My father worked as a gravedigger at the church of St John. I never believed I smelt the dead on him, but an earthy odour lingered constantly around his skin and clothes, crusty and pungent, with an edge to it that made me squint when he kissed me goodnight. As he was ordered around at home he was ordered around at work, mostly by the stern vicar, Alfred Boyland, whose sermon on local sin had once infamously sent members of the congregation at his previous parish, Wickhampstead, running from the church in tears. ‘It’s not just about laying a body in the ground,’ my father told me. ‘Folks like things just so.’ When John Ludgate succumbed to cancer of the throat, the Ludgate family insisted that he not be buried on the south side of the churchyard, since over there had been recently interred Richard Cavendish, a rotund bully with whom Ludgate had been involved in a thirty-year feud over a prize hog. The bereaved, however, more often requested that the north side of the churchyard be avoided, since it was said that was where the Devil’s Door was located. As a child I searched and searched for the door, but was never successful in locating it. Some said black dogs had been buried there too, but my father was dubious of that and had never found any evidence in his excavations. When not with a shovel in his hand or being harangued by my mother, he hid in books, taking a great interest in the history of the moor, particularly its Bronze Age and Beaker relics and the unfortunate vandalism inflicted on many of them during the last couple of centuries. It saddens me that he did not live to see the excavation of the kistvaen near Trembling Hill mine, in which the remains of a girl, thought to be no more than fifteen years old, were found preserved in the peat, along with those artefacts her people had believed would see her safely into the next world: an axe, a necklace and a shawl, woven from a beaver’s pelt. It was his habit of a weekend to walk up there, along the old Lych Way, and he once remarked to me that when he did, he felt the presence of the dead more strongly than he had ever done in his working day.