Tony Bryant has saved a coffin for me. I’m forty-five minutes late because of a cancelled train and I’m running up the path when I see him standing out the front, waiting, the blocky brick crematorium chapel looming behind him. He’s in his mid-fifties, wearing a tight black T-shirt tucked in to black jeans and a studded leather belt. Faded tattoos poke out the bottom of his sleeves. In his thick West Country accent he shouts, ‘We’ve co-ordinated our outfits!’ Mine is sweatier. Dragging myself up hills while Bristolian men wave at me from afar seems to be my MO now.
Through a door around the back of the building, we head down the grey and green linoleum stairs, all edged in yellow-and-black-striped hazard tape, to the basement. A wooden coffin sits on a white steel hoist in front of four furnaces, each with their own metal door. A printed photograph of two young blonde children is tucked under the engraved metal nameplate next to the green floral clay that once held the wreath in place in the chapel upstairs.
It really doesn’t matter that I’ve now seen coffins, empty, standing in rows in a mortuary, or others, occupied, in funeral homes. There is a symbolism and a reality in a coffin that still winds me. I’ve sat at intersections waiting for the lights to change, then missed it because a hearse drove by, brought back from my thoughts by beeps and horns. In my mind I’m picturing it: the shoulders aligned in the angled corners, the lid so close to the nose, the hands holding each other in the dark. Seeing a coffin in a stark industrial setting like this, denuded of flowers and religious ceremony, is a different kind of shock from seeing the hearse and car pull up outside your house to take you and your family to the church – but the power this box holds is still there.
Tony walks around the coffin and motions to me to follow him, ducking through the gap between the machines to get to the touchscreen controls: unexpectedly high-tech for something made of fire and brick yet still designed with a similar aesthetic to Windows 95 (before the touchscreen he had a manual control board with buttons he describes as being like Doctor Who’s TARDIS). Nearby, tubs of ashes line two shelves against the brick wall. Tony tells me they belong to families waiting to decide if they want to witness the scattering of the ashes – the ones on the top are for people who have already decided they don’t want to be there for it, but he gives them two weeks to change their minds. Some do. In a small office off the cremating room, he keeps those that are waiting to be collected. Sometimes, no one comes for them.
The temperature of the space inside the bricks needs to be 862 degrees Celsius so it will incinerate, not cook. We stand at the screen and watch the numbers flick over: 854, 855. A bar graph in the middle shows the levels of various things and Tony explains them over the loudening roar. I catch bits of it, something about the cooling and heating and filtering of air so that there’s no visible smoke outside the building. He’s pointing at a spaghetti junction of steel pipes above us, compartments below us. He’s explaining UV sensors, air flow, spark plugs. He opens the hatch to the main burner – the heart of the machine, the fire that heats the furnaces. The flames rage, burning the fresh oxygen as it rushes in to feed them. A black beetle scuttles past on the floor, its long articulated body raised in a curl behind it like a scorpion. I point at it. ‘That’s called a Devil’s Coachman!’ Tony shouts above the noise, grinning because he knows I won’t believe him. I google it later and it’s true.
The numbers march on: 861, 862. Tony rushes back through the walkway, where the coffin is waiting by the doors to the furnaces. He tells me to stand back in the corner where I won’t get in the way, and presses a blue button. One door slides up to reveal a glowing orange oven lined with bricks, and a cement floor as ravaged as the surface of the moon. I squeeze myself into the corner and can still feel the heat on my face from ten feet away.
‘This is very unceremonious,’ he says, his hand on the foot of the coffin.
Here is a fact that only becomes obvious when you’re standing in front of an open cremator: there are no wheels on the bottom of a coffin. There are no pulleys or levers to gently move this heavy object from the hoist to the hot place where it will ultimately disappear – at least, there aren’t any in this crematorium. And so there’s this: the unceremony of Tony relying on momentum and aim alone. He slides the coffin back on the smooth metal hoist and then charges it, one-armed, with all of his weight, into the mouth of the oven. My involuntary gasp is lost in the roar as the coffin rumbles across the uneven cement. Sparks fly and glitter white against the orange. The picture of the children flutters to a corner and combusts. The coffin is already on fire as the door comes down. I step forward to look through the peephole and watch as it is swallowed by flames. There’s a faint smell of steamed clams.
Tony holds his arms out to show me: one bigger than the other, a lopsided Popeye. ‘I should swap sides occasionally, I suppose,’ he says, laughing. Why change a habit of thirty years?
Canford Crematorium in Bristol averages about eight bodies a day, maybe 1,700 a year. Tony walks up from his lodge inside the cemetery (it comes with the job) and turns the machine on at seven o’clock every morning, giving it a couple of hours to preheat before the first cremation. They’ve had four already this morning, and three scheduled for this afternoon. I’m here in the quiet gap between them. Tony keeps checking his watch.
The cemetery that surrounds this place is about a hundred years old, the crematorium half of that. Since the time it was built, the cremation rate in the UK has risen from around 35 per cent to 78 per cent of all funerals (America is lagging behind at 55 per cent). The size of people has changed too: if you’re over six foot ten, or weigh over 150 kg, it is possible your coffin won’t fit through the hole in the floor of the old chapel that allows your body to be transported downstairs. Local funeral homes are aware of this and take larger clients elsewhere.
Before Tony got the job in the basement, he worked outside as one of twelve gardeners, tending to the thirty rose beds and some 2,000 bushes, trimming the hedges and shrubbery, keeping watch over the greenhouse that grew fresh flowers for the chapel vases that are now filled with plastic displays. But the machinery of cremation interested him, the money was (marginally) better, and, he said, ‘You can’t stay outside getting cold and wet forever.’ Downstairs, you’re always warm.
We’re in the kitchen now, the kind of bare governmental back room that is made only slightly less bleak by comedy signs about quitting your job and the kind of mugs that are left behind after Secret Santas and Easter eggs. One has Homer Simpson holding Spider Pig up to the ceiling, and Tony is drinking black instant coffee from it. His colleague, Dave, is eating toast with ham and fried eggs. Dave’s black suit jacket hangs on a hook by the door, his matching black tie tucked inside his shirt so he doesn’t get egg on it before the funeral service. He’s younger than Tony, about my age, with dark hair and a goatee beard. When I meet him he’s reading a copy of Dracula he found on the wall outside someone’s house. There are supermarket chocolate-chip muffins in a plastic tray on the Formica table. We eat them while bodies downstairs burn in their furnace cubicles.
I’m here at the crematorium to see the industrial end of death: the part where all of the ceremony and courtesy of dealing with the living has passed and bodies are consumed by flames. I’ve met people who organise funerals, another who carefully takes imprints of faces, and someone who meticulously sets those features for the family’s final look. This is the place beyond that, the basement, where the interaction with the living is over and all we have is men moving coffins to ovens, and bones to blenders. Or at least that’s what I thought, but I very quickly realise that’s not exactly the case.
I’ve been talking to them for an hour and what has struck me the most is the disconnect between what happens above and what happens below, how a lack of knowledge in what happens in death – either by general ignorance or funeral directors not being straight with people – leads to things going wrong, or less well, downstairs. Tony says he never would have taken a job that involved touching dead bodies – ‘They’re spooky, innit’ he says, recoiling – and mostly, he doesn’t have to. If everyone was more aware of how the system works, dead bodies would remain only the theoretical contents of a sealed box. But a family arguing for months about who’s going to pay for the now much-delayed funeral doesn’t think of the man in the crematorium when the body finally arrives. They don’t picture Tony, waiting, his back against the wall in the furthest corner of the basement, listening to the final notes of the organ as the mourners leave, already able to smell what is about to come down on his hydraulic lift. They don’t think ahead to the body leaking and contaminating the hearse, the chapel and finally the basement, engulfing him in a funk of decay for days – a stench so bad the funeral director apologetically gifted him air freshener that, according to Tony, smelled even worse than the dead man. ‘Have a go on that,’ he says now, incredulously, holding up the small brown bottle he’s fetched from his office, the lid already off. It smells like chemical liquorice. I agree it would be olfactory warfare to put this in a diffuser. ‘There’s a time limit on a dead body,’ he says, screwing the lid back on tightly. ‘Sometimes I think funeral directors skirt round it.’ He puts the bottle back on a shelf, never to be used.
Then there’s the funeral directors selling coffins made of wicker or cardboard, pitching them as a greener alternative to families who want to do environmental good. When they originally entered the market, nobody considered the physical action of ‘charging’ a coffin, and how much of that relied on solid wood being able to skate across cement. Early designs would combust and vanish before the coffin was all the way in – leaving crematorium staff to push the body into the cremator without it. Now, after much discussion and testing, they come with a solid board base. But the wood from a traditional coffin also serves as fuel for flames, so to compensate for its absence Tony has to turn on the gas jets – transforming the coffins into not quite the eco-friendly alternative they were sold as. Without combustion, the body merely bakes. Peer through the peephole and it looks like a man in a wetsuit. The jets blast the body apart.
In response to whether thirty years of this makes him think about his own death, or his own body being burned, Tony is proudly showing me pictures of his dog, Bruno: a white and speckled-brown rescue Staffie, his huge tongue lolling out of his beefy face. Tony is beaming like a man in love. ‘I missed it! I escaped my own death!’ he says, so far failing to explain why I’m looking at a picture of a dog, not that I mind. ‘I got run off the back of me motorbike at 60 mph, four years ago. Old Bruno was in the sidecar.’ As Tony’s head hit the ground, Bruno sailed on unharmed in the sidecar of the Kawasaki Drifter, eventually coming to a stop a little further down the road. Tony ended up in hospital, while Bruno sat patiently in his stationary seat, waiting to be collected.
Tony regularly gives tours of the place, much like I’m getting today, to new vicars or funeral directors so they have more of an idea of what actions above mean to those below – but the thing that’s becoming increasingly clear is that this job isn’t confined purely to the basement, or even to the dead. Sometimes those tours are given to the dying, who are planning their own funeral and want to know exactly what will happen. Tony will show them the catafalque in the chapel – the decorative plinth that bears the coffin, with its hidden industrial lift controlled by a brass button in the pulpit, worn and discoloured by decades of celebrant fingers – and tell them they have a choice of whether or not they would like it lowered at the end of the service. (Most don’t. Partly, this is because of the misconception that the coffin is being lowered directly into flames. Others want to say goodbye to the coffin in their own time; having a vicar press a button means you only get as long as their schedule allows you. ‘One time a vicar collapsed and pressed the button accidentally and we had to send it back up,’ says Dave, laughing. ‘We had to get another vicar to finish the service off. It was food poisoning, apparently. He just flaked out.’) Tony will show them the religious options and the less so, like the curtains that can be pulled in front of the crosses to obscure them. Sometimes he sits upstairs to fill a pew at the council-funded cremations for the poor or forgotten who had no mourners of their own, always in the 9.30 a.m. slots that are harder to sell. Tony and Dave make sure everyone has someone at their funeral, even if it’s just the two of them.
For the last five years or so Dave has been the substitute for every role in the building: he covers the crematorium downstairs when Tony’s away, he’s the chapel attendant on other days, he occasionally digs graves or steps in to carry a coffin if a pallbearer is looking a little wobbly on their feet. He even scatters ashes in the cemetery, performing small intimate ceremonies for the families. He says that standing there at the chapel door, looking at the backs of all these mourners’ heads, he finds it impossible not to picture who might fill the seats at his own funeral one day. But what gets to him, mostly, is being around bereaved people eight hours a day: he gets empathy fatigue from seeing people so sad all the time and knowing he cannot help, or can only help in a finite way. Vicars, in their training, are taught to take some time out after a funeral to recharge – but Tony and Dave go on to the next, and the next. They sit in the pews, or stand at the doors, or wait for the coffins downstairs. And while funerals end after an hour or so, cemeteries do not.
‘Because I work here, people ask me if I believe in ghosts,’ says Dave. ‘I categorically do not believe in ghosts, but you do see ghosts every day in this place. It’s the people who are visiting, day after day, and they’re alive and kicking but they’re so bereaved that all they’ve got left is coming here and going to the gravestone and standing there.’
Dave tries to befriend them, these ghosts, when he’s out in the cemetery tending to the grounds. There’s the guy with the deck-chair and the newspaper. The mother and son who do a lap of the cemetery daily and read the Quran at the bottom of the garden. But it’s the widowers he struggles with: the old men who travel up on the bus and stand alone in the wind or rain. He says he can’t help but create stories about them, imagining a nagging guilt in the man who buys his dead wife expensive flower arrangements three times a week that Dave, days later, has to put in the bin. It eats at him. He suddenly looks exhausted just talking about it. ‘Eventually you end up avoiding them, because you know they’re going to suck the life out of you just by saying hello.’
It goes quiet in the kitchen, and Tony pushes the muffins across the table at me with his bigger arm. He asks if it doesn’t get me down, hanging around in places like this for whatever it is I’m doing – it was explained to him, vaguely, down the chain of character references that led me here, but it was hard to elaborate over the sound of the machine. I tell him that ‘down’ isn’t really how I’d put it. I tell him that some things get to me in a way that others don’t, but I stop short of telling him about the baby. I tell him that I think the difference is that I’m a visitor in this world and can leave at any time, so what sticks is not the sadness – which, as Dave said, can be cumulative – but the stories of people doing the good and right thing even though no one will notice. From Terry swapping the faces back in the Mayo Clinic, to the funeral director sneaking in exiled boyfriends after hours to say goodbye during the AIDS crisis in small-town America, to the gravedigger and his feather-light molehills. There is tender care here, if you look for it. So many of these jobs, like Tony and Dave’s, aren’t limited to the text in the advert.
‘This is an example of a perfect cremation,’ says Tony, standing in front of the machine, finger poised at the button.
He opens the metal door and I peek inside. We’re at the other end of the machine, the opposite to where we stood when he charged the coffin. If the body were still there, we would be at the head, looking down at the feet, but it only takes a couple of hours for a coffin and person to be reduced to a smouldering pile of bones and charcoal. The coffin is gone now. The back of the skull has been crushed under the weight of itself – all bones become more fragile, like 3D dust. Still visible are the perfectly intact structures of the eye sockets, nose and forehead, surrounded by glowing embers of wood burning themselves into oblivion. Beyond the skull, delicate ribs, a pelvis, just one full femur, the bones scattered inside the machine, having been moved by air and fire from the positions they once held in the body. A young, fit person will have a stronger, harder skeleton to leave behind, but this was an old woman – osteoarthritis weakens bones before flames do. When Tony touches them with a long metal rake, they break apart. The skull collapses and the face disappears, as if below waves.
‘Right, do you want to rake this one down or what?’ he says.
Tony hands me the rake and directs me on how to use it. Like playing pool in a cramped pub, it has maybe six inches of clearance before it hits the wall behind us – something Tony has gotten used to in time, but I keep hitting the brick. Right to left, left to right. The sound of metal dragging on cement is thunderous, adding to the roar of the burner. He points out the metal roller at the front of the oven that I can rest the handle on and suddenly everything is easier on my back. The heat has lowered considerably since the coffin went in, but my skin feels close to burning by being so near. I’m finding it hard to get all the pieces, with the bumps and crevasses in the floor of the cremator, the effects of time and wear – the floor of their more recently restored cremator is comparatively smooth. Tony grabs a smaller, more delicate rake and takes over, making sure each piece and pile of ash goes down the hole at the front of the machine to cool in the metal container below, a sort of enclosed dust shovel. He does his best to get as much of the ash out of the oven as possible, but a tiny percentage will, inevitably, stay lodged in the cracks of the brickwork. In the metal container, the charcoal sits among the shards, glowing and burning itself out until only the bones remain. Once cooled, the bones go to the cremulator – a sort of blender with metal balls that smash the bone into dust – and from there, to a plastic urn the kind of colour you would expect to find ketchup in. Sometimes it’s green.
Every step of the way, a small printed card with the person’s name on it is moved with them, from the cremator, to the metal container, to the bone blender, to the urn itself.
Not everything burns. Some bodily implants are removed before the body is laid in its coffin, lest they explode: in Poppy’s mortuary in south London, after we had dressed Adam, I stood and watched as a short, bloodless slit was made in another dead man’s chest and the pacemaker and its wires were pulled out from the place it held near his heart, while I, unconsciously, held the dead man’s hand to comfort him. I didn’t notice until the mortuary staff tried to wheel him away that I was, apparently, gripping him. He was a man with white hair unconstrained by gravity, like a flamboyant composer standing in a wind tunnel – a man generous enough to donate his body to science, whose gift was rejected for reasons we would never know. Instead, he was burned in a building like this, a little earlier than he had expected to be.
By the time bodies come to Tony, whatever implants are left inside are OK to go in the machine. He picks them out afterwards, when he’s raking the bones, and places them in his bucket of battered metal joints and pins, which they used to bury in the cemetery but now have recycled. Other non-biological pieces – like the mercury in teeth – melt and escape into the atmosphere, or, in the case of breast implants that funeral directors sometimes forget to take out, stick like chewing gum to the bottom of the cremator.
Cancer is the last thing to burn. Tony doesn’t quite understand why it happens; he thinks maybe it’s the lack of fat cells, maybe the density of the mass – but when the rest of the body is gone, a tumour can sometimes remain, sitting black and still among the bones. Tony turns the gas jets on and shoot flames at it directly. The surface glows gold. ‘It’s almost like black coral,’ he says.
Earlier that day, he had opened the furnace door to a cremation he describes now as ‘nasty’. Whereas normally he might see a lump, this tumour appeared, to him, to be all through the body: from neck to pelvis. It was the body of a young woman whose photo was pinned to coffin wreaths that said ‘DAUGHTER’ and ‘MUM’, which will lie outside under a grapevine until a week from now, when Dave will put them in the bin.
‘There’s always something here that will get you,’ says Tony, who seems choked up by this one cremation. ‘That’s why I struggle with the very religious. How can they believe in that when this is happening, and horrible bastards live to ninety? I’m not sure if there’s a God looking down, but he’s a funny geezer if there is.’
He keeps shaking his head imagining the pain she must have been in. He’d never seen anything like it in thirty years of manning these machines. (And neither has anyone else: I’ve asked a pathologist, an APT, an oncologist and an American crematorium worker, but nobody has seen this happen but Tony. It may be a quirk of the English machine, which runs at a lower temperature than American ones. The oncologist suggested maybe it was a calcification of the tissue. Mostly though, everyone was baffled.)
I remember the embalmer saying that when friends tell him about a cancer diagnosis, he extrapolates that information to its most extreme end point – death – and I wonder if hearing of a cancer diagnosis will now mean, to me, black coral in a crematorium. From the look on Tony’s face, it’s a hard image to forget. It feels like burying someone with the murder weapon, like something we should remove. Christopher Hitchens described the tumour in his oesophagus that would ultimately kill him as a ‘blind, emotionless alien’. He later wrote, in his posthumously published book Mortality, that it was a mistake to ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. But I think there is no better way to describe a mass of flesh that will not burn, that will outlast its host – at least in an objective physical sense – if only for moments. Blind, emotionless, alien.
There’s another funeral just finishing upstairs now. Tony’s turned on the speakers so we can hear what’s happening above piped down below: the calm of the funeral celebrant mixing with the growl of the machinery as it heats up: 850, 852. A beep sounds, and Betty Grey, in her MDF coffin with its plastic meltable handles, comes down on the lift.