We had hoped for a sunny day, but when we woke up that morning it was as if we even the sky had decided it couldn’t be arsed. A flat grey coat of emulsion where there might have been brilliant blue, a dramatic sunset or the intimidating metallic purple of a storm. With just the grey, it is hard for us to get out of bed. Yesterday was a long journey, we arrived here late. I had been driving for three hours and was tired enough to watch Too Fast Too Furious on her grandmothers tiny television, Ali wasn't so she turned it off at about midnight and we went to go to sleep.
Waking up now our bodies ache from the unfamiliarity of a strange mattress. These Springs have not formed to our body. These springs have adjusted to the shape of someone else body. Ali's grandmother, Jane, has been dead for four months now. This room still smells like her. Still contains all her stuff.
We get out of her bed. There is no food in the house, we have tea with no milk. There is a supermarket over the road but it’s Sunday so it will not be open until 10am. It is 9.
We decide to make a start, that we can go get some supplies in an hour.
From the kitchen I take a feather duster on the end of a stick that I will use to sweep cobwebs out of the way.
We head out of the back door. No one has been here for a while except the gardener who comes once a week, a pair of wood pigeons that have been living on a window ledge explode into the sky, with a noise like a shotgun, I swear one of them gives me a dirty look.
There is a conservatory/greenhouse full of cacti, her entire collection, well over sixty different kinds. They will have to be looked after by someone. It would be a shame for such and extensive collection to go to waste.
We walk past it onto the lawn. A fat baby blackbird darts from cover and bashes into the chain link fence. Dazed it takes up a new hiding place beneath a shrub and watches us nervously as we proceed towards the end of the garden. We cannot see the birds parents, but we leave it alone.
The garden looks perfect. I guess that Ali’s uncle is paying the gardener so that when the time comes for us to sell the house it hasn’t fallen into a state of disrepair.
We press on towards the garage. Opening the doors we see a five-foot pile of Boxes, Tubs and furniture covered with tarps. There is not enough light for us to work with so we open the double doors at the other end of the garage, where cars would normally come in. Spiders fall from the rapidly expanding gap between to the two doors. They crawl off to find new dark places in which to hide.
There is a lot of stuff in here that got stored away it has come from West Wales to Toddington in Bedfordshire and then all the way up here to Brandon, Suffolk. We are going to take some of it to Bath and then post bits of it all over the world.
Even without the memories attached, the journey it has taken to get here already imbues every dusty item with some kind of fetishist significance. If you wanted to you could picture their journey as a five dimensional graph love knot, where the past left is behind us like neon snail trails, like the matted threads that spew from the backsides of these wandering spiders. I can see our paths and the paths of the contents of these boxes tied up together in the complex web of our shared history. I see the moment when I lured Ali away from Wales, away from her mother and all this stuff. I see her mother already disabled, mostly wheelchair bound, moving to be near Uncle Rob, I see her getting worse, having a fall, having a stroke, having to be moved into a home. I see this whole pile of stuff pulling in tight and leaving a trail away from the rest of us and coming here into the dark were it has waited for us to return and collect it, bring it back into the light.
We must be rational and strong in the face of emotion. We will objectively look through all of this and catagorise. We will take some of it home to our already crowded flat. Some will be given away to charity shops. Some will be photographed with a digital camera. Some we will just throw away. This is going to be complicated.
The first hour is spent just assessing what we are getting into, before heading over to the supermarket and buying sandwhich-building materials, some ham, some lettuce, a Jar of pickled Gerkins (sweet dill) and a pack of four mini bagettes. We eat them in the kitchen, not wanting to mess up her grandmothers carpets.
Anyone who buy’s this house will undoubtedly replace the carpets inside of a week, but that’s not the point. It is the principle of the thing, Jane kept this house spotless for half a century, we are not about to ruin that legacy in a single weekend.
With our bellies full we head back the shed and, applying the hand-and-fast plaster-principle, start with the hardest bag; soft toys.
Teddy bears and puppies and dinosaurs from Ali’s childhood piled up like an orgy wrapped in a plastic bag. We are looking for two in particular. Miss Bunny and an old pink bear that Ali's mother sometimes asks for.
Both Ali and I can be ridiculous about this kind of thing. Irrational.
We are adults that keep soft toy’s in our bedroom. We have new ones. They have names and personalities. This is a side of our lives that we do not often share with other people. Back home we have the Pigs (little Pig, Pig Wigglington and Singing Pig.) We have Goat, a Squirrel and a bush baby. We have the big white Snow-God, We have Clangers and frogs and polar bears. We even have duck billed platypus and an akidna. We look after them, we know them all well. We don't have kid's, We'd love a dog but live in rented accommodation.
The soft toys here however have suffered from years of neglect. They look like props for an NSPCC fund-raising advert. The worst casualty is a beanbag frog that once contained dried lentils. Mice have ripped him apart, he is now just shreds of cloth. Mice have attacked the other bears also. They have ripped open seams in order to get to the stuffing. They do not discriminate between hands and bodies and faces. Childhood friends appear from black bags like victims of torture. I am reminded of one a particularly cruel children's book. It is a story about a teddy bear. Abandoned and Unloved for years in an attick and then suddenly overjoyed at a reunion with its owner, because it knows that it will be loved again. Ali is holding it together fine.
To me, what the mice have done seems like wanton destruction, it is insult to injury. they piss and shit on everything and then tear it apart, but I am judging them too harshly. What they are doing is pulling out stuffing to make their nests. This knowledge makes it easier to deal with. I can re-frame and step outside of myself. Actual living things have benefitted at the expense of what I have to keep reminding myself are just funny shaped pillows.
Mrs Bunny is ok. We also find the pink bear. It is no longer pink but at least it still has it’s face.
We separate the toys into three piles. Silently, without telling ali I tell the middle pile that they will be going to a charity shop where they will be bought and given to children and loved again. I make them a promise. In particular I make this promise to Big Dog, a birthday present which I gave to Ali around the time that we first got together. It’s a small thing but it makes it ok. I am re-rewriting that children’s book. I think that maybe I have misremembered the children’s book anyway. I think in the end the bear comes down from the attic to be given to his own owner’s daughter. I'm pretty sure that in the book there were no mice.
With the bears out the way we are able to press on to what we think will be easier tasks, vases, knickknacks, functional crockery. Every object drips with nostalgic memory.
A lot of it is broken, that is easy, it can be thrown away. We throw away a busted doll’s house made by her father. We throw away the moth-eaten head of a stuffed impala once mounted ironically on the living-room wall. There are dozens of boxes too small to have any really practical use. There are Tin’s and miniature teacups. There are plastic cars and metal soldiers. Why would anybody buy these? I ask myself.
I start to become shocked by the amount of useless frippery a person can collect in a single lifetime. I find figurines, small handmade sculptures and costume jewelry I picture them all on shelves.
I get an image in my mind of my own shelves at home. Of a porcelain Indian running duck with a ribbon around it’s neck. A carved wooden dolphin. A logic puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I start to wonder about what it means to be human, why we choose to spend so much time and energy making shelf fillers, stocking fillers and ultimately landfillers. What will the historians of the future make of all of this. They will say, no doubt, that it has Ritualistic Significance which is what they say when they can't figure out what something is for. I wonder if any other animal collects objects that have no practical purpose other than to express their owner’s personality. I wonder if cave paintings just made the place more 'homely'.
Somewhere elbow deep in the mess I get the idea that the bags of ‘Sulvanian Families’ stuff we keep finding might be valuable. That perhaps we could sell them on Ebay. Sulvanian Familes were like Doll’s houses for Animals. Ali used to collect them, she has a doll's river barge in which resides a family of otters. All it’s parts are there; that has to be worth something right? Even if it’s not we can clean it up and give it to my neices.
When Ali was a girl she also collected Trolls. I start to put each troll we find in a bag I am convinced that someone out there must still be collecting these, that they must hold some value to someone. I throw chipped art objects into the trash, and mass produced neon-haired trolls into a pillowcase to take home. Because they can be grouped together, because they are easily identifiable it seems worth-while to collect them. 100 dead plastic faces in a bag.
We strike a seam of artwork. Several portfolios of both Ali’s father’s and Ali’s Mother’s work. We knew that this would be here; we know that we cannot keep all of it, but Ali has a plan, but the plan is going to take a long time. Carefully we put all the art all to one side and break for lunch.
I decide that we have done well and that as such we deserve a nice dinner, that we should walk down the road into town and get a pub lunch. I think it’s a good idea for us to have some down-time let people wait on us for a while. Away from the dust and the spiders.
Ali doesn’t want this to turn into a wasted afternoon so we are to make it as quick as possible. It’s Sunday, It’s 3pm, nowhere is serving lunch anymore, we walk a mile and a half before catching the very end of a serving at a roadside pub. It’s a good lunch, meat and gravy and Yorkshire puddings. Our waitress clearly wants to go home already. We talk about how we are making good progress how the weather is turning, that it looks like blue skies ahead. We feel that we have broken the back of the thing.
When we come to pay we find out that the pub's card machine is broken, I am told that I will have to walk another half mile back to the centre of town and it’s only working cash-point. I am conscious that all of this is taking up valuable time as well as energy and strength. I am pissed off about it but I hold it in as this whole lunch thing was my idea.
Instead of going all the way into town I pop into an Aldi which is quite close by. Despite being stuffed I pick up a bag of Haribo Cola-bottles and £20 cashback. When I return to the bar, Ali is talking to the barman and an alcoholic ex-hippie. I tell them about going to Aldi instead of the cashpoint, the hippie pipes up, ‘and that’s all you bought… they told me I had to spend over a fiver’ I look at him. He looks at me. He had long hair once but now due to male pattern baldness it’s just a curtain now around the back of his head. He has the loose grin of a drinker, rough skin and rougher clothes. For reasons unexplained I’m looking pretty good, short hair, clean shaven, young and affluent, who are they to know it's a sham.
‘yeah they were gonna make me do that’ I say ‘ but they decided they liked my style’
I look down my nose at the Hippy, half smiling, telling him with my eyes that I think he looks like shit. The barman stiffles a laugh.
‘See you later guys’ I say swanning out the door with my beautiful young wife in tow.
‘Not if I see you first’ says the Hippy. I'll most likely never see him again.
