"Might be of use one day"

The above phrase is another of my feeble excuses
for keeping a lot of clutter in the house. There
may be a grain of truth in the view that I’ve
inherited or learned this hamster-like behaviour
from my parents and my late aunt, but I think this
would be a poor excuse.

Auntie was a strange woman to put it mildly. She
rarely threw anything out except for food refuse
and newspapers, and so when she died we had to do
a massive house clearance job. She was a retired
headmistress who lived with her mother, for most
of her mother’s life. Both lived to a ripe old age
– Nana died aged 97 in 1974, Auntie aged 92 in 1998.

Auntie lived in a modest 3 bed-roomed semi in Leeds,
the top floor of which was waist-high in clutter,
mainly inside poly bags. There was a narrow alleyway
through the mountain of poly bags to her bed in the
front bedroom. I recall one funny story, when she
asked my dad to fetch her some cash she had hidden
inside her bedroom wardrobe – this was when she was
in hospital for a gallbladder operation. Dad managed
to prise open the wardrobe door, whereupon a huge
avalanche of tins of Boots Freesia Talc fell down
from the top of the wardrobe onto him.

Not only were there masses of clutter inside Auntie’s
house, but also inside her decaying wooden garage,
which was full of sodden mouldy rubbish. In amongst
all this we found an old schoolboy’s cap of her
brother’s, who died when he was 15 of meningitis.
The cap was wet and the metal badge was rusting.
Nearby was a letter of condolence from his school’s
headmaster to Nana, saying how much everyone at the
school missed him. I felt sad to see these, but we
lobbed them and the rest of the garage contents.

Going through the clutter in Auntie’s cupboard drawers,
we found a poly bag containing some broken parts of an
old vacuum cleaner – bits of brown Bakelite (anyone
remember Bakelite plastic?). Auntie had labelled the
bag with this message, “Might be of use, one day”.
She wrote the same message on a good quality black
bin liner, the only problem being that there was a
large hole in the bottom of the bag. Crazy woman.

We did salvage a few things of use from her house –
my mum had the pleasure of wearing some of the
jewelry that Auntie had locked away all her life
(a few pieces of which belonged to my mum). Also an
electric hob with two rings on it, which was handy
when we had our kitchen done (in this house and in
the previous one also). We saved a few other bits:
some crockery, and a plastic watering can for indoor
use. We got rid of everything else, either to the
charity shops or into three large skips. The smell
of what we got rid of was appalling – a rank, musty
smell that invaded our clothing, skin and hair, and
which was impregnated everything in the house. Yuck!

To end on, here is a photo of the two sisters, Auntie
aged about 12 and my mum aged about 4. Pretty, aren't
they?