Deal with your baggage or it deals with you

They were sitting in their car opposite my house. No doubt I should have felt extra safe that Friday night, sleeping, knowing the visible presence of two of Derbyshire’s finest police officers keeping warm in their Vauxhall Astra with the flask of tea provided by neighbours would deter any miscellaneous miscreants strolling along. The street was quiet, at last; the fire engines had gone along with the council workers, ambulances, news reporters and road barriers. A respectful silence had fallen for Linda. Nobody knew where she was.

I had been woken that Friday morning by large, noisy, diesel engines. Presuming it was workmen about to start drilling in the road, I covered my head with bedclothes, obstinately attempting to stay asleep and expecting my attempts to be shattered by the vicious sound of a pneumatic drill. It almost worked, for about five minutes but the noise was persistent and nasty. I lifted the duvet for air and smelled smoke. Out of bed faster than an earthquake, I looked out of the window. Three hours sleep and a mild hangover from a great night out with my two sons did not need the surveyance of chaos flinging its sticky fingers at me when I opened the bedroom curtains.

Fire Fighters, like ants around jam, were tackling the blazing house across the road. Instead of the usual nose to tail cars parked along this built up, residential street of Victorian houses, I counted five fire engines and three ambulances. Police were directing residents to move their vehicles and, as I looked down, noticed a female police officer about to knock on my door. Dressing quickly, I grabbed the keys to my van and left by the back gate. A police officer moved it just around the corner on request, wholly on double yellow lines and partly on the pavement. It would have been easy pickings for PC Jobsworth to nick me for still being over the limit. Paramedics were laying kit onto large green sheets outside the houses on my side of the street, the even numbers. The burning, smoking house was number 41. Giant yellow, wax crayon, oxygen canisters with face masks beside each one lay waiting on more green sheets. It all looked very over the top. Only one woman lived in the house. One woman and floor to ceiling, wall to wall junk in every room, including the loft cavity, hampering the progress of the fire crews.

They were still there, along with news crews, when I returned from an appointment in mid morning and it looked no less busy. The stretch of road where the burning house was had been closed off. A sole police officer patrolled the blue and white tape, preventing unnecessary foot traffic from passing and asking for permission to return home added to the cloying atmosphere. Fire Fighters had begun strapping on harnesses and were going to attempt to enter the house through the roof cavity. The female resident was known as a loner who rarely went out during daylight hours and her house was crammed with years of accumulated junk, hampering the search and, equally as urgently, the attempts to bring the blaze under control. Artificial tunnels had been dug through the clutter to enable progress into the house.

By lunchtime, the story was in the online version of two local papers and BBC Radio Derby. Living in my town, on the Derbyshire side of the Nottinghamshire border, when a good story broke, it hit the headlines across two counties. Neighbours were interviewed by film crews from East Midlands Today, their sound bites re-quoted in the local press. Disturbed by the noisy activity, getting down to serious work was hampered and my frequent coffee breaks were taken outside over short conversations with the emergency teams. A strange picture began to emerge of the woman and her lifestyle, pieced together with morsels of information gleaned from these brief meetings. She was reclusive.

This is a reasonably friendly neighbourhood. People pass acknowledgements while taking out or bring in wheelie bins, or by their cars, as one person comes and another goes. As the years go by, more people with cars move onto the street and parking has become very difficult, especially as quite a few households have more than one vehicle and only two houses within sight of mine have driveways. The family living next door to the one on fire irritate others of us by leaving their brown wheelie bin in the road when they go out. The elderly widower next door to me can be grumpy and unfriendly; we have three same sex households within a few doors of each other and a young couple nearby live with their small son. My son and I had been in kick boxing classes with the mother a few years earlier, when she was single and lived in the next street. The family next door to me have had two sons since moving in and wanted to move to a house with a bigger garden. Their house was taken off the market a month earlier as there had been a shortage of viewers. One property, diagonally opposite mine, is much more modern than the rest. At around 40 years-old, it is reputedly owned by a former England goal keeper who had played for Nottingham Forest during their late 70s peak. The days before top footballers commanded ‘silly money’ and who bought detached houses in streets like ours. A regular neighbourhood with ordinary people living on it.

Even though I have lived opposite her house for over eighteen years, we have never spoken. Everyone was invisible to her. Any attempts to catch her eye, nod, smile, or make any acknowledgement were ignored yet she did not look unfriendly. She was a slightly built woman who still wore the loose fitting and wild coloured trousers of a sixties flower child. There was something remote and eccentric about her. Rarely seen out during the day, she could often be seen silently watering the front garden in the middle of the night. The shrubbery, which had been none existent when I moved in, had grown to cover the front ground floor window. At some point, she had moved wardrobes across the front bedroom windows. A man lived with her then but nobody had seen him for years. It was her husband and he had been working in Spain, according to one of the police officers I questioned. The door to door enquiries were repetitive: everyone knew who she was, nobody knew her name and she was reclusive. Three hundred years earlier and she would have been the village witch, burned at the stake. She became a real person, a missing person, when her name was revealed in the local newspapers. Linda Parkes.

The fire was out; two council trucks and a dustcart moved in to begin clearing the vast amount of debris. Everyone said the same: ‘Never seen anything like it.’ Not only could Linda have never thrown anything away at all, she must have also actively brought in more of it. When my friend moved out of number 44, he had a house sale; like a garden sale without the garage. He opened his front room for the day and sold off books, CDs and some old vinyl and was the only person I know who had spoken to her. She was, apparently, very intelligent and nice to talk to. Whatever she bought that day much have been among the charred debris being wheel-barrowed into the white trucks. My daughter said she could be hostile. Felicity had worked at the local Cooperative store for some years, as a supervisor. It was her student job, which she did very well at. She told me that Linda, or ‘that weird woman who lives over the road’ would dispute the prices on reduced goods and make the staff go and check. Then she would spend a while counting her change to make sure it was right, blocking access for other customers.

I escaped from the chaos that evening by sharing drinks with a friend seven doors up. We talked, over wine and then tequila shots about everything and nothing at all, as good conversations often go. The street between our houses was deserted. The police tape had been removed yet nobody had brought their cars back. A lone patrol car was parked outside Lind’s house, two officers inside keeping themselves warm. The purr of their car’s engine was the only sound the now eerily quiet street. It was what woke me up the next day, when more police cars arrived, along with a forensic support van and more masked and overall clad officers working from a Mercedes Sprinter van. Local residents were carrying on life as normal, often questioning the team working in the house, as I also did. Cars began to repopulate the street but the atmosphere was cloying, oppressive and dark.

On Sunday morning, two large skips were delivered, taking up parking space all over again and the forensic team carried on, clearing large amounts of debris from the house. My son was going out that afternoon and would be away until Monday afternoon. It would be good for him. The neighbours had been around to the back of Linda’s house with cameras and it was winding Martin up. Seeing so many people, who never had time for her while she was alive, now seemed enthralled by the whole drama. I decided to catch up with a friend in a village in the Derbyshire Dales. Fresh, clean air and a change of scenery was to prove an excellent antidote to the sickly smell of old fire smoke that hung around by the skips. It stuck in my throat as I spent a few minutes talking to one of the forensic officers before leaving. He had spoken to Linda’s husband that morning, he said, but denied there had been any rubbish in the house. He said he had been there six months earlier and there had not been any junk in the house. Astonished, the officer told me he could not believe the husband’s denial. He had missed the bags of human excrement in the house? He shook his head and was gone by the time I returned home.

I get up at around 6.30am for work on Mondays and saw, that week, a bicycle propped up between the skips. A thin man in a dark duffle coat and pull on hat was shining a torch in one of them, then the other. I watched him from my bedroom window. It is not unusual for passers by to peer into parked skips but this man seemed intense in his search. He then began poking through a pile of rags in the front garden. He was still there when I left for work just before 7am so I wandered over.

‘You won’t find much in there, lad,’ I said. He was back at one of the skips by then and did not even look up.

‘She was my best mate, she was,’ he replied, ‘a lovely woman. Her husband’s going to be heartbroken when he sees this, he is. She was with me till half past two that morning and as happy as anything. I walked her back round here and we were laughing and joking all the way. The police have said I’m a key witness. I’ve managed to find a couple of necklaces in there,’ and pointed to the rags under the front shrubs. ‘I just wanted something to remember her by.’

I left him to his search and went for the train.

Linda’s body was discovered at 11am that day. She had been buried under the junk for three days. According to a report in the Derby Telegraph, she had been trying to escape.

Over the next two days, a few flowers and messages were left on the wall between her house and next door, where the guy who had been interviewed by news reporters on Friday lived. The same one who had often complained to the council about the vermin and mess and who had first alerted the fire service on the Friday morning. People have to pay their respects. It had hardly seemed so when they were peering in the house, taking photographs or making sniped remarks in the online version of the local paper.

People are often unaware of the powerful impact they have on the lives of others. Linda had that effect. I would not leave flowers. It seemed a sick gesture, given that she died unable to escape from the chaos in the house. Why add to the clutter?
What was most moving was the metaphor between the obvious physical mess at the house and the assimilated internal chaos of our reclusive neighbour. We all carry burdens, clutter, and emotional baggage; call it what you might. Not one of us goes through life free of issues but it is how we take control of them that makes the difference. Linda clearly could not deal with her internal or external junk and it was the death of her, quite literally. There is a profound lesson to be learned from Linda’s life and indeed tragic end, which would not be to leave it too late to address problems before they get too big. It is possible, as Linda proved, to live hermit-like, even in a densely populated area such as mine. However much we shun social contact, our lives do affect those of others. Our personal burdens whether physical or metaphoric, impact on other people and people care. On whatever level, whether it is out of desire not to live next door to so much junk, noise or bad smells or a wish to help the clearly suffering individual.

Three weeks on and the house is boarded up. The police and emergency vehicles have been replaced by occasional men in vans, sifting through the remains of the junk. One of them looked like Linda’s husband, who has been seen at the house, his Peugeot estate car parked opposite my house. Everything that remains of Linda’s life is being slowly brushed away. May she rest in peace and the lessons learned from her remain. The unaddressed issues we all have, ignored and neglected in some foolish hope they will simply melt away, can wreak devastation to more people than we could ever possibly imagine.