My baby was put in a shared grave

Years after losing her son through hospital blunders, Alvina Carrington discovered a new horror
Denis Campbell, health correspondent
Sunday December 2, 2007
The Observer

In late 2004, on a visit to her son's grave, Alvina Carrington was surprised to find fresh flowers. 'I knew I hadn't put them there, so I thought it was odd,' she recalls. But Alvina assumed a friend or member of her family had brought them, and was touched someone had made the journey to Alperton cemetery on the north-west fringes of London to remember Luke, who had been stillborn at seven months.

After his death in October 2003 Alvina's life fell apart. She had lost the first child she desperately wanted and had spent six years trying for. An appalling series of blunders by doctors and midwives meant her pre-eclampsia went unidentified, with fatal consequences. Amid the shock, grief and anger, her relationship broke up. Previously very sociable, the 33-year-old became introverted and virtually housebound. She gave up her job, unable to stop crying every night after she got home. Alvina thought she had reached the lowest point of her life.

But more than a year after that trip to the cemetery, in early 2006, she suffered another heartbreak. In the course of asking what sort of headstone she could put on Luke's grave, Alvina discovered that what she thought was her son's final resting place also contained the bodies of several other babies. The flowers were for one of them, not Luke.

'I'd rung the cemetery, told them Luke was buried there, given them the plot number and asked them what size of headstone I could erect. I'd decided that I was going to have gold lettering saying "Blue: in our hearts always", because that was the nickname I'd given him, and then 'Luke' underneath.

'That would have been the final act. But the cemetery people explained to me that it wasn't my property, that it belonged to Brent Council, that I'd need to get their permission for the headstone and that there were other babies in the grave,' says Alvina. 'I was devastated. I thought it was Luke's grave and only Luke's grave, and that it was my property. I thought the cemetery had got it wrong. But they said to me: "It should have been explained to you that the grave belongs to the council and that other babies are there."

'I wanted to know how many other babies were in there beside Luke, and whether they were on top of each other or side by side. I wanted to know if there was another baby on top of Luke.'

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