It isn't easy to get the skin colouring right: Mrs Ward was still a little yellow. Perhaps another layer of foundation? Carrie applied lipstick carefully, a shade of pale pink, and Mrs Ward's mouth smiled stiffly at us, her eyes glued shut with a thick cream. Her grey hair was brushed outwards in a fan around her head, ready for its final arrangement around her face.

It is an extremely personal thing, dressing the dead. Carrie had already washed, embalmed and clothed Mrs Ward (not her real name), and was now preparing her to be visited in her open coffin in the chapel of rest.

It is also an extremely physical thing. Behind us another dresser was wrestling to get Mr Myers into his suit. It wasn't easy to get the second half of his torso into the grey flannel. Its second arm in, the cadaver landed back on its trolley with a low thud and Mr Myers was wheeled back into the fridge. “Don't stand there,” Carrie said as the door swung open. “There's a decomposer in there.”

We were backstage at T.Cribb and Sons, Funeral Directors and Carriage Masters. Front of stage, a steady trickle of visitors filed through the spacious reception in East London and into the four chapels of rest.

Winter is a busy time of year for an undertaker: the fridges, which hold 48 bodies, were full, and the corridor behind the chapels held a queue of corpses in various stages of dressing and presentation. An old man in a black suit lay on a trolley, his feet hanging off the end. His fingernails were dirty.

As visitors arrived to view their relatives or friends, staff wheeled the coffins in and out of the chapels. In a room at the side of the reception sat John Harris, director of ceremonies, purveyor of funerals, and fourth generation of Harrises to run the family business. Across the room was the fifth, his daughter Sarah, 28.

All day long the phone rang and they filled in forms — cremation or burial; to be dressed/our robe; hearse/limos/horses. Floral tributes? Music? Organist or tapes? Then they totted up the price.

“Nowadays you get lots of people telephoning for quotes,” Mr Harris said. “I've seen the breakdown in the family unit. You see a lot more who just want a quote, and if it's cheap enough, that's fine. That's sad really, because they [undertakers] are not all the same.”

Outside a church in the East End, Nelson and Stanley, two of Mr Harris's 16 black stallions, tossed their heads, breath steaming in the cold. “No, you don't,” said a groom in spotless black as one of them tried to chew its harness. On the hearse sat a stunning series of flowers, composed as a pint of Guinness, a betting slip, a horse's head.

“I think what's sad is when someone's had a very full life, and you have this very brief service at the crematorium and then people are whisked away,” Mr Harris said. “Hardly anybody there. Yet when you listen to their life story, there's an awful lot of it.” His office has a cupboard full of uncollected ashes. “A load of people never bother.”

Others bother a lot. A large Ghanaian lady who has been dead for six months was being prepared for a three-hour ceremony at the funeral parlour, after which she would be flown home for a second. Her vast, pink-enamelled coffin (with sprung mattress) was a sight to behold: a pool of soft, pink covers, sequinned, feathered and beaded. Nestling in it, one round brown face, heavily made up: pink blusher, pink eyeshadow, pink lipstick. A little tiara balanced on her head.

Throughout the day, as coffins from the mortuaries arrived through the back, bags of clothes arrived through the front: this man was to be dressed in a comfy, dirty old sweater and pyjama bottoms; that lady in a fancy suit, accompanied by a glamorous photograph for the dressers to work from.

It is the living and not the dead who cause problems for Mr Harris. A staff member came in to say that a woman in reception, let us call her Emma, was trying to organise her mother's funeral. Emma's mother had not yet died, but there had been a family row and she had left her money to relatives whom Emma did not like. So Emma was trying to spend as much of it as possible before the mother died - and one of the legitimate expenses was a funeral. “She can have four horses if she likes,” Mr Harris suggested.

Death seems to be particularly potent at igniting old feuds. One special request stated that “on no account should Doreen Parker be allowed to view the body”, another that a golf club be temporarily removed from a coffin “because the other side will nick it”. (The other side, arriving later, did indeed come out of the chapel of rest asking indignantly where the deceased's favourite golf club was, saying: “We was looking for it”).

Does it ever get to Mr Harris, I wondered, all this death? “No, not really. We are here to do a job. You've obviously got to have feelings towards the families, but you would be no good to them if you were too involved.”

In a silent chapel, a father in his 40s lay alone, a teddy bear and a picture of his young daughter on his chest. Just another family tragedy, just another job.

Job description

Name John Harris
Age 54
Job title Funeral director
Length of service 35 years
Hours 7.30am-7.30pm
Number of staff 45, plus 16 horses
Average cost of funeral £2,500
Hire of horses £900
Oddest requests DNA samples
Strangest musical request Jaws
Most memorable moment Mourners who asked to go via the police station, then chucked a brick through its window

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