The front room was the scale of it.
Floor to picture rail, three walls, with a channel down the middle about shoulder-width that he had kept clear so he could get to the window and the meter cupboard. There was an armchair in there. I did not find it until day nine.
Boxes, mostly, and he had been systematic about those too — banana boxes from a supermarket, all the same size, all closed, all labelled on two faces so you could read them from either direction.
GLOVES — SINGLE — 2004–2007. BOOKS — PAPERBACK — NO INSCRIPTION. BOOKS — INSCRIBED.
Those were separate boxes. He had separated the books somebody had written a name in from the books nobody had, because one of them was findable and the other wasn’t, and he had done that with about nine hundred books.
PHONES — PRE-SMART. Four boxes. PHONES — SMART — LOCKED. Two. CHARGERS. Eleven boxes, which tells you something about buses.
And along the back wall, in a different kind of box — proper archive boxes, the grey ones you buy — thirty of them, one per year, 1987 to 2016, each labelled with the year and a number.
1994 — 138. 2001 — 171. 2008 — 156.
It took me until the second week to work out that the number was not how many items came in.
It was how many went back.
The total, when I added the thirty boxes up on the tailgate of the van on a Thursday afternoon, was 4,109.
Four thousand one hundred and nine objects returned to the people they belonged to, over thirty years, by one man in a back room at a bus depot, and then for ten years after that by a retired man at his own kitchen table with no office and no authority and no reason.
Each box held the paperwork for that year’s returns. The letter, the reply where there was one, and the slip with the second date on it.
I read a lot of them. More than I should have; the job took eleven weeks in the end and I could have done it in five.
They are not dramatic. That is what I want to convey about them. It is a wallet, a set of keys, a coat, a bag of shopping, a child’s shoe, a folder of work papers, a laptop, a walking stick, a urn — I will come back to the urn — and a letter beginning Dear Mr. Chandrasekhar, I hope you will excuse me writing to you at this address.
Thousands of them. All the same shape. All apologising first.
The returns were maybe a fifth of what was in that house.
That is the arithmetic that sat on my chest for eleven weeks. Four thousand went home. The house still had — and I did eventually count, because the insurers needed it and because by then I could not have done it any other way — thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and sixty labelled items in it.
Nine out of ten never went back.
And every one of them had been through the same process. The label. The attempt. The letter, where there was any way at all to write one. And then a status, and the status was almost always HOLDING, and holding meant he had not given up on it, and he had not given up on any of them, for thirty years, which is why the house was full.
He never threw away an object he had failed to return.
I have thought about whether that is a kind of illness. I am not qualified and I have decided I don’t think the question is useful. What I would say is that the illness version of this looks completely different — the illness version cannot label, cannot sort, cannot let go of its own things. Alec Ferris’s own possessions fitted in one wardrobe and a chest of drawers and I catalogued them in ninety minutes.
He wasn’t keeping things. He was refusing to be the last person who tried.
There was one box in that room that was not like the others and I want to describe it now because it is where I stopped being a professional about this job.
It was on the mantelpiece, on its own, in the only clear space on any surface in the entire ground floor. A shoebox, and the label was longer than any other label in the house.
LEEDS — 11/9/03 — RETURNED 3/12/03 — RETURNED TO ME 19/12/03 — HOLDING.
Four dates.
Inside was a christening gown, folded in tissue, and a letter from a woman in Leeds, and I read the letter because by that point I had entirely given up pretending I wasn’t going to.
She thanked him. She said she had been looking for it for three months and had cried when it arrived. And then she said that her daughter had died in October, between his first letter and the parcel arriving, and that she could not have it in the house, and that she was sending it back to him because she could not put it in a bin and she could not give it to a charity shop and she had thought about it for two weeks and he was the only person she could think of who would understand why it could not just go.
She wrote: I am sorry to make it your problem. I think you might be the only person in England who won’t mind.
And he didn’t. He put it on the mantelpiece and he left it there for twenty years.