“Work is Love made visible….”

I served an apprenticeship as a carpenter, but it was with the local joiner & undertaker, four years of learning how to change wood into various things: some items were purely functional, others beautiful, a few just…necessary. It had its funny side – the senior joiners would tease me mercilessly, threatening me with tea laced with the ’embalming fluid’ they said was kept in a bottle on the shelf, but which I later discovered was an empty Chianti bottle with straw around it from a previous works night out!

But there was real and ‘unexpected’ humour which arose regularly due to the fact that our workshop was located at the back of a small square, and to its right a pair of doors, one of which was our coffin store. Sitting parallel to our square was another similar square, the same size and layout, and in the position that our workshop sat, was the local library, and to its right precisely where our coffin store door was, was situated the RVS office and drop-in centre, which attracted many elderly ladies. Some of whom were a tad confused.

The same scenario was played out weekly…..I’d be alone in the workshop making something and I’d hear footsteps, a door opening….then silence…maybe a gasp….then a more peculiar silence gradually being filled with a looooonnnng slow inhalation……..

This was my cue to rush out with the chair we kept just for this moment, and thrust it under the bottom of the shell-shocked elderly lady who, in keen anticipation of a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit, had gaily bustled through ‘the door of the WRVS’, but instead of finding tables heaving with cups of the warming beverage she expected, was confronted with a neat line-up of coffins, ranging in size from small on the left to large on the right. Yes, wrong square dear. And wrong door.

Calming down some was easy. Others not so easy. Those who committed the same error twice needed additional support and guidance in person around the corner to the correct location, and an extra-strong cup of tea.

But our coffins were factory made, mostly, and the only ones we actually constructed were for children, infrequently, and most often for babies. And what struck me, as a wayward teenager, was the reverence. Jimmy or Andy who did a lot of the shop work, and were the craftsmen I learned from, were normally fond of a laugh. But not when we made a child’s coffin. There was no room for jokes, no tolerance of anything other than making this small box the most beautiful and carefully constructed object these big rough men could manage with their work-hardened hands.

“It’s the last thing they’ll be carried in son, that’s why it matters.”  I was solemnly informed. And so we invested that small oblong box with as much care and craftsmanship as we could.

I was reminded of this today when I saw this beautiful short film by Dan McComb: ‘The Coffinmaker’