Left Behind
"What is the strangest thing a Londoner has lost?" I asked an official of the Lost Property Office in Scotland Yard.
"Well, let's see. Two leg bones came in last week. They had obviously been left in a tramcar by a medical student. Once we had somebody's appendix in oil; but I think the funniest thing I ever remember a man losing—and I've been here thirty-three years—was a tree-climbing bear! Alive? I should say he was alive! You ought to have seen him climb up to the mantelshelf. It turned out that he had been left in a cab by a Scotsman who owned him. This man had been abroad for a long time, and was paying his first visit to London after many seafaring years abroad. Apparently he was so excited to be back that he forgot all about his bear. He left it in a four-wheeler. He remembered next morning, and jolly glad we were, too, for although we get all kinds of strange things in this department it's not organized like a zoo."
During thirty-three years in the Lost Property Office this official has seen a great change in London's crop of forgetfulness.
"Muffs have stopped coming in now," he said. "Once we were full of muffs; but women don't carry them nowadays. Everything else has increased, not because people are more absent-minded, but because the speed of traffic has increased. We take only objects found in omnibuses, tramcars, and taxicabs. In the old days you could run after a horse omnibus and find your umbrella, but to-day as soon as you remember you have left it the vehicle is out of sight. Just look here!"
We walked down a long avenue packed with umbrellas. There must have been over twenty thousand of them! The avenue ended in a room full of the more recently abandoned specimens. Here men and women were nosing round looking for their lost property. What a task! The room was stacked to the ceiling with umbrellas, all neatly docketed. They lay in racks, the handles only protruding.
When handles are round and shiny this room, which is always full, presents to the eye four walls of round and shiny knobs; when the fashion in umbrellas changes, this room changes too. At the moment it is full of originality and colour. Thousands of green jade and red coral handles jut from the walls; thousands of check handles vary the pattern. Here and there you see a dog-headed handle, a handle shaped like a bird, or a handle carved to the shape of a pierrot's head, a pathetic white face with drooping carmine lips, which seems crying to be claimed and taken home!
"Oh, I shall never find it in this forest of umbrellas!" cried a girl. "Never! I don't think I want to. I hate the look of umbrellas."
Another woman picked her umbrella out in the first five minutes. What an eye! And all the time girls came up to the counter, rather breathless, with:
"I've lost a lovely new umbrella on a number three omnibus; it had a dear little green handle carved like a fish, and I said to mother——"
"Come inside, miss," said a weary official. "I said to mother that I think I lost it when I got off at Westminster, or it may have been earlier in the morning, when——"
"Come inside, miss!"
More remarkable even than the jungle of lost umbrellas is the series of rooms packed with every conceivable thing a passenger can carry in a tramcar, an omnibus, or a taxicab. You gain the impression when you tour the Lost Property Office that some people would lose an elephant between Ludgate Circus and Charing Cross.
How do they lose full-size typewriters, gigantic suit-cases packed with clothes, gramophones, bulky parcels, crates, and small perambulators?
There are thousands of lost shoes, mostly new, some of them dance slippers bought by forgetful girls, or perhaps by husbands who were thinking of something else! There are ball dresses that have been left in omnibuses, silk nightdresses, hats, costumes, and, of course, jewellery.
The Lost Property Office looks like a gigantic pawnshop or a large secondhand store. The officials are surprised at nothing. Have they not taken care of skulls and the hands of mummies? In another room I saw October's crop of lost umbrellas being distributed to the tramcar conductors, the omnibus conductors, and the taxicab men who found them. This happens every three months. If it did not Scotland Yard would have to build an annexe somewhere. The finders made merry as they were given incongruous umbrellas. One large, red taxicab driver drew a neat little mincing silk umbrella with a kingfisher on the handle.
"Oh, how sweet, Bill!" said the tram conductors.
* * *
At the other end of the office other conductors were handing in dozens of umbrellas and sticks, the ceaseless daily harvest of London's wonderful absent-mindedness. Most of them had wrist straps, too!