REFUSED took me eleven days to understand, and when I did I had to go outside.
I had assumed it meant the postal thing — refused delivery, returned to sender, addressee gone. That is what the word means on an envelope and it is what I read into it for a week and a half.
It is not that.
REFUSED meant he had found the owner, written to them, and they had said no.
Two hundred and six of them across thirty years, and they are in a box file of their own, and the replies are in there with the items.
Some of them are just rudeness, and there is less of that than you would think — maybe twenty. Not mine, stop writing. One that says only how did you get this address and which I understand completely and which he answered, at length, apologising, explaining exactly which document in the bag had carried it and saying he had destroyed his note of it.
But most of the refusals are the christening gown. Over and over, in different handwriting, for thirty years.
A man in Workington, 1996, about a briefcase: That was my father’s and he died in March and I have thought about it and I would rather not have it. Thank you for finding it. I hope that doesn’t sound ungrateful.
A woman, 2007, about a phone: There are photographs on it of somebody I am divorcing. Please destroy it, and thank you for asking first — nobody has asked me first about anything for a year.
2011, about a wedding ring found in a coat pocket on the 0715 from Ulverston. Four words: No. But thank you.
He kept every one of them. Two hundred and six objects that their owners had deliberately let go of, and he could not, and they went upstairs.
Here is what I could not get past, and it took a walk round the block and a cigarette I hadn’t wanted in four years.
Every single one of those people got a letter first.
He could have posted the ring. He could have put the briefcase in a jiffy bag and been rid of it, and been a man who did a nice thing, and never known that the recipient stood in a hallway holding his dead father’s briefcase and wished he hadn’t.
He asked first. Every time, for thirty years, on eleven thousand letters: if it is yours I can post it or you are welcome to collect it. Never I am sending you this. Always a question, always leaving them a way to say no, always taking the no.
Which means he built himself a house full of things he could have got rid of by simply not asking.
That is the most decent thing I have ever encountered in a house and it is also, unmistakably, what buried him. Both. I have never got them apart.
The urn was 1999.
I am going to tell it quickly because it does not need decorating.
A woman left a bag on the 1210 from Kendal to Windermere containing her husband’s ashes in a cardboard container from the crematorium. It was in the office for six weeks. He found a receipt in the bag and traced the funeral directors and the funeral directors would not give him her address, correctly, so he wrote to the funeral directors and asked them to forward a letter, which they did.
She collected them on the 14th of December 1999 and the file has a note in her handwriting at the bottom of his own copy — she wrote on his letter and gave it back to him, which I think means she had it in her hand at the counter.
It says: I thought I had lost him twice.
RETURNED 14/12/99.
That one is in the 1999 box with a hundred and fifty-five other slips and there is nothing about it to indicate he thought it was any different from the gloves.
I want to say one more thing about REFUSED, because it is the hinge of all of this and I did not see it until much later.
Two hundred and six people said no.
And he never wrote back to argue, not once in thirty years — I checked, because by then I was checking things like that. No second letters. No are you sure. He took the no, wrote REFUSED on the label, and carried the thing upstairs.
There is a man in that behaviour who understands exactly what it is to be told no about something you have been trying to get back.
I found out why on day thirty-one, in the loft.