Weapon: Superglue
well. But there is serious intent behind the merriment.
Doughty believes our attitudes towards death and the dying have become fearful and unhealthy. We live in a culture of death denial, which takes many forms: our obsession with youth, our terror of growing old, our disinclination to engage with the reality of dying.
Westwind now has an internet-only service, whereby you order and pay online, the company picks up the body from the hospital or hospice, has it cremated without fuss or ceremony and delivers the ashes to your door, without any human interaction at all. How creepy is that?
Yvette Venables’s book has no such didactic purpose: it is a gentler book about harsher times.
Stan Cribb’s undertaking career began as German bombs were flattening the East End — by 1944, Cribb Bros was almost the only building left standing in the immediate vicinity.
Amazingly, their stables weren’t hit, either. Stan’s beloved horses all survived the war with barely a scratch. Unfortunately, Stan’s uncle then decided to replace them with cars. Three went to auction, three to the knacker’s yard.
He tells some great stories, of good times and bad, of business rivals and eccentric customers. This is social history of the most entertaining sort.
Venables, who is married to former England manager Terry, hadn’t written a book before, but she knows good material when she finds it.
Here’s Stan on the Great Smog of 1952 in which thousands died: ‘Let me try to describe what it was like. Imagine if you held your hands out in front of you and they disappeared — that’s how thick it was.
‘It was black and evil and crept silently under doors and through windows and suffocated you in your sleep.
‘Within a few days, undertakers all over London, including us, had run out of coffins and were working as hard as they could under dire conditions to make as many as was physically possible.’
You almost feel as though you were there. And you are mightily glad that you weren’t.