The inspiration for this story lies in dark's passion for graveyards, which, he maintains, never seem to him to be morbid places. Among earliest memories are those of his schoolmaster father taking him to view mountain cemeteries where subsidence had torn open the graves to reveal skeletons that had been turned banana yellow by salts in the soil.
Clark is married with one son and lives in the Yorkshire village of Adwick-le-street, within a skull's throw of a graveyard that contains the tomb of an ancestor of George Washington. This sixteenth century tomb bears a Stars and Stripes design in the coat of arms and will almost certainly figure in another of his stories.
"Jesus!" exclaimed the electrician as he levered the back off the big one hundred cubic foot chest freezer. "What did you have to dig them back up for?"
Weathered brown, whip-lean, sixty-plus, half-Smoked cigarette behind one ear, the gravedigger grinned, displaying an uneven row of yellow chips that had once been teeth; he leaned forward, bare wrinkled elbows resting oh the freezer lid.
"The new by-pass. It's going to take half the graveyard yonder, so before they lay the road, we have to lift 'em and plant 'em in the new municipal ground up
Borough Road."
Pulling a face, the electrician wipe the palms of his hands on his overalls. "There must have been some… some sights. Well, they've been dead years."