The New York Review Abroad (18 page)

The mass meeting in the Municipal Workers building dragged on.

The press were not allowed to attend it. The television crews and the camera men and the host of national reporters waited impatiently outside for the gravediggers’ verdict. Suddenly a spokesman for the National Union of Public Employees which represents the diggers came out of the door of the building. The reporters surged toward him. The union official was Irish and he looked very pleased with himself. As all the TV cameras focused on him, he announced that the gravediggers had decided to go back to work “but only with a skeleton staff.” Having made his joke he quickly disappeared back into the building.

After another hour and a half the meeting broke up in earnest. The gravediggers filed out of the committee room. They were stared at with a curiosity far more intense than that accorded to other union strikers. Their faces were closely scrutinized to see if their daily dealings with death had imprinted special traces of woe upon their features. In fact the diggers looked no more woeful than any other group of working men. They were mostly rather small, with the stunted look of the badly nourished. None of them had the huge arm muscles one expects from those whose life has been spent digging. Quite a few of them were extremely old, some were very young with the John the Baptist hair of hippies.

One gravedigger was black and I was puzzled how he had been allowed to join this selective white union. The gravediggers have a family tradition—their fathers, their grandfathers, their great grandfathers, etc., were usually all gravediggers before them. Some of these grave-digging dynasties can be traced back to the eighteenth century. They have a pride in their craft which they pass on from father to son. There was evidence of this during their strike in Manchester, a town where you are allowed to bury your own dead, unlike Liverpool, where there is a local law that declares amateur burial illegal. Two
brothers carrying their father’s coffin staggered into a graveyard and passed the Manchester pickets. They then proceeded to try to bury it. The pickets watched them with horror. The brothers made such a hideous mess of their grave that the gravediggers could stand it no longer. They left their posts, took the spades from the brothers’ hands, dug a perfect grave—finished it off—then returned to be on strike and keep vigil at the gates of the cemetery.

The gravediggers are a closed shop. They allow no one to join their union unless he is a son, a nephew, a brother-in-law of one of the present diggers. When I later asked the undertaker how the black gravedigger had been accepted he said that a lot of the Liverpool girls “slip up” with the foreign seamen and therefore the black gravedigger must be a relation too.

As the gravediggers filed past the press and the television cameras after their meeting they looked sheepish and bashful. They had been given orders by the union officials that they were not to speak to the press. Their spokesman however gave a press conference. He said that for humanitarian reasons the diggers had agreed to go back to work, but only for four weeks. If the council had not met their demands by that time they were going on strike indefinitely.

What were the gravediggers going to do about the “backlog”? He said they were not going to knock themselves out dealing with the “backlog” unless they were paid overtime for the work involved. He said the gravediggers feel that their services are appreciated only once they are withdrawn. At the same time they regretted and sympathized with the distress the strike caused the bereaved.

After the meeting I went in a taxi to Liverpool’s Jewish cemetery to see if it had been affected by the strike. My driver was a tough Church of England man. It soon emerged he was also anti-Semitic. He said that he bet that Jews were getting away with it. “Trust them to get themselves buried when no one else can manage it.” When we got
to the cemetery he got out of his taxi and came in with me. “Look at all the expensive marble they’ve got in here,” he said. He then became wildly excited because he found a freshly dug grave. “Didn’t I tell you! Trust the Jews!”

Usually newly dug graves are a depressing sight but in the curious atmosphere of the Liverpool strike I found myself staring at a dismal strip of wet mud in the Jewish cemetery with a kind of wonder. It looked rather beautiful and miraculous—just because it existed. When a tiny elf-like Jewish gravedigger came out of a lodge, I asked him if he was affected by the strike. He told me he did all his own digging and he was not paid by the council. But he looked terrified, as if he felt it was dangerous to admit this. He obviously was afraid that a peculiar new phenomenon of “grave envy” might stir up ancient racial and religious prejudices, that he might suffer retaliation, and Protestant and Catholic vandals would arrive to despoil and desecrate his graves.

Liverpool’s leading undertaker is brisk and dapper—a businessman. He and his three younger brothers own four Chapels of Rest and also a trucking firm. Undertaking, he said, was a profession that was handed down in families, like that of the gravediggers. The strike had made his life a nightmare. In the Chapel of Rest where we were talking he usually had two occupied coffins, but he now had one hundred and fifty. None of the corpses had been properly embalmed. It was no good pretending they had. He was an embalmer himself. As a small child his father had taught him the trade. There was not much to it. Embalming was similar to what any woman does when she stuffs and prepares a chicken for the oven, he said. It was a question of plugging up the appropriate orifices.

Unfortunately he simply hadn’t had the time to work on the bodies since the strike. He was much too frantic trying to arrange for his
hearses to do all the “pick ups” and the “drop offs.” He was using a “freelance” embalmer. The poor man was at the end of his tether and the work was “snowing him under.” The freelance embalmer had done his best, but it was a makeshift job as he hadn’t got the proper oils and salts. The undertaker waved his hand toward the back of the Chapel of Rest on the door of which was written “Enter with joy—all you who enter here.” “None of the bodies in here at present are satisfactory …,” he said. “Not what I’d call satisfactory at all.…” In normal times he apparently got few requests for embalmment. The process was not required by the health laws and was too expensive for most families. It costs £50 and the results last only seven weeks. Now in the emergency the relatives were insisting on it. “Fortunately they can’t see what a bad job we are doing here. We don’t dare to let the relatives in.”

During the strike bereaved Liverpool families still insisted on hiring a hearse and three black cars to take them to a funeral at the church. After the service the mourners would go back to their homes while the hearse with the coffin went off in a different direction, to one of the suburban warehouses. “That’s not what most families want from a funeral,” the undertaker said. “People want their dead to have some little patch of ground that belongs to them—a definite place where the mourners can come in order to shed a tear—or plant a rose.” One thing he would say in favor of the strike, though—there was equality in the warehouses at the moment. People who would normally be given a pauper’s grave were getting exactly the same treatment as the well-to-do. He was worried that once the strike stopped, the coffins would get muddled up.

The undertaker said that some of the bereaved families were being extremely unreasonable. They seemed unable to sympathize with the problems of logistics that would face him in the next weeks. They
refused to have their coffin taken from the warehouses directly to the cemetery. They insisted it be first taken to a church for a service before it went on to the graveyard. They wouldn’t acknowledge they had already been given a church service—that he’d already once provided them with a hearse and three black cars. They wanted to start from scratch. He warned them he would have to charge them the price of two funerals.

I asked him how he would cope if the gravediggers went on strike indefinitely. He clasped his head in a gesture of agony. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “As I’ve told you, I can’t cope with the backlog we have got at the moment. I have new bodies coming in every day and I have to put them at the back of the queue. A funeral is a slow thing—that’s the trouble. You can’t hurry up the funeral procedures in order to fit more people in.…” I could see his point, that it would be startling to see solemn black hearses whizzing like racing cars through the streets of Liverpool as they did their “pick ups” and their “drop offs.”

As I sat in the Chapel of Rest and listened to the problems of the undertaker, they seemed like those of the nation, almost insuperable. Once the backlog of this particular strike eventually had been cleared up the gravediggers seemed likely to go back on strike—as have so many other strikers who cleared up other backlogs. The general prospects, like the condition of the badly embalmed bodies, appeared “unsatisfactory.”

—May 3, 1979

Rosemary Dinnage

HALFWAY BETWEEN THE
southern cities of Madras and Bangalore, Vellore is a small town with a thirteenth-century fort, a long, busy bazaar, and Christian Medical College. Founded in 1900 as a one-bed dispensary, CMC has grown to employ 2,500 staff, train graduates in thirty different specialties, and treat patients from many countries outside India. It is a reminder of the benevolent aspects of the Raj; supported by Protestant churches abroad as well as missions and diocesan councils from all over India, it still adjusts its charges to the patients’ purses and prides itself on dispensing two or three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of free care in a year.