And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Zoe Turner had no call to wonder about such things. Five years ago, with her brother, she bought a £400,000 house in Brixton, south London, writes Kevin Myers.
She was then 23, and a debt of such magnitude must have been daunting. The best way for her to maximise the return on her huge investment was by do-it-yourself home improvements.
So that's what she did, working hard, day and night. In time, she might well reap a rich return on that courageous investment of so much capital, aided by all her hard work. Alone in her house the Friday before last, she was drilling some holes in a wall. She bent closer to the drill - perhaps to apply more pressure to it - and her hair or her headscarf caught in the drill-bit.
The drill then whiplashed around her, turning the cable into a noose which instantly locked itself around her neck. It did this so tightly and so powerfully that she couldn't release herself, and in the complete safety of her home, it strangled her to death.
Ronald McClagish had been living by himself for only two weeks when he apparently decided to clear out a large walk-in wardrobe in his bungalow, outside Wisbech, a small town in Cambridgeshire. He hadn't had much luck in recent times. Already divorced, he had only recently split up with his most recent girlfriend. Moreover, he was rather frail, with a liver complaint, and suffered from asthma.
As he was cleaning the wardrobe, something disturbed the heavy, free-standing wardrobe opposite, and it fell forward, jamming shut the door of the of closet he was inside. He was unable to push the door open, and so was now trapped in total darkness. Presumably he began to shout for help, but no one could hear him.
In the dark he groped around for something to help him break out of his prison, and found a pipe running along the wall. He wrenched at it, and it finally came free in his hand. But this action also unleashed an unstoppable torrent of mains water. Thus, he was now trapped in an utterly lightless wardrobe, with cold water cascading all over him.
So he frantically began to smash the pipe against the walls of his prison. His neighbours heard the din - "repeated digging noises" they reported - but did not enquire what the cause might be. So there he was, in the safety of his own home, water pouring all over him, day after day in the utter dark. The coroner's inquest heard that he seems to have succumbed to bronchitis after about a week - though in this perpetually-filling, freezing, lightless aquatic hell, death could have been caused by almost anything. But he did not drown: no, he was spared that swift mercy.
In the middle of the North Atlantic 63 years ago, Pat Jackson was certain a cold and watery end awaited him. Half Irish - his mother was a Callaghan (coincidentally, his commanding officer being the legendary Eugene Esmonde, from Dromahair, Tipperary) - Pat was a pilot in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, searching for the German battleship Bismarck.
He had already, only hours before, had a very close call with death - on the dawn of his 24th birthday, as it happened - launching a torpedo strike on the German vessel from his antiquated Swordfish biplane. He had flown into the tornado of flak and the exploding walls of water caused by the battleship firing its big guns into the sea in front of him. He launched his torpedo, before slowly turning - the Swordfish's top speed was around 80 m.p.h. - and managing to escape.
Bismarck had then vanished in the filthy Atlantic weather. Pat returned to his aircraft carrier, Victorious, and managed to land his plane on a violently pitching deck in a raging storm. After refuelling, he set off again in pursuit of the quarry that half of the British navy was now looking for - only now he was searching in the wrong direction. Bismarck was gone - and worse, after five hours in the air, with the Atlantic gales unabating, he was lost and out of fuel.
The Swordfish lacked the survival equipment for him and his two crewmen to withstand the appalling conditions in the Arctic seas. He would have to ditch his aircraft, out of radio contact, hundreds of miles from help, into these vast, mountainous waves. All naval airmen knew that there was but one outcome to such a plight: Pat and his colleagues had two options - death from exposure or death by drowning. He said three Hail Marys and prepared to die, soon and coldly.
Then, in the middle of thousands of miles of empty ocean, incredibly, a third option appeared out of nowhere - a large and utterly empty lifeboat. He landed the Swordfish on the sea beside it, and he and his two crewmen swam over to the floating miracle. There they found food and water, a sail, and even brandy. They spent nine days on the boat, in volcanic, icy seas, until an Icelandic fishing vessel rescued the three of them, on a day in May in 1941.
Pat Jackson lived another 63½ years, and he died the other week aged 87, within a few days of Zoe Turner (28) and Ronald McClagish (51) - all, in their own time and way, discovering the meaning of: It tolls for thee.