Why I hoard my life’s memories in over 100 boxes stashed in the basement: A lock of his teenage girlfriend’s hair, a Christmas card from Maggie… even a random Rolo wrapper. GYLES BRANDRETH’s treasured possessions
Nowadays I hear young people talking about ‘making memories’, creating special moments to treasure in the years to come. Well, I have been doing that all my life, but with a difference.
I have kept all my memories together, stored in boxes in the basement. I have a large room full of them — more than 100 boxes in all, stacked in piles 8 ft high and arranged in chronological order. This Christmas I will be packing two more boxes, full of my memories of 2021.
These boxes represent all my yesterdays. What’s in them? Everything. School reports, bus tickets, wedges of wedding cake wrapped in tissue paper, Christmas cracker riddles, old menus, old newspapers (the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the day Diana died in 1997, the day Lynda Lee-Potter first interviewed me for the Daily Mail in 1975!).
Old theatre programmes (starting with Frankie Howerd’s Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic in 1957), my first Sooty (he’s a bit threadbare now), toys and trivia, bits and pieces of every kind.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, my wife and I took our children to Berlin for a weekend break and helped chip away at it. Yes, there’s a bit of the Berlin Wall in my boxes — and a Christmas card from Margaret Thatcher.
I have kept all my memories together, stored in boxes in the basement. I have a large room full of them — more than 100 boxes in all, stacked in piles 8 ft high and arranged in chronological order. This Christmas I will be packing two more boxes, full of my memories of 2021
This is the stuff of my life packed into cardboard boxes, from my baby teeth (kept in cotton wool in a matchbox by my loving mother) to a lock of hair my last teenage girlfriend sent to me in June 1968.
It was a bittersweet souvenir of our break-up and it arrived by post on the very day I happened to meet another girl — the one who, 53 years later, is my long-suffering wife, Michele.
I was a romantic teenager and I have kept every love letter any girl ever sent to me. There are hundreds in my collection — all kept in foolscap ring binders, with coloured paper dividers separating one girl from the next.
When I was writing my autobiography recently, I got in touch with one of these girls and asked if she had kept any of my letters to her. ‘Sorry, Gyles,’ she said, ‘I threw them all out years ago.’
I have managed to keep my life as a hoarder pretty secret until now. But the truth is out: I can’t throw anything away. And most of it is rubbish, I know.
Who needs a Paris Metro map from 1959? But to me all of it is precious. I kept that Rolo wrapper for a reason. And I particularly treasure the yellowing certificate from the Broadstairs and St Peter’s Urban District Council Entertainments Department: ‘Gyles Brandreth, aged ten, was placed first in the Children’s Talent Competition held at the Broadstairs Bandstand on 18 July, 1958.’
For me, a memory box is a living diary. It is a personal time capsule. Into this year’s box I will be popping the card they gave me when I got my first Covid jab (Date: 31/03/21; Vaccine: Pfizer; Batch No: EN1185), just as I have kept the plastic identification tags each of my children had fixed around their ankles when they were born.
Birth, life and death, they are all there. From the 1970s, when I was in my 20s and my contemporaries were getting married, I have got lots of printed wedding invitations. These days, I find I am keeping a lot of service sheets from friends’ funerals.
Not that I plan to sell any of it, but I reckon some of what I have kept might even fetch a few bob on eBay. When I was a boy, I was star-struck and I wrote fan letters to my heroes. Amazingly, they replied. Dig deep into my memory boxes and you will find letters from people as varied as Sir Laurence Olivier, Harold Macmillan and Malcolm X.
Who needs a Paris Metro map from 1959? But to me all of it is precious. I kept that Rolo wrapper for a reason
In my teens I wrote to the great wartime general, Field Marshal Montgomery (I found his address in the local library in Who’s Who), asking him what he believed were the qualities a young person needed to succeed in life.
He sent me back a postcard simply signed, ‘Montgomery of Alamein, FM’ with the message:
‘1. Moral courage — always do what you believe to be right.
‘2. Complete integrity — no lies, no deceptions, honesty and transparency.
‘3. Ceaseless hard work.’
I have got lots of postcards, from aunties and godparents and the poet John Betjeman, among others — and telegrams, too. I wrote to the film star Sir Michael Redgrave asking him to come to perform the prologue to a student production I was putting on at university.
He replied by telegram: ‘WHAT FUN. ACCEPT WITH GREAT PLEASURE. REDGRAVE.’
I have got lots of postcards, from aunties and godparents and the poet John Betjeman, among others — and telegrams, too. I wrote to the film star Sir Michael Redgrave asking him to come to perform the prologue to a student production I was putting on at university
Of course, I have also kept the telegram I got telling me I had won a scholarship to go to university. (I have kept all my school and university revision notes, too. And my first pay-slip, of course.) Where did this mania come from? My father. He kept everything, too. And looking through his memory boxes (stored in tin crates in the garage) I have discovered one of the sad secrets of his life: his money worries.
He kept all his bills — from his first car (a Morris Cowley that cost £8 in 1937) onwards — and the notebooks in which he kept reworking the family accounts, trying to make ends meet.
My dad wasn’t as bad as another great hoarder I knew, a lovely old actor called Richard Goolden. His claim to fame was playing the part of Mole in the original stage adaptation of Wind In The Willows in 1929. He went on playing the part almost until he died, in 1981, aged 86.
Once (I keep a diary, too, so I can tell you it was Saturday, October 6, 1973) I went to have lunch with him and, when I told him how much I liked the chicken soup we were eating, he ran off to the kitchen and returned waving an empty Swiss Knorr soup packet.
After lunch, he took me into the kitchen and showed me his collection of empty Swiss Knorr soup packets — scores of them. He threw nothing away. He took me upstairs to the top room in the house (it had bare floorboards with old suitcases and cardboard boxes all over the place) and showed me the shelves where he had kept every bank statement and cheque book stub that he’d had since he first opened a bank account in 1914.
I am not as bad as that — but almost.
A psychiatrist friend tells me the reason I do it is that I am trying to keep death at bay by hanging on to my past life. He says I put everything that matters most to me neatly into these boxes because I am trying to stay in control of my destiny.
He has noticed that I also arrange my bookshelves neatly, with the books lined up in alphabetical order by author and with the spines all aligned in a straight line.
He says I am wasting my time. ‘Life is chaotic, Gyles,’ he says. ‘You can’t pin it down. And death is inevitable. Nothing lasts — and that includes you and your memory boxes.’
A psychiatrist friend tells me the reason I do it is that I am trying to keep death at bay by hanging on to my past life. He says I put everything that matters most to me neatly into these boxes because I am trying to stay in control of my destiny
I am sorry to tell you that my wife is on the side of the psychiatrist. She wants the basement back. She has already made me get rid of the teddy bears. Did I mention those? My glove puppet of Sooty, my Sweep, and my Growler, my first teddy bear, are now hidden in the boxes, but I have given the rest of my soft toys away.
I admit there were rather a lot of them — more than 1,000, in fact, including the original Fozzie Bear given to me by Jim Henson, who created The Muppets, and a tiny Paddington Bear given to me by Paddington’s creator, Michael Bond.
Happily, I found a good home for them, at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, a mansion designed by Christopher Wren, whose owners have kindly built a sizeable log cabin in the garden for all my old bears to live in.
I know I am not easy to live with (my wife has told me so, more than once) and I know I take up far more than my fair share of our house. Alongside the room with my memories, there is second room full of my jumpers. I have dozens of them.
I have been collecting fun jumpers since I first started wearing them on TV in the 1970s.
‘At least you wear the jumpers,’ says Michele. ‘But those boxes, Gyles, please…’
My wife has told me that she has got the local skip company on rapid-dial, and when I die she is calling them before she calls the undertaker. I believe her. She is going to get rid of the lot. She says you can’t live in the past.
She is right, of course. And I don’t live in the past. Truly I don’t. I very rarely dip into the boxes. I just like to know they’re there.
- Odd Boy Out, Gyles Brandreth’s childhood memoir, is published by Penguin Michael Joseph.
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