The Haunted Attic by Lu Hersey

Moving is traumatic. I know, because I moved this week. For me, the trauma wasn’t so much about the upheaval or change of neighbourhood –  it was dealing with the bodies in the attic.

Not my attic - way too interesting...

Somehow the loft had accumulated a number of dead relatives, and I had to clear everyone out. There weren’t any actual bodies of course (sorry to disappoint) - I’m talking about family history. Sentimental attachment. Guilt. More guilt. People’s entire lives in a few boxes.

I hate dark, spidery loft spaces, and have a fear of death by falling from a loft – so over the last 20 years, I’d been shoving things up there just to get them out of sight, thinking I’d deal with them later.

Bad idea. The day comes when you have to confront them all, and that time is when you move house. The loft had to be totally emptied, so I was forced to clear out the ghosts. All those things you get landed with when people die, the detritus left from other people’s lives.

Years ago, I had to translate a chunk of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the reign of Alfred the Great (an interesting man, who didn’t just burn cakes) as part of my English degree. It was about a visitor to Alfred’s court from somewhere in Scandinavia, telling them about the customs of his people.

King Alfred

When someone died in his community, all the dead person’s possessions were piled up in a big heap in the middle of the village. Then everyone raced to take what they wanted before the rest was burned. Alfred probably recorded this to make a point to his courtiers - that inheritance isn’t a foregone conclusion.

However, since King Alfred chose not to introduce this custom over here, we still end up dealing with our dead relatives’ possessions. If we’re lucky, these will include useful things, like treasure and property. Sadly, not in my attic. 

My grandmother was up there, confined to a box of photos of her family, a moth-eaten patchwork quilt, a horseshoe from her wedding cake, a few sad letters relating to the death of one of her children, and more on the death of my grandfather. My grandfather was divided between the photo box, and a collection of watercolours in varying degrees of awful.

An unknown dead relative from the attic, and his horse

 My mother took up a lot more attic space. After my father remarried, I got landed with all the photos ever taken of her, her books, all her dreadful paintings, and a collection of letters (which I’ve never read) between her and my father when he was away on National Service.  And all the letters she wrote to me when she knew she was dying. 

My mother with me, a long time ago...

So what we’re talking about is a lot of things you can hardly bear to look through, and leave you feeling like an emotional wreck when you do, but you feel obliged to keep. It’s all that is left of them. And that makes it very hard to get rid of.

Worse, my dead relatives were just the tip of the loftberg. There were all the paintings my children did at school. Four children can do a lot of paintings over the years. And they get a lot of school reports and bring home a mountain of school work. Two very large boxes and a trunk’s worth to be precise. Fortunately, my two youngest showed up to laugh at their old stuff and share the best of it with their friends online, and we managed to more than halve the quantity after some harsh quality control.

Lastly, there were the ghosts of my own past. Photos of people I’d forgotten existed, letters from old boyfriends, and piles of folders of ‘ideas’ (mostly pieces from magazines and old journals, all yellowing around the edges, and frankly the easiest thing in the loft to bin.) There were old computers I thought might still hold info I needed, old tvs that ‘might come in useful’, and tins of paint. Enough to paint entire mansions in a range of out-of-date colours.

My stuff was the easiest to deal with. I junked it all, entirely guilt free because it was mine to junk. My relatives were the real problem. In the end, I squeezed them into a few boxes, and the charity shop benefitted from the rest. Maybe other people will like the some of the terrible paintings. I thought about burning all my parents’ letters, but my youngest daughter persuaded me to keep them. So now they’re in a box marked ‘archive’ – and they’ll become her problem one day.  

But part of me is still tempted to dump all of it. Along with all the guilt and the sadness. As it is, I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about people in a Mesolithic type environment who aren’t overloaded with stuff. In fact they own nothing.

It’s been very therapeutic...

Lu Hersey

w: luhersey.com

t: @LuWrites