My mother, the hoarder who just couldn’t let go
‘DID you know what kind of state the house was in?’ asked the policeman who called Susannah Walker in 2016 to say that her mother had fallen at home.
PC Harford had been summoned to break down the once-glossy red front door of Patricia’s three-storey Georgian terrace so the paramedics could get in.
There was an awkward pause. It had been a long time since Walker’s mother had let her into the house, which she imagined was messy and possibly damp.
PC Harford filled the silence with details. There were brambles growing through the back door. Electric radiators stood in puddles.
Lumps of plaster were dangling from the hall ceiling and, when he went upstairs, his foot had gone through the floorboards. Piles of papers and possessions were glued together in towers.
‘Did you know how she was living?’ he persisted. Walker found herself hating the man. ‘ He obviously came from the normal world,’ she thought, ‘a place where families cared about each other and showed it. Where mothers looked after their daughters and daughters then took care of their mothers in turn.
‘In his eyes, I had failed entirely in the most basic duties of a person.’
But Walker’s relationship with her mother was far more complicated than that. Her insightful memoir reveals Patricia to have been a bright and interesting, but difficult, woman.
Born in 1937, she watched her father drink away the grand Victorian family home. Patricia’s first child, Fiona, was born with her organs outside of her body and died the same day. She went on to have two more children, first Susannah and then her brother.
But they came with two awful bouts of postnatal depression and a mental breakdown. Her husband, Nick, divorced her in 1975, when Walker was just eight.
Nick decided that it was ‘all for the best’ if the children came to live with him and his new wife, visiting Patricia every other weekend.
When Walker was eleven, Nick moved them all over to Denmark for three years and visits back to their mother were reduced to Easter and summer holidays.
For the last 20 years of her life, Patricia slipped into depression and alcoholism. Her once-lovely house filled up with clutter: reacting to a lifetime of loss, she held on to every dead battery and bank statement.
When Walker had a child, she stopped going into the smoke-filled house and her mother insisted they met in pubs.
After Patricia’s death, Walker was forced to face the full extent of her mother’s hoarding. The problem was that she wanted to find her mother in all this mess. She had felt very little as she stood beside Patricia’s cold corpse at the hospital, but she had inherited her mother’s love of objects and hoped that something in the mountain of things she left behind might trigger more emotion.
Though some might see no connection between themselves and the hoarders we see on our screens, human beings have always invested their possessions with spiritual value. We buried our flint axes with our loved ones. The dying placed their beads around the necks of their children.
And today, Walker reminds us, museums serve as national hoards, hanging on to evidence of a past we can’t let go.
Minimalists are not immune. On the contrary, says Walker, ‘it’s the flipside of the same obsession, in the same way that anorexics are just as aware of the importance of food as fat people. They just flee from its powers instead of embracing them.’ If you think you’re above investing objects with emotion, imagine I give you a mug of tea. Then I tell you the mug used to belong to Fred West. Do you still feel like drinking from it?
In the end, Walker hired a pair of marvellously efficient house-clearers. She kept a few items that reminded her of good times and struggled to let go of those that memorialised her mother’s pain. What should she do with the silver napkin ring engraved with the name of Patricia’s long-dead baby brother? Could she really chuck out all evidence of his short life?
She couldn’t. But, unlike her mother, she refused to carry it as dead weight. In the end, she had it melted down and turned into a bangle.
And in learning more about hoarding, Walker understood that no matter what PC Harford might think, there was nothing she could have done to ‘fix’ her mother.
That knowledge, she concludes, felt like ‘cleaning the windows of my own soul’.