Tragedy that gave me strength to succeed

WHEN I was 15, my father was crushed by a falling boulder down the mine he worked in.

Both his hips were shattered and he suffered awful internal i njuries. According to the doctors, he should have died but somehow he managed to remain conscious until he was found.

I went with my mother to the hospital. He was pale and in terrible pain. ‘Don’t die, Dad,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m trying my best not to, lad,’ he said.

His full recovery took many months, during which time he was off work. ‘Brian, lad,’ he told me, ‘we’re going to have to take you out of school and put you to work.’

My mother agreed. ‘You’re eating us out of house and home. You must weigh at least 13 stone. I need you to work, Brian!’

I was devastated. I was now the model pupil and had just been made school captain. To have it all taken away seemed so unfair. My final year at school — gone.

But there was no alternative. I became an undertaker’s assistant, making coffins. Bleeding marvellous!

My boss was Percy Philipson, the most miserable man who ever set foot on this earth. Smiling was a sackable offence. Just being in his company depressed me. He wasn’t known as the Grim Reaper for nothing.

I worked in the basement underneath his shop, a large room with no natural light.

After a few weeks’ training, he succeeded in teaching me how to make the perfect coffin. I was now a proper undertaker’s assistant. I could wash the body with carbolic, massage it where rigor mortis had set in, use make-up if they’d started to go off a bit, bring the eyes out from their sockets, build a coffin, line it and so on.

My only fault was that I was forever getting the measurements wrong. This didn’t really matter when I made the coffin too big but too small was a problem. On more than one occasion I’d have my knee on some poor corpse’s chest, desperately trying to lever him or her into their new home.

But I was never completely impervious to the more distressing aspects of my job. I arrived at work one morning to find on the slab the body of Barry Patterson, one of my oldest friends. He’d been on his bike and killed by a car.

Tears welled in my eyes and that was the end for me. I was just a 15-year-old boy.

I made Barry’s coffin (although I couldn’t bring myself to prepare the body) and then I quit.

But being an undertaker’s assistant left its mark. When I left Mr Philipson’s service, I did so with a greater appreciation of life and a much diminished obsession with death.

It was there that I learnt to accept death for what it is and to embrace life for as long as it’s here. I have Barry to thank for that. Seeing him reorganised my priorities — into the right bloody order this time. I went off to be an actor.