Anything to Declare? (4 page)

If you can (and some can’t), please try to die in your home country. Obviously better if you don’t die
at all
but, just in case, I thought I’d mention it.

Repatriation of a human body back to the UK is complicated and very expensive (currently about £4,500 for Spain to the UK). To us, as Customs officers, repatriated bodies and body parts were simply freight and they even appeared on the aircrafts’ airway bills listed as such. Which may come as a surprise to trusting passengers, who are too used to being fooled by the clever skills of the pilots and the cabin crews into feeling that the airline does really care about them. But it will come as no surprise to the pilots and the cabin crew, who secretly refer to the passengers as SLF – or self-loading freight. That’s you, that is, that they’re talking about. And me, too, when I fly. We are just pieces of baggage with legs that are occasionally viewed as mildly preferable to the other baggage because we walk ourselves on board; but often viewed as less preferable to the other baggage because we complain and get drunk. There is no suitcase in existence (outside one that explodes) that aircrews could hate more than a human passenger.

But, if you are a smuggler, a human corpse represents not a symbol of human loss but simply a good vehicle for contraband importation. Even so, we didn’t often check the dead as we knew it would take quite a widespread and very professional organization to pull off smuggling in this way. So what makes it so complicated?

Well, if Billy Bobbins gets pissed on cheap plonk and does a backflip off his tenth-floor hotel balcony in Tenerife while singing ‘Come on England!’ and finds that he misses the swimming pool below by a good fifty feet (and which, by the way, with a Brit abroad, would be classed as a ‘death by natural causes’), then the result is that the body has to be embalmed within forty-eight hours. Traditionally, it tends to happen quickly in hot countries, for the obvious reason that before refrigeration the dead would soon turn ripe. Scotland, on the other hand –
nae
problem. Granddad could pop his sporran there and you could prop him up in his favourite chair for a few weeks for company. One of the benefits of a cold climate.

After a death abroad, next comes lots of paperwork: death certificate, embalming certificate, certificate of transportation, freedom from infection certificate. Once all these certificates are in place, they have to be checked by the local authorities and copies sent to the British Embassy. Next comes the physical stuff: the body must be sealed by a Spanish Customs officer in a zinc-lined coffin. Zinc is used to create a hermetic seal and also because it still allows the coffin to be X-rayed. The body can be clothed but under no circumstances is anything allowed to be put in the coffin, even personal mementoes of the deceased.

The coffin will then be transported to the airport where it is placed within a specific cargo container and registered with its own airway bill. The choice of which airline to carry the deceased is either by special freight plane or – and this is the option most often used – by a normal everyday passenger jet. So, that’s right, a normal holiday jet can, and often does, carry corpses. Often when there is someone on a plane crying for most of the flight, it’s because they know that down in the hold they are bringing home evidence of an ended life.

You might think that, if someone was dead, his relatives would notice that fact and not try to take him on a plane. But you’d be wrong. There have been cases, believe it or not. One was at Liverpool Airport where two German women tried to check in for a Berlin-bound flight with an old man in a wheelchair who was husband to one and father to the other. The ninety-one-year-old was apparently asleep and wearing sunglasses, though, it has to be said, looking rather pale. ‘Staff,’ it was later reported, ‘became very suspicious when they tried to check in the deceased.’ The two women said they hadn’t noticed he’d died in the wheelchair, but both were arrested on suspicion of failing to give notification of a death. Airport staff noticed the chap was a lot stiffer and colder than he should have been when one of them helped the women get the old man out of their taxi. The staff member noted, ‘To my horror, his face fell sideways against mine, and it was ice cold.’ Even so, the two women
still
asked if they could board the flight with the old man’s corpse! Obviously because it was cheaper to take him home on a £100 ticket than pay thousands for repatriation. Now I know they were flying easyJet but even they’re not
that
easy going.

For those who bring the deceased back in a coffin rather than propped up in a seat wearing wonky sunglasses, once they are into the UK, all the paperwork is examined and only then is the coffin released. Between arrival and release, we at Customs can examine the contents . . . if we really want to.

During my early months at the airport, I was often thrown in at the deep end and some tasks were, I knew, to test my mettle and mental reserves. My tutor Mick’s evil smile usually informed me that whatever he had in mind was going to be amusing for others and a lot less so for me. Still, what was I to do, pack it all in and go running home to my mother?

‘Right, we’re off to the freight shed,’ Mick said one day. He didn’t expand on this but I’m sure now that all the other guys in the office were aware of what lay in store for me.

The freight sheds and Customs freight office were on the other side of the airport, a fifteen-minute drive. The freight staff and the passenger Customs staff rarely mixed. We thought that we were superior as we dealt with real people, and they countered with the fact that cargo didn’t sweat or act nervous so they had the harder job because they had to solely use their investigative minds to find contraband.

We were joined in the car by my senior officer who said that he had some admin work to do in the freight office. That was, I thought, bollocks for sure – he was coming to watch my pain.

We drove straight into the freight shed and parked near the Customs clearance cage. As we got out of the car, I couldn’t miss my target for the day. There, in the middle of the shed, was a large, shiny brass-handled casket. The strip lights were reflected in the dark polished wood. The cargo handlers had unpacked it from its flight container and forklifted it on to a narrow exam bench, a bit like balancing a shoebox on a matchbox. Because of its size and the overhang of the width, as you approached it from certain angles it looked like it was almost floating in mid-air.

The senior officer headed off towards our offices as Mick and I stood either side of the boxed-up deceased. Mick smiled, Okay then, off with the lid and let’s see what we are dealing with.’

It took me about five minutes to remove all the decorative screw covers and then the screws themselves. Together, Mick and I lifted off the heavy, zinc-lined lid to reveal the occupant. The first thing that hit me was the smell of embalming fluid, and with its composition being a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other solvents, the smell was quite distinctive. Then came the body. The chap was chubby and well dressed with a great shock of ginger hair.

‘Right then, Jon, how do you feel?’ asked Mick.

How did I feel? I thought for a few seconds: how should I feel? The chap looked as if he was asleep yet smelled like a hospital sluice room.

Mick, standing on the opposite side of the coffin, continued, ‘We are going to search the coffin but, in this case, we are not going to search the corpse.’ Well, that was a relief anyway. ‘I want you to reach in and roll him towards you. Now, this is not going to be easy as there is not much room in there, so you will have to use a bit of force.’

I put my right hand on his cold head and grabbed his right arm with my left hand. Mick looked impressed – I had not bottled out. ‘OK, on my count, roll him towards you . . . Three, two, one, roll!’

As I pulled his arm, there was a loud human cry of
‘Aaaarrrgghhh!
’ The world suddenly went into very slow motion . . . and then speeded up: FUCK ME – the bloke must be alive! With a loud shout of my own, I let go and flew backwards. What I didn’t know was that the cry had come from the senior officer who had just crept up behind me, so as I flew backwards I clattered slap-bang into him and we both went sprawling on the floor. Fifteen stone of me knocked him clear off his feet and we both hit the ground with a crunch.

Still on the floor, I could hear laughing. The freight staff and the cargo handlers had all come out to watch Mick and our senior officer play this trick on me. The officer was star-fished out on the floor, covered in scalding coffee from the cup he’d been holding and, with a fracture to his drinking arm, screaming blue murder at me. I was lying on top of him and screaming blue murder at Mick, and my right arm was in the air holding – I suddenly noticed to my shock – what was obviously the dead man’s bright-ginger wig. I must have grabbed it as I flew backwards.

The other thing I couldn’t help but notice – and this was something else I must have inadvertently grabbed and pulled at in the shock – was that the deceased’s right arm was now stuck up in the air, sticking straight out of the coffin like he was giving some eerie Nazi salute from beyond the grave.

Mick was chuckling uncontrollably and, as a result, he was struggling to hold on to the heavily lined coffin lid, which was about to topple out of his hands. I got to my feet but didn’t help him – I thought that was the least he should suffer. I pressed the Nazi salute back down into the coffin like pushing a giant lever, and I was just grateful it didn’t spring back up again of its own accord. That
would
have been scary.

And though I tried it all different ways, turning it this way and that, pulling it backwards and forwards, spinning it around from right to left, lifting it up and putting it back down again . . . I was never really completely happy with the way that big orange wig went back on.

One of the fascinating things about working inside certain professions is the fact that they give you the fish’s-eye view of a swan’s arse. Meaning, while the swan looks calm and serene up top, underneath its legs are going ten-to-the-dozen, and sometimes looking beneath the surface is where you find the truth. Ask any chef who’s ever worked in a kitchen what he’s seen going on in there, and you’ll probably never eat out again. Similarly, once I’d seen some of the aviation industry from the inside, I wondered if I’d ever again fly. It might seem odd coming from someone whose working life revolved around airports, but I have to admit to not being a fan of planes myself: they’re dangerous in the air and often even more dangerous on the ground.

Funnily enough, the word ‘airport’ itself was coined by a British Customs officer. The first ever engine-powered aircraft flight over the English Channel was made in 1909 by a French flyer, Louis Blériot, who landed in fields near Dover Castle, claimed his £1,000 prize money for the achievement and overnight became world famous. And you might well think ‘bloody typical!’, but guess who was waiting for him when he landed at Dover? That’s right, a Customs officer! I love the fact that even at the end of a record-breaking world’s first journey there would still be a little guy in a uniform licking the end of a pencil and saying, ‘Now, sir, if you could possibly just sign here . . .’ But the fact is, even though Blériot still had to make a Customs declaration, the officer only had forms with the words Sea Port (as commercial air travel didn’t yet exist). So he crossed out the word ‘Sea’ and above it wrote ‘Air’. A new word was born. The dutiful officer also had to make do with reporting the plane as a yacht and describing Blériot as its master.

Still, it could have been worse, Blériot could have mentioned that he’d stopped off in Amsterdam and ended up going down in history as the victim of the first ever Customs airport strip search.

I quickly discovered how shockingly little some areas of aviation had come on since Blériot’s time. There was a scary unforeseen consequence of the end of the Cold War: the skies became full of very old, very badly maintained former USSR and Eastern European aeroplanes with coughing engines, the craft also usually full of hard-smoking, coughing passengers – if one of these planes had burst into flames, no one would have noticed; they would have all probably lit another fag from the flames. But, as a bit of light relief, it gave staff at the airport endless entertainment watching these things lurch out of the sky like elderly asthmatic ducks. Once a week, we would get a Bulgarian Airlines ski flight coming in from Várna. The plane was always the same, an old and knackered Tupolev plane that must have been one of the first out of the factory. We were surprised that it didn’t have an outside toilet, Roman numerals on the side and a chimney for the engines. It was the kind of aircraft that would make you want to rediscover the joys of train travel.

So, every time the Bulgarian flight arrived, myself and a few other officers would go out on the tarmac and wait for it. The reason for the rare occasion of a Customs officer stepping outside the channels was twofold. First, the boarding officer had to be there to inspect the weapons in the cockpit. I have no idea why the pilots carried a couple of pistols, locked in a safe, as no hijacker in their right mind would want to hold up this bucket airline – and if they did their first ransom demand would have been to get the plane to a repair shop. There was more chance of it blowing up of its own volition than with a terrorist bomb.

The second reason for the Customs officers gathering outside was the amusement provided by the plane itself. This was still at a time when Stansted Airport was operating from the old terminal and, as such, the passengers had to walk down the stairs that had been physically wheeled out on to the tarmac (nothing motorized here!), and then they had to walk to the terminal. It was hilariously low-tech. But not as low-tech as the Bulgarian plane.

So it was for the final act of passenger disembarkation that we all gathered to watch. The aircraft was so decrepit and aged that, as passengers disembarked, the plane’s hydraulics would start to expand, making the plane rise higher and higher in violent jumps. By the time the plane had jacked itself up to a good three or four feet, it meant that there was a reciprocal three- or four-foot drop from the aircraft to the top of the stairs. And just who was left on the aircraft that had to try to jump this gap to safety? Our patience was paid off every single time. The crew always left the injured and broken-boned skiers to disembark last: in other words, the people least prepared for the jump – those with legs and arms in casts and with white-bandaged heads.