Panning for glints of the living past
Beneath the desk at which I work at home sit six worn-looking archive boxes. They were not in good condition when they were entrusted to me last year; but now, like many things that have endured 2020, they appear rather damaged. From haphazard kicks, ill-advised stacking, and the small jaw of a teething puppy those boxes are deckled and scuffed and their sides bulge uncomfortably. Each box is overfilled and heavy with yellowing paper, comb-bound booklets, and pulpy newspaper clippings. There are thousands upon thousands of words in these boxes, on everything from reports on the economy in April 1984 to plans for a Christmas function to a brief note, written in permanent marker on a thick piece of ivory-coloured paper, asking someone named ‘R’ for a cookie.
The contents of these boxes, and the twenty-three others that sit in my cupboard, were disinterred from a garage earlier this year by one of my sources. This source had worked for the company about which I am writing for more than thirty years and in that time he seemed to have saved every piece of paper that had crossed his desk. When he delivered the boxes I was staggered. There was just so much: letters, pay slips, memos, pamphlets, notes on meetings — even a voucher of the kind that Dominoes still drops in the mailbox. I thought it was terrific. Here’s everything, I thought. It’s comprehensive.
It was not, of course: it took a while, but I found gaps. There was a six-week stretch in every year where there was no material (my source’s holiday period, I surmised). There were memos that were missing pages (probably casualties of errant paperclips). There were board minutes that seemed unaccountably shorn of detail (sign of a stormy meeting?) and days that people I spoke with recalled being momentous but for which my source had kept not a skerrick of paper (was he sick?). And there were vast areas that today would concern any reputable company but which evidently did not my source, at least: gender and cultural diversity, for example. There was nothing on those issues.
But amid this are glimpses of this company, the people who worked in it, and the work that they did. Using the payslips I’ve been able to sketch how the company wrestled with an economic downturn; using the board minutes I can trace how its leaders made plans, saw them overturned, and nonetheless tried again; how senior figures bickered, publicly, via memo and then ‘got on with the job’ the next day. It’s been fascinating because all of it has been so human. What ostensibly was a collection of old papers dealing with dead companies has instead been teeming with life, with character, with unanswered questions. Why did they do that? What on earth is that? The papers give a glimpse of this.
What has long kept me writing — this long wearying year, last year, for the near-decade I have been writing non-fiction, now — is the hope that I can find more than these glimpses. I know now that it’s optimistic to think that by collation and cross-reference I could capture something that has long since flown the coop; it’s ludicrous to think that I could re-create something that has long-vanished. But I am always hopeful that I can get that glimpse to last just a little longer — just a little bit longer. I go back to those boxes each day, pull out a stack of pages, and begin turning them, searching for an answer with the same hope that I think my source must have had when he took up that permanent marker and looked for ‘R’. Did he get the cookie?
