Anyway, that is all in the past, and I am free to forget about it, and I will soon. But so far it's only been twenty-seven years. Give me a chance to let the hurt die down. Please.
OK. Picture this. We're moving into a village. A hamlet, in fact. One of those communities that has always run on feudal lines. Where you are an incomer till the day you die. And you are going to be representing the organisation that has become the landlord of all it surveys within the last few years. An organisation that has brought new ways. New ways - hear the threat in that? No more the benevolent Lord of the Manor with his nasty Land Agent, but a penny-pinching charity that does things differently. And what do they do to ease your reception into the community? They chuck another family out of their home into a smaller semi-detached house, because you need their larger detached place in a quarter of an acre of garden, on account of you being a family of six, not to mention a couple of dogs. Good start, then, sensitively handled.
When we arrived the other family were still moving out, and our lorry-load of skate-thieves (bastards) had to hang around, which made them reluctant to fit the carpets as agreed, because of time constraints. Something about a 500-mile drive back to where they came from. They did the living-room all right, but the bedrooms were a patchwork of slashed foam-back monstrosity that in the future kept shredding itself round the brush of the hoover and causing us all to trip on loose corners and trailing fibres.
The house was far from big, and arrangements meant that the double parental bed was accommodated in the box room, the door of which would not open fully because of competing with the sleeping arrangements. To access the airing cupboard, it was necessary to dismantle the bed completely. The bathroom, was, frankly, squalid. It had no bath, but only a breeze-block shower, painted in a hideous pink gloss, which I discovered afterwards was necessary to enable the easy removal of black hairy mould, which would collect with great rapidity, due to the bathroom being an unheated, uninsulated, single-skinned lean-to extension to the main house. Apparently, the Lord of the Manor, who will henceforth be referred to as 'The Old Man', had once had a bath fitted for a former Gamekeeper, who had been very grateful for it. I understand he expressed his pleasure with the immortal words, 'Very good. 'E 'old 5 hundredweight o' taters, 'e do.'
The bath, however was long gone. Modernisation, I expect it's called. Several years later we were remodernised, and the place became more habitable, but I expect I'll forget to tell you about that when the time comes.
There was no fitted kitchen, so we had to cobble something together from what furniture we had brought with us. Cooking and heating was via a Raeburn which had two settings, cool or fierce. This explained why the previous occupants had practically lived in the dining-room, which survived on borrowed heat from this appliance. We had brought an electric cooker with us, so at least didn't have to rely on the inaccuracies of the stove for cooking. It did, however, heat the area around it quite efficiently, and I was never likely to be short of wood to fuel it, what with my job and all.
We, on the other hand, fancied living with our larger family in the small living-room. A good job I checked the chimney, as it had been bunged up with two bin-bags of old blankets to stop the tornadoes that came down it, swirling smoke into the space, ensuring that even on the coldest days, at some point we would have to throw the windows wide open so we could breathe. There was no central heating. Later improvements rectified that, but they would not take place until I had started making the estate more profitable. I was going to have to work for my keep.
From the outside, the house was a rather ordinary two-up two-down Edwardian farmworker's cottage, of a type that, despite being ugly and utilitarian, impractical and cold, people fall over themselves to buy nowadays. I don't advise it. Quaint comes at a price. Even crap quaint.
There was nothing in the garden at all, and the hedge was eight feet high all round, our predecessors being very private people. Even the internal keyholes were bunged up with toilet paper, although that may have been protection against draughts rather than prying eyes. I am going to show only one photo of the place, but you have to bear in mind that it was taken four years after we moved in. By that time I had reduced all the hedges to two feet, so we had views into open countryside, had dug a substantial veg patch, had planted a number of fruit trees and had begun training wall fruit up the house to go with the one existing espalier-trained pear tree that we inherited with the building. Here it is. Looks better than my description, doesn't it? Just bear in mind that it wasn't. I am the master of illusion.
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