The loft was nearly empty, which after four weeks in that house was the most disorientating thing in it.
Insulation, a cold water tank, a folded camp bed, and a single archive box in the middle of the boarded section directly under the hatch — placed where you would find it, at head height, the first thing a torch would land on.
The box was grey, the same as the thirty year-boxes downstairs. The label was in the same square capitals.
FERRIS, A. — 1986–87.
Here is what was in it, and I am going to set it out the way he did, because the order is the point.
A hospital property receipt, Westmorland General, dated 4 November 1986. Itemising the personal effects of Ferris, Margaret J., deceased. Signed for by A. Ferris.
It lists nine items. Somebody had gone through the list in biro and put a tick against seven of them and a line through two.
A photocopy of a letter, 19 November 1986, from him to the hospital. Polite, short. Two items on the receipt had not been in the bag when he opened it at home. He was not making a complaint. He would be grateful if they could be looked for.
The two items were a wedding ring and a photograph.
The reply, 2 December 1986. A form letter, mostly. Sympathy, then the sentence that I read about six times standing in that loft:
Unfortunately we are unable to trace the items you describe and would advise that the hospital cannot accept liability for personal property. We consider the matter closed.
We consider the matter closed.
Then eleven more letters from him, between December 1986 and August 1987. To the ward. To the hospital administrator. To the ambulance service. To the funeral directors. To the hospital again. To a laundry contractor, because somebody had suggested the bedding.
They are not angry. That is the thing about them that I found hardest. Eleven letters over nine months and not one of them raises its voice. Every one of them opens by apologising for writing again.
And the replies. Four of them. Three say no. One is a compliments slip with “nothing found” written on it in biro.
And then the last sheet in the box. In his hand, undated, on a scrap:
Nobody looked. That is the whole of it. Nobody had to look and so nobody looked.
Under it, ruled off, the four words that ran the next thirty years of his life:
MARGARET — 1986 — NO CLAIM.
He had given his own loss a label and filed it in the same system as everybody else’s. And he had used the status that means there is nobody left to give this back to on the two things he most wanted returned, because the person they belonged to was gone.
He started at Cumbria Coaches in 1978 as a driver.
He moved into the lost property office in 1987.
The photographs in the shoebox stop in the mid-eighties. The labels start in 1987. There is no gap and no mystery in the middle. His wife died in November 1986, two items came back missing, eleven letters got him nowhere in nine months, and the following year he took a job in a back room and spent the rest of his life making sure that when somebody else lost something, at least one person looked.
Four thousand one hundred and nine times, it worked.
I want to be careful here, because this is the point where a story like this wants to become tidy, and I have had eleven weeks in that house and it is not tidy.
It is not a beautiful thing that a man’s grief turned into a public service. It is both things and they do not cancel.
He lived alone for thirty-two years in a house he had filled so completely that he could not have had anyone in it. He ate from one plate. His own possessions fitted in a wardrobe. There are no photographs of him after 1986 because there was nobody there to take one.
The ring in the biscuit tin was his own — he had taken it off and put it in a tin, and hers was in there too, which means at some point somebody found or replaced it and he did not wear either. I do not know which and there is nobody to ask.
He was not at peace. Men at peace do not write twenty-two entries on a sheet of paper about sixty letters from 1943. He was doing something with both hands for thirty years so that he did not have to stop and be a man in an empty house, and the thing he chose to do with both hands happened to be one of the most consistently decent things I have ever seen documented.
Both. Always both. I have stopped trying to resolve it and I would distrust anyone who could.