”I’ll just move Keith so you can sit down,” says Hugh Dawson, Oxford’s dry and avuncular cemetery manager. Keith, just cremated, is sitting in a small wooden box on one of Dawson’s office chairs. “Mention funerals to some people and it scares them to death,” Dawson observes wryly, putting Keith on his desk. “Someone asked me recently about pre-paid funerals. When I told him he could book a space in the cemetery for £600, he looked horrified and told me it would be tempting fate.”
Dawson and his deputy, Janet Simmonds, work from an office in his house in the grounds of Wolvercote Cemetery, north Oxford. Between them, they’ve clocked up more than 40 years in the cemetery. They love their jobs, but are relieved to be retiring before the city’s cemeteries run out of space. “It won’t be our problem by then. Two of our four cemeteries are full already, and this one’s got about ten years left in it.”
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