Taking Nesta home
Today we buried Nesta's ashes in Llanddeiniolen, in North Wales.
My brother's photo
It is a very fine site near Anglesey, between the mountains and the sea, as the vicar said in a short ceremony in English and Welsh. My brother and his girlfriend had already visited the graveyard on Sunday when the weather was fine, and said they could see Snowdon from the grave. This was very appropriate, as today I presented my brother with a photocopy of the story Nesta had filed from the summit of Snowdon in April 1950, about a rally of 600 ramblers celebrating the National Parks Act; at the end of the phone call, my father asked to speak to her, and told her that his son had been born that day, and would she be godmother? The views were not so good today, and it was raining lightly during the ceremony, but we could see enough of the hills for me to have an idea of what a splendid position it is.
You enter the graveyard at St Deiniol between two yew trees, one of them 2,000 years old and the other a mere 1,800; the vicar told us that the writer and MP W. J. Gruffydd, whose grave is a few yards from Nesta's, wrote a poem about them.
We were impressed that they had managed to get the stone up already. It is made of Welsh slate. My brother wanted the inscription to be as simple as Nesta's Paris business card, which just said "Nesta Roberts/Paris correspondent/The Guardian".
The vicar looked in the parish register for us to see if Nesta had been christened in the church, but her name did not appear. So we are still unsure of her precise connection with Llanddeiniolen, though we are fairly sure she was born somewhere near there. My brother did find the house of a cousin, bequeathed some teaspoons in the will, only to find that he and his wife had died several years ago.
My brother seemed very pleased with the ceremony and the gravestone. He said this was one aspect of her life that he had known very little about - she didn't talk about the area, though she asked to be taken back to Llanddeiniolen in her will - and felt that this return was a fitting ending to Nesta's story.
The view from the grave in sunshine, taken by my brother.
My brother's photo
It is a very fine site near Anglesey, between the mountains and the sea, as the vicar said in a short ceremony in English and Welsh. My brother and his girlfriend had already visited the graveyard on Sunday when the weather was fine, and said they could see Snowdon from the grave. This was very appropriate, as today I presented my brother with a photocopy of the story Nesta had filed from the summit of Snowdon in April 1950, about a rally of 600 ramblers celebrating the National Parks Act; at the end of the phone call, my father asked to speak to her, and told her that his son had been born that day, and would she be godmother? The views were not so good today, and it was raining lightly during the ceremony, but we could see enough of the hills for me to have an idea of what a splendid position it is.
You enter the graveyard at St Deiniol between two yew trees, one of them 2,000 years old and the other a mere 1,800; the vicar told us that the writer and MP W. J. Gruffydd, whose grave is a few yards from Nesta's, wrote a poem about them.
We were impressed that they had managed to get the stone up already. It is made of Welsh slate. My brother wanted the inscription to be as simple as Nesta's Paris business card, which just said "Nesta Roberts/Paris correspondent/The Guardian".
The vicar looked in the parish register for us to see if Nesta had been christened in the church, but her name did not appear. So we are still unsure of her precise connection with Llanddeiniolen, though we are fairly sure she was born somewhere near there. My brother did find the house of a cousin, bequeathed some teaspoons in the will, only to find that he and his wife had died several years ago.
My brother seemed very pleased with the ceremony and the gravestone. He said this was one aspect of her life that he had known very little about - she didn't talk about the area, though she asked to be taken back to Llanddeiniolen in her will - and felt that this return was a fitting ending to Nesta's story.
The view from the grave in sunshine, taken by my brother.