I arrive at the cemetery around midday, five years and four days since I had first visited this historic place. Fort Langley, also known as the ‘Birthplace of B.C.’ was a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1827 making it older than Canada itself. The cemetery opened sixty-four years later in 1881. I slip in today through a side-gate and see the flag of the Canadian Federation at half-mast, or half-staff as they call it here.
I start to walk diagonally across the parched lawn, as I can remember where I should be going to find the graves which have special meaning for me. This photograph was taken of me in that spot in the cemetery to which I am headed now by my companion and guide, Kobi Christian, the heritage curator of the local Centennial Museum on the afternoon of September 8, 2017. It’s a day I will always remember, even more so now, when the day and the month if not the year, will now forever be commemorated on a thousand and one memorials and anniversary events.
I knew this burial plot would look different today. As I recount in Chapter 12 of ‘Secrets Never To Be Told’ I pledged that day that this unmarked grave between the memorials for a pioneer farmer and colonist, called George Underwood, and for William, the man who took his name as a boy but who was not his son – and from whom I received a windfall inheritance, would one day be completed. Jessie Underwood, George’s widow, William’s mother, (whether natural or adoptive, we will never know, as William had no birth record) has lain here in the middle known only to the cemetery record since her death in 1970.
Yes, there are now memorials to three Underwoods here, one born in British Columbia, one in the Scottish Borders, the third, my cousin Jessie, in Cambridge, in England. George bought the plot for himself, his wife of a few months, and the son, he seemed happy to claim as his own, shortly before he died in 1921. Now visitors to this historic cemetery can see that a woman lies here between the two long-commemorated men.
I see the plaque for the first time now. I feel a sense of quiet satisfaction – of a wrong righted. Now a life which through the strange co-incidence of an unexpected inheritance, my decision to research this illegitimate child’s life, and most recently, via my commission given just a few months ago to a Vancouver stonemason for a granite plaque, Jessie’s is now a life not forgotten.
I wanted to be alone for this first visit, to find it myself, not knowing for sure what my reaction would be, so a moment best to have privately. I stand quietly before the grave for a few minutes then leave. I take a break, in the bustle of lunchtime in a tourist town before meeting up with Kobi Christian at the museum. It feels again like a reunion with an old friend. She hugs me before we walk over together to meet with a local newspaper journalist who Kobi has put me in contact with. We are soon joined by a surprise duo, Wes, who is the cemetery superintendent and his colleague, David, the man who Wes introduces as the one who actually set the plaque into the ground.
Kobi – as she did in 2017 – takes a photo of me now. It was cloudy in 2017 – the cloud from the forest fires which affected that summer too. Today warm autumn sunshine lights the scene. The stifling heat and smoke of yesterday thankfully has cleared.
I get up off my knees and smile at the small circle witnessing this scene – I smile too, but as I did in 2017, inside I feel moved as I was then, moved by anger, that a woman, who lived for fifty eight years in her new country, worked hard all her life, and died at the age of ninety-three, could lie so long disrespected, it seemed to me, by her son and her neighbours and contemporaries.
I have another thought . I suggest to the group standing around me that we should have a reading. Not to say a prayer here, but to read aloud from the book, which I dedicated to Cousin Jessie.
I start, and read a few pages. I won’t repeat the full extract I chose here, but just a couple of sentences from my account of that first cemetery visit.
‘Here she lies, somehow illegitimate to the end, erased from memory, written off the slate of humanity, until this day…
In this moment, I resolve that one day I will come back to honour her properly, to have a headstone carved..maybe underneath this, I’d have a suitable text from her birthday book inscribed. No better surely, to add just two simple words:
Not Forgotten.’
I fulfilled that resolution today. A promise made five years ago is today honoured.
Jessie Underwood, born Jessie Heading. known to me now as family, as my not-so-distant cousin Jessie. R.I.P.
This is how the local newspaper recorded my day and my reading at the grave