You can tell a great deal from a kitchen and I have learned to read them the way some people read a face.
A hoarder’s kitchen is the saddest room in the house, generally. It is where the illness shows most plainly, because a person can live surrounded by newspapers and still be dignified, and a person cannot live with a kitchen they can no longer use. You find a single cleared square foot by the kettle. You find the microwave working and the oven full of carrier bags.
Alec Ferris’s kitchen had a clean cooker, a clean sink, one plate, one bowl, one mug, and a cupboard containing eleven tins of soup, all the same, and a bag of rice.
And the entire rest of the room — the table, the worktops, two of the four chairs, and a set of steel shelving he had put up himself along the window wall — was files.
Ring binders. Ninety-two of them, and I did count, because by that stage I had started counting everything and had already accepted this job was going to take much more than three days.
They were numbered on the spine in the same square capitals. 1 through 92, and inside each one, in plastic wallets, was paper.
I opened number 61 at random.
It was correspondence. Letters, mostly photocopies of letters he had sent, with the replies where there were replies, in date order.
The first one I read was to a woman in Carlisle, dated March 2003, and it said — and I have the copy in front of me now, because Mrs. Iqbal eventually let me keep copies of a few, and this is the one I asked for:
Dear Mrs. Hartley,
I hope you will excuse me writing to you at this address. I have a suitcase which I believe may be yours, left on the 0840 Carlisle to Barrow service on 4th February. There is no name on it but there is a letter inside addressed to you at a previous address, which is how I have found you, and I have not read any further than the envelope.
If it is yours I can post it to you at no cost or you are welcome to collect it from the depot office any weekday before 4pm. If it is not yours I apologise for troubling you and would be grateful if you would let me know so that I can correct my records.
Yours sincerely, A. Ferris Lost Property, Cumbria Coaches
Stapled behind it was a reply, handwritten, four lines, saying yes it was hers, thank you, she had assumed it was gone forever, and could he possibly send it to her daughter’s address instead.
And behind that, a slip in his own hand: RETURNED 19/3/03.
I sat down on one of the two usable chairs in a dead man’s kitchen and I read ring binder 61 from the front to the back, which took about two hours, and then I went out to the van and sat in it for a while.
Because here is what ring binder 61 was.
It was one hundred and thirty-eight letters, written between January 2002 and November 2004, to people whose belongings had been left on a bus in Cumbria.
Every single one written by hand and then photocopied. Every one in the same register — formal, careful, slightly old-fashioned, apologising for the intrusion before it did anything else. Every one saying I have not read any further than the envelope, or I have not opened the wallet, or in one case I have not listened to it, about a dictaphone.
Ninety-two binders. If 61 was typical — and I have since been through enough of them to say it roughly was — then Alec Ferris wrote somewhere in the region of eleven thousand letters to strangers about their lost property.
The lost property office at Cumbria Coaches was one man, in a back room at a bus depot in Kendal, and it was open to the public four hours a day.
He did the letters at home.
The other thing in that kitchen took me until the second week to understand, and it is the thing that changed how I felt about all of it.
On the shelving above the table, separate from the numbered binders, were four box files. They were not numbered. They were labelled, in the same hand:
1987–1994, 1995–2001, 2002–2009, and — the one that stopped me — 2010–.
With nothing after the dash.
He retired in 2009. The office closed when he retired; they never replaced him.
And there is a box file for 2010 onwards, and it is three-quarters full, and it contains four hundred and six letters written between 2010 and 2019 by a retired man with no access to any lost property office, about items that were already in his house.
He kept going for ten years after he stopped being paid.
He was still trying to give it all back.