"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!