a small mystery
When I first came to University of Southampton, I became aware of a small mystery, and one that remains a mystery.
Outside the door of an office down the hallway, the office that in fact I now inhabit, there hung on the wall a small glass fronted wooden box. The box measured roughly three inches high and the same wide, and an inch deep. The front was a single square of old glass.
Into the inside top of the box, which could be lifted off, was screwed and small hook, and from the hook hung a small key, perhaps two centimeters in length. And this is the mystery – what was the lock that matched this small key. Over the years, this small box and its key has never left my imagination.
The building was put up in the mid-1960s and so the key couldn’t belong to anything too old. The building was the first to be built on that site, which had previously been a brickworks, and so it wouldn’t be a key transferred over from some previous structure, however intriguing that would have been.
I asked my older colleagues about the key, but there was no lore they had to share. And it wasn’t the case that there was lore that had been lost; one of these colleagues had been of the first generation to be in the building and so would have known.
Some few years ago, work was done in the hallway and the box was taken down off the wall. I asked, and it is now on shelf in my office, just in case there is some day in the future a knock on the door, and a cloaked figure points at the wall and asks, in a deep voice, ‘But what of the key?’
The actual explanation is almost certainly mundane, some feature of the building that didn’t survive a previous remodeling, perhaps, but I want there to be a mystery attached to this small key.
multijimbo 