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Just a Suburban Pack Rat

For a time I lived underneath an individual who said he was an astronomer of note and formerly a lecturer on the Fine Arts. He'd been a friend's mother's lodger, but when she heard the place above me was to be let she quickly informed the old boy about this ideal niche. We found out later they were glad to get rid of him, though to us they described him as an ideal lodger, prompt with his rent, if a bit untidy in a rather endearing way.

The man was a pack rat, rattus oeconomicus.

Overhead at night there came small, persistent rumblings and occasional precise but heavy thuds, as when someone wades hip-high through piles of refuse and places his weight on the heel of his outdoor shoe.

The landlady collared me one afternoon when he was out and we went up to look at his gaff.

Near-tragic, it was.

Towers of stacked paper and crushed cartons, clippings from magazines, pieces torn from cereal packets for the logo or some aspect of the design, garlands of ring-pulls from drink cans. Trade-mark symbols, ten-year-old newspapers, the original boxes in which plastic moon-buggies and police motorcycles were sold.

The landing was overrun too, and the kitchen. He'd never drawn the curtains or opened a window. The crush was such that the refrigerator couldn't be opened more than two inches and it was obvious that he would have been afraid to use the grill or hotplate, assuming he'd been able to get to them. He didn't possess so much as a kettle with which to make a cup of tea. That he regarded as women's work, anyway; he formed a habit of scrounging tea and toast off the landlady in the early days, though he was supposed to be self-catering. When she saw through his little scam eventually, he went without.

He was never caught bringing any of this refuse of his in, that was the uncanniest part of it. There must have been dozens of painstaking creeping journeys at dead of night as the mess proliferated.

One rumour was that he had all over the county any number of basements, cellars, 'lock-ups' and sheds in the same condition.

If any hint was dropped about his stuff he would laugh and say, 'They can bury me under it.'

How often after being so self-effacing he must have gone up there to gloat.

The craftiness of it all, the furtiveness, was repulsive and unearthly. It looked as if he didn't even sleep there -- he probably just leaned against the wall. The bed was well encumbered and the sheets seemed as if they'd never been pulled back. One thing that always had a prominent position was the gleaming leather-covered naval telescope with which he probed the night sky.

No one could say he was unintelligent. An atheist, yes. A bigot too, in some respects; but he could hold his end up in a conversation, seemed rational. I saw some specimens of his art work, heavy pencil drawings of married love. In these the male always seemed to be playing a subservient rôle. In fact he often resembled nothing so much as a sack of potatoes draped over the well-blessed woman. The bugger could draw, all right. Most of them were dated 1943 or '44. These were the gems among the litter.

Not only that: they said he possessed an original water colour by Max Ernst. If this was the one we thought, it was a sight uglier than his own efforts. But we were forced to conclude that he was a happy man. With his spirograms and his pictures of his 'first love' made by colouring in the squares on graph paper, his matchbox with a bee inside it, his incredibly delicate plastic microscope, his extravagant interest in carpet patterns and lavish books about rocking horses.

You don't run into many real philosophers in life, and this was one of them. He was certainly more cheerful than we were, worrying about him. Was he really hurting anybody with his ton of rubbish? It enraged the landlady though, this desecration of her place. The worst of it was that, apart from the Max Ernst, nothing amongst the whole lot was worth a ha'penny.

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