Read Murder on the Home Front Online
Authors: Molly Lefebure
It was at this point that Dr. Simpson came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and asked me for my secretarial services.
This little scene took place in Walthamstow cemetery—a suitable spot—and quite flabbergasted me, for I had never until then exchanged a word with Dr. Simpson, indeed never dreamed he had noted my existence. Yet now he came up to me, said he wanted a word with me, and asked me if I had ever thought of doing secretarial work. I gooped at him.
He went on to assure me he thought I had the qualifications necessary for a medical secretary. I looked him coldly in the eye and turned the offer politely, but firmly, down. I remembered only too well the horror of secretarial work and secretarial young ladies I had developed at secretarial college. Dr. Simpson gave me a phone number to ring in case I changed my mind, but I don’t think he really expected to hear from me again.
By three that afternoon I had changed my mind.
I had, for one thing, mentioned the offer of this job to a fellow reporter and she had been astounded I had refused it. “You must be crazy. You’re interested in crime, you’re always saying you’d like to be a crime reporter. Dr. Simpson is one of the big crime experts. With him you’d learn masses about crime. It sounds a wonderful job to me.”
“But would I ever be any good as a secretary?”
“Oh, you could hold down a secretarial job if you tried.”
The other thing that tempted me of course was curiosity. To discover what goes on in mortuaries.
So at twelve p.m. I was offered the job; by three p.m. that same day I had accepted it. Next morning I gave my editor a fortnight’s notice, and Dr. Simpson lent me a book on forensic medicine, with many illustrations of cut-throats, drowners, hangings, shootings, poisonings, and the like. Each night, for the next fortnight, after I had finished writing copy for the newspaper I settled down with forensic medicine before I went to bed.
My First Day in the Mortuaries
It turned out that no secretary, good, bad, or indifferent, had ever set foot in a mortuary before. I took this pioneer step one early spring day in 1941, and the mortuary was Southwark.
Southwark mortuary stands in St. George’s churchyard, on the site of the old Marshalsea prison, at the end of the Borough, London’s most flavorsome thoroughfare. I traveled there by taxi, and the driver was a bit distant when I asked for Southwark mortuary and said he had no idea where it was. He knew St. George’s Church, though, so at the church he deposited me. I crossed the churchyard, pulled at the mortuary bell, which clanged and tolled a doleful, old-time ditty, and was quickly ushered through the front door, across the courtyard, through a doorway marked, “Private. Doctors only,” into the postmortem room where Dr. Simpson was at work examining two bodies.
He was garbed in a white p.m. (postmortem) gown, a rubber apron, rubber gloves and white rubber galoshes and was armed with a very large knife, which he brandished genially at me as he bade me good morning. He then introduced me to a small, quick, dark man who was swabbing the interior of one of the bodies with a sponge. This was West, the mortuary keeper, a celebrated personality, and destined to become one of my greatest friends. But that first morning, eyeing me rather speculatively across the bodies, West merely gave me a polite bow. He has told me since that he was waiting for me to scream, or faint, or throw a fit, but I didn’t. “There were two dirty, stinking bodies on that table and I thought, ‘Here comes a young woman to work where no woman’s ever worked before, and what’ll she do?’ But you came in smiling, and went on smiling.”
Now the truth was that I had been aching to see inside a mortuary, and watch a postmortem, for a long time, so that I was only too delighted to have at last achieved my ambition, and was much too pleased and excited to think about fainting.
Dr. Simpson did two p.ms. at Southwark that morning, and on that first occasion I merely watched him. He explained that in the future I would have to sit close by with the typewriter and type a report which he would dictate to me as he dissected.
The two bodies lay on gleaming white porcelain tables, each body with the head propped on a small wooden block, and Keith Simpson dissected the organs on a small wooden mobile table. West swabbed the bodies, handed instruments, washed and tidied things up as the work progressed. Everything in that white place was very clean. There was a mingled odor of bodies and disinfectant, which at first I found unpleasant, but to which I gradually became acclimatized. The thing about postmortems which I most disliked in those early days was the sound of a saw raspingly opening a skull.
Postmortem work in the hands of an expert is amazingly clean, absolutely fascinating, quite devoid of horror. I was lucky to see only experts at work at the beginning; later I occasionally saw students at Guy’s trying their hands at the job, and over their efforts I draw a veil. Luckily by that time I was quite hardened. But, of course, everybody has to make a first attempt, whether it be at performing a postmortem or, shall we say, bathing a baby. There always has to be a start.
On that first day with Dr. Simpson I saw postmortems at Southwark, Hammersmith, Poplar, Leyton, and Walthamstow. The cases were all noninquest, simple cases, “B” cases, the coroners’ officers call them. In all, I saw eight postmortems that first day. They were far too interesting to make me feel ill. Nevertheless it was a strange day. Besides the p.ms. we attended two inquests at Hammersmith, and at lunchtime we went to Guy’s Hospital, where Dr. Simpson had his headquarters.
The now famous Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s had not at that time come into being, but Dr. Simpson, who was assistant curator to the Gordon Museum at Guy’s, had already an embryo forensic medicine department in the Museum. It was in the curator’s office that we did all our filing, report writing, correspondence, and so forth, amidst a gleaming array of specimen jars in which floated grotesque babies, slashed wrists, ruptured hearts, stomach ulcers, lung cancers, bowel tumors, cerebral aneurisms, and the like. Here, too, we generally took afternoon tea, with the one and only Ireland, the Museum assistant.
Yes, that first day on my new job seemed strange, and I arrived back at my digs that evening feeling pretty tired. But very pleased with myself, because I had been in mortuaries, and watched postmortems, and, moreover, not felt ill.
My landlady was waiting for me, all agog. “Did you see any of those dreadful postmortems?” she asked.
“Yes, eight.”
“Eight? Never!”
And making noises of disapproval she went to fetch my dinner, the centerpiece of which was a dish of chops.
When she brought in those chops I realized, with a jerk, that I must either eat them, resolutely, or become a vegetarian for life.
Somehow or other, I ate them.
“Well, dear,” said my landlady, popping in presently to see how I was getting on, “would you like another chop?”
I said no, thank you.
“Oh, I hope this awful job isn’t going to affect your appetite.”
I replied firmly that I had no intention of letting it do anything of the sort, but I felt I had eaten enough chops for the evening. And turned my attention, with relief, to stewed fruit and junket…
The world of coroners, courts, and mortuaries in those days was very definitely overshadowed by a Great Man; a modest, unassuming Great Man, but Great, for all that. He, of course, was Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
I was introduced to Sir Bernard at Hackney Coroner’s Court, about a fortnight after I had started work with Keith Simpson. “Spilsbury” had become such a legend it was difficult to believe there really was a man, Spilsbury. I had always visualized him as a slight, somewhat mysterious person, slinking from shadow to shadow, carrying a bag of autopsy instruments. When I met him he was certainly carrying the celebrated bag, but there the likeness between the imagined and the actual Spilsbury abruptly ended.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury looked, more than anything else in the world, like a prosperous gentleman farmer. Very tall—though stooping slightly in his later years—powerful, with broad shoulders and a very ruddy, open, earnest face, you would have said he was an expert on dairy herds, or sugar-beet crops, or agricultural fertilizers, but you would not have suspected that he was Sir Bernard Spilsbury. He was reserved, modest, and courteous in manner, very serious, very intent on his work. Indeed, he appeared to exist for nothing but his work. And above everything was his complete integrity.
His handwriting was the most astonishing I have ever seen. He wrote his p.m. reports by hand, and the writing was like some hieroglyphic which professors despairingly pore over. I once sat next to him at the Old Bailey; while waiting to give evidence he took two notebooks from his famous bag and proceeded to copy notes from one book into the other. These notes were written in green ink and each completed page was a bewildering sight. He sat there very quietly and absorbedly writing, waiting to give evidence which would probably prove to be the vital evidence of the trial, yet, when I sat down beside him, humble secretary that I was, he had a “Good afternoon” and a charming smile for me.
He always gave evidence in a quiet voice, with marvelous clarity, and his evidence carried enormous weight with the juries.
I never saw him do a p.m.—I wish I had. He did not like to have people in the mortuary while he worked, except those persons who absolutely had to be there.
He was accorded a vast respect. For a mortuary keeper to announce, “I’ve got Sir Bernard coming here to do a p.m. this afternoon,” was the equivalent of saying that King Solomon was due to appear in all his might and glory. Not that Sir Bernard was the least ostentatious. Very far from it. Nevertheless, he carried an aura with him, an aura which had been thrust upon him, one sensed. I think that so far as he was concerned he might have been perfectly content to have spent his life poring over a microscope examining unsensational slides. But Fate had arranged things differently. He became a front-page figure of exceptional proportions.
Once I went to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Dr. Simpson was to do a postmortem. St. Bartholomew’s is London’s oldest hospital, and the autopsy instruments the attendant proffered Dr. Simpson looked as if they might very well have been used by St. Bartholomew himself. Dr. Simpson politely refused them. “I always carry my own instruments,” he explained. Said the attendant, “Sir Bernard Spilsbury
always
uses these.” “Nevertheless,” replied Dr. Simpson, gently but firmly, “I prefer to use my own.” “But,” said the dazed attendant, “Sir Bernard Spilsbury always uses these!”
There was a gleam in Dr. Simpson’s eye as he again expressed polite preference for his own instruments. The attendant was literally dumbfounded. He simply could not believe it. It was as though a trumpeter from another land had visited the royal court of ancient Egypt in its heyday and refused the proffered use of Tutankhamen’s trumpet.
Despite these adulations Sir Bernard was a deeply modest man; a quiet, withheld man, withheld not in pride but in natural reticence.
It was said, and was probably true, that nobody ever really succeeded in getting to know him. Everyone looked forward to the day when he would publish his memoirs, but he never kept systematic personal notes of his work; he was not, one suspects, very much inclined to reminisce to the world at large, and so the memoirs never appeared. When he died he carried innumerable thrilling stories with him.
For it is not just the inside knowledge of the facts of the big, front-page murders which make a pathologist’s work so intensely interesting, it is also the astonishing, infinitely varied, little incidents of day-to-day life in the mortuaries. You could spend a hundred years in London’s mortuaries and never be bored.
One morning, for example, walking into Hammersmith mortuary, I was drawn up short by the sight of an enormous hairy man lying on the p.m. table, the nearest human thing I have ever seen to a gorilla, clasping between huge Neanderthal hands folded on his huge Neanderthal chest a dimity posy of snowdrops. I stood staring, and MacKay, the mortuary keeper, came up to me.
“Former British Fascist, Miss Lefebure. Used to be a P.T. instructor to the Hitler Youth Movement in Germany. Looks the type, doesn’t he?”
“But why is he cuddling that dear little bunch of snowdrops, MacKay?”
“Special request of a relative, Miss Lefebure,” said MacKay, drily.
“My, my, my,” I murmured. A lot of my time in those early days was spent in murmuring “My, my, my.”
Laughable things occur frequently in the mortuaries; but the laughter they provoke is of the internal, wry sort; grotesques, like details from a Bosch.
A day or two after the Fascist and the snowdrops I was at Poplar mortuary. As I walked past the huge refrigerator where the bodies were kept I saw two undertakers, splendid in their black coats and top hats (they had come direct from a funeral), tussling to remove a very stout matron from one of the metal refrigerator trays.
“Blimey,” said one of the undertakers, “she’s frozen to it, mate. We’ll never get her off.”
They stood the tray up on end, against the wall, in the hope the plump matron would slide off, but there she remained, stuck to her tray, up against the wall, like some unique mural decoration.