Ian McMillan: Keys that unlocked the mysteries of a lost world

Of course your first instinct is to pat your pockets to make sure they’re not yours and they weren’t; mine jingled away happily next to a paperclip and a two-pound coin.

I picked up the keys. There were three of them: a front door key and a back door key maybe, and a key to a shed perhaps. I imagined the owner getting home with armfuls of shopping bags and two fretful children and discovering she couldn’t get in the house. I imagined her standing there and patting her pockets again and again like I’d patted mine; a kind of simultaneous pocket-patting ritual going on all around the Cleethorpes district.

So of course I was suddenly struck with Finder’s Responsibility. I had to do something with the keys. There was no address on them, of course, which is a good thing, but that left us with a dilemma. What should we, as upright citizens, do? One option would be to leave them on the floor: perhaps the owner would come back for them, retracing her steps (I don’t really know why I think they belonged to a woman. Call it Key Owner Instinct, a little-known and totally impractical function of the brain, and find them again and smile a broad smile. Or perhaps we could just take them home and dispose of them: after all, nobody would know whose they were and perhaps she had a spare set at her mam’s and because they were unidentifiable they were really no good to anybody. And maybe by a kind of voodoo they might fit our front door and back door and shed. Now that would be weird, but as you know in Cleethorpes anything is possible.

In the end we decided we should take them to the police because they would know what to do and anyway the woman with the three kids and the worry lines (I was filling out her biography now) would go to the police in the hope that some kind Yorkshireman full of fish and chips would hand them in.

I thought about the other two times I’d found something and handed it in and the excitements and difficulties involved. The first time was about 30 years ago when I was walking home from Wombwell; I noticed a purse in the middle of the road. I stepped into the road to pick it up. A car almost flattened me. I stepped into the road again and another car almost flattened me coming from the opposite direction. I almost sympathised with the Good Samaritan who walked by the other side but in the end I took advantage of a gap in the traffic and snaffled the purse. I carried it up to the Police Station in Wombwell, feeling a scaled-down version of the same kind of glow of satisfaction Bill Gates feels when he throws a hurricane of money at ending world disease. Maybe that’s why you hand things in, for that burst of satisfaction.

The second time I handed something in was harder: we were in Llandudno and the family were little and we found a wallet and a pension book and the police station was miles away and kids were tired and we were tired but in the end we found the cop shop and handed it in and that case the glow burned brightly like a candle, if only for a short time until we realised how far it was to walk back to the Tan-Y-Marian guest house with three grumpy kids.

So we went to the Police Station in Cleethorpes and I passed the keys to a copper who wrote the words Three Keys in a notebook. He took my name and address and I said, for a joke, that I’d expect a five thousand pound reward and he didn’t laugh. Well, it wasn’t that funny. And I hope Tracy (I’ve given her a name now) goes and gets her keys. And I hope that she didn’t have to stand outside her house for days in the East Coast mist.

On the way home I thought about all the lost and found things in the world, swirling round in a spiral: that scarf I left on a train in 1998, that nice blue shirt I left in a hotel wardrobe in about 2002, that scarf I found on a train in 1998, that single earring I found under a bed in a hotel in about 2002. It’s as though there’s a kind of cosmic symmetry going on here, with lost things and found things bumping into each other along the route of life.

So now I know that if ever I lose my keys, I just have to go to a police station in Cleethorpes and claim them. They’ll be there, waiting.