Flat

July 1975

I’d bought the house Paul and I had been living in very cheap, because it was scheduled for demolition at some unspecified time in the future. I’d almost got the purchase price in my savings, and Dad gave me the rest. He’d already helped Patrick with the deposit for his house, and had lent me a lot of money when I was doing my PhD, which he’d refused to let me pay back – all out of his savings from working as a bus driver. Our Dad really was someone special.

April 1979

Shortly after I got back from India, I got the letter informing me that the house was due to be compulsorily purchased for demolition. I got back almost as much as I’d paid for it, which wasn’t bad considering I’d lived in it for nearly four years. If I’d got nothing back it wouldn’t have been terribly expensive considered as rent.

But it did mean I needed to find somewhere to live, and the whole of the compulsory purchase price, plus my savings, didn’t amount to a deposit on a decent house. I’m sure Dad would have found the money, but I was beginning to feel it was unfair to ask – I was thirty, not twenty-three! So I went looking for somewhere to rent.

I was very lucky. I really landed on my feet. I asked around at the department. Sheila, the prof’s secretary, said that her nephew Neil had a lovely flat in a former vicarage a couple of miles from the centre of town, and that one of the other three flats was about to come vacant. She put me in touch with her nephew, and we met up over a coffee in town. I think Sheila might have been trying her hand at matchmaking, but as I discovered after I moved into the flat, Neil had a girlfriend that his family didn’t know about yet. But whatever the truth of that might have been, the flat was lovely, I was the first person to enquire about it, the landlords seemed to approve of me, and I lived there for fifteen years.

An important part of what makes a rented property nice or nasty is the landlord. Generally, I’m sure that the more remote the landlord, the better. Mr and Mrs Oldfield lived in a bungalow built in the grounds of the big house, but that was absolutely fine, because they were absolutely lovely. You couldn’t ask for better landlords.

One of their idiosyncrasies was that they never raised anybody’s rent. Each time a new tenant moved in, they set the rent at the current market rate, but that’s what it remained as long as you stayed.

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