The donation warehouse

The piece went up on the local paper's site on the nineteenth of March, with four photographs and three hundred words, and I am going to correct it in parts.

Not out of spite. It is that whoever wrote it spent forty minutes in there, in daylight, and what happened in that warehouse happened at night.

Nor am I writing this to diminish what was done. Four thousand two hundred sorted bags went out of that building, and they reached people who were sleeping in a school hall. The work existed and it was worth doing.

What did not exist was the pretty version of it.

"Around 120 volunteers took turns sorting the donations."

A hundred and twenty is the number of people who signed the list across nine days. On any given night there were between twenty and thirty-five of us. On the night shift, ten until four, there were thirty-one on the best day and eleven on the worst.

The difference matters, because sorting is not work that divides well. Eleven people in a warehouse of twelve hundred square metres do not add up to a relief effort. They add up to a handful of people a long way from each other shouting questions about sizes.

"In an atmosphere of solidarity and hope."

That was not the atmosphere.

The atmosphere was anger. Anger at the council, which took four days to release the warehouse. Anger at whoever donated high heels, suits, party dresses and, in one case I saw with my own eyes, a waffle maker. Anger at the smell, which is the part nobody tells you: clothing donated in bulk, bagged, sealed and stacked starts to go mouldy in forty-eight hours, and twelve hundred square metres of clothing going mouldy is a thing that gets into your own clothes and leaves on the third wash.

Hope is not the word. The word is stubbornness.

"Donations were separated by type and by size."

By type, yes. By size, only men's shirts, and only because one volunteer who works in stock control built a bay system out of masking tape on the Monday.

That volunteer is the reason this text exists.

He turned up on the Monday night shift, on his own, in work boots, and spent the first hour not speaking to anybody, walking the floor with a notebook. Then he went over to the coordinator and talked for about three minutes. By half eleven we had bays.

I never learned his surname. I know he is called Jonas, that he works in drinks logistics, and that he never learned mine either.

About the work, because the piece does not describe any.

You open the bag. You take out one item at a time. Dirty goes one way, good goes the other, torn goes to textile recycling and not to the bin, and that is the thing everybody gets wrong in the first two days.

Big items need two people: one holds and the other folds, or it touches the floor and goes back on the dirty pile. Blankets, coats, duvets. There is a correct way to do it as a pair and it requires the two people to stand facing each other, about seventy centimetres apart, moving their arms at the same time.

One night we folded a hundred and forty blankets.

Nobody who has not done it understands that folding blankets with a stranger for six hours is more intimate than almost anything. You learn the person's hand. You learn when they are about to let go. At three in the morning, on the fifth day, you and she do the whole movement without looking and without agreeing it, and that has no name and is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me.

"The work continued into the early hours."

It did.

On the Thursday, the sixth, two lorries arrived at twenty past two in the morning with no warning, because the driver had taken a diversion and had no signal to call ahead. The coordinator had left at midnight. There were nine of us there.

Unloading two lorries with nine people takes you to half five.

At twenty to five the other seven went outside to eat what was left of the bread, and the warehouse stayed with the high lights off, because the coordinator switches half of them off on her way out and nobody knew where the key was.

The back of that warehouse has a corridor between the wall and the last row of pallets, ninety centimetres wide and about four metres long, and it is the only place in the building not visible from the door.

I am telling this with measurements because that is how I remember it. Somebody who spends nine days counting items and square metres stores things as numbers.

There was plastic sheeting stacked there, the blue kind, new, still in the factory wrap.

The others came back from the bread at ten past five.

"In the end, everyone went home with a full heart."

That is invention by somebody who needed to finish a piece.

On the last day we swept the floor, handed back the key, and each of us went to our own car with no speeches. There was an awkward group hug that lasted about ten seconds and that nobody properly proposed.

I did not take his number and he did not ask for mine, and that was a decision rather than an oversight. What happened in there belonged to the warehouse, to the mould, to the blankets and to four in the morning, and outside of that it was not going to survive a coffee on a Tuesday.

One thing in the piece is right, and it is the caption on the third photograph, which reads: "Volunteers fold blankets in the early hours of Thursday."

The photograph is from the sixth. I am in it, from behind, on the left. He is holding the other end.