‘Have you come to terms with the thought of dying?’ asked the Observer Magazine of 27 October 1968. ‘Far from being prepared for death, society has made the very word almost unmentionable’. Cecil Day-Lewis said he had his own interpretation of Shakespeare’s ‘lightning before death’ – ‘a kind of getting rid of things pressing on you, an unloading’ – but wondered if he would ‘clutch at any old straw’ when dying. At the other extreme was the actor Nicol Williamson – ‘Knowing I am going to die makes me terribly angry; angry and panic-stricken to the point of screaming’ – who used a suitably theatrical metaphor for holding thoughts of death at bay. ‘Movement is life and without that you die; it’s why I hate a long run in the theatre. When I’m filming I have different things to do each day. It holds the mind and stops me thinking.’ Playwright and folk singer Dominic Behan was more defiant: ‘Life is of real importance: death is a joke… You’ll rarely see a grave more than five years looked after. Death is important for the subject, but not to us.’ Odette Hallowes, the French-born British agent, was more measured and resigned, and said she thought death would be friendly, ‘that it will be in some ways like meeting someone I have known a lot of things about for a long time and at last I will come face to face: I will be interested.’ This philosophical outlook came from when she was being tortured during the war and she thought, ‘Only two things can happen: I can survive or I can die. And then I was no longer frightened.’ ‘I regard death as the most liberating thought there is,’ said novelist Jennifer Dawson. ‘If I’d known this sooner I would have used my time more.’ At the end an incongruous colour ad for dishwasher tablets seemed to imply cleanliness was next to godliness and if you kept on top of the dishes the afterlife beckoned.