The Box Was Labelled Not to Be Opened, in Her Mother’s Handwriting

Gwen is sixty-one and a retired district nurse and she is not given to drama, and she took that box down the ladder with her heart going like a bird.

It had been under the water tank, behind the Christmas decorations and a bag of curtains that had not been up since the nineties. She had nearly missed it. She had actually written the loft off — she had been up twice, decided it was all rubbish, and come down — and then on the third trip she had gone round the back of the tank for a torch she had put down, and there it was.

A carton, about the size of two shoeboxes, taped along the seam. Not dusty, which she noticed, because everything else up there was.

And on the lid, in biro, in her mother’s handwriting, in the small tidy capitals she used for labelling everything from jam to fuse boxes:

NOT TO BE OPENED.

---

Gwen sat on the landing with it on her knees for a while.

The house was going on the market in eleven days. Her mother had died in the March, at eighty-six, in a good way, after a fortnight in a hospice and a great deal of admin. Gwen had been doing the house since May, an hour or two at a time, in the evenings, with a car boot full of bags for the tip.

She took the box down to the kitchen, put it on the counter, and made a cup of tea.

Then she looked at it for eleven minutes.

---

She has been asked since why she did not simply open it.

Her answer is that she had spent five months clearing that house and had opened several hundred boxes without a second thought — her father’s tools, forty years of bank statements, a drawer of dead watches — and that not one of them had had an instruction on it.

An instruction changes what a box is. Before an instruction, a box is a container. After an instruction, it is a conversation with somebody, and the somebody was dead.

She also says, more simply, that she was frightened, and that she does not think that was unreasonable.

---

She rang her brother in Vancouver, where it was six in the morning.

“There’s a box up here that says not to be opened,” she said.

“Well, open it then,” said Ian, still mostly asleep.

“Ian.”

And he woke up properly, because he has known her for fifty-eight years and that was not her ordinary voice.

“Sorry,” he said. “Right. Do you want me on the phone?”

“Yes,” said Gwen.

---

She put him on speaker and propped the phone against the kettle, and got the good scissors, and cut the tape along the seam, which took two passes because the tape had gone brittle.

“What can you see?” said Ian.

“Nothing yet. Tissue paper.”

“Tissue paper,” Ian repeated, in the tone of a man in a dressing gown four thousand miles away trying to sound calm.

Gwen lifted it out.

---

There were three things in the box.

A bundle of letters, maybe twenty, held together with a brown shoelace tied in a bow. The envelopes were slit neatly along the top, the way her mother opened everything, with the paper knife that was now in a bag for the charity shop.

A small brown envelope, unsealed, about the size of a postcard.

And, on top, face up, a photograph.

---

“There’s a photo,” said Gwen.

“Of what?”

“A woman. Young. Early twenties, maybe less.” She held it under the light. “She’s in uniform. Nurse’s uniform — proper one, the old cap, the collar. She’s standing outside a building and squinting, so it’s sunny. There’s a low wall and some railings and a bit of a sign but I can’t read it.”

“Do you know her?”

“No,” said Gwen.

She turned it over.

On the back, in pencil, in a hand that was not her mother’s, it said: Eileen, May 1958.

---

There was a pause from Canada.

“Mum was Eileen,” said Ian.

“Mum was Eileen,” Gwen agreed.

“So that’s Mum.”

“Ian.” Gwen sat down slowly on the kitchen stool. “Mum was nineteen in 1958, and in May 1958 Mum was in Wolverhampton, living with Nana, working in a shop. That’s not Wolverhampton. And Mum was never a nurse.”

“She might have—”

“I was a nurse for thirty-four years,” said Gwen. “She never once said.”

The line from Vancouver went quiet.

“Read a letter,” said Ian.