As a child the dead were my playthings. A jaunty row of human skulls, arranged by varying degrees of teeth, grinned down at me from my bedroom windowsill. I am certain this proximity to death at an early age led me to my adult profession: I’m a literary scholar specialising in thanatology, the ways we culturally process death and dying through the written word.

In 1983 when I was six my property developer father acquired an extraordinary plot in the centre of St Albans right next to the Cathedral – an entire, enclosed acre in the middle of the city, between the back of the shops on medieval George Street and the graveyard wall. It was a tranche of land that had formerly belonged to the Abbey, upon which had stood a Benedictine monastery. Henry VIII had taken it from the church during his dissolution of the monasteries, along with all the gold and jewels from Saint Alban’s shrine. From the early twentieth century Osbornes the greengrocers had stood on the site. Dad claims he was offered an OBE to sell the land back to the Church of England. As a proud Irish Catholic, he told them to get stuffed and remains resolutely ungonged. He decided, instead, to build our dream house.

My brother and I started to collect the bones in a large Victorian cash register left behind by the grocers

The diggers moved in to start on the foundations when the ground thawed in spring, but work was immediately halted after the very first scoop dug up five bodies. We were swarming with forensic police officers before you could say CSI St Albans, since the serial killer Dennis Nilsen had been arrested twenty miles away in Muswell Hill, just a few weeks earlier. Nilsen’s preferred method of disposal of the poor young men who had the misfortune to fall into his vile clutches was to dismember them, then boil the remains and flush away the resultant sludge. The clogged drains at 23 Cranley Gardens were ultimately his undoing, of course, but for years he had successfully secreted the remaining bones under floorboards and in the gardens of his various abodes across North London. Had my father unwittingly stumbled across one of his macabre disposal sites?

I remember gawking alongside my four-year-old brother as forensic police officers in pristine white bunny suits spent weeks meticulously using teaspoons to excavate whole skeletons. The bones were sent to be radiocarbon dated. Thankfully, it turned out we hadn’t unearthed a serial killer’s dumping ground. Once it was established the bones were, in fact, several hundred years old and that my father had bought a giant medieval plague pit containing hundreds of unfortunate fourteenth-century souls, the police departed. The plague had ripped through St Albans in 1349. Pilgrims escaping London and seeking the protection of Saint Alban came to pray at his shrine and venerate his remains, bringing the illness with them. The Benedictine monastery, where the sick were tended and last rites administered, was to become the epicentre of the plague in the city and the Abbot, Michael de Mentmore, was one of the first to die of the disease in 1349. Bodies were interred initially with due ceremony, then with increased haste, and finally, when the gravediggers had died, chaotically slung into the pestilential pit.

As a child I thought not at all of how these poor souls had come to their final resting place, but I can clearly recall the horror of realisation that struck me when I read Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year as an undergraduate. Defoe’s book is a fictionalisation of the 1665 Great Plague of London, drawing on contemporaneous accounts and parish records. I was sitting in the robin’s-egg-blue Round Reading room of the old British Library when I came across the following description of the plague pit next to the Three Nuns Inn at Aldgate: “There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those pits, and that was only to prevent infection. But after some time that order was more necessary, for people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves.” I remember having to shut my eyes and rest my head on the desk to stop the library swimming around me as my stomach flipped with nausea, finally gripped by an awareness of the terrible fate of the people whose bones I had played with as a child. At the time, however, my parents seemed blithely (and perhaps, admittedly, necessarily) oblivious to the situation. The Connolly family were now the proud owners of an acre of prime real estate and thousands of 634-year-old human bones. There were so many bodies it would’ve been impossible to exhume them all, and anyhow they had been buried in consecrated ground. My unsentimental father had no qualms about continuing to build our family home on a charnel house. Rather, we decided to embrace it.

My brother and I started to collect the bones in a large Victorian cash register left behind by the grocers, which we hid in the garden shed. You’d push down on one of the stiff keys marked with the old imperial pounds, shillings, and pence, and out would shoot a drawer full of carefully sorted jaw, toe, and finger bones. We used to invite kids from school around to have a look at our human remains collection. Their parents thought we were joking. Every time it rained heavily yet more remains would pop to the surface of the flower beds. Our dogs, a series of glossy black flat-coated retrievers, were always bouncing delightedly about with someone’s tibia or femur. Best of all, though, were the skulls. My brother and I prized those that had the most teeth the highest, which, I now realise, were probably among the youngest of the dead. Mum had, initially, forbade us from bringing them into the house but after a year or so I had squirreled several up to my morbid bedroom-cum-ossuary, which looked like it had been decorated by the Khmer Rouge.

At 46, I’m now likely far older than the perished I played with. Even before the plague hit you would’ve been lucky to make it into your 30s in fourteenth-century St Albans. As Sinéad Morrisey points out in her wonderful poem “Fur”:

At 25 and 29 respectively Hans Holbein’s
burly furred ambassadors haven’t got long to go:
the pox, the plague, the ague, a splinter
in the finger, a scratch at the back of the throat
or an infection set into the shoulder joint
might carry them off, in a matter of writhing
hours, at any instant –

In my study in Texas, where I’m now a professor at the University of Houston, I have a copy of Holbein’s painting of the sixteenth-century ambassadors above my desk. Whenever I’m back in London I always stop by the National Gallery to admire it in the flesh, standing at the far right-hand edge of the painting to see more clearly the skull Holbein cast in anamorphic perspective across their living figures. In her poem, Morrisey suggests it would be “Too obvious a touch to set the white skull straight. Better / to paint it as something other.” The obliquity of Holbein’s memento mori forces the viewer to interact physically with the skull just as my little brother and I did with the plague dead forty years ago. However, unlike Holbein’s ambassadors mine was not an encounter with death held at an aesthetic remove, and unlike Nilsen I had not sought out the company of the dead. Rather, my formative, close, and unavoidable encounters and my consequent familiarity with death gave me strange comfort. Having had the dead as my childhood toys I find myself fortunate to agree with Walt Whitman when he writes in Leaves of Grass: “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” To play with death is different from what you might suppose. And luckier.

Sally Connolly is Associate Professor of Contemporary Poetics at the University of Houston. Her third book, The Poetry of the AIDS Epidemic, is forthcoming from