Willenium's story reminds me
of my family, my family being my mum. A hoarder from a line of hoarders - she'd been born during the war in an East End slum and had grown up with rationing. Once it was all over nobody told them to act differently. My grandmother still has very neatly folded paper bags in a drawer from the eighties, along with the ubiquitous boxes of assorted buttons and bobbins, skeins the thread and napkins. She was the queen of hoarding, in that she hoarded neatly, kept everything spotless and knew where it all was.

One generation down, and it seems my mother had not honed the skills of the ordered hoard. When I grew up, the room my mum used as a study was literally three foot deep in papers (the room btw, was the size of a living room, so this was a not inconsiderable achievement) and there was only a small path from the door to the swivel chair in front of her computer, itself threatened by the papers the loomed around it. When the time came to move house - we were living on murder mile in a house we couldn't afford - the papers did get thrown away, and suddenly in the middle of the room a beautiful round table emerged which _I had never seen before and had had no idea was there_. The papers were pretty much the only thing to get chucked though. Everything else was packed into boxes and shoved into the loft of our new, much much smaller house. I loved this. The loft was converted and had windows, so I would spend afternoons rummaging in amongst the boxes, gazing out over rooftops, finding fascinating things, odd books and snippets of my mum's past.

Time passed, and my mum wasn't even able to afford the upkeep on our new house. I'd half moved out already, but would return in the holidays, and so we both got down to the business of sorting out our stuff. Mine was done in a day, all packed into boxes. I went to inspect what my mum was doing with the rest of the house.

It was chaos. Faced with 40 years of very real baggage, her hoarder mentality had short circuited and turned into an 'all or nothing mentality'. She had piled up nearly all her books to be sold off for peanuts to a dealer because 'there wouldn't be space'. Huge numbers of things were being put in bags to be thrown out. Over the next couple of days it carried on. She sold off the washing machine for no good reason, and when the skip was hired (there was a lot in the house, we really did need it!) precious things started to go onto it - her almost but never completed PhD thesis, photos and slides, some eighteenth century boots. She'd gone into a kind of frenzy of throwing away because she'd never really done it in earnest before and had no idea of moderation. Slowly, discretely, I scuttered round the house and made my selections. Books that I thought were unique, priceless, parts of my childhood, beautiful and snapshots of their time. Mementos that I knew my mum would miss if she threw them out and then looked back at what she'd lost. I selected the good photographs out of the seven large plastic roller-boxes stuffed full of them and stashed them in an album in one of my own boxes. I slipped in a few antiques that were portable and too good to get mindlessly chucked. I even bargained for a victorian harmonium that was about to get sold off and begged to be given it as an engagement present.

We moved into the new flat. It was small, but once I'd made up bookshelves it was clear there would have been more than enough space. I kept many of the items I'd salvaged just to keep them safe, but a lot I gave her back. "Oh, I was wondering where that was! I thought it'd gone with all the other things, I'm so glad you kept it."

The most amazing thing? I did all of this despite that fact that when I was four she'd thrown away my beloved bottle and my blankee because I was too old for them :( Ah, the lack of revenge...
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:33, Reply)