When we moved into this house almost 31 years ago (never have problems remembering that as DD was 6 days old), it was full of the possessions of the previous owners. When we’d first viewed the house, which we’d been told was unoccupied, it was as if someone had popped out round the corner; coats hanging up, birthday cards on the mantelpiece in the living room and even a couple of cigarette ends in an ashtray. We’d agreed to clear the house as we didn’t want to delay moving in any further. What I couldn’t credit was the amount of personal stuff, letters, photos, diaries, WW1 postcards, school things from the two sons of the people we’d bought from all left behind. There was also an Anderson shelter in the back garden which had been turned into a garden feature and could still be sat in. We knew the couple we’d bought from had been elderly and one of them must have had a long term illness as the back reception had been converted into a bedroom where a couple of oxygen tanks had been left. It was quite an adventure sorting it and helped me settle at the start of my maternity leave. The house (late Victorian) had been in the ownership of the same family since built with the parents leaving it to their daughter, who’d lived there since birth. Fred, her husband, had obviously been a keen DIY person up to about the 50’s, with the result that most of the Victorian fire places had been replaced with tiled hearths and the wooden doors and stairs boarded over. He’d also been a keen recorder of family holidays, with maps marking routes and postcards of where they’d been in his shed in the garden. Most of the furniture and clothes went to charity but it took us about 2 years to get into the basement, as we had a lot of internal modernisation done to the house. Lots of glass dishes, sets of china, ornaments with dates on the stuff as to when it had been last checked, some of it not since the 50s. We had a forwarding address of a care home in Chester which did puzzle us as the son we’d dealt with had been based in Colchester. About 10 years later, I had a phone call from a man identifying himself as the ‘other son’, apologising for leaving so much stuff behind, explaining that they’d had to move their parents out very quickly as his mother was ill, he lived in Chester so that was why they’d moved there and had we come across his box of theatrical brochures from when he had been at school and a keen performer and did we still have them. I did remember them as at the time we wondered if we should offer them to the school for archiving but did have to tell him we had disposed of them. I did send him some photos we’d kept of the house the family had taken over the years, including some which must have had him in. It’s something that does make me wonder about the things I’ve hung onto; I’ve got a batch of papers to go through going back to my university days including letters from people I’m no longer in contact with. Do I move them on myself or, like DP’s family, just leave them in the loft so someone else can do it whenever. (Rhetorical question really).
