Bill the Body

 

My friend “A” is doing research for a novel . . . . .

A :  Tell me about the morgue.

D :  It was always called the mortuary, never the morgue.  This mortuary was at the back of a large old teaching hospital in the East End of London which was on a busy main road from the City and its Banks.

A : What does the mortuary smell like?

D  :  The three I have been in all have a distinct smell  -  a combination of stale disinfectant and a faint but certain unmistakable rotten body-odour.  The London had an extra smell, formaldehyde (preserving fluid) because samples were kept for teaching purposes.

A  :  What temperature is the mortuary?

D  :  Always a dry cool, not a damp clinging cool, like a cool in the supermarket frozen section as you walk through it.

A  :  What was the overall colour of the mortuary (grey, white, stainless steel)?

D  :  Tiles on floor and walls, off-white.  The coroner’s mortuary was old green tiles, many chipped and worn.

A  :  What was the overall feeling of being in the mortuary (cold, quiet, scary, normal, busy, eerie)? Would that feeling be any different late at night?

D  :  Visitors were always uneasy but the staff work there so they are very matter of fact; even the new staff adjust very quickly, taking their cue from the older more experienced staff  but even the old hands would not linger in the mortuary at night.  There was one Asian porter who was more timid than most and he hated to go to the mortuary on his own.   Once, he took a body there late at night but made a mistake transferring the body into the fridge and it fell on top of him.  It was a very fat lady who pinned him to the floor with her weight and he had to struggle like mad to get her off.  A passing Lab Technician heard his cries and went to help him.

A  :  How many bodies were kept in the mortuary at any one time and for how long?

D  :  The fridge had a capacity for 24 places.  One big fridge, four places in a stack, with 6 rows, each row having its own single door.  I never saw it full.

 A body usually stayed there from several days up to a week or 2, and then a Funeral Director’s hearse would come to collect the body.  (I think the College attached to the hospital, where the Doctors trained, had their own fridge where the cadavers were kept for the dissection classes).

Where a body was part of a police investigation, it might be kept longer, but those bodies would normally go to the Coroner's Mortuary, (about half a mile away in Limehouse High St).  Sometimes, bodies went straight there, where cause of death in suspicious circumstances needed establishing.

Bodies would stay in the fridge where no next of kin claimed them.  The hospital then had to arrange funerals and dispose of any property; all this carefully controlled by regulation. (When I moved on from being a porter, I used to do this job.)  If there were complications, such as, knowing there were next of kin but not being able to contact them, this could take a long time.  I remember one body was there over 6 months. 

A  :  How were bodies taken to the mortuary (what was the trolley called that the body is carried on, were they covered up)?

D  :  Patient dies.  If no doctor there, one was called to pronounce death and write up details in notes.  If relatives there, they can see body.  Or the body may remain on ward for a while till relatives arrive, especially at weekends when no staff in the mortuary to show bodies.  Eventually, a nurse would phone the porters’ station at the Front Door.  Two porters would come unless they were busy or if at night or weekends, then only one.  The nurses would have to help lift the body, wrapped in white sheet, into the box of the mortuary trolley.

It was called the mortuary trolley or the body cart.  A large aluminium box on wheels with a white sheet draped over it.  Very few patients or visitors knew what it was.  I was often in the lift full of people coming to visit patients and I was taking the trolley to the mortuary with body inside, whilst the visitors chatted about this or that.  If the lift filled up, I would sit on the trolley to make more room.

Late at night, in one of the long corridors and no one around, I would rush the trolley down the corridor and then jump on to it, riding it along for a bit.  There was one slightly downhill but that was lots of fun.  I was the only porter that would talk to the bodies as I was putting them away.  I told them not to be scared and to follow the light etc . . . .

A  :  What colour was the sheet/body-bag covering the body in the morgue and what type of material?

D  :  Always heavy coarse white cotton.

A  :  Did visitors come to the mortuary to see bodies?

D  :  There was a side door to the mortuary that lead to the viewing room.  At night or at weekends, the nurses would have to come over and get the body out and arrange it in the viewing room.  The porters never did this and would refuse if asked by any inexperienced nurse.  The porters were always careful not to volunteer for anything for fear of getting "lumbered".  Office hours saw the mortuary staff deal with visiting viewing relatives.  Jewish and strict Moslems had to be processed fast; (burial in 24 hours).  A rabbi or relative was supposed to stay with the body all the time.  They would sit on an uncomfortable looking formica chair next to the fridge.

A  :  Is the head of the mortuary known as the head mortician?

D  :  It may vary from place to place, but Bill was titled Head of Mortuary Services.

A  :  What's the difference between a mortician and a porter. Can a porter do a mortician's work but not vice versa?

D  :  Morticians have a professional qualification, the better qualified would run a mortuary in a large teaching hospital, probably with 2 or 3 staff.  They run the mortuary, do all the admin, liaise with wards and funeral directors, prepare the body for post mortem exam by opening the chest with  a mechanical saw, take out all the organs ready for inspection, saw off the top of the head and take out the brain.  All organs left on the side of the slab ready for whoever is going to carry out the exam.  The examiner does very little cutting.  The technician would then replace all the organs and sew the body back up.

Porters move patients and carry out other routine tasks.  Moving dead ones is just a variation on that task.  Porters and mortuary technicians are therefore quite different and did not mix much.

A night and on weekends, the porters had to put the bodies in the fridge.   During the day, the porter had to take the trolley back to the hospital, so they used to put the body on a slab to wait for moving into the fridge, which the technicians did.

A  :  Did Bill the Body have any odd characteristics?

D  :  Bill was not very popular.  He looked down on his own technicians and porters and cleaners, looked down on ordinary nurses but was servile and obsequious to senior nurses and doctors, even quite junior doctors.

He kept his sandwiches in a Tupperware box and his milk bottles in the mortuary fridge.  Often I would open the door and see his food there on the floor, under one of the body-trays.  I hid them under a body once and he was furious, though he never found out it was me!

In those days, most people smoked at work.  Bill seemed to permanently have a little droopy rolled cig stuck to this lower lip; when he spoke, it wobbled up and down.   He looked at you over his glasses.  He was a bit like a shorter version of Walter Matthau but he never smiled.

A  :  Were there any other notable/odd characters working in the hospital/morgue?

D  :  They were all a strange & Dickensian lot.  Some of the 'old salt' porters had been there 20 years and knew all the dodges and subterfuges.  No one worked harder than they had to.  Older porters used to always tell the younger ones to slow down.  I used to volunteer to “do the bodies” on my own and they let me because it was hard work.  They accepted my explanation that I was just weird.  I would dodge out of other jobs or slip off for a cig so I was accepted as one of the lads, (just a bit weird).   I would go the mortuary as often as I could and Bill seemed to tolerate my looking round.  He seemed flattered that I was interested in his job and would tell me about it, (at length).  He took me into a small room, full of pickled brains, all the jars still had the patients' names and dates on them.

A  :  What does a dead body (before rigor mortis has set in) feel and look like? Grey, clammy, cold, peaceful, asleep, calm, pale, blood pooled in lower extremities, water comes to surface so no wrinkles?

D  :  Bodies after they die are still soft (and heavy, awkward to lift).  Rigor sets in about 2 - 4 hours after, and it goes stiff, (but still bendable if force is used).  About 12 hours later the body gets soft again but never as soft.  When a body comes out of the fridge after several days it is stiff but pliable.  Dead people go a very particular yellow and grey colour, their mouths often hang open, their features are slack so they do not look peaceful as such.  They look dead.

A  :  How do you get the bodies into the cold store?

D  :  You have to lift the body from the box onto a tray.  This is done by opening the side of the box, (whereas you put the body in via the top lid.)  There is a device that the tray sits on that can go very low, you slide the body onto this device and onto its tray.  You then move the device so it lines up with the open fridge door and vacant slot.  You then pump the handle on the device which raises the tray as high as you need.  The device has rollers on it, as does the slot in the fridge, so the tray slides in easy.  However, if you slam the tray too hard, it bounces back off the rear wall of the fridge and can shoot out fall on top of you.  This never happened to me but I nearly go clobbered the first time: my porter friend had told me to give it a good hard shove, he scarpered out the way and I only just held onto the rapidly re-emerging tray with wobbling body on it.

The bodies are all wrapped in sheets.  Often, the sheets are rolled back when in the fridge so the grey-yellowy faces are seen.   Very small babies, who sometimes do not go grey-yellow but still look as if they are sleeping, are kept in clear plastic bags.  if the fridge is a bit full, sometimes the babies are 2 or 3 to a slot.

A :  When you were in the morgue, sorry mortuary, late at night on your own, seeing the dead bodies in the freezer, did you ever wonder about you, your body, being in a place like that one day?

D  :  No.

A  :  Just “no”?  I think about things like that sometimes.

D  :  That’s because you think of it as “your” body.