In retirement, Steve Mills began collecting secondhand books that he had read as a child. It was an effort to reawaken lost memories.
His search revealed more about his family’s past than he’d thought possible.
He was at home in Hockley, east of London, flipping through titles from a recent book haul from a charity shop. Inside the pages of an early hardcover edition of “The Naughtiest Girl Again,” by the English author Enid Blyton, he found a girl’s handwritten notes from more than 50 years earlier.
It took a few moments for Mr. Mills to grasp who the writer was: his wife, Karen.
At first, Mr. Mills, a 67-year-old former civil servant, simply recognized an address in the town where his wife had grown up, written in a child’s handwriting. He brought the book to Ms. Mills, and said, “Oh look, they used to live in the village you came from,” Mr. Mills recalled.
The address had been her childhood home, though it was spelled wrong. Ms. Mills couldn’t believe it. Surely, she thought, her husband must be playing a trick on her.
“I thought at first that it was him being a silly bugger,” she said. “I actually said to him, ‘Are you trying to misspell our first address?’”
“But I looked at it again, and I thought, ‘Oh my word, this is written by my brother and me when we were 9 and 10,’” she said.
They turned the pages together, revealing the interior world of a young girl: stick figures of family members, the name “Karen” written in cursive, and notes jotted in pencil, marker and pen.
There were timetables she had carefully recorded, pages she had folded to save her place and a sketch of little Karen, freckles dotting her face.
“We both sat there quite amazed,” Mr. Mills said.
The book would have had to make a long journey to return to its original owner.
Ms. Mills, 60, who is recovering from an illness in a hospital, grew up in Staffordshire, about 170 miles northwest of Hockley. Her parents, Brenda and David Larden, both 87, told their daughter that they must have donated the book to a church or school drive around 1975, when they moved.
How many children’s bookshelves it had sat on since then, in how many English cities and towns, they’ll never know.
“For 50 years,” Ms. Mills said, the book had “gone around the country, doing I don’t know what — entertaining children — and then it came back to us.”
Mr. Mills said he couldn’t remember where he had bought the books. But serendipitous finds like his have occurred before.
Last year, a British fashion designer was reunited with a coat she had designed — 40 years after it went missing from her warehouse — when it was found at an Oxfam charity shop in London.
Two years before that, a woman found the first album she had ever bought — with her name written on it from four decades earlier — at a charity shop in the Channel Islands.
“These sorts of finds are a rare occurrence,” Lorna Fallon, the trading director at Oxfam, which operates charity shops across Britain, said in a statement.
“Mr. Mills’s discovery is a wonderful example of the magic of charity shops.”
But his discoveries weren’t over.
A few days after finding his wife’s name in “The Naughtiest Girl Again,” Mr. Mills suddenly realized that there were other titles in the haul that he hadn’t looked at. Could some of those, too, have been from his wife’s childhood home?
“I picked up another couple of books and, lo and behold, there was my wife’s name,” he said.
He found doodles by Ms. Mills and her brother Mark on two other Enid Blyton books, “The Adventures of Pip” and “The Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island.” The latter was one of Mr. Mills’s favorite books as a boy.
The find was particularly meaningful for him, he said, because Ms. Blyton’s stories reminded him of boyhood adventures with his mother in Cornwall, on the English coast.
“The point of the exercise was for me to try and recoup some of my childhood memories,” he said. “But I didn’t expect to recoup my wife.”
His search, it turned out, was just beginning. In the back of one of the three books, he said, his wife had written, “I have got 12 of Enid BLYTONS Books.”
“So that leaves me with another nine to try and find now,” he said.
Jonathan Wolfe is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news.
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