SINCE 1998, environmental health officers from Herefordshire Council have been 'biographers' to 10 people with no family to arrange a funeral. One of those was Alojsky 'Alec' Nowak.

A PAUPER'S grave. A parish funeral. The stuff of sepia tinted tearjerkers. Reality is greyer, more prosaic.

A simple service. A solemn dignity.

'Hereford cemetery. Plot M0083. Alojsky Nowak. 1925-2002.'

For the record, the deceased was found at his home address. Post mortem examination was carried out on behalf of HM Coroner, Herefordshire. Cause of death was given as bronchial pneumonia complicated by chronic obstructive airways disease - natural causes.

No inquest opened. No next of kin came forward.

He died alone, overnight on the sofa he used as a bed, in an atrophied ground floor flat at Golden Post, Hunderton, Hereford.

A police officer found him the following morning. The TV was still on showing a breakfast programme.

The doorstep obituaries are anecdotal. Stories of a stranger among strangers. The black woollen cowl, the zip-up cardigan with fold over collar, the greatcoat worn in all weathers. Turning aside, never meeting. What was it he carried with him back and forth from Belmont Tesco or to The Oval - with tutored wilfulness - on pension day?

Finding clues

Memory moulds his character, summons his spirit from a house haunted by that which is left undone. Its exorcism is an administrative exercise - identity as inventory.

Pull out the drawers. Pick through pockets. That which might not have mattered in another moment is all that matters now. Searching for clues to someone close, perhaps a contribution to costs.

Fingers run through the residue of reality always find a mark. A stained set of medals maybe, dog-eared diaries, gaudy sentiments on an old birthday card.

His interests - Italian opera LPs. A complete collection of classics.

These were the only items of any value.

Bureaucracy is his biography; a paper trail that puts him back in his native Southern Poland aged 16 and a miner fleeing Hitler's Blitzkrieg in 1939.

Forced into German ranks he spends the first years of the Second World War on several fronts until captured by the British in Italy, switching sides to fight against those he had fought for.

At the war's end was among the hundreds of Polish DPs or 'Displaced Persons' sent to Herefordshire and their own expatriate community at Foxley.

The former American army camp was a first stop for those bound for new lives in the USA or Canada.

Alojsky Nowak never got that far.

Instead he made a room at Hereford's Redhill hostel his home and went to ground again - 40 years working in trenches with the 'Gas Board'.

His was a unique, oblique angle on the city.

Colleagues called him Alec. He wasn't one for conversation. A speech impediment hampered permanently poor English.

His face always seemed to hide something no confession could assuage or clear. But they learned to respect him. Gave him his due. He wouldn't shirk when the work was going.

Driven inward to find a private peace, so much cause seems unaccounted for.

The past puts no such burden on Alojsky Nowak now.

Two friends and three council officers attended his graveside funeral service, arranged with an appropriate undertaker, as regulation requires.

The grave is given a marker instead of a headstone. Fresh flowers are often alongside.