We left it that Hilary would try to get clearance from the offender manager for my involvement. He was so snowed under, she couldn’t say how long it would take. Employing me would also have budgetary implications, and government departments didn’t have a great track record for the speedy authorization of payments.
I have, incidentally, long since made it a rule that I never work for nothing, however deserving the cause. My conscience is clear about that, because of the time I spend in follow-ups with clients. For instance, in the case of Queenie, I invoiced the Housing Association for my initial consultations and the time I spent rehoming some of the cats, but my continuing visits, like the one that morning, are unpaid. And I have quite a raft of former clients on whom I still keep an eye.
Hilary was going to an eleven o’clock lecture at the University of Chichester Criminology Department, where she’s doing her PhD, so we parted about ten fifteen. I too had an eleven o’clock appointment. I said that, in the unlikely event of Hilary getting clearance from the offender manager that day, I could juggle my diary to get to the Hargood Estate at the end of the afternoon, say about five.
I mentioned that I deal with a lot of different clients at the same time, and the next person on my list could not have been more different from Queenie.
I could have told that from the address, apart from anything else. The house was a substantial Edwardian property in the leafy suburbs, on the way out of Chichester if you’re travelling west, in an area where there are quite a lot of big houses. This one was called ‘Clovelly’, a town somewhere in Devon, I recall. The house wasn’t in great decorative nick, but it was big. Price? Definitely talking seven figures.
The call had come from a woman called Dorothy Lechlade. She was making contact secretly, which is not unusual in my line of business. And she gave me more information than might be expected in a first conversation with someone she hadn’t met before. Again, that is not unusual in my line of business.
In a precise, slightly old-fashioned voice, she told me that her husband was an historian by profession (she actually said ‘an’). Theirs had been a late marriage, he in his mid-sixties, she in her early fifties. Remarkably in this day and age, the first time for both of them. She said that, since each had been living on their own for a long time, there were many adjustments to be made. Many compromises required. People become set in their ways and the introduction of someone else into a single existence almost inevitably prompts discussion, if not outright disagreement.
She hastened to assure me, as if I was about to question it, that theirs was a very happy marriage. However, she was worried that the rooms at the top of the house in which Tobias worked were in need of some reorganization. Was that the kind of service I might provide?
I had assured her that it was. I told her my charges. Her response suggested that money was not something she had ever had to worry about. I then suggested that I should make a preliminary visit, a recce to assess the scale of the job. I asked if she thought it would be better if I met husband and wife together for that meeting.
This idea unsettled her and she got very fluttery as she chose the option of my seeing her for the first time when her husband was out. She was elaborately secretive as we fixed the date. Tobias Lechlade, by long habit, spent Fridays in London, researching at the British Library. He always caught the same trains to Victoria and back. If I were to arrive at eleven in the morning, he would be safely absent. She gave me her mobile number and said she would ring mine if we needed to change our plans – if, say, Tobias was ill on the appointed day. Belt and braces.
The big deal Dorothy Lechlade made of all these arrangements suggested that she was inexperienced in the ways of duplicity.
So did her reaction when I parked the Yeti outside the house at two minutes to eleven. She had clearly been watching for me and scurried straight out and asked if I’d mind parking a little further down the road. She didn’t want to advertise to the good folk of Chichester that she required the services of SpaceWoman. It was not the first time I had encountered that reaction.
Dorothy Lechlade was a tall woman with greying hair cut in a long bob. My mother would have described her as ‘handsome’ or have said she had ‘strong features’, both of which in the Fleur Bonnier lexicon meant ‘unattractive’. I found her rather appealing. I also, in a strange way, seemed to recognize her from somewhere.
She wore a grey pinafore dress over a navy-blue shirt and I was not surprised to hear that she had until recently been head of history at a local girls’ private school. Before that, she insisted on telling me, she’d trained as a social worker. ‘Thought, you know, having come from a very privileged background, I should do something to help people less fortunate than myself.’
Her first job had been in Worthing, but she’d found dealing with abandoned children ‘very distressing’. ‘So many of them just get lost in the care system, it’s heartbreaking. I’m afraid I wasn’t up to that kind of emotional stress. Some of the cases were really harrowing … toddlers whose parents had died in violent circumstances. I’d always said I’d wanted to work with children, but I just couldn’t handle that stuff. I didn’t have the required ability to shut my mind to it when I got home. I’d wake up from nightmares about the kids. I was in a bad way.’ She winced with the pain of recollection.
‘So, I gave it up and retrained as a teacher. That was a more suitable role, in which I could still be of some use to children.’
Her manner was strange. She combined practicality with a slight other-worldliness.
I accepted her offer of coffee and followed her through to the kitchen while she made it. She used an all-glass Cona Percolator, an antiquated device I hadn’t seen for a long time in these days of Nespressos and pods. Looking round the brown-painted space, I got the feeling it wasn’t the only thing that had stayed there unchanged for many decades. I felt certain that she had moved into her husband’s house, rather than the other way round.
As if detecting the direction of my thoughts, Dorothy said, ‘Tobias’s parents lived here, since before he was born. He wasn’t actually born in the house; women went to nursing homes to have their babies in those days. Funny, isn’t it: then a “nursing home” was for having babies, now it’s for the very old.’
She was talking too much, betraying her nervousness. I did not interrupt.
‘But he’s lived here all his life so, you know, he’s quite resistant to change.’
I began to see the scale of the difficulties she might be encountering.
She poured the coffee. I said I was happy with cold milk. It came out of a high cream-coloured fridge with a bulging front, another vintage item.
‘Would you like to drink it down here?’
‘No. Let’s go up and see where the problem is,’ I suggested, tactfully ignoring the fact that the problem might well pervade the whole house. This impression was reinforced as she led me up two flights of stairs to the top floor. While well on the right side of squalid – and believe me, I know squalid – the décor was in need of a little refurbishment. Wallpaper, featuring rather too many large flowers, was faded, scuffed and rubbed at by the passage of the house’s residents. The stair carpets were thinning at the edge of the treads.
This should have prepared me for the top floor, but I was still taken aback by what Dorothy’s opening of the door – and switching on of the light – revealed. The attic comprised two rooms which, in the days of servants, were probably their living quarters.
The first one was lined with bookcases, full of dusty tomes which might once have had some order but were now stuffed in higgledy-piggledy – upright, sideways, diagonal, upside-down. Many had also cascaded to the floor, where they joined an undergrowth of more piled-up books, beige files and loose documents, stained brown where their paper clips had rusted. From the landing door, which could not be opened fully because of the books stacked behind it, a thin path – like an animal track through long grass – led to the second room.
Here the chaos was even more pronounced. The large windows which looked over the street in front were almost obscured by piles of documentation on their sills – I realized why Dorothy had switched the lights on. And, though there were fewer shelves, the tide of books and papers had risen to a couple of foot deep in places.
On the desk in front of the window, only just proud of the surrounding litter, stood a manual typewriter whose natural habitat was a museum. Microsoft might have staged a takeover of the entire world but had achieved no foothold in this attic in Chichester. Even the telephone on the desk was a black Bakelite one, its receiver attached by a plaited brown wire.
And over everything was a sticky patina of dust.
The only item in the room that had been touched by any form of cleaning was a small free-standing bookcase beside the desk. In this stood, erect as guardsmen, a series of books whose spines boasted their authorship by ‘T.J. Lechlade’. I took a note of the publisher’s name.
Following my eyeline, Dorothy said, with considerable pride, ‘Tobias’s publications. His special period is the Wars of the Roses.’
‘Ah,’ I said, not pretending to have any special knowledge of the subject. My recollections from school history lessons were hazy. I knew York and Lancaster were involved, but which side had which rose I’m afraid I couldn’t remember. It’s one of many things that I’ve got this far through my life without knowing. And my ignorance doesn’t hold me back – the Wars of the Roses don’t often come up in my line of business.
‘You do see the problem …?’ said Dorothy tentatively.
She phrased it as a question and the only possible answer was self-evident. I still said, ‘Yes.’ And then went on, ‘But presumably your husband has his own way of working, and it’s been like this for years? He knows where everything is?’
I was sounding her out, seeing if my intervention was really needed. Though I couldn’t personally have survived more than a few seconds in that environment, I recognized that people are different. And if conducting his life in that level of disorder suited Tobias Lechlade, then who was I to make him change his ways? I don’t feel I have a God-given mission to declutter everything. Some hoarders are not doing any harm to anyone and should be left to their own devices.
‘Yes,’ Dorothy replied. ‘But I’m worried from the safety angle. I mean, you can smell it, can’t you?’
Funny, I’m so inured to much worse smells that I hadn’t really analysed the one in the attic. But now I focused, I was aware of that thick stench of tobacco which used to greet you every time you walked into a pub. I saw on the desk a rack of briar pipes and an ashtray full of ash and dottle.
‘You mean the fire risk?’ I asked.
‘No. The damp.’
I sniffed again and realized what she was talking about. Beneath the predominant pipe tobacco was another fungal layer of smell. Mushroomy, cellar-like.
Dorothy pointed to a corner of the room where – from the top of the wallpaper – there seeped down an uneven black stain. Papers and books had been moved away from the floor beneath, but the damp had darkened the exposed carpet and was clearly spreading.
‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Does it get worse when it rains?’ She nodded. ‘Then it needs sorting. Have you got a reliable roofer?’ She shook her head. ‘I could give you a couple of names. Locals. They won’t sting you.’
I have a list of such essential people. Roofers, electricians, plumbers, decorators, all of whom I’ve worked with before. Most of them called Don, Dan or Dean, for no very good reason. I recommend them to private clients. When I’m working for the local authority or a housing association, I have to work with people they approve. Quite a few of my private workmen appear on both lists. There is no better way of finding the right man for a job than word of mouth.
‘Oh,’ said Dorothy. ‘If you could. I’d be so grateful.’
‘And while you’re getting all that done …’ I looked around at what looked like an explosion in a paper factory ‘… presumably you’d like me to make a start on this lot?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, decluttering it.’
‘What, you mean … interfering with Tobias’s workspace?’ She spoke the words as if I’d suggested painting the Taj Mahal Day-Glo pink.
‘Not interfering. Just tidying it up a bit.’
‘Tobias wouldn’t like that.’ She sounded deeply shocked. ‘We couldn’t do it. It might affect his work.’
‘You mean you don’t want it decluttered?’
‘Well …’
‘Why did you ring me, Dorothy? Why agree to me coming out here? If you just wanted me to recommend a roofer, I could have done that on the phone.’
‘Yes …’
I could tell she was losing her nerve. I went on, ‘Listen, apart from the leaking roof, this place is a major fire hazard. And if your husband smokes up here …’ The stench of tobacco was now becoming irksome. You quickly forget how it used to permeate virtually every building you walked into.
‘But,’ said Dorothy feebly, ‘Tobias has worked up here all his life.’
‘And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t continue to work up here for the rest of his life. Just work in a rather more organized space.’
‘He won’t like the idea,’ she said.
‘Not at first. But he may be persuaded to see the sense of it.’
‘I don’t know. Tobias is very strong-willed.’
I wondered briefly if she meant he was a bully, but somehow her tone was too affectionate to support that reading. ‘Listen, Dorothy, you wouldn’t have contacted me if you hadn’t considered some level of decluttering up here. I’m happy to undertake the job, but only in consultation with you and your husband. From the impression I get of him, Tobias won’t like the idea of your going behind his back. If you want to proceed, call me and we’ll fix another appointment for me to meet you and Tobias together. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll know you’ve changed your mind.’
Dorothy Lechlade seemed to take that on board. As she opened the front door and let some light into the gloomy hall, she asked, ‘Oh, what do I owe you for today?’
‘Nothing. I don’t charge for the first consultation. If you decide you do want to go ahead, then I’ll charge you at the rates we discussed.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘And thank you.’
I realized, as I walked down the road to the discreetly distant Yeti, what an effort it had cost Dorothy Lechlade to contact me. I also realized that, if their marriage was going to work, she was going to have to take issue with her husband over other things that he might not like.
I didn’t know whether I would ever hear from her again. The chances I would have put at exactly fifty-fifty. But I was intrigued by the Lechlades. I’m naturally curious about people. I couldn’t do this job if I wasn’t.
And I felt confident that I could help Dorothy and Tobias, if they chose to take up my offer. I saw no reason why they couldn’t have a very happy marriage. In spite of everything, I am still by nature an optimist.
But I knew that, if I did start working at Clovelly, it would be a long job.
I had heard the ping of an arriving text while I was with Dorothy and, once in the Yeti, I opened it. From Hilary. ‘Contacted the offender manager and the Housing Association. Both happy for you to check out the place today. There’ll be no one there, the mother’s had to go into hospital, so you’ll have to pick up a key from the Housing Association. Now it’s official, I can tell you the released lifer is called Nate Ogden. His mother’s name’s Maureen. I’ve said you’ll visit about five, but since there’s no one there, I guess the exact timing doesn’t matter.’ She gave me the address of the flat on Portsmouth’s Hargood Estate and the landline number there.
The intervening hours were filled like most of my days are. A wasted journey to Arundel, where a brother and sister in their fifties wanted their late mother’s house emptied as quickly as possible so that they could get it on the market and realize their inheritance. I had made it clear to them on the phone that I do decluttering rather than house clearance but, like many people, they just hadn’t listened. I gave them the contacts for a couple of house clearance companies I know to be reliable. They didn’t even thank me or apologize for wasting my time. I got the impression, from the simmering atmosphere between them, that they couldn’t wait till they were once again alone to argue about the terms of their mother’s will.
Lunch was a chicken and sweetcorn wrap eaten hastily (and almost definitely illegally) while I was driving back along the coast to Smalting to visit one of my former clients in a care home. She was a widow whom I had helped downsize from the family home to a two-bedroomed flat, and then helped to choose which few belongings she could take to the small room which was now the extent of her property. She had a daughter in Australia and a son in New York, neither of whom had visiting their mother in West Sussex high on their priority list, and most of her contemporary friends had died. So, I had got into the habit of visiting her at least once a fortnight. I never felt I could stay for less than half an hour. That, I suppose, is another bit of the job that I do for free.
My next call was in Bognor Regis, not the posh bit of holiday brochures and genteel retirement flats. Like most seaside towns, Bognor has an underbelly of unemployment, deprivation and drug abuse. My client there was a girl called Ashleigh. Because of an alcoholic mother, she had spent most of her childhood in care. And before she was eighteen, she had given birth to a little boy called Zak. Though a father was never mentioned, the child’s appearance showed him to be mixed race.
I had been put in touch with Ashleigh by the local authority. They had found her a one-bedroomed flat but were worried about how she was coping there. As ever, neighbours could be relied on to raise objections to any new tenant, though whether their complaints were justified, or born of resentment at the idea of a single mother getting preferential treatment, it was hard to know. Many times in my work I’d heard grumblings about ‘these girls who just get deliberately pregnant and rely on our taxes to pay for their housing.’
I had visited a couple of times, and on each occasion been struck by how much Ashleigh adored Zak. He was the light of her life, the first thing that she had ever felt genuinely belonged to her. If motherhood consisted only of hugging her baby, Ashleigh would have been wonderful at it.
Sadly, though, in the more practical aspects of the job description, her shortcomings were all too apparent. As is common with girls like her, Ashleigh didn’t want to breastfeed. And when it came to preparing Zak’s formula food, her schedule was fairly random.
She was equally erratic in nappy-changing. Having never experienced any kind of nurturing from her own mother, she had no instinct for it. In the same way, having never eaten much home cooking, she lived on takeaways. And, presumably, when Zak was weaned off the formula, he would be put on the same diet.
Ashleigh also seemed to see no reason why having a baby should stop her from going out drinking with her girlfriends. I hoped that it stopped at drinking. She had certainly used drugs in the past. I prayed that she was through that stage in her life.
The reason I’d been called in was because of the limited resources of the social services. They simply hadn’t got the staff to follow up on a case like Ashleigh’s. So, they reasoned, if they could reclassify her problem as hoarding rather than general inability to cope, they could get in an outside contractor – i.e. SpaceWoman – to deal with it. Employing me every now and then was a lot cheaper than taking on the new permanent staff members they really needed. They were up against it with the funding cuts in the sector.
Their version of events was true, in a way. There was a decluttering problem. Ashleigh had a chronic inability to tidy anything up. Each time I visited, the floor of her flat would be littered with empty packs of formula and spilled powder, dirty nappies, damp sheets and fast-food cartons. It was as if she genuinely didn’t notice the chaos around her. Every time I had to point it out for her to become aware of the mess. Then she would make half-hearted attempts to tidy up, but I would end up doing most of the work. My supply of black bin liners, and indeed clean nappies, would be raided every time.
It took me a long time to understand Ashleigh. She was certainly not uncaring – she adored Zak – but she didn’t seem to understand the basic practicalities of care. And what worried me was that if she didn’t get a grip on her life, if she didn’t stop living in self-generated squalor, the council would have her out of the flat in no time. If – heaven forbid – she started on the drugs again, Zak would definitely be taken into care. In that event, the chances of her ever getting him back were pretty slender. The cycle would be perpetuated.
So, the challenge to me was to convert her undoubted love for her son into the form of caring for him properly.
When I arrived at Ashleigh’s that afternoon, she was playing music too loudly. Some version of rap – perhaps the latest subdivision of the genre that I hadn’t caught up with yet (and probably never would). Though I didn’t mention the noise right away – didn’t want to come across too much as the disapproving mother – I knew it was just the kind of thing to generate more complaints from the neighbours. But I think playing music too loud, just like the squalor in which she lived, was something Ashleigh just didn’t think about.
Zak still looked beautiful, through the encrustations of formula and snot on his face, but he was screaming. The causes were a nappy that hadn’t been changed for too long, and sheer hunger. I pointed them out to Ashleigh.
‘Yeah, I know. I’ve just never been very good with time, knowing when things need to be done, you know.’
The easy route would have been for me to change Zak’s nappy and mix his formula – as I had done on earlier visits – but I saw my task as building Ashleigh’s self-reliance. So, I monitored her through the necessary processes. She was far from incompetent. She changed the nappy efficiently, cleaning his little bottom up with baby wipes (my baby wipes). As she did so, I noticed there was a bit of redness about his tiny anus, the beginnings of a rash.
‘You’d better put some cream on that.’
‘Oh.’ Ashleigh looked at me hopelessly. ‘I haven’t got any cream.’
Another thing to add to the list for my next visit. Sudocrem.
The contents of his nappy had leaked on to his Babygro, to join other noxious substances there. I picked it up gingerly. ‘For the washing machine,’ I said.
‘Washing machine’s buggered,’ said Ashleigh.
‘For how long?’ She shrugged. The pile of filthy clothes in front of it suggested at least a week.
‘Have you rung the Housing Association about it?’ I knew the terms of her rental agreement. The washing machine was their responsibility, not hers.
She shrugged.
‘Why not?’
She shrugged again. I made a mental note to call the Housing Association.
Holding Zak on her hip, Ashleigh riffled though the clothes in front of the washing machine and found a Babygro slightly less soiled than the others. She put it on him.
She brought the same efficiency that she had to the nappy to mixing Zak’s formula. While she did it, I was allowed to cuddle him on my lap. Which I knew was a big concession to me. Ashleigh was very wary of letting anyone else touch her baby – something which had raised another problem with health visitors and got the words ‘difficult and uncooperative’ indelibly imprinted on her notes. She was one of those people who always, often unwittingly, managed to get on the wrong side of officialdom.
While she prepared the mixture, she kept giving little, covert looks in my direction. To check I wasn’t doing Zak any harm. When the bottle was ready, she almost snatched him from my arms. She settled down to feed him, holding him close, almost making me feel I was an intruder in this moment of mother/son bonding.
Zak seemed restless, so I suggested gently that the level of music might be putting him off.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten that was still on.’ She sounded as if she really had. Mercifully, she used a zapper to extinguish the sound.
After its changing, Zak’s dirty nappy had just been dropped on the floor and lay next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken box spilling over with gnawed bones. I looked around the small space. ‘Where’re the nappy disposal bags?’
‘Mm?’ asked Ashleigh, unwilling to have the feeding togetherness interrupted.
‘When I last came, I brought you some nappy disposal bags, to put the dirty ones in.’
‘Oh, I think they’re over there.’ She gestured towards a pile of debris by the sink.
I found them. The packet was unopened. The nappies on the floor must have been all the ones used since my last visit. And if Zak had been changed with the frequency that he should have been, there could have been twice as many of them.
Deliberately, I opened the packet of nappy bags, rolled up the nappy Ashleigh had just changed, put it in the bag and tied the handles. ‘That’s what needs to be done with all of these,’ I said.
‘Oh well, if you don’t mind …’
‘I do mind. You clear them all up when you’ve finished feeding him.’
Ashleigh’s face assumed a very put-upon expression, but she didn’t raise any objection. I knew I was using a very mild form of tough love, but I did somehow have to get her to take responsibility for her own life. And Zak’s. It was the only way they were going to survive together.
Reluctantly, Ashleigh handed him over to me again after she’d finished feeding. With a baby wipe I removed the excess from his face, and he snuggled into my chest, comatose. As Zak slowly twitched against me, the inevitable, atavistic memory came back to me of cuddling Juliet (before she became Jools) and Ben in the same way.
I did not have to give Ashleigh any further instructions. She picked up and folded each reeking nappy into a bag and tied it up. She put them in the black bin liner I had provided. Then she picked up all the discarded formula boxes and fast-food containers. They went into the bin bag too. The carpet they revealed was stained and here and there dusted with formula powder.
Finally, she got out a vacuum cleaner and swept over the floor. The room was transformed. The actual cleaning process had taken less than twenty minutes.
That was what was so frustrating about Ashleigh. She knew exactly what she should be doing. It was actually doing it that was the problem.
My next visit was another waste of time. I didn’t recognize the name or address on my Outlook calendar, but that didn’t surprise me. Bookings come at me from all kinds of sources – the SpaceWoman website, phone calls, texts, and sometimes quite a long way ahead. I’m perhaps not as organized as I should be about my diary. I tend to work a week in advance. If there’s a name I don’t recognize, then I can guarantee it’s a first consultation. And quite often those get aborted. People approaching me about their own problem have cold feet. People approaching me about a family member’s problem get worried about the family member’s likely reaction to my appearance. Usually, they contact me to cancel. I never attempt to dissuade them. That’s the decision they’ve made and, fortunately, I don’t have to look for more work.
The one that afternoon was annoying, because they hadn’t been in touch. And the address was way into the Downs beyond Goodwood. The satnav directed me towards a dusty, little-used track. By the entrance from the main road hung from one rusty hook a faded sign reading ‘Walnut Farm’.
When I reached my destination, the old farm building looked as if it had been uninhabited for years, but I have learned in my work not to judge by appearances. Many hoarders are as careless about the exteriors of their homes as they are about the overcrammed interiors.
Pressing the bell push, tapping on windows, banging on front and back doors, none of them had any effect. The place was locked up and felt it had been that way for a long time. So, I put the excursion down to experience. If the clients got back to me, I might ask about the missed appointment. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t bother.
I didn’t hang about. I had to move on.
As arranged, I picked up the key from the Housing Association and, though Hilary’s text had said it didn’t matter what time I arrived, it was, as per schedule, just after five when the Yeti drew up outside the block of flats on Portsmouth’s Hargood Estate.
It had started to rain on the way, which meant there were few people on the streets, and the relentless grey drizzle didn’t add to the charms of the area. Everything was extremely run down. Road pockmarked with potholes, cars whose smashed windscreens suggested they’d been there for a long time. Inevitable plastic bags and McDonald’s wrappers in the gutters. The area around the entrance to the block was graffiti-covered and smelt of uncleared rubbish.
I knew that Portsmouth had undergone considerable urban redevelopment in recent years. Well, the process hadn’t reached the Hargood Estate.
I put on my sharp-proof gloves – you never know what you’re going to encounter in a new site – and walked into block. In the enclosed space of the entrance hall, the rotting smell was intensified and new graffiti had covered the old. The lift, it goes without saying, did not work.
I still saw no one. Perhaps it was the rain, or perhaps the residents were afraid to leave their flats.
The people at the Housing Association had told me my destination was on the second floor, so I climbed up to it. The concrete stairs were wet. There was a sound of dripping. The rain was getting in somewhere.
All of the flat doors were blue, though the paint was stained and flaky. I stopped outside 27. The once-shiny brass numbers were dull and tarnished. There was a bell. I pressed it, but no sound came from inside. I knocked tentatively on the door with my knuckles, then harder a couple of times. Still no response.
I wasn’t expecting a reply, but I had to go through the routine. Maureen Ogden, Hilary had told me, was in hospital. I wondered what for. Serious hoarders do not like leaving their premises, nor do they like to let strangers in. I’ve been doing what I do long enough to know that they are very secretive. They may not see anything strange about their obsessions, but they certainly don’t want the results to be observed by people they don’t know – or, in many cases, by people they do know.
I used the key the Housing Association had given me and, the minute I stepped inside, recognized the smell of the hoarder’s home. Much stronger than the whiff of the stairwell. Dust, paper, wool, damp, with various less appealing undertones.
The pathway through the hall, narrowed down by teetering piles of cardboard boxes, told me the same story. Though I’d brought my torch with me, I switched on the light.
Five doors led off the hall, two either side, one at the end; all were closed. The one straight ahead opened on to the kitchen. Or half opened, I should say. The clutter behind the door saw to that. Access to the stove and sink was just about possible, though the fridge could not have been opened until the stepladder and ironing board propped against it had been moved.
But, rather as with the copies of Tobias Lechlade’s books, there was an oasis of tidiness in the midst of chaos. The kitchen table’s surface was covered in small rectangles of paper and cardboard, neatly held in blocks by rubber bands. A closer look showed me that they were all coupons, the kind of coupons which mostly come in free local magazines – granting free pizzas, discount dog food, ‘50p off your next purchase of granola bars’, ‘25% off a main course on production of this coupon’, ‘A free 175ml glass of house wine, red or white, with any steak ordered’, ‘Kids Eat Free’, and hundreds of other offers that sounded too good to be true (and usually were).
There was a system to the way the coupons had been categorized. Restaurant offers in one pile, food shopping in another, discounts on clothes with their own section and so on.
It was a phenomenon I had frequently noticed with hoarders. There is one area of their life where complete order reigns. By focusing on that particular special interest and seeing that that’s in order, they can genuinely make themselves unaware of the surrounding shambles.
One end of the table seemed to be reserved for scratch cards. Used scratch cards. Maureen Ogden’s hoarding instinct didn’t allow her to throw any away. Next to the scratch cards was a pile of coupons offering large prizes, tens of thousands of pounds in what were described as ‘Giant Cash Draws!’ (each one decorated with an exclamation mark). Maureen Ogden was clearly a woman dedicated to augmenting her pension. Whether any of her attempts to win a fortune had been successful, there was no way of knowing.
I went back into the hall and had a real problem opening the second door. My job involves a lot of heavy lifting, so I’m pretty fit – gym membership at Goodwood would be a waste of money for me – but there was something so heavy propped against the inside of this door that for a moment I didn’t think I’d make it.
I tried one final shoulder-charge, however, and that did the trick. I heard a crashing sound as something I’d dislodged fell away, and was able to push the door wide enough to squeeze my way in.
The space, presumably designed as a sitting room, was not large but it was piled high, floor to ceiling, with furniture. Furniture of all kinds: armchairs, office chairs, tables, cupboards. The item which had fallen over to allow me access to the room was a tall Edwardian coat stand, with a series of pegs round a central mirror. Heaped up higher than me in the centre of this nest of wood was a pile of bed clothes. Not modern, duvet-style bed clothes. Old knitted blankets, discoloured pillows, eiderdowns covered with material that looked like silk but wasn’t.
As I looked down, I noticed one unexpected item sticking out of the wall of bedding.
It was a human hand.