The New York Review Abroad (17 page)

In the eighteenth century Liverpool was an important seaport, international, glamorous, and gay. It thrived on the slave trade. Now it is intensely depressing, provincial, and poor. Only a few Georgian terraces remain as a reminder of the city’s vanished beauty. Most of its
eighteenth-century buildings have been razed and replaced by tower blocks and unsightly concrete high-rises. Architecturally it is a mess. The center of Liverpool was bombed by the Germans and gutted in the war and now at its very heart all that has been reconstructed is an ill-planned and tawdry shopping complex. The whole city gives one the feeling that it died long ago and no one chose to bury it. It is therefore ironic that of all English towns it should have been the most seriously affected by the gravediggers’ strike.

When I arrived there during the second week of the strike it was freezing weather and the garbage-strewn streets were shrouded in an unhealthy gray mixture of sea mist and industrial fog. My journey by train from London had taken twice the time it should have done because the train workers were staging a go-slow strike. No refreshments were served on the train because the railway canteen staff were also striking. The hall porter of my hotel told me that Liverpool recently had been even more plagued by strikes than London. It had no bread, milk, ambulance service, social security workers, rubbish collection, or working hospitals. The water-workers were just about to strike, so were the sewage men, the firemen, and the police.

He found the gravediggers’ strike particularly upsetting. “Can you imagine the distress it’s causing to the people who’ve just lost someone? They are making the bereaved remove all the jewelry from their relatives’ bodies. The council are frightened there may be looting in the warehouses. It’s barbaric. It’s like something in science fiction!” The porter told me that the council was trying its best to keep the bodies of dead children on ice in the hospitals. “No mother can bear the idea of her dead kid being put in storage with lots of cancerous old people in some bloody warehouse. The trouble is the hospital morgues are very small and they are running out of space.…”

Like many other people that I spoke to in Liverpool he felt the government ought to bring in the army. About the gravediggers as a
group his feelings were ambivalent. He felt that they were ill-paid (they earn an average of £45 a week) and that their working conditions were undesirable. On the other hand he thought it was ludicrous that such a small group of men should have the power to create such distress. Liverpool has only fifty-six gravediggers. Manchester has fourteen. He saw no reason in this modern age why there should be any gravediggers at all. He found it ridiculous that three men should still be spending up to six hours hacking away at frozen earth with a pick in order to dig one solitary grave when machinery could do the same job with much more speed and efficiency.

One of the chief complaints of the diggers themselves is that whenever they dig a grave, they almost always find another coffin in the ground. Their feet go through it and they find themselves wading around in foul water which is floating with rotting human remains. They often also see grinning skulls staring them in the face. Their opponents remain skeptical about the validity of this particular grievance and take the attitude that unless the council is allowing people to be buried one on top of another with no time lapse at all, the bones that the diggers come across must be ancient and therefore clean—this leads to the argument that if the gravediggers are so fastidious that they can’t bear to come upon a few clean bones, they have clearly chosen the wrong trade.

The ancient operatic image of the gravedigger as a diabolic scavenging creature with spade and dark cloak apparently still lingers in the psyche of this modern community. In Liverpool I often heard the gravediggers charged with hypocrisy. They were accused of claiming to be underpaid while all the time they were holding down a job which brings them in inestimable untaxed wealth in the form of buried treasure. I also heard them denounced as fraudulent because while they bemoan their £45 a week wage, they refuse to admit either
to the general public or to the tax officials that for every grave they dig they receive automatic and handsome tips—in Liverpool, which has a predominantly Irish-Catholic population, it is a custom that the bereaved must “give something to the gravediggers.”

Never, so I was told, has there been a more unpopular union strike. The striking gravediggers were frightened to go into any pub or bar in case they encountered the relations or the friends of someone who had ended up stored in a warehouse.

I asked a doctor working for the city Health Authority what he felt about the strike. He said that its effects obviously were not very pretty—that it was being suggested that the council put the bodies in the ice-rink, submerge them in water, and simply freeze them in so that the kids could figure skate above them. He still felt that the public’s hostile attitude toward the diggers was unfair. “Have you any idea what the morbidity rate of the average gravedigger is?” he asked me angrily. “No,” I said. “No … No … I’m afraid I have no idea.” “Did you know that any gravedigger has
three
times the morbidity rate of the average British working-class man!”

Later I asked a taxi driver to take me to the nearest cemetery. He looked at me with alarm and horror. It occurred to me that it is not customary to ask to be taken to the
nearest
graveyard. In general people tend to be specific about which particular one they wish to visit. I explained that I was writing about the strike, that I hoped to be able to talk to the pickets. He said I wouldn’t find any pickets, that they’d locked the cemetery gates and gone home. “I’ll take you up to see one of the factories where they are putting the bodies,” he said. “The bodies are just as much to do with the strike as the gravediggers.” “Yes, I suppose they are,” I said. I had a vivid and ghastly image of the “critical coffins” and I felt nauseated by the idea of having to inspect them.

We drove out of the center of Liverpool into a terrible suburb called Speke. A sprawling industrial complex, it covers a vast area. We kept driving and driving through a hellish landscape where cheap prefabricated factories lie so close together they roll on like fields. Barbed-wire fences provide the only hedges, and the menacing silhouettes of pylons are the nearest things to trees. Driving through this fearful industrialized wasteland the taxi seemed like a tumbrel and the factory with the unburied buried dead about as appealing as the guillotine. We turned off the highway into a hinterland of factories separated by ribbon lanes of concrete. We stopped outside a huge, modern, vomit-colored building, beside which there was an ambulance and a policeman.

“That’s where they’ve put the bodies,” the driver said. “Can you wait?” I asked him nervously. “I really don’t want to stay here very long.” “Sorry, I have to go to the airport,” he said. “Don’t look so frightened, luv.… The bodies aren’t going to eat you.”

I got out and the taxi drove off. I went up to the policeman and explained I was writing about the strike. I asked him if this was the factory where they were storing the bodies. “Oh, we have hundreds of bodies in here.” His tone was jovial and complacent. “What do you want to know about them?”

“Exactly how many hundreds of bodies are being stored here?” I asked him. He looked at me with suspicion. His voice became gruff and accusatory. “Why do you care how many bodies we’ve got in this factory? What makes you so very interested?” “Well.…” I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see that the precise numbers had a certain interest.

“Are they in coffins?” I asked. I had heard unpleasant rumors that they were being stored in plastic bags. “Coffins?” He looked astounded. I then saw that the taxi driver had dropped me off at the wrong place. I was at a Leyland factory, one of Britain’s largest car
manufacturers. When the policeman had spoken of having hundreds of bodies he had been speaking all the time of car bodies. Since Leyland workers were planning a major strike the following day this coincidence had added to our misunderstanding.

“You want the place where they’ve put the deceased,” the policeman said.

Apparently they were just down the road in a disused electronics factory. I wondered if it had closed down as a result of some other strike. As I walked down the road I noticed the most vile and overpowering smell. I tried to pretend it was the stench of industrial waste. But I knew quite well I was getting very near to the deceased.

The factory that held them was a pretentious red brick building with a neo-Georgian façade. It looked as if it had been built around 1930. It had a white flagpole on its roof, but no flag. The pole looked too upright, jaunty and festive. Perhaps it was respect for the unburied that had prompted the council to choose this untypical warehouse with its imposing neoclassical design, this terrible mockery of a stately home. The stateliness of its façade was fatally marred by the fact that where there should have been ivy or Virginia creeper there was an impenetrable entanglement of barbed wire, put there to ward off possible looters.

There was no one on the premises. The bodies had been locked up—sealed off with barbed wire and totally deserted. Who could be expected to sit day and night in this lonely neo-Georgian factory with the dead? Yet I felt the unburied should have been given the symbolic honor of at least being guarded by a policeman. It seemed disturbing that the cars in the Leyland factory were being given preferential treatment. But then what exactly would a policeman guard the dead from? The possibility of looters was minimal. Time was the enemy of these unlucky corpses, not marauders.

The following day I went to the General Municipal Workers center where the gravediggers were holding a mass meeting in order to decide if they would return to work. There was a feeling of excitement and tension, and suspense. The building was surrounded by reporters, including television crews. On top of their demand for a “substantial pay increase” the gravediggers are asking for better facilities in the cemeteries. They want to have showers and changing rooms. They complain they have nowhere to wash after work, and they have to go home in filthy clothes.

The cemeteries have a machine that flattens the graves. This machine is housed in a shed, with spades and other tools. The diggers are bitter because they are not provided with a shed of any kind and they feel that the graveyard equipment is given a care and respect which they are denied. They receive almost unanimous public sympathy for this complaint. The diggers, however, are also asking to have tea machines in the cemeteries. This demand is being much less sympathetically received. Most urban British graveyards are vast and they cover countless square acres. For this reason a single tea machine per graveyard would be impractical. If the diggers are to have hot tea made conveniently available to them a plethora of machines will have to be installed. This creates a genuine dilemma for the local council; to any religious person who sees the cemetery as a hallowed and sacred spot, the thought of it being dotted with multicolored machines is blasphemy. People visualize the graves of their loved ones littered with paper cups. They see this particular union demand as the thin end of the wedge. Once there are tea machines in the graveyards—why not cigarette machines, candy machines, pinball and fruit machines? “The gravediggers are going a bit too far with their tea machines,” Liverpool’s leading undertaker said to me. “You’d think they’d never heard of such a thing as the thermos.”