The small room over the front door was the one I left until day twenty-eight, because it was the fullest and because by then I had stopped being in a hurry in a way that I could not have justified to anybody paying me.
It was floor to ceiling. I emptied it over four days.
Nine hundred and eleven items, and I am not going to list them, because by that stage the list had stopped meaning anything to me and it will have stopped meaning anything to you. Bags, coats, tools, a cello. There was a cello.
What was in there that was different was one object, on the floor, in the far corner, under the window where I did not reach until the last afternoon.
A wooden box about the size of a shoebox, dark, with a brass keyhole and no key. Somebody had made it rather than bought it.
And it did not have a label on it.
I want to convey what that meant on day thirty-one of that house.
Thirty-eight thousand items. Every one labelled, in the same hand, with a place and a date and a status. The system did not have exceptions. I had by then catalogued single gloves, dead phones, a set of dentures, and a plastic bag of seashells, and all four had a paper label tied on with string.
An unlabelled object in Alec Ferris’s house was not an oversight. There was no category of oversight in that house.
It meant either that it was his — like the biscuit tin, the one other unlabelled thing — or that it was something the system could not hold.
It was not locked, in the end. The lid lifted; the keyhole was decorative or the key was lost long before he had it.
Inside were letters. Perhaps sixty, in bundles, tied with the same string he used for the labels, and they were not his handwriting and not addressed to him.
They were addressed to a Margaret Pentley at an address in Barrow, and they had been written between 1941 and 1945, and they were from a man signing himself Jack.
Wartime letters. Sixty of them, in a handmade box, on the floor of a small room in Kendal.
There was one more thing in the box and it was Alec’s, and it was a single sheet folded twice, and it was a list.
Twenty-two entries. Dates down the left, from 1994 to 2016. Each one an attempt.
Barrow address — occupier does not know name — 1994 Electoral roll Barrow 1945 — three M. Pentley — wrote all — 2 replies, neither — 1996 Local paper letters page — printed 14/3/98 — no response Married name? — assume married — untraceable this route — 1999 Registry — cannot request without relationship — 2002 Library microfilm — Barrow deaths 1946-1990 — 3 candidates — 2004 Wrote Pentley, Ulverston — not related — 2005 Internet (library) — no result — 2008 Nephew? — Pentley, J — Preston — wrote — returned unknown — 2011 Museum — declined, not local enough — 2013 Wrote Barrow archive — will accept but cannot trace family — 2016
And then, at the bottom, in the same hand but shakier — a much later hand:
Not the archive. Somebody is still owed these.
Twenty-two attempts over twenty-two years to return sixty letters to a woman who was almost certainly dead before he started.
He had no obligation to any of it. Nobody knew he had them. The bus company would not have cared. There was no status he could write on that box, because none of the four applied: he had not returned it, nobody had refused it, and “no claim” would have meant admitting there was nobody left to claim — and he would not write that down.
So he left it unlabelled and he kept looking, and the last entry is from three years before he died.
I closed the lid and I sat on the floor of that small room and I did not do any more work that day.
Because the question that had been underneath the whole job for a month finally arrived properly, which was: why.
Not why did he do the job well. Plenty of people do a job well.
Why does a man spend thirty years, and then ten more unpaid, and then his last years on sixty letters from 1943, refusing every single time to be the person who decides that a thing is finished with.
The answer was in the loft and I found it the next morning.