Letting go of my mother’s house

My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her Suffolk home to get it ready for selling. There was a huge amount to do. Alongside organising my mother’s headstone – no small or hasty business – there was an entire house and a life to sort through. This involved going through endless knick-knacks, glasses, crockery, clothes – and 15 or more rubble sacks of papers and old letters. The last was both cathartic and disconcerting. These are written relics of a life that existed before I came along, one that may well have been richer and more hopeful. I found mountains of love letters to my mother from luckless suitors, good luck telegrams from her family as – in her early twenties – she’d set out on her big trip to America, and notes from university theatre directors begging her, as a young woman, to audition for their latest play.