the past and the present. It contains the past, we put it up in the present and it goes forward into the future." . Well, that’ll do. I can only add that I agree with the man who wrote that "there are few better ways of commemorating the dead than contributing to the life of a craft" and I KNOW that Nick would agree with that.
It’s been said that it requires an exceptional person to commission a headstone and an exceptional person to execute it. Lorna and Teucer have been those persons. A boulder somewhere is inscribed "Art should speak to us across centuries. It is a means by which we break bread with the dead".
Dennis Potter, with the sharpened acuity of the dying, memorably described the Peach blossom outside the window of his sick room as being the "peachiest" the most "blossomiest" you could ever imagine.
Put your hand on Nicks’ stone. It’s the "stoniest" stone you could ever imagine. The "Feeleyist" stone you could ever imagine feeling.
Nick probably wouldn’t thank me for comparing him with a carboniferous lump of old fossil. But, I’d suggest, the nature of the stone, its’ composition is a testament to who Nick was. Shiny, beguiling, glossy, even glamorous on the outside. But inside – quirky mysteries, teasing ambiguities, Crinoidal complications.
So, where marble once lay under Clay, now Clay lies under marble. We have a lamentation in letters for a man we loved and miss – DREADFULLY and when I think of Lorna and this stone, I’m reminded of the inscription, the encomium, written by his widow in 1830 on the headstone of the critic and essayist, William Hazlitt, " This stone is raised by one whose heart is with him in his grave.
And the wonder of it all is that 350 million years from now. Long after this species has wiped itself out and, yet again, the tectonic plates have yawned and groaned and shifted and this little Suffolk valley will perhaps have hauled itself down near the Equator again, cheek by jowl with perhaps Katmandu or even Kilkenny. Nick and his headstone. This sparkling little Church and all who rest in its’ magical churchyard will have slipped into the carboniferous soup and become the fossils, the crinoids, the marbles that some future species will excavate, wonder at, polish and inscribe.
Let’s go and raise Nicks’ stone.
Clive Merrison