Time Slip

I was thirteen at the time. We had been visiting relatives for the day, my parents and I. my uncle - my fathers brother - insisted on showing us the family grave in the little churchyard among fields near his farm. The family was big enough for five graves laid side by side. There was a low marble wall alla round, and a big tombstone at one end with all the names of the deceased carved on it.

The names went back to the century, and each one was followed by a date of birth and a date of death. For people like me, who cannot do arithmetic, there was also the age of the person.. Charles Ellis. Born 5th March 1898. Died 10th May 1962. Aged 64 yrs. Fifteen names, one on top of another. A death list.

As I stood looking at this bed of dead bodies I suddenly thought: there are people lying under there. People who are connected to me. I saw a picture in my head of a long row of dead bodies stretching back away from me in time. And beyond them, others; people I did not know about but who belonged not to this queue but tree of Ellis’s.

I giggled. Everyone was being very solemn and my mother glared at me. She thought I was going to show her up. But I wasn’t giggling because I thought there was anything funny. I was giggling because I had suddenly been struck by the foreverness of time.

This forever time was not filled with minutes and hours, days and years, but with people, people’s lives, one after the other in every direction. Hundreds of thousands, millions and billions of them. They stretched not only backwards in time, but across time as well, and away into future. Time in all directions, all over the world, for ever and ever, measured by people. I started giggling because it was all to much: all that time: all those people. I couldn’t grasp it with my mind. But I knew it was there. That they were there. That it was true. I could feel it.

I went wandering about among the graves because I could not stand still anymore. And I couldn’t keep my eyes off the gravestones. Some of them leaned over at clownish angles as if they were performing a slow-motion collapse, which of course they were. Some were so old and eroded I couldn’t read the names and dates carved on them. Others were new and smart and somehow smug in their well-kept neatness.

I read the names and ages and kept thinking: Every one of these people must have been alive and must have felt like me once. They were inside them-selves, as I am inside myself now, looking out of themselves seeing other people looking out of theirselves at them. But then one day they