Necropolis – a memory. When Billy Bravaal, Lanark list administrator, forwarded the poem ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ to me by William Miller, born Dennistoun, Glasgow who died destitute at the age of 60 in 1872, I remembered that there was a headstone erected to him in Glasgow Necropolis cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the cathedral and Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The Necropolis (city of the dead!) was just a ‘wee walk’ away from where I was born...the tenements of that area now gone to make way for such as the University of Strathclyde and student housing, as well as pocket gardens. The ‘wee walk’ to the Necropolis was with some of the older neighbourhood children who warned me not to step on the flat headstones as that was unlucky. That’s all I remember except standing outside the ‘blue box’ at the junction of Cathedral Street and Stirling Road. The ‘blue box’ was used as a call box for policemen to ‘report in,’ now obsolete with modern electronic forms of communication. Somehow, somebody must have found me for a policeman to report finding a lost child. I have absolutely no recollection beyond standing outside the blue box, but my mother said she had to bail me out of the jail by paying a shilling for the sausage and tea I was fed! The docent at Glasgow Cathedral warned my American husband and me not to go wandering around the Necropolis as it was a hang-out for druggies and other undesirables. Not everyone buried in the Necropolis has a headstone, and my aim was to try to find the graves of my grandparents and other relatives buried there, and then to see if I were to find the flat headstones to jog my memory of how I became separated from my friends. We should maybe have taken one of the historical tours instead. What caught my eye reading the following link on the Necropolis is that prior to ‘paid-for’ municipal cemeteries, the burial of the dead was the responsibility of churches. St. Michael’s in Dumfries is an example where Robert Burns is buried. Oddly enough, unless my memory is failing me, when on a cruise to French Polynesia, I believe family dead were buried in the front garden! I think. Surely a bit of a problem for family genealogists or others as time would go on and property changed hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Necropolis Maisie