3 - Monuments in Virginia Woolf and Hope Mirrlees

Summary

In late September 1919, a small monument was unveiled in Cookham, in Berkshire, to commemorate sixty-two local servicemen who had lost their lives in the First World War. A Celtic cross, a popular symbol in the years following the conflict, was carved from brick and flint, raised on a stepped base, inscribed with a list of names, and placed on the village green. Working from a photograph in 1922, the former official war artist Stanley Spencer, who himself had served in the Balkans and whose older brother was listed among the casualties on the monument, turned the scene of the dedication into the subject for a painting (Figure 3.1). Spencer lived in Petersfield at the time, in a room that overlooked the churchyard. ‘I am in immediate communication with the dead,’ he observed. ‘They are buried in the side of a bank, so that they only have to push the gravestones a little bit forward and lo! they are in my room, like extinct gentlemen – a very Cookhamesque place, as you can see.’ Unveiling Cookham War Memorial shows what such communication with the dead may have looked like: far from pompous, it is intimate and unhurried. No dignitaries crowd the scene on the village green. Instead, locals in their Sunday best gather near the Celtic cross to commemorate the community's losses, their bodies pressed together, their hands holding leaflets, their necks bent, their entranced faces turned in all directions, except towards the viewer. On a grass patch nearby, four young men lie down, seemingly unaffected by the day's proceedings. With their uncannily long legs, these four slain men, who symbolise soldiers who fell in action, distort the painting's perspective, creating the illusion of bodies piled not only into the narrow frame but on to each other, as if magnetically pulled into the monument's orbit.

At the time, war memorials were often enclosed to protect them from accidental damage through contact with passers-by or grazing animals. The absence of a fence around Cookham's Celtic cross, by contrast, seems to encourage such contact – a way of communicating with the dead. In Spencer's rendition of this moment of disclosure, five young girls are pulled so near the monument that they can touch it.