Twenty Years
I moved to my current address exactly 20 years ago today.
This has led me to think about all the house moves I've made in my life.
I was born in a house converted into flats in Brandram Road in south-east London. I remember little of that house and a couple of years later we moved round the corner to a basement flat in Blessington Road. This must have been about the time my sister was born. I have a few clearer memories of that. For instance, the flat upstairs was occupied by a Mr and Mrs Stocking, a name I found amusing at that age.
At this point came a possible move that never happened. Apparently my father had a job lined up in Perth, Western Australia. This was the time of the cheap emigration deals to Australia and we were going to take advantage of that. But my maternal grandmother (who lived not far from us) didn't like the idea. If we moved, she'd probably never see us again. In the end, we didn't move.
i only found out about this completely after my father's death when my sister mentioned having got the story from our father, although my mother had told me part of the story many years ago.
What did happen then is that my father got a job in the north of England and we moved to the new town of Newton Ayclife during the final weekend of 1957. I still have memories of the train journey north, and how, before our furniture arrived, we stayed at the Eden Arms Hotel in Rushyford, on the old A1 to the north of the town. I think we were due to stay just one night in the hotel, but my father told me many years later that after all the effort of unpacking, we decided to go back to the hotel for an extra night. This delayed my father's return to work and one of his work mates actually came round looking for him. In those days, too, he was expected to work New Year's Day, not yet a public holiday in England.
By then I had two sisters. The address we moved to was 34 Eden Road, a terraced house, newly built. The houses across the road were still being built. There, in 1962, my brother was born and that house was then too small, so we moved again.
To explain, the houses in Newton Aycliffe were mostly council houses and there was an official channel to go through if you wanted to move. This was a character called Mrs Hamilton. This history of the town reports "These were the days of the fearsome Miss Hamilton, who interviewed prospective tenants, and visited them to make sure they were keeping their council houses tidy!" The local Am Dram group could get a laugh in their production of the panto Aladdin in the scene when Widow Twankey converts her house to a palace by having a character say, "Does Mrs Hamilton know about this?"
Well, we must have jumped through the right hoops because we moved on the 19th April 1963, the day before my mother's 35th birthday. This must have been in the school Easter holidays. We moved to 3 Mellanby Crescent, a semi-detached house just round the corner from Eden Road. This time, the house wasn't completely new, there had been previous tenants. However, the house backed on to my primary school and I recall a time when that ground was just a bog. Indeed, a fellow pupil managed to lose a show one day whilst playing there. Living next to a school did mean I had not far to go when I was still a pupil there - which was only for another year before I went to secondary school - but did mean you got a lot of noise from the school. This was especially so in the late sixties when there was a craze in the north for something called jazz bands. These had little to do with jazz but were groups of young children dressed in something like an American high-school band uniform playing kazoos and drums. (You can see one of them in a scene in the film Get Carter.) One of these bands practiced on the school playground. I vividly recall their attempt to play the opening to Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (this was the period of 2001, A Space Odyssey) on kazoos and drums.
My father lived in that house for over forty years, moving out only at the end of 2006 when he moved into a care home. In the early seventies, he'd bought the house from the council and he still owned it when he died in early 2007.
But for the decade 1970-80, things get a bit complicated for me. I started at Leeds University in 1970 and lived in a hall of residence, Vaughan House Bodington Hall, just to the north of the Leeds Ring Road on the Otley Road. But, of course, out of term time I still lived at my parents' house.
When I graduated in 1973, I moved permanently back to Newton Aycliffe for a few months whilst looking for a job. The job I got was in London and I started work the final week of October. I moved in with my grandfather in Hedgley Street, not far from where I was born, a house with no internal loo or plumbed bath. My uncle lived nearby and he worked for the Civil Service where he heard about the London Hostel Association, which provided accomodation for working men in London. After a couple of weeks with my grandfather, I moved into Bowden Court in Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill.
This was intended to be a temporary arrangement until I found somewhere better to live, but inertia and other matters meant I actually stayed there nearly seven years. And during that time, much of my mail was still going to my parents' house and forwarded to me. And much of my belongings were still there, including many of my books. (My nephew was born in 1974, and he treated many of my books as colouring books.) I did make a few attempts to move out and by the late seventies I realised I could probably afford to buy something in the London suburbs. I even got as far as making a mortgage application in 1978 for a converted flat in Leyton, but the builiding society turned the place down as not suitable.
In late 1979, my parents came down to London to visit my grandfather and one morning I got a phonecall at work. They'd been passing an estate agents near his house and saw advertised a block of flats that had been tenanted but were now being sold off as the tenants left (or possibly died off). I got the details of the estate agents and went to inspect the available flats. I found one I liked and started proceedings to buy it.
This was Lee Court in Lee Hight Road, just round the corner from Brandram Road, where it all started over 25 years earlier. In those days, there was a bit of a wait for getting mortgages. I applied in November and the money didn't become available until February. (I never received a letter from my solicitors asking me to make an appointment when the money came through and I later discovered they'd sent it to the flat I was buying, not to Bowden Court.) And even then, when I'd exchanged contracts, so much work was needed to be done on the flat that it wasn't until July 2nd 1980 that i actually spent a night in the flat. It was a couple of days before I got all my stuff out of Bowden Court and a few months later that my parents came down with the rest of my stuff from their house.
The house I was born in was still there when I moved in, but was knocked down a couple of years later. The flat in Blessington Road was long gone by then.
I stayed in Lee Court for over 15 years. In 1994, my company decided to close all its London offices and move the staff to Guildford. (When I moved into Lee Court I was working for the Central Electricity Generating Board. By 1994, I was working for the National Grid Company, but I hadn't actually changed jobs.) I took this as an oppurtunity to move out of London and used my lunch hours to traipse around estate agents in Guildford. During the summer I found a place I liked. The owner said he was moving to Spain for his health and there was an oxygen cylinder in his living room that backed this up. I put my flat on the market and found a buyer.
At first I was planning to move beginning of August 1995 but my vendor had relations coming to stay from Denmark in August, and would I mind moving over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Well, some of you may recall that Intersection was being held in Glasgow that weekend, and I was a division head at that convention. We agreed that I would move the first Monday in September.
The trouble was, my buyer was dawdling over exchanging contracts. When I left for Glasgow, we still hadn't exchanged. At the convention, I kept having to phone my solicitor from a pay phone in the SECC to see what was happening. I returned home on the 31st and finally managed to exchange contracts the next day, which required me to get a large cheque from my building society savings to give to my solicitor. The move went as planned the following Monday. However, when I went to the estate agents in Guildford to pick up the key, all the solicitors were at lunch and the estate agents couldn't hand over the key until they received the go ahead. By the time I got to the house, the removal men had arrived with my stuff, found an open window and had been able to get in and start unloading.
And I'm still here. I don't think I'll move again.
This has led me to think about all the house moves I've made in my life.
I was born in a house converted into flats in Brandram Road in south-east London. I remember little of that house and a couple of years later we moved round the corner to a basement flat in Blessington Road. This must have been about the time my sister was born. I have a few clearer memories of that. For instance, the flat upstairs was occupied by a Mr and Mrs Stocking, a name I found amusing at that age.
At this point came a possible move that never happened. Apparently my father had a job lined up in Perth, Western Australia. This was the time of the cheap emigration deals to Australia and we were going to take advantage of that. But my maternal grandmother (who lived not far from us) didn't like the idea. If we moved, she'd probably never see us again. In the end, we didn't move.
i only found out about this completely after my father's death when my sister mentioned having got the story from our father, although my mother had told me part of the story many years ago.
What did happen then is that my father got a job in the north of England and we moved to the new town of Newton Ayclife during the final weekend of 1957. I still have memories of the train journey north, and how, before our furniture arrived, we stayed at the Eden Arms Hotel in Rushyford, on the old A1 to the north of the town. I think we were due to stay just one night in the hotel, but my father told me many years later that after all the effort of unpacking, we decided to go back to the hotel for an extra night. This delayed my father's return to work and one of his work mates actually came round looking for him. In those days, too, he was expected to work New Year's Day, not yet a public holiday in England.
By then I had two sisters. The address we moved to was 34 Eden Road, a terraced house, newly built. The houses across the road were still being built. There, in 1962, my brother was born and that house was then too small, so we moved again.
To explain, the houses in Newton Aycliffe were mostly council houses and there was an official channel to go through if you wanted to move. This was a character called Mrs Hamilton. This history of the town reports "These were the days of the fearsome Miss Hamilton, who interviewed prospective tenants, and visited them to make sure they were keeping their council houses tidy!" The local Am Dram group could get a laugh in their production of the panto Aladdin in the scene when Widow Twankey converts her house to a palace by having a character say, "Does Mrs Hamilton know about this?"
Well, we must have jumped through the right hoops because we moved on the 19th April 1963, the day before my mother's 35th birthday. This must have been in the school Easter holidays. We moved to 3 Mellanby Crescent, a semi-detached house just round the corner from Eden Road. This time, the house wasn't completely new, there had been previous tenants. However, the house backed on to my primary school and I recall a time when that ground was just a bog. Indeed, a fellow pupil managed to lose a show one day whilst playing there. Living next to a school did mean I had not far to go when I was still a pupil there - which was only for another year before I went to secondary school - but did mean you got a lot of noise from the school. This was especially so in the late sixties when there was a craze in the north for something called jazz bands. These had little to do with jazz but were groups of young children dressed in something like an American high-school band uniform playing kazoos and drums. (You can see one of them in a scene in the film Get Carter.) One of these bands practiced on the school playground. I vividly recall their attempt to play the opening to Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (this was the period of 2001, A Space Odyssey) on kazoos and drums.
My father lived in that house for over forty years, moving out only at the end of 2006 when he moved into a care home. In the early seventies, he'd bought the house from the council and he still owned it when he died in early 2007.
But for the decade 1970-80, things get a bit complicated for me. I started at Leeds University in 1970 and lived in a hall of residence, Vaughan House Bodington Hall, just to the north of the Leeds Ring Road on the Otley Road. But, of course, out of term time I still lived at my parents' house.
When I graduated in 1973, I moved permanently back to Newton Aycliffe for a few months whilst looking for a job. The job I got was in London and I started work the final week of October. I moved in with my grandfather in Hedgley Street, not far from where I was born, a house with no internal loo or plumbed bath. My uncle lived nearby and he worked for the Civil Service where he heard about the London Hostel Association, which provided accomodation for working men in London. After a couple of weeks with my grandfather, I moved into Bowden Court in Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill.
This was intended to be a temporary arrangement until I found somewhere better to live, but inertia and other matters meant I actually stayed there nearly seven years. And during that time, much of my mail was still going to my parents' house and forwarded to me. And much of my belongings were still there, including many of my books. (My nephew was born in 1974, and he treated many of my books as colouring books.) I did make a few attempts to move out and by the late seventies I realised I could probably afford to buy something in the London suburbs. I even got as far as making a mortgage application in 1978 for a converted flat in Leyton, but the builiding society turned the place down as not suitable.
In late 1979, my parents came down to London to visit my grandfather and one morning I got a phonecall at work. They'd been passing an estate agents near his house and saw advertised a block of flats that had been tenanted but were now being sold off as the tenants left (or possibly died off). I got the details of the estate agents and went to inspect the available flats. I found one I liked and started proceedings to buy it.
This was Lee Court in Lee Hight Road, just round the corner from Brandram Road, where it all started over 25 years earlier. In those days, there was a bit of a wait for getting mortgages. I applied in November and the money didn't become available until February. (I never received a letter from my solicitors asking me to make an appointment when the money came through and I later discovered they'd sent it to the flat I was buying, not to Bowden Court.) And even then, when I'd exchanged contracts, so much work was needed to be done on the flat that it wasn't until July 2nd 1980 that i actually spent a night in the flat. It was a couple of days before I got all my stuff out of Bowden Court and a few months later that my parents came down with the rest of my stuff from their house.
The house I was born in was still there when I moved in, but was knocked down a couple of years later. The flat in Blessington Road was long gone by then.
I stayed in Lee Court for over 15 years. In 1994, my company decided to close all its London offices and move the staff to Guildford. (When I moved into Lee Court I was working for the Central Electricity Generating Board. By 1994, I was working for the National Grid Company, but I hadn't actually changed jobs.) I took this as an oppurtunity to move out of London and used my lunch hours to traipse around estate agents in Guildford. During the summer I found a place I liked. The owner said he was moving to Spain for his health and there was an oxygen cylinder in his living room that backed this up. I put my flat on the market and found a buyer.
At first I was planning to move beginning of August 1995 but my vendor had relations coming to stay from Denmark in August, and would I mind moving over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Well, some of you may recall that Intersection was being held in Glasgow that weekend, and I was a division head at that convention. We agreed that I would move the first Monday in September.
The trouble was, my buyer was dawdling over exchanging contracts. When I left for Glasgow, we still hadn't exchanged. At the convention, I kept having to phone my solicitor from a pay phone in the SECC to see what was happening. I returned home on the 31st and finally managed to exchange contracts the next day, which required me to get a large cheque from my building society savings to give to my solicitor. The move went as planned the following Monday. However, when I went to the estate agents in Guildford to pick up the key, all the solicitors were at lunch and the estate agents couldn't hand over the key until they received the go ahead. By the time I got to the house, the removal men had arrived with my stuff, found an open window and had been able to get in and start unloading.
And I'm still here. I don't think I'll move again.