Ordinarily, the life of a mortuary is predictable and quiet – it’s when the living come in that things get difficult. Valentine jokes that there’s a reason she became a mortician: She’s no good around live people. Doing viewings and dealing with family members is one of the hardest parts of a job that most people couldn’t stomach. It shatters the focus, makes the job more difficult.



The temporary mortuary, with its on-site viewing suite big enough for two or three bodies at a time, was more difficult than others. In mortuaries Valentine has worked in, staff have a hard time explaining to family members what they’re about to see, and it doesn’t help that our modern, Western relationship with death means that we don’t see it close up until we’re in no emotional state to handle it subjectively. Sometimes it’s best to talk them out of it entirely. “We would have to say to the family members that they won’t recognise their family member and it really isn’t worth it, and we’ll do as much as we can to put them off having the viewing," she says. "If they insist on it, we have to make them sign a waiver that basically says please don’t sue us if you’re traumatised.” It’s hard for people to get their heads around what they are about to see, even with the tricks that APTs have to make our dead less dead: the cotton balls under the eyelids to make them fuller, the ways to make a mouth stay closed.

In the case of 7/7, grief counsellors had a meeting and decided that it all happened so quickly that for the sake of closure, family members needed to see their dead. APTs don’t normally put make-up on the deceased before a viewing – that’s more of a funeral home thing – but they had to in this situation, because some of the bodies were more heavily decomposed than most of us realised. “The King’s Cross explosion on the Piccadilly line was the worst hit, and it was boiling down there," Valentine says. "It took them longer to get in there because they couldn’t tunnel their way in as easily as they could with some of the others.” Other APTs became viewing counsellors, and grief-stricken family members responded as anyone would: with horror, with disbelief, with denial. The APT who was doing the make-up had a nervous breakdown and had to leave.

Valentine says she’s not a grief counsellor, and in her work and writing she deliberately stays away from anything to do with end-of-life care or grief. She has no idea how beneficial it would have been to the families. All she knows is that people were screaming “no, this isn’t him”, that they were knocking bodies over in the viewing suite.

Today she works as a curator at Barts Pathology Museum, preserving Victorian body parts in jars of formaldehyde and assisting television shows in autopsy accuracy. Her experience didn't change the way she travels around the city – it actually gave her the impetus to move from Liverpool to London a year later, having met a lot of people in the trade – except for her first day off from the mortuary, on 21 July. She was on the Central line into Oxford Circus with a plan to go shopping, when what would later turn out to be failed bomb detonations caused the service to stall at the platform. At the first hint of something being wrong – a held train, a vague announcement – she ran up the escalator into the open air. No one followed her lead.

But she knew what she was getting into at the temporary mortuary. “I just wanted to feel useful. I didn’t just want to be one of those people who’s just watching TV and going, 'Isn’t this terrible, I’m now afraid to go on the tube.' I wanted to actually do something and help. It was good to feel part of something that was really important. I’d do it again, if I had to.”



