The Chick and the Dead

by Carla Valentine

  And everyone is especially interested in dead people or body parts or ‘remains’ or ‘cadavers’ at Halloween; I become particularly popular around that time of year. I always thought my fifteen minutes of fame were done and dusted with The Death Detective and never really expected any more front-of-camera brushes with showbiz until I was asked to go on Alan Titchmarsh’s show and bring some specimens from the Pathology Museum. The segment was to be on bizarre medical cures through the ages, one of my favourite topics, since many of the specimens in the pathology collection illustrate them. For example, there are syphilitic bones, twisted and pocked, from people who’d not only suffered with the infection but also from the damaging effects of the toxic mercury used as a ‘cure’. There is also a pot containing a long, thin tapeworm, an example of something women used to deliberately swallow as a diet aid; if you have a tapeworm living in your small intestine then it’ll consume the calories and you won’t … or so the theory goes.

  I was collected from work in a taxi, carrying a plastic crate containing delicately wrapped bones, tapeworms and more. I had absolutely no idea what to expect and I was a bit self-conscious when I arrived at the studio, considering the bizarre nature of my cargo. But when I was helpfully shown to the Green Room, given a coffee and introduced to the other guests I started to relax. I needn’t have thought the box of body parts was the weirdest thing happening that day because in the Green Room were Rula Lenska, some of the Muppets, the Hairy Bikers and a baby that could do the dance to Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’. When my time came to get on stage and meet Alan and talk through the specimens live on camera in front of a studio audience, I just got on with it without any nervousness because I think I assumed I was dreaming.

  The tactic must have worked because they invited me back on to the show for a Halloween special, this time to discuss a topic of my choosing. I talked about the medical origins of some popular monsters and brought in preserved examples of those conditions. One was leprosy as a real-life zombie analogy. Lepers used to be known as the zombies of the Middle East, declared un-dead by the Catholic Church. They were alive and yet they were not considered to be, so they had no rights. Another was porphyria, a type of anaemia, which may have given rise to the vampire myth as it leaves sufferers unable to go out in sunlight and causes their teeth to be stained red. They even asked me to take part in a quiz at the end of the show which consisted of Halloween-themed questions and tasks, and of course I won – I love Halloween! The prize was a golden pumpkin – a real mini pumpkin sprayed with gold paint. It was my pride and joy for about six months until one day I realised it had deflated into a bronze fungus and I knew it was time to lay it to rest. It went the way we all eventually will and decomposed into the earth. Unless, of course, we’re artificially preserved in pots like those under my charge now.

  The specimens were a hit on TV. Human remains have power which fakes and fabrications do not.* In the UK it is difficult for most people to have contact with real human remains for various reasons, one being that we don’t tend to lay out our own dead like we used to and instead have professionals do it for us. Another is that museums, such as the one I work in, containing the remains of deceased individuals, require special licences in order for the general public to be able to see them. But I feel that there are things only human remains can teach us: they have an intensity and an agency that facsimiles don’t.

  I remember being in history class aged about fourteen, learning about the Nazis. It seemed that half the class were more interested in spraying Impulse deodorant on themselves and reading Just Seventeen so our teacher became furious with us. ‘These people made lampshades out of human skin!’ he shouted. ‘How can you just witter on as though nothing horrifying happened?’ But we couldn’t relate – we were teenagers, more interested in whether or not our boobs were growing and we could upgrade from crop tops to bras than some random thing that happened in some random place years before we were born. It wasn’t until I saw a Holocaust exhibition – the piles and piles of human hair that had been shaved off the Nazis’ victims’ heads – that the horror actually hit me. There was a force from those remains that told me they would not be ignored. Student doctors feel the same when they dissect their designated cadavers in the labs at our medical school; they appreciate the donation and become attached to their charges. They even have a ceremonial Service of Remembrance at the end of the year once they finish their dissections. The new fake SynDaver™ made from silicon rubber will not elicit the same power and respect.

  Actor Bradley Cooper felt the same. He played the Elephant Man in a recent production at a London theatre, and although there is a replica of Joseph Merrick’s skeleton in our public museum he asked to see the real remains, which reside in one of our galleries reserved only for medical students and researchers. He wanted to do the part justice so we obliged. He was praised for his representation of the character of Joseph Merrick and was very respectful of his remains. In fact, the day before he left to return home to the US he came back to see Joseph, simply to say goodbye to him. That skeleton is human, those decedents on the autopsy tables are human, even the people in my five thousand specimen pots are human. Important, powerful, and full of stories to tell – stories that I am privileged to be qualified to elicit in different ways.

  * * *

  This is why I love what I do now: the randomness of one day being on TV wearing a badge that says ‘Creepy Carla’ and winning a golden pumpkin, on another re-potting a specimen of a hernia from 1750, then on yet another being on a film set manhandling a method actress. I have years of experience carrying out autopsies, but as I said, the irony is that back then I was so busy I could never pursue any extra-curricular activities such as furthering my studies or appearing on TV. Now that I don’t work in mortuaries full time I’m much freer to reflect on what a totally crazy, rewarding and fulfilling job being an APT actually is. I have one foot in death’s past with my current job and collection of human remains, and one foot firmly in death’s present and future.

  Working in a mortuary is not a dead-end job.

  Two

  Preparation: ‘Grief Encounters’

  I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

  —Winston Churchill

  My granddad, Frederick, gratefully took the weight off his legs and sat back into his favourite chair with a gravelly sigh which metamorphosed into a smoker’s cough. We had just come in from what I called ‘the garden’, although it was really just a grassy patch at the front of the sheltered accommodation which he and my nan, Lily, called home. Still, it seemed like a huge garden to seven-year-old me and I can remember running lengths of it, back and forth, back and forth, as he sat with his back to the wall and his face to the sun, smoking a roll-up.

  Looking back now, my granddad reminds me of Sid James, with his slicked-back grey hair and mischievous laugh which pushed his shining eyes into tight slits. But in younger years, in photos of him marrying my nan, for example, he was like Humphrey Bogart: all sharp suits and Brylcreem. During the Second World War he fought in Burma, though he never spoke about it, and he played the accordion because he was descended from Gypsies. And I don’t mean the ones you see on TV now, in huge, gaudy wedding dresses wearing too much make-up. I mean the ones from the Old Country who traversed the land in brightly painted horse-drawn caravans called vardos: proper Romani Gypsies who drank unpalatable liquor by firelight, who’d curse you as soon as look at you, and who slaughtered chickens during rituals to find out which of the family’s females would marry first.

  My granddad’s father, my great-granddad, had been a Gypsy boxer, despite having arms so short he wore garters to hold up his shirt sleeves long after they were fashionable. He had one long thumbnail, a bit like Sport from Taxi Driver, and he used this to mend clocks. He also pierced people’s ears (no, not with his thumbnail), and he turned his one-hoop earring into a wedding ring for my great-
grandmother. After they married they had five children but all of them died as was fairly common a hundred years ago. After moving to the UK in around 1903 they had another five of which my granddad, Frederick, was the eldest. This is really all I remember of my granddad’s life.

  More vivid in my memory is the look on his face during his death.

  Just after he sank back into his comfy chair that day he began to convulse. From my vantage point at his slippered feet I looked up at my granddad but found myself staring into the face of death itself. His eyes rolled back into his tilted head and one lone droplet of blood trickled from the corner of his lips and painted a delicate crimson trail across his crêpey cheek. Then, like an exclamation point, his dentures comically shot out of his mouth and landed on the carpet with a thud. I don’t remember who but somebody wrenched me away from the scene, and the implication was clear: this was something a seven-year-old child shouldn’t see.

  My granddad had suffered a massive stroke. He didn’t technically die in that chair but he never recovered once he reached the hospital. He passed away with my mum and aunts around him. I didn’t go to the funeral because I was considered too young, and I don’t remember how my family behaved on that day. But I do remember one thing about his death – I had been intrigued as well as afraid.

  * * *

  I was quite a ballsy child and I think I inherited that from my father, a rather arrogant and headstrong man from a huge Catholic family. In me, the eldest of two children with a less rigid upbringing than he’d had, those personality traits just manifested as independence, a desire for knowledge, and a need to be frequently alone with my books or with my thoughts. I learned to read at about two years old and apparently I could tell my mum what time my favourite TV show was on by reading it in the paper. Once, when attempting to punish me, my mum sent me to my room, as all flustered parents do. After an eternity of what she considered to be ‘difficult solitude’ she came by to investigate and found me quietly and happily reading. ‘It’s OK, you can come out now,’ she reassured me, to which I replied, ‘I just want to finish this chapter first.’ Some punishment!

  My brief encounter with death may have terrified lesser children but I was of different ilk and, fascinated, I saw this enigmatic Grim Reaper as a challenge; something to research. I had an innate acceptance of the way the world worked and I understood at a young age that there could be no light without darkness.

  Perhaps for that I can blame my strange pagan Gypsy blood. Perhaps it was my father’s morbid Catholic influence. Perhaps blame my insatiable appetite for Agatha Christie at an age when I should have been content reading Enid Blyton. Or perhaps you could blame the Bunny Massacre.

  My father would sometimes, out of the blue, gift me and my little brother random pets. Once it was two young black and white rabbits, and even though we hadn’t asked for them, the last thing children do is turn pets away, especially little bunnies. So, one huge hutch and a lot of hay later, the two new rabbits were happily sheltered from the elements in their new home: the garden shed. We’d let them out of the hutch to roam around the shed every day, or watch them run free in the garden, safe in the knowledge they were protected from cats on the prowl. Or so we thought. One day, without warning, there was a cacophony of high-pitched squeaking and snarling from the garden which caused us in the dining room to freeze, forks halfway to mouths. Eventually, coming to our senses and rushing out into the bright daylight, we were assaulted by a tableau like a scene from a US sorority house movie: as though several lithe female students had just finished their sexy pillow fight, and errant feathers were now floating delicately down on to their languid, heaving bodies. Only instead of white feathers it was clumps of fur, and instead of sticking to sweaty tanned limbs they were sticking to twitching, bloody rabbit carcasses.

  You see, my father had chosen a male and female rabbit and, unbeknown to us, they’d mated and she’d given birth to what seemed like a million babies. They were so tiny they’d ingeniously hidden from us in the crevices of the shed whenever we’d gone in there: between the hutch and the wall, behind the chest freezer, under the lettuce and behind the water bowl. We had no idea they even existed. It seemed that a determined cat had managed to sneak into the shed through its tiny window and had a field day, much like Mike Myers on Halloween. Before we even knew of their existence this cat had slaughtered all the little newborns, just for sport.

  Well, nearly all.

  Once the final clump of fur had settled and we’d raked over the carcasses like a bunch of hyenas, we did find one tiny bunny still alive and shaking. I remember being able to hold this pitiful creature in the palm of my hand because it was so small, and I recall feeling its frantic, delicate heartbeat against my skin. I felt helpless, as if I should have somehow seen this tragedy coming, and if not that, then at least be able to put it right somehow.

  Death, my Old Foe, had struck again.

  The more you know about something, the more you can control it. In the case of tragedy, demystifying it helps you to regain control of the emotions. I did that with death. They say ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. Well, I kept my enemy, Death, so close to me it eventually felt confident enough to shoot ahead, do a complete lap around, and join me once more as my friend.

  * * *

  A stroke is medically known as a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), although in some ways there’s nothing ‘accidental’ about it. One of the main risk factors is tobacco smoking so my granddad, with his roll-up cigarettes, had contributed to his own death. Other risk factors include high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity – all things we can try to manage ourselves. I know this because years later, as a trainee APT, I would hold in my hands the brain of someone who had died from a CVA while Dr Jameson explained all this to me.

  ‘A stroke occurs when blood flow to part of the brain stops, either due to a blockage or the rupture of a blood vessel. Here – you can see the rupture.’ He pointed to a dark red area of blood in the pale brain slice. ‘You can decrease the risk of a stroke with blood thinners like the humble aspirin and generally taking good care of yourself.’

  ‘And can you tell if one is coming?’ I’d enquired, thinking of my granddad as I carefully placed the fragile brain back down on to the dissection board.

  ‘Yes. One side of the body may go numb or the vision in one eye may deteriorate. There might even be weakness to one side of the face and slurring of speech.’

  And there it was; I felt like I’d known it or at least wanted it to be the case since the day my granddad passed away: you could see Death coming if you knew what to look for. You could control him.

  Well, at least you could try.

  * * *

  The first time my mum heard I wanted to be a mortician was when I was about nine years old, in the salon chair, as the hairdresser carried out the usual ploy of chatting to me to distract me while she removed chunks of my hair, lest I start screaming.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ she sweetly asked, to which I replied ‘A mortician’, just as sweetly.

  I’m sure the scissors paused in mid-air at this, just for a moment, while the hairdresser glanced at my mother who returned her inquisitive stare with a shoulder shrug as if to say ‘nothing to do with me’. It just wasn’t that common for a small, blonde, female child to say they wanted to be a mortician in those days – the days before the media made death and forensics popular. It wasn’t a career that was well known and it wasn’t something that ran in my family, but for me it was a calling; I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. I had always been fascinated by the body and how it worked, long before I associated the miracle of life with inevitable death – a lesson I had learned at my dying grandfather’s feet. But after that fateful day I wanted to know what had happened to his body to snuff out his life so quickly, like a clockwork toy shuddering just before the energy is completely spent and the key stops turning.

  And it didn’t stop there.


  I was enthralled by any dead animal I found on the street – just like that poor cat – and often roped my friends into giving them burials in the garden. This is a very common thing for young children to do when becoming aware of their own mortality so please don’t worry if your little one creates a graveyard in the garden – you don’t have a budding serial killer on your hands. Perhaps less commonly, though, the maggots, the blood and the bloating only piqued my curiosity rather than dampened it: I needed to know what was going on. I asked for a microscope around my tenth birthday, and on ‘Bring in a Toy’ day at school I did a show-and-tell about how it worked to my classmates who I imagine were less than thrilled. I’m quite surprised I had any friends, now that I think of it. At the same age I could often be found wandering to the local library and borrowing A-Level biology textbooks to pore through on my own. I read in one of those many books that an earthworm cut in half will become two earthworms. Imagine that! Like a tiny Dr Frankenstein with pigtails and knee socks, I thought this was the key to avoiding death. Worm after worm was pulled out of the undulating mounds of our garden/graveyard by my relentless little fingers, then chopped in two and observed with a magnifying glass.