Here is the unglamorous truth about what happens to a house like that.
I am a contractor. I was paid a fee to inventory and clear a property for an estate with no beneficiaries, which means the residue goes to the Crown, and the Crown does not want thirty-eight thousand umbrellas.
The correct professional answer — the one I would have given on day one — is that everything of value is sold, everything else is tipped, the house is sold, and the file closes. I have done it perhaps six hundred times.
I could not do it and I want to be honest that this was not entirely noble. Part of it was that I had read too much. I had stopped being able to see a box as a box eleven days in, and that is a professional failure as much as anything else.
What I actually did, over about fourteen months, with Mrs. Iqbal doing a great deal of unpaid work at the other end of it:
The paperwork went to the county archive. All ninety-two binders, the thirty year-boxes, the four box files. They took it — not as a curiosity, but as a records collection, which is what it is: thirty years of correspondence with several thousand ordinary people in Cumbria about the things they lost. There is nothing else like it that anyone I spoke to has heard of.
The 1986 box went with it, and I thought about that for a long time and decided he had filed it in the same system deliberately and I was not going to be the one to separate it out.
The letters went to Barrow. Not the archive — his own note said not the archive. Mrs. Iqbal traced Margaret Pentley through a probate record he had no way of accessing in 2016, and she died in 1998, and she had a granddaughter in Lancaster.
I drove them over myself. That was not part of the job and nobody paid me for it and I would do it again.
She had never heard of Alec Ferris. I explained who he was, badly, standing in her porch with a wooden box, and I gave her the list of twenty-two attempts because I thought she should have it, and she read it on the doorstep and then she asked me to come in.
Jack was her great-uncle. He came home in 1946. There are photographs.
Two hundred and six things stayed together. The back bedroom. I could not break that up and I could not think of anywhere for it, and in the end a university took the whole room as a collection, on the argument that two hundred and six documented refusals with the letters attached is a piece of social history and not a pile of objects. I do not know what became of it after that. I have deliberately not looked.
The christening gown went back to Leeds. The woman was still at the same address, twenty-one years on. I wrote first. I asked. I did not send it.
She said yes.
Everything else was cleared — and I want to say plainly that thirty-four thousand items went to charity, recycling or landfill, because that is what happened and it would be dishonest to leave you with the impression that I found homes for a house.
I did the phones properly. Wiped, then recycled. He would have minded about the phones.
The house sold in the spring.
I did not go to the completion. Mrs. Iqbal sent me a note when it went through and said she thought I would want to know, and I did.
What it did to me is smaller than you would expect and it has not gone away.
I still clear houses. It is still the job, and I am still good at it, and I still mostly manage not to read the birthday cards.
The change is that I now do one thing I did not do before, and it costs me maybe two hours a month.
When I find something in a house with a name on it — a name and any route at all, an address, a photograph with a studio stamp, a school on a sports day certificate — I write. One letter. I say what I have, I say where I found it, I say I have not read further than the name, and I say they are welcome to it or I will not trouble them again.
I have written about ninety of those in three years. Forty-one have come back yes. Eleven have come back no, which I have learned to hear properly.
The rest is silence, and silence is fine.
I have a box in my garage. It is not thirty-eight thousand things and it is never going to be, because I made myself a rule after that house: one letter, and if there is no route, it goes. I am not built the way he was built and pretending otherwise would be how I end up in a terrace in Kendal eating out of one bowl.
But the box exists now, and it did not before, and that is because of a man I never met who died in February with four thousand one hundred and nine successes filed by year in a front room he could not walk across.
Somebody is still owed these. He was right about that. He was right about it for thirty years and nobody had to agree with him and nobody did.