Book reviews

Ian Shipley's Tales of a gravedigger is packed with funny and terrifying stories.

He said there was always time for a practical joke - even in the cemetery.

There was the time when we found a manikin that someone had just chucked over the wall", he said. "We ripped the arms and legs off and stuck them in the top of a grave - it looked quite realistic". Unfortunately the little old lady who walked past it didn't have the same view - she did not see the funny side and had an absolute fit about it.

Mr. Shipley also said that the job made some of his co-workers a little nervous.

"A group of nuns walked through the graveyard every day. They're always in single file and they looked a bit strange, but they're just on their way to the local convent. We had one lad who convinced himself they were ghosts. Every morning he'd freeze when he saw them. He would close his eyes and not open them until they had passed - he wasn't joking he was genuinely scared".

The book describes the sickening regular occurrence of putting a foot through a coffin, leaving the digger ankle-deep in stagnant water and human remains. It also gives horrific accounts of the trauma of exhuming murdered children.

Review by James Newall.

This chatty little book starts with the 150-year history of Newark cemetery, in which the author dug more than 2, 000 graves by hand over the last two decades.

We are soon in the grave with Shipley, fighting tree roots and worrying about water logging. Superstitions saturate the field, as illustrated when Shipley excavates three feet away from an original plague pit or digs in the dark.

He worked with a man and then dug the grave of the 13-year old girl that man murdered. He has dug and reopened pauper's plots. He has of course been the butt of practical jokes, but has also seen poltergeist activity.

Shipley describes shining a light into the corner of a rediscovered vault like Carter discovering King Tut's tomb, and interring a coffin that wouldn't stay buried at sea The author doesn't stumble over any mouldering corpses, but he does recall a couple of exhumations and the reburial of dozens of remains from a crypt.

Shipley's no Indiana Jones, but there's some adventure here.

Christine Quigley