Hayley Campbell on Death and From Hell

Excerpt from Hayley Campbell's excellent All the Living and the Dead book.

"[...] You aren't born knowing you will die. Someone has to break the news. I asked my dad if it was him, but he can't remember. [...] Maybe death came to you in the form of a goldfish or a grandparent. You might have processed mortality as much as you were able, or needed to, in the time it took for the fins to disappear in the swirl of a toilet bowl. I don't have one of those moments. I can't remember a time before death existed. Death was just there, everywhere, always. 

Maybe it began with the five dead women. Throughout my single digits, my dad - Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist - was working on a graphic novel called From Hell, written by Alan Moore. It's about Jack the Ripper and shows the full horror of his brutality in scratchy black and white. 'Jackarippy' was such a part of our lives that my tiny sister would wear the top hat to eat breakfast, and I would stand on tiptoes to study the crime scenes that were pinned to my dad's drawing board while trying to get him to agree to something Mum had said no to. There they were, the disembowelled women, the flesh torn from their faces and thighs. Next to them, the stark autopsy photographs, their sagging breasts and bellies, the pinched rugby-ball stitching from neck to groin. I remember looking up at them and feeling not shocked, but fascinated. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to see more. I wished the pictures were clearer, I wished they were in colour. Their situation was so removed from anything I knew of life that it was too other to be frightening - it was as alien to me there in tropical Brisbane, Australia, as the foggy London streets where they had lived. To look at those same photographs now is an entirely different thing - I see violence, the struggle and misogyny, the lost lives - but back then, I didn't have the emotional language to process something so terrible. [...]" - Hayley Campbell