If anyone had seen me walking through a sedate Norfolk town with three swords, they might have assumed I was out on a crime spree. But these weapons were masonic paraphernalia left behind by my father and I was taking them to a solicitor. When my father died a year after my mother, I had vowed to do a green house clearance. There would be no skips or clearance companies involved, instead we would reuse or recycle everything we could.

But shifting my dad’s masonic gear was problematic. The solicitor handling his will was a member of the same lodge but was reluctant to take the stuff at first. A year later, with the house about to be sold, I’d finally persuaded him to accept the swords. It wasn’t easy, but sticking to the facts of the case had finally resulted in a masonic amnesty.

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The next day, I returned with a further two ancient suitcases of masonic regalia. As a non-mason, I feared that at any moment the suitcases might spill aprons, white gloves, medals and rosettes on to the ground; possibly resulting in my terrible ritual humiliation for revealing secrets of the craft and, of course, increasing my solicitor’s caseload.

Sometimes it seemed my dad specialised in activities that his Guardian-reading metropolitan son would find embarrassing, such as playing the flute in military bands. But in my new persona of an eco-Arthur Daley I had to shift his British Legion and Corps of Drums band uniforms from my lock-up (his other clothes went to charity). A call to the British Legion head office found the local secretary who agreed to come and pick up the uniform; an email to the Corps of Drums resulted in an address in Kent where I could post his uniform.

My dad also had four flutes and a bugle, on which he used to play The Last Post at antisocial hours. The local music shops weren’t interested, but on the way back to London I found a place in Cambridge, which, after a long walk from the station and some pleading, took them all for a fiver.

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But then there was his Lambeg drum, acquired during a visit to Northern Ireland for another of his hobbies, attending Orange parades. He was an Essex man born and bred, but started visiting Northern Ireland in his retirement. He joined the Orange Order, and with no previous training learned to play the flute at 60 and joined a Protestant flute band in Corby. He also went to Northern Ireland for the 12 July marching season, enjoyed watching “kick the Pope” bands and marched down the Garvaghy Road in Drumcree when in his 70s.

He grew up during the war and loved all things military, Winston Churchill and the Queen. My father had an insecure childhood and perhaps something about the Unionist cause, with its rigid certainties and resistance to change, appealed to his sense of lost values and innate conservatism, as well as his maverick streak.

I gave the Lambeg drum to a local garage sale. Anything not sold there would be sent off to help victims of Chernobyl I was assured, raising the odd prospect of some kid at a Dynamo Kiev match banging a huge Ulster drum. At least my dad’s old West Ham programmes were more my territory and easier to pass on to a stall outside the ground.

It took a year and hundreds of journeys to the charity shop to clear my mum and dad’s house, but I learned far more about my parents through this than if I’d just chucked everything out.

They grew up during the second world war and I became enveloped in their hoarding mentality. My parents kept everything: broken electrical item (four kettles, five radios including my defunct childhood Philips that once played live Elton John gigs on Radio 1) and bank statements (with envelopes) going back to the 1950s. Hefty sums of money were stashed in various building society accounts yet my parents’ underwear and sheets were full of holes.

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Never before had I realised the sheer scale of my mum’s collection of china and knick-knacks, or her later struggles with Alzheimer’s revealed in lists of birthdays and notes for the milkman. Little things spoke of my dad’s various foibles. The numerous torches and batteries and spare keys betrayed his worries of power cuts and being locked out. A huge collection of Ordnance Survey maps revealed his fear of being lost.

Then there were the letters of complaint to banks, councils and the Inland Revenue. My dad spent much of his life claiming refunds and often getting them through sheer nuisance value. There was a stack of obstinate correspondence about the M25 dissecting his council-owned farm, where his awkwardness resulted in a nice little earner. And an astonishing letter where he complains that he’s paid £1.24 too much interest to the Inland Revenue.

In the dressing-table drawer, my dad’s 1940 diary tells of church visits, downed aircraft and evacuation. And in the bureau at the bottom of my mum’s tin full of ancient premium bonds, there are some letters from their courting days. Suddenly, my father is no longer a grouchy old ex-farmer hoarding broken kettles and bank statements, but a young man talking of listening to their song at a cafe on his six-hour motorbike ride home from seeing her and signing off “I love you, darling.”

Now, everything has gone – the masonic swords, the flutes, the maps, torches and clothes and the traces of two lives; yet I have a better idea of my own identity and who my parents were. And, as inveterate hoarders, I think they would approve of nothing going in the bin.

Pete May’s book There’s A Hippo In My Cistern is published by Mainstream, £9.99.

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