Love for sale, one careful owner

Near to where I live is an antiques auction house, small, but still a well-known place for the curious and the collector to congregate once every few weeks and raise their hands against each other in a trial for pieces of the past.

I was there last weekend, looking to bid on two lots; a box with loose 'meccano' pieces and some clockwork railway items, and a larger box containing some old cameras and a Bakelite Bagatelle game. I bid on the box with the game, and was about to drop out as the price cleared the estimated sale figure, but something made me keep my hand up and the other bidder backed down. I had gone ten pounds over my allocated amount for it, and was worried that I now would not be able to get the box with the 'meccano' and model railway parts, but nobody else bid against me, and I got it for less than the anticipated figure. I left the salerooms with both lots, at my expected cost.

The box with the cameras also contained some guide books to London, Switzerland, and South Africa, and several packs of photographs, all of which were negatives. There were two large cast-metal flower vases, a plastic Alligator-skin handbag and un-matching purse, and a small time-capsule containing someone's love of their life.

In a cream-yellow cigarette tin, (50 Players No. 3), I found a tightly packed wad of memories. On the very top lay a dried Edelweiss flower and the label from a bottle of wine.



Beneath it were several postcards from Scotland, Bath, Switzerland, all dating from 1952, and a photo of a young man in formal highland regalia. Then, an envelope containing a dozen or so black and white negatives, titled 'honeymoon'. Beneath that I found a few small prints, mostly two inch square.













































Beneath those prints was a larger greeting card with a photo of them both and their dog, then several more packs of negatives.

The items I had bought belonged to a woman, I am certain, and I assume she was the woman in the photographs. The memories she had cherished so much were mostly negatives, the original prints would be in albums or framed on mantelpieces. I am also sure that she is dead. Someone came in to clear out her last possessions, packing them all into old fruit crates, an odd mixture of vases, trays, and her treasured photographic items. Why did nobody claim the photos? Did she never have children? I cannot find any negatives showing a family, although I have only flipped through them in a cursory manner.

Whoever had been her executor must have opened the cigarette tin, and gone through the contents, just as I did. They would have known if there had been anyone who had a claim on the memories, so I assume that there were no children, and that her husband had died before her. The executor had faced two choices; destroy the memories on the grounds that they were too personal to be given to strangers, or put them back in the tin and let fate decide. They took the second choice.

And so what do I do now? Can I throw away these carefully ordered items, because they belonged to a stranger and have nothing whatever to do with me? Strangely, I cannot do it. I have looked through the evidence of someone else's love, and know that destruction would be wrong. I cannot say for certain why, but perhaps it is because I realise that there is no-one else in this world who cares that she existed, laughed at things, fell in love, and treasured the small collection. I have become an unwitting curator.

Would anybody else like the job? It is going to weigh heavily on my shoulders. Is there, somewhere in this world, a museum for people's lives, a place where ordinary and un-remembered souls can rest in peace for occasional visitors to take inspiration from? Please let me know if you can help.

Love, it sometimes seems to me, is so plentiful that you can't even give it away.I wonder what someone might leave in the future as their memories of me?