Carla Valentine - The Chick and the Dead - Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors

And everyone is especially interested in dead people or body parts or ‘remains’ or ‘cadavers’ at Halloween; I become particularly popular around that time of year. I always thought my fifteen minutes of fame were done and dusted with The Death Detective and never really expected any more front-of-camera brushes with showbiz until I was asked to go on Alan Titchmarsh’s show and bring some specimens from the Pathology Museum. The segment was to be on bizarre medical cures through the ages, one of my favourite topics, since many of the specimens in the pathology collection illustrate them. For example, there are syphilitic bones, twisted and pocked, from people who’d not only suffered with the infection but also from the damaging effects of the toxic mercury used as a ‘cure’. There is also a pot containing a long, thin tapeworm, an example of something women used to deliberately swallow as a diet aid; if you have a tapeworm living in your small intestine then it’ll consume the calories and you won’t… or so the theory goes.

I was collected from work in a taxi, carrying a plastic crate containing delicately wrapped bones, tapeworms and more. I had absolutely no idea what to expect and I was a bit self-conscious when I arrived at the studio, considering the bizarre nature of my cargo. But when I was helpfully shown to the Green Room, given a coffee and introduced to the other guests I started to relax. I needn’t have thought the box of body parts was the weirdest thing happening that day because in the Green Room were Rula Lenska, some of the Muppets, the Hairy Bikers and a baby that could do the dance to Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’. When my time came to get on stage and meet Alan and talk through the specimens live on camera in front of a studio audience, I just got on with it without any nervousness because I think I assumed I was dreaming.

The tactic must have worked because they invited me back on to the show for a Halloween special, this time to discuss a topic of my choosing. I talked about the medical origins of some popular monsters and brought in preserved examples of those conditions. One was leprosy as a real-life zombie analogy. Lepers used to be known as the zombies of the Middle East, declared un-dead by the Catholic Church. They were alive and yet they were not considered to be, so they had no rights. Another was porphyria, a type of anaemia, which may have given rise to the vampire myth as it leaves sufferers unable to go out in sunlight and causes their teeth to be stained red. They even asked me to take part in a quiz at the end of the show which consisted of Halloween-themed questions and tasks, and of course I won◦– I love Halloween! The prize was a golden pumpkin◦– a real mini pumpkin sprayed with gold paint. It was my pride and joy for about six months until one day I realised it had deflated into a bronze fungus and I knew it was time to lay it to rest. It went the way we all eventually will and decomposed into the earth. Unless, of course, we’re artificially preserved in pots like those under my charge now.

The specimens were a hit on TV. Human remains have power which fakes and fabrications do not. [5] OK, I was caught out that one time when I confused a prosthetic for a live human being but that’s not quite what I mean. In the UK it is difficult for most people to have contact with real human remains for various reasons, one being that we don’t tend to lay out our own dead like we used to and instead have professionals do it for us. Another is that museums, such as the one I work in, containing the remains of deceased individuals, require special licences in order for the general public to be able to see them. But I feel that there are things only human remains can teach us: they have an intensity and an agency that facsimiles don’t.

I remember being in history class aged about fourteen, learning about the Nazis. It seemed that half the class were more interested in spraying Impulse deodorant on themselves and reading Just Seventeen so our teacher became furious with us. ‘These people made lampshades out of human skin!’ he shouted. ‘How can you just witter on as though nothing horrifying happened?’ But we couldn’t relate◦– we were teenagers, more interested in whether or not our boobs were growing and we could upgrade from crop tops to bras than some random thing that happened in some random place years before we were born. It wasn’t until I saw a Holocaust exhibition◦– the piles and piles of human hair that had been shaved off the Nazis’ victims’ heads◦– that the horror actually hit me. There was a force from those remains that told me they would not be ignored. Student doctors feel the same when they dissect their designated cadavers in the labs at our medical school; they appreciate the donation and become attached to their charges. They even have a ceremonial Service of Remembrance at the end of the year once they finish their dissections. The new fake SynDaver™ made from silicon rubber will not elicit the same power and respect.

Actor Bradley Cooper felt the same. He played the Elephant Man in a recent production at a London theatre, and although there is a replica of Joseph Merrick’s skeleton in our public museum he asked to see the real remains, which reside in one of our galleries reserved only for medical students and researchers. He wanted to do the part justice so we obliged. He was praised for his representation of the character of Joseph Merrick and was very respectful of his remains. In fact, the day before he left to return home to the US he came back to see Joseph, simply to say goodbye to him. That skeleton is human, those decedents on the autopsy tables are human, even the people in my five thousand specimen pots are human. Important, powerful, and full of stories to tell◦– stories that I am privileged to be qualified to elicit in different ways.

This is why I love what I do now: the randomness of one day being on TV wearing a badge that says ‘Creepy Carla’ and winning a golden pumpkin, on another re-potting a specimen of a hernia from 1750, then on yet another being on a film set manhandling a method actress. I have years of experience carrying out autopsies, but as I said, the irony is that back then I was so busy I could never pursue any extra-curricular activities such as furthering my studies or appearing on TV. Now that I don’t work in mortuaries full time I’m much freer to reflect on what a totally crazy, rewarding and fulfilling job being an APT actually is. I have one foot in death’s past with my current job and collection of human remains, and one foot firmly in death’s present and future.

Working in a mortuary is not a dead-end job.

My granddad, Frederick, gratefully took the weight off his legs and sat back into his favourite chair with a gravelly sigh which metamorphosed into a smoker’s cough. We had just come in from what I called ‘the garden’, although it was really just a grassy patch at the front of the sheltered accommodation which he and my nan, Lily, called home. Still, it seemed like a huge garden to seven-year-old me and I can remember running lengths of it, back and forth, back and forth, as he sat with his back to the wall and his face to the sun, smoking a roll-up.

Looking back now, my granddad reminds me of Sid James, with his slicked-back grey hair and mischievous laugh which pushed his shining eyes into tight slits. But in younger years, in photos of him marrying my nan, for example, he was like Humphrey Bogart: all sharp suits and Brylcreem. During the Second World War he fought in Burma, though he never spoke about it, and he played the accordion because he was descended from Gypsies. And I don’t mean the ones you see on TV now, in huge, gaudy wedding dresses wearing too much make-up. I mean the ones from the Old Country who traversed the land in brightly painted horse-drawn caravans called vardos: proper Romani Gypsies who drank unpalatable liquor by firelight, who’d curse you as soon as look at you, and who slaughtered chickens during rituals to find out which of the family’s females would marry first.