Somebody Has Been Tidying My Mother's Grave For Eleven Years

My mother is buried in a village cemetery three hundred miles from where I live. I go twice a year, which is not enough, and I know it is not enough, and I have made my peace with the size of my own failure.

Every time I go, the grave is immaculate.

Weeds pulled. Grass cut close to the stone, closer than the mower gets. The glass jar — my mother's own jam jar, which I put there in 2014 because I could not afford a vase and then kept because it felt right — washed, clean, and holding flowers that are never more than a few days old.

There is nobody. My father is dead. I am an only child. Her sister is in Australia and has not been back since the funeral. Her friends are old or gone.

I asked the parish council. They said they cut the grass on the paths, not the plots, and they were quite firm about it, in the way of people who are asked to do too much for free.

I asked the neighbours, the shop, the pub. Nothing. A woman in the shop said, "Ooh, that's nice, though, isn't it?" which is the most British sentence ever spoken about an unexplained phenomenon.

I have thought about a camera and I have decided against it, and I would like to explain why, because I think it is the only interesting thing about me.

If I put a camera up, one of two things happens.

Either I find out it is a kind stranger — a neighbour, an old friend, somebody who owed her something — and then I have to thank them, and they have to be thanked, and the whole quiet arrangement collapses into embarrassment.

Or I find out it is nobody.

I do not want either of those. I want the flowers to keep being there and I want to keep not knowing, and I want, twice a year, to stand at a clean grave with a washed jam jar and feel — and I know exactly how this sounds — looked after.

So I leave a five-pound note under the jar. Every visit. Eleven years.

It is always gone. That proves nothing, and I know it, and I am going to keep doing it.