Sifting through a Life

Arrived this morning to my father's house with a lot to do; the death certificate is ready for collection. That will be tomorrow morning at Ealing Hospital, where both my parents died and where both my children were born.

[I flew in via Luton. Wizz Air offered me a flight for 559zł for flight the next morning; BA's best price was 2,250zł. But no rucksack, just a satchel stuffed with laptop and other essentials. Max free carry-on 40x30x20cm. At Luton a welcome surprise - you can use contactless debit/credit cards to touch in to get on the bus to Luton Airport Parkway station, and also use contactless for your journey by train into St Pancras. Massive building works going on to build a monorail from the airport to the station - will take years to complete.]

Anyway. A house full of personal effects - books, paintings, porcelain and other collectables - needs to be dealt with sensitively. Chucking it all into a skip is brutal and leads to regrets later. I'm more interested in documents, letters, diaries - helping to piece together family history. I've agreed with my brother that nothing will be thrown away, but the sorting of objects will be a long and arduous process. What gets kept and by whom? What gets sold, what gets given away to charity and what gets thrown away?

Left: one lovely discovery - my father's diploma piece for Polish University College, the post-war academy for Polish ex-servicemen in London. This is my father's project for a stretch of mainline railway between Motkowice and Pińczów (I just checked - no such line exists!) with all maps and calculations (curve, camber, bridges, embankments, cuttings, tunnels etc). A highly detailed work, for country unable to put it to use. Poland at the time was a Stalinist satrapy.

Below: a section of the hand-drawn map of the railway. A lovely historical artefact, so full of meaning.

By coincidence I wrote about this very subject exactly two years ago - throwing it all away - how to keep a place tidy without throwing away things of value. My father was a great hoarder, especially of things with a perceived engineering benefit. Engineering with a small 'e'. Little improvements to daily life; he hated waste. It was hard for him to dispose of objects. He remembers when everything was expensive, and DIY was the only way to get anything done. A little description of this trait of his here.

The garden kept him active right up to the end. He made beautiful compost - vegetable food waste was carefully prepared, chopped up finely; coffee grounds, tea bags would be left out to dry, the bags cut open, the old tea leaves added to the mix. This autumn saw a profusion of apples on his one apple tree - he turned them into the most delicious juice, unmatched even in Poland.

Sorting through the garage will be a particularly hard task. A proto-'man-cave' decades before the term was coined, it was his workshop, his lab, his tool shed, his retreat, layer upon layer of jars, tins, tubes and sundry receptacles containing rock-hard paints from the 1970s all needs to be sorted out (and here, I suspect, chucked out).

After my mother's death, I found all her wartime and post-war documents in one handy box. I fear this time round my search for artefacts of historical significance relating to my father's life will be harder to find - located across many files, bookcases, trunks and nooks and crannies around the house.

Ealing Hospital called late this afternoon to say the death certificate is ready. Amazingly quick given that as he died less than 24 hours after being admitted to hospital, a post mortem was required. I will collect it tomorrow morning and put in train all the necessary procedures to do with the funeral and registering the death with the various administrative organs. This is made easier by the Tell Us Once service - one government website which informs the tax authorities, National Insurance, the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Authority, the passport office, the town hall, the National Health Service, the pensions department. So much better than in Poland, where each office needs to be notified separately.

This time two years ago:
Throwing It All Away

This time three years ago:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again

This time four years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back

This time six years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury

This time seven years ago:
Thorunium the Gothick

This time eight years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew 

This time ten years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden