By Kenn Taylor
Sorting through his deceased father belongings provoked a mixture of emotions in David.
The scale of the task overwhelmed him. His father had been a hoarder who’d lived in the same house for 60 years. Even with the help of his siblings it would be a big job to sort through it all. They had put the task off until a few weeks after the funeral, but soon the house would have to be sold for all their sakes, so the clear out had to begin.
For the sake of organisation, they divided themselves into different rooms. After first looking through the house for individual items they wanted as keepsakes. There had been little conflict over this – their father kept far more tat and trinketry than they could ever want and, with them having all had their own families, old toys, personal items and the like had long been removed.
What remained was nearly all their father’s and their 9-years-deceased mothers stuff. David took the smallish room at the back of the house latterly used as a dining room. It was dominated by a poky resin dining table with wood-effect pattern and a large, dark-wood display cabinet whose lower drawers were stuffed with everything from a basket full of sewing kit to twenty-year-old birthday cards and boxes of ageing photographs.
It was a huge task to clear the cabinet and took David most of the day. His speed was slowed by having to sort through all the photographs. Nostalgia and sadness was inevitable as he sifted through the still glossy images in their fraying paper folders. After a while, he just put the boxes of photographs to one side, reasoning that he’d take them home and sort through all of them at a less pressing and less emotional time.
David had a sometimes difficult relationship with his father. John Hughes had not been cruel or violent, but his hard working life in the shipyard, especially during WWII, had made him somewhat distant and cynical. The harshness of the time had also no doubt contributed to his father’s hoarding instincts, which David now had to deal with the ultimate results of.
David had been born after the war and had grown tired of hearing about it or the Depression before it. He was a lot more optimistic and liberal. That said he was no hippie and he knew that his father was quietly proud that David had risen to the role of Technical Manager at the oilseed plant, before it closed and he took early retirement. It was never really something he had a passion for, but it had given him and his family a good living over the years and now he was retired, he had time more to indulge his fondness for art.
With the cabinet cleared, it left only the bureau to sort through. In his old age David now found it curious that their staunchly British father would use such a fancy word for the tatty fold out desk, but that’s what they had always called it and it had been in the same corner of the room since David had been a child. They were always forbidden to play with it as was where the ‘important’ things were kept; bank books, birth certificates, warranties. They were especially not allowed to go near it after one of David siblings had lent on it too hard and broken one of the brackets on the fold down desk top. His father, true to form, had never repaired it, so even now the closed cover hung off centre.
David walked over and pulled the desk top down. Slowly as, just as he predicted, it fell away when pulled. Once lowered he began to look through the various spaces that made up the interior of the bureau: small draws, racks and cubbyholes. Each one stuffed full with letters, documents and folders.
In the largest space there was a long green tin. Patrick pulled it out and looked at the faded labels above each coin slot: ‘Rates’, ‘Electricity’, ‘Gas’, ‘Radio Licence’….opening it up revealed just a few defunct coins and an ornate button.
David threw the tin in his rubbish pile and carried on. He pulled out payslips, insurance documents, brown enveloped letters from the Inland Revenue. He kept the odd thing, such as a small black and white photograph of his mother while she was still young, but most of it he placed in the pile to discard, with increasing frequency as he went along.
He pulled out a particularly old white envelope, then paused just as he was about to throw it away, noticing that it was addressed to him rather than his father or mother. He thought he had long ago taken anything related to him away to his own home. The envelope had been carefully and cleanly opened. David pulled out the letter inside, noticing straightway despite its age, the quality of the paper it had been printed on.
He carefully unfolded the letter and felt and lump in his throat when he read the dispatch address:
Liverpool School of Art
62 Hope Street
Liverpool
L1
Telephone: Royal 3162
Telegrams: ArtHope
He carried on reading
Dear David Hughes
We are pleased to be able to offer you a place on our Pre-Diploma Course based on your interview and your portfolio, providing you satisfactorily complete your GCE O-level.
If you wish to take up this place, the course will begin 15th September 1959. Please take this letter with you to the Admissions Office in the main college building at the above address, before 30th May 1959, to confirm your attendance and register.
The Admissions Officer will provide you with information on the materials and equipment that you will be expected to have procured ready for your classes starting.
If you have any further queries, please speak to the Admissions Office.
Sincerely Yours
Thomas Barnes
Senior Admissions Tutor
David examined the neatly typed, short letter for a long time. His nose stung and his eyes watered, though he didn’t allow himself to cry. Just as he hadn’t that time so long ago now when, on his return from school, once again his hope of receiving a letter from the College of Art had proved fruitless.
He had asked his father if he should go to the College to ask them, as it had taken so long for them to contact him.
His father looked up from his newspaper and, seeing the degree of emotion in his son, sighed. He walked over and placed his hand on the 15 year old David’s shoulder.
“There’d be no use bothering them. It’s time to accept that you haven’t got in David. Like I told you it’s not much of a thing to do anyway. You’re clever. We’ll go down the College of Technology next week, enquire about you doing a HNC.”
His mum had joined in, “Yes, it doesn’t matter David. Either way, we just want you to be happy.”
Hearing his sister enter the room, David folded the letter up, placed it back in the envelope and threw it in the pile of things to discard.
This piece was published in the Summer 2016 edition of The Crazy Oik.
Kenn Taylor 