Since my father died, I’ve done nothing but deal with a ton of admin (I call it dadmin), arrange his funeral and start work clearing 97 years’ worth of hoarded stuff from his house before it sells. At night I dream I’m trapped in dust filled rooms, where ghost figures flicker in dark corners, moth eaten carpets crumble under my feet, and huge spiders fall on me from web-strewn ceilings, jerking me awake at 3am.
On the plus side, I’ve found some interesting things along the way. As a hoarder, my father kept practically everything. It’s too late to ask him why he had an alligator skin in the wardrobe, or what the two live bullets (no gun…as yet) were doing in the kitchen cupboard. In fact his house is filled with endless threads to unfinished stories.
Take the boxes of letters. Not just his – his mother’s, his father’s, my mother’s and even some of his last wife’s. Many are self-explanatory and easily discarded, but some leave me dying to know more. Like the one from his sister to my grandfather complaining bitterly about my mother and ‘that unspeakable incident in Gibraltar’… My mother? I didn’t think she was the unspeakable incident type, so WHAT HAPPENED??
Obviously there are endless photographs. The large filing cabinet in his office, entirely filled with boxes of slides, proved way too much for me. I kept some taken pre 1981 (haven’t had time to look at any of them yet, and of course have nothing to look at them with) but left the rest for house clearance. Life’s too short for that many slides of other people’s holidays.
More interesting were some printed photos from before he started taking slides. In among some black and white photos I’d never seen, there was a picture of my parents holding two babies – only one of which was me. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if maybe you were a twin and no one bothered to tell you.
And now there’s no one left to ask.
Of course he kept every single passport he’d ever owned, along with all the address books (including his mother’s, my mother’s and his last wife’s). I flipped through before discarding them, So many people I didn’t know, and so many places i’d never visited. Like driving through towns on your way to somewhere else, and briefly wondering about the lives of all those people who live there.
Diaries? Tons of them, mostly recent, all totally uninteresting, filled with doctor appointments and bin day reminders – but he’d kept them anyway. The one exception is a Letts Schoolboy Diary from 1939, and what makes it interesting is the content Letts considered suitable for a schoolboy at that time. The bottom of each double page spread has a box with a different, reasonably researched snippet of information on such things as mythical beasts, necromancy, demons, different types of fairies, witches, harpies and Norse gods. I found it fascinating, but I don’t think he did. All his diary entries are about visits to the dentist or going on car journeys – a schoolboy life so dull, he’d given up writing in it before March was out. Seems even the start of the war didn’t make an impression.
On his computer I found the start of his autobiography, and thought that might be worth reading. Sadly it stopped before he reached the age of seven. Fair enough. Memoir writing is a lot of effort – and anyway, knowing my father, he’d have left out ALL the interesting bits.
Clothes? The dressing gown alone was one he’d had since before his first marriage. Unwashed, moth-eaten and badly stained. Ew. I think he kept all the clothes he ever owned since doing his national service. And of course he kept all his last wife’s clothing, still neatly hanging in the wardrobe just as she’d left it when she died 10 years ago. Presents she’d bought, waiting to be wrapped for unknown children, long since grown up and probably past university by now.
I guess house clearance sums up all the messiness of a life. Few of us manage to tie up all the loose ends before death, and my father was no exception. Even at 97, he was planning for a future while carrying the weight of his past with him, just in case any of it came in handy.
It’s left me wondering whether to make my own house a minimalist haven, or leave tantalising half-finished letters, spicy diaries and cryptic clues to a mysterious past lying hidden in wardrobes and kitchen drawers. Fragments of stories for my children to wonder at.
But on balance, I reckon they’d rather I went for minimalist.
Lu Hersey
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