set in orderly rows, this one seemed to have no clear boundaries and the tombstones appeared to grow like the trees in whose midst they appeared, randomly and without logic. Many of the statues had been vandalised over the ages and there were a great many decapitated angels. Originally perhaps there had been some attempt at order and symmetry, for somewhere near the centre a space had been cleared and a memorial to a certain William Hedgeman, in the form of a large cross standing on an inscribed plinth, had been erected. But three of the four paths leading to it from the sides had lost all semblance of straightness, the way been blocked by fallen trees and more gravestones, overgrown now by creepers and moss. Many of those buried in this mysterious place appeared to be Dutch, according to the names and the inscriptions on the gravestones, though why he had no idea, and no one seemed to have been buried there after 1940. He was pleased though to find the grave of Francis Palgrave (1824– 1897), the editor of the much-loved Victorian poetry anthology Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, resident of Twickenham and one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, as well as that of Ebenezer Cobb Morley (1831–1924), regarded, said the inscription, as the father of modern football, and of Julia Martha Thomas (d.1879), described simply and suggestively as ‘murder victim’. She was in fact, he discovered in the local library, the victim of one of the most famous murders of the Victorian era, killed in a fight with her Irish servant, who then cut off her head and sliced up her body, boiling the dismembered parts before burying some of them and throwing the rest in the river. For some reason, perhaps in order to sell the furniture, she impersonated her

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