Most of the boxes contained Dad’s stuff—he had been an accountant, his last few years working independently, and there were files from his various employers, even a few musty old accountancy training manuals. I doubted I would need to keep any of this stuff; it was more than eight years since he had retired. In one box I found a small red clothbound book, an ancient, battered, and much-used set of log tables: Knott’s Mathematical Tables (Four-Figured). The binding of the little volume was actually fraying. And here, too, was a slim cardboard box that contained a slide rule, wooden, with scales marked in pasted-on paper. I could barely see the tiny numerals, but the plastic of the slider was yellow and cracked. I put the rule back in the box and set it aside with the log tables, meaning to take them down later.

I moved deeper into the loft. I found one box marked XMAS DECORATIONS—WILMSLOW, 1958—WILMSLOW, 1959—MANCHESTER, 1960 . . . and so on, down through the years, right up until, I saw, the year of my mother’s death. In a box of assorted junk I found a couple of stamp albums and a half-filled box of first-day covers, plastic board games in ugly seventies-era boxes—and a scrapbook of pictures, original sketches, photographs patiently clipped out of magazines and comics, all pasted onto thick gray paper. My sister’s, from her own childhood years. It was a cobbled-together depiction of a family legend, a tale told by grandfathers and great-aunts: the story of a girl called Regina, who had supposedly grown up in Britain in the time of the Romans, and when Britain had fallen she had fled to Rome itself. And we were Regina’s remote descendants, so the story went. I’d grown up believing it, until maybe the age of ten. I put the book aside; perhaps Gina would like to see it again.

Then I came to a box that caught my eye: TV21S, read the label. (GEORGE). With some eagerness I hauled the box back to the light and opened it up. Inside I found a pile of comics—“TV Century 21, Adventures in the 21st Century—Every Wednesday—7d.” They were neatly stacked, from a very grubby and fragile issue number 1 downward. This was, of course, the comic that had been spun out of the Gerry Anderson science fiction puppet shows during the sixties, and a monumental part of my young life. I had thought my parents had burned this stack when I got to around twelve, with my uncertain adolescent acquiescence.