I clear houses for probate. It is a real job that most people have never heard of, and what it means is that when somebody dies and the family cannot face it, or lives four hundred miles away, or does not exist, somebody like me is paid to go in and turn a house into a list.
Eleven years. Maybe six hundred properties. You develop a way of not being in them, which sounds cold and is actually the only way to do the work properly: you are cataloguing objects, not a life, and the moment you start reading the birthday cards you are no longer any use to anybody.
I am telling you this so you understand that I am not a person who is easily affected by a house.
The instruction came through a solicitor in Kendal. Deceased: Alec Ferris, 79, died in hospital in February, no next of kin traced. A terraced house on Brockhole Street. Full inventory and clearance, standard terms, keys at the office.
The note at the bottom of the instruction said: Property is heavily accumulated. Executor advises allowing additional time.
That is solicitor language for hoarder, and I have done maybe forty of those, and I allowed three days instead of one and thought nothing else about it.
I could not open the front door more than about nine inches.
That is not unusual in itself. What was unusual is what was behind it, because in a hoarded house what is behind the front door is rubbish — post, bags, newspaper, the sediment of somebody who stopped being able to throw things away.
Behind Alec Ferris’s front door were suitcases.
Eleven of them, stacked two deep along the hall, and I had to go in sideways and move the first four out onto the step before I could get properly in. Hard shell and soft, old and less old, a tan leather one with a brass catch and a purple nylon thing from about 2005 with a broken wheel.
Every single one had a luggage label on the handle. Not an airline tag — a label, the paper kind you write on, tied with string, in handwriting.
The one nearest the door said: KESWICK — 14/6/98 — RETURNED 22/6/98.
I stood in that hallway for a long time.
Here is what a hoarded house is actually like, so you know why this was different.
A hoard is chaos. That is the whole nature of it: the illness is an inability to decide, so nothing is ever sorted, and what you get is strata. Newspapers from 2003 under a box of Christmas decorations under a bag of clothes under more newspapers. You dig, and the deeper you go the older it gets, and nothing has ever been organised because organising is the exact thing the person could not do.
Alec Ferris’s house was full to the ceiling in most rooms.
And all of it was labelled.
Every object in that house — and I mean every object, I mean forty thousand objects, I counted eventually and I will come to that — had a paper label tied or taped to it, in the same small square handwriting, with a place, a date, and a status.
The hall alone, before I got past the stairs:
Eleven suitcases. Nine holdalls. Twenty-two umbrellas in a barrel by the door, of which nineteen were labelled and three were, I think, actually his. A stack of coats on the newel post, seven deep. And on the shelf above the radiator, in three shoeboxes, one hundred and forty-one pairs of reading glasses.
Each pair in a small clear bag. Each bag with a label.
PENRITH — 3/11/11 — NO CLAIM.
I did the thing you are not supposed to do, which is that I stopped working and started reading.
The statuses. There were only four, once I had been through enough of them, and they were consistent across three decades:
RETURNED, with a second date.
NO CLAIM.
REFUSED — which I did not understand for two more days.
And HOLDING, which was the most common by a very long way, and which never had a second date on it.
Holding. Not kept. Not mine. Holding.
You do not write “holding” on something you have stolen and you do not write it on something you have bought. It is a word with a beginning and an intended end, and this house had thirty years of it stacked to the picture rail.
I called the solicitor from the front step at about half past ten.
I said I needed to flag something before I went any further, because if this was what I thought it was then a lot of what was in that house did not belong to the estate, and clearing it in the normal way would mean selling or tipping several thousand items that had owners.
The solicitor — a very calm woman called Mrs. Iqbal, who I have since decided is one of the more decent people I have dealt with — asked me to explain what I was looking at.
I described the suitcases. I described the glasses. I read her four labels.
She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “What did he do? For work, I mean. Do we know?”
I said I had no idea. I had been in the house forty minutes.
And she said she would find out, and she rang me back at two o’clock that afternoon with three sentences that reorganised the entire job.
She said: “Alec Ferris worked for Cumbria Coaches from 1978 until he retired in 2009.”
She said: “For the last twenty-two years of that he ran their lost property office.”
And then she said, “The office closed in 2009 when he retired. They never replaced him.”