mortal THIS TOIL

The grisly and gripping memoirs of the world’s weirdest mortuary technician

Think of a mortuary technician and you probably imagine a palefaced lank man, ‘a cemetery mink [who] lives down in a rib cage in the dry leaves of a heart’, as Clarice Starling said of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs. You almost certainly don’t imagine a young woman with hair as red as her lipstick and tattoos poking out of the sleeves of her vintage coat. Yet that’s Carla Valentine, and her book Past Mortems – memoir, technical guide and philosophical musing – is gripping.

Valentine skewers our fascination with and revulsion towards death: ‘the human instinct is to both turn away and look at the same time’.

We devour crime shows and novels, but few of us have seen a dead body in real life. We like the theory more than the practice. Valentine is our guide to that practice, and a most engaging one she is, too.

Past Mortems can be very funny, as you might expect from someone whose Twitter handle is @ChickAndTheDead and who runs a dating agency called Dead Meet.

The humour is often strictly gallows. ‘Did you find his left eyeball in that bag of brains?’ her colleague June asks at one point. But that particular case was a suicide jumper with horrendous injuries, and ‘June was being facetious for a reason. She needed to take me out of my head for a moment before I lost it.’

So the humour is not disrespectful to the dead: quite the opposite. Valentine not only sees her work as important, bringing dignity to her charges, but she also genuinely loves her job. Quoting poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch, she calls herself someone ‘whose being had begun to blend with their doing’.

Even aged seven, watching her grandfather die, ‘I had been intrigued as well as afraid’, and at university she ‘attended lectures on massfatality protocol and capacity-building in post-conflict regions rather than head out to the students’ union for Red Bull and vodka’. If you think that sounds weird, she’d probably agree, but it’s also what makes her interesting. Clocking that the word ‘autopsy’ comes from the Greek for ‘examination of the self’, she talks movingly of her own troubles, including a disastrous affair, a miscarriage and a near-breakdown. She’s always fascinating, even when being opaque for reasons of sensitivity (discussing her work after the 7/7 bombings), and the passages about dead children are beautifully handled if wrenchingly hard to read. The nuggets of information she drops in here and there are riveting. ‘Old age’ is rarely used on death certificates thanks partly to Harold Shipman. Rings are marked as ‘yellow metal’ or ‘white metal’ rather than ‘gold’ or ‘silver’ to avoid lawsuits (she sings ‘five yellow metal riiiings’ at Christmas). A body’s colour can hint at the cause of death: pink for carbon monoxide poisoning, blue for asphyxiation, yellow for liver failure. And all CPR dummies have the face of L’Inconnue de la Seine, an unknown 19th-century woman who drowned in Paris. A grisly topic, but a glorious read.