Casslee Road

Another Saturday and another intense day of property viewing was lined up.  We’d planned two places in the morning, a midday protest march against the closure of Lewisham Hospital’s A&E and then a third place in the late afternoon.  A nice balance of the bourgeoisie with the revolutionary, I thought.

If the two properties we’d seen on Rushford Road were in need of some modernising, then Casslee Road was their poor, disadvantaged cousin.  A large nineteen-thirties house in the same mould as Montacute Road, but lacking its charm.  It looked as though someone had stopped caring for it thirty years ago.

‘The thing you need to understand about this property,’ oozed the agent, ‘is that it’s a repossession.’

‘Yeah,’ I said ‘we’ve seen a repossessed place already.’

‘So you know how it works?  You know that you’re not likely to get this place?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Okay,’ he said in a mildly patronising tone.  ‘So with a repossession it has to be advertised for a set period of time.  Usually a month.  That’s to ensure that the debtor receives the best possible offer.  They want to get rid of it, but they’re obliged to try and secure as much of the money owed as possible.  If you or anyone else were to make an offer, that offer has to be publically displayed.’  That explained why we’d seen a couple of adverts declaring as such; we had wondered.  ‘That means, at the last moment a cash buyer can slip in an offer only a couple of grand higher than yours and still get a bargain.  Do it up and sell it on.  There are hundreds, thousands of guys in this city who make their living out of this.  They just ring their bank and transfer the funds.  Bingo-bango.  Buy somewhere, spend twenty-five grand doing it up and sell it on for a forty grand profit.  The problem you have is that you’re not a cash buyer.’

Despite him being discouraging we had a look around.  The rooms were spacious and light if a little under cared for.  An Australian woman was looking around upstairs and the agent flittered between us.  The kitchen was missing.  There was just an empty room with some water and gas pipes sealed off.   On the walls of the living rooms were gas fires of the sort last seen in adverts where people died from carbon monoxide poisoning.  The living and dining room were knocked through again, only the arch to support the ceiling was a curious mushroom shape. 

‘Handy to put things down on,’ I nodded to the shelves the mushroom created as the bulb spread out from the stalk.

‘The whole place will need rewiring,’ the agent appeared as if from nowhere.  ‘Ideal for a cash buyer. A repossession.’  He noticed the phone in my hand and said sharply ‘Don’t take any pictures’ before whirling away again to make sure no-one else was doing anything they weren’t supposed to be.

I was beginning to find him somewhat irritating as we headed upstairs and he scuttled along after the Australian who had headed out the back.

‘It’s got loads of potential,’ my girlfriend said.  I wasn’t so sure.  It was cheap and big, but it needed a lot of work.  Not least a kitchen.  And my inability to tell one end of a hammer from the other made it daunting.  I didn’t know where to start.

Upstairs there was the by now seemingly obligatory horrifically coloured bedroom.  This one was a delicate pink, with blood red carpets darkened by furniture that had only recently been moved for the first time in decades; the rest of the carpets showed their age but those patches were timeless.  In a cupboard was a copy of the Daily Mail from 1973 with a headline about the oil crisis.  The Leader probably blamed immigrants or the EEC.  Same old, same old.  The toilet had a plastic seat over the top of it, the sort that people with bad hips or knees used.  The house was making me think about mortality.

‘I reckon someone’s died here, still owes the bank money and so it’s being sold on.’

‘What about their family?’

‘Perhaps they don’t want it or can’t afford its debt.  Or perhaps there is no-one.’

‘Poor old soul,’ my girlfriend looked rather wistfully as the garden soaked up the early morning wintery fading grey sunshine.  ‘I think with work we could make it lovely.’

‘But don’t forget,’ said the agent suddenly materialising again, ‘that if you put an offer in, a cash buyer will just swoop in at the last moment and take it off you.  You’ll have wasted surveyor and solicitor fees.  It’s a repossession.’

‘Does that happen often?’ my girlfriends asked.  ‘People losing out like that?’

I guessed his answer before he said it.

‘It’s a repossession.  Now, I have to be off to another appointment.’

‘Could we just have another quick look round?’

‘Sorry, I have to be off.’

2011:  George looked at up the pink porcelain of the toilet bowl half a metre from his nose.  He’d never liked that colour.  It had been Glenda’s choice just like everything else in this house.  1948 they’d moved in. They’d gotten married five years previous when he’d been back on shore leave.  It’d been a ridiculous idea.  He could have made a widow of her, but then you do some stupid things when you’re young.  When there’s a war.  It wasn’t that George felt invincible; far from it.  He spent most of his war watching waves crash away from the dark iron of his ship and being scared.  But he was desperate.  Desperate for her and so a quick ceremony, him in his dark blues, her all a shimmer of white and, somehow, despite the night the ship went down with most hands, he found his way back to her.

They’d lived on the other side of Catford at first, just round the corner from her Mum and Dad, but in ’47 he got a job with the Pru and soon they could afford this house.  Glenda was over-awed when he first showed it to her.  She’d expected to keep living the way she’d been bought up in one of those two up, two downs, but George had other plans.  Little Michael and the children that followed would live in a proper house, close to parks and schools and they would have more than their parents ever had.  That wasn’t such an unreasonable dream, now was it?

George tried to move, but he couldn’t.  It felt like the weight of a thousand woes lay on his spine.  He’d heard it go, he’d heard the vertebrae click-click-click even before he’d registered the searing pain and there he was, lying on the floor with nothing to look at other than the shocking pink of the toilet.

They’d stopped at two in the end.  Michael and Dawn, four years later.  George was doing well for himself, but he wasn’t made of money.  Besides, one of each was what everyone wanted, wasn’t it?  A perfect little family, a perfect little life.  They’d been good little kids, really.  Michael had been a bit of a tear-away, but then who wasn’t at thirteen?  That was what little boys were supposed to do.  Run around with scrapped knees, torn trousers, hanging out of trees and splashing through streams, giving a bit of cheek here and there, but knowing when enough was enough.  Michael got good grades at school and at sixteen George managed to find him a role with the company, let him work his way up, see a bit of the real world, but commuting into London every day showed Michael more of the city.  Before long he was going on out on Friday nights to beat clubs and his hair started to inch across his collar.  By the time he was twenty, he’d stopped going to work and just spent his days in his room playing records far too loud, smoking those reefers or whatever they were called. 

George threw him out.  He had to.  Michael was going to be a bad influence on Dawn, he was going to help her mess her life up too.  If he wasn’t going to shape up then he could ship out. George hadn’t fought the bloody Germans, been terrified every bloody day and night for three years just so his son could waste his life.  There were many things George wished he could change, but the biggest one would be not to hear that door slamming and the sound of his son’s boots echoing away down the street.

It hadn’t done Dawn any good anyway.  By 1970, barely a couple of months out of school, she was pregnant.  George was going to send her on her way too.  It wouldn’t do for a man of his position to have a daughter in her position.  But Glenda had stood up to him.  If Dawn went, she went too.  So his daughter stayed and little June, his granddaughter, had been a delight from the first time she opened her eyes.

The carpet was frayed right through.  Just there, between George’s face and the edge of the toilet.  He ought to replace it, but he knew he couldn’t afford it.  The whole damn house needed replacing, it was coming down around his ears just like the country had done in the seventies.  No power half the time, the rubbish never being collected and blowing along the streets, foxes getting the size of damn dogs, the bodies piling up as the mortuaries walked out and then George had been shown the door at the Pru.  Restructuring, reorganising, out with the old, in with the new.  His job was probably being done by a bloody computer now.

And that had been George.  He’d never quite managed to get back on the ladder.  He’d picked up part time work and junior positions here and there, but it was galling to have to work for someone who was wondering how old your granddaughter was. Dawn helped all she could, but then she met Desmond.  Nice lad, considering.  And he loved June, so he did.  Shame they had to move down to Devon.  Still, at least he’d made up with Michael in the end.  The boy had come home; they’d shaken hands, drunk whisky and said no more about it.  It didn’t need words. 

He’d hoped Michael would stay in London, at home even, but by then he had a life and a wife of his own in Cambridge.  George scrunched his eyes remembering that they were coming to visit soon.  Michael and Nicola were bringing the boys down for the weekend.  When was that?  How long had he been lying there?  How many times had he looked up and seen the darkness through the fanlight of the bathroom?  His clothes felt damp and from somewhere he smelled the distant sea.

Thank God they’d made up before Glenda slipped away.  He knew that if he hadn’t mended bridges with the boy she’d have fought no matter the agony to stay.  The cancer tore her apart.  In the end it was a blessing, a relief even though her going ripped him apart and from that there was no respite.

He’d spent more than fifteen years rattling around that big house they’d been so proud of, all alone.  He couldn’t sell it even though he’d never paid the mortgage off; it was all that was left of his life.  The children and the grandkids needed somewhere to stay when they came to London and George needed the memories.  He needed to see Glenda every morning, standing in the kitchen door with flour in her hair, baby Dawn in her arms and Michael at her legs. 

Once, so long ago, he’d struggled for two days to stay afloat, to go back to her.  Now, as the world drowned around him, as all his life lapped at the edges of his mind, he just had to let himself go, to submerge forever and make his way into her arms one more time. 

We had time before our next appointment and so we went for a cup of coffee.  I made a note of things that needed to be done.  Kitchen, rewiring, carpets, back door frame, bathroom suite.  The numbers ratcheted up.

And yet we kept talking about.  She loves a bargain, my girlfriend does.

‘If we can get it for twenty or maybe even thirty grand below the asking price, it’ll be a steal.’

I wasn’t so sure.  It seemed like a lot of work, much of which would have to be done before we moved in, so we’d still need to cover our rent.  I got some estimates off my Dad and we talked about a contractor who owed him a favour.  I emailed the details over to a friend who’s an architect as my girlfriend began to plan moving walls around, sealing up the mushroom and knocking the kitchen through into the dining room. 

It would have been tight, incredibly so, but, maybe, just maybe we could have afforded it without everything going wrong.  In the end, I was scared and sometimes you just have to run straight at whatever it is that frightens you.

Late on the Monday after much toing and froing I triple checked:  ‘Okay, I’ll ring them and make an offer?  We’re happy to potentially lose the money of the fees?  We’re prepared to take the risk?  This means no more lie-ins until about 2015?’

‘Hi,’ I said.  ‘I’m ringing about the place on Casslee Road that you showed us on Saturday.  We’d like to make an offer.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.  ‘An offer has already been made.’

‘Oh, okay.  How much was it?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ he chuckled as though I were an idiot.

‘But doesn’t it have to be declared?’

‘It’s been accepted.’

‘But you said in a repossession the property has to remain on the market for a fixed period of time. ‘

‘This is a probate.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s a probate property.  Not a repossession.  It works differently.’

My mind span, but slowly things clicked into gear.  His blatant attempts to put us off, his eagerness to get us out of there quickly.  Anyone would have thought he’d played it for his own advantage.

‘You definitely, repeatedly told us it was a repossession.  Was that a mistake?’

‘It’s a probate property.’

‘Okay, let me try again:  When you kept telling us that it was a repossessed property was that a mistake on your part or a deliberate attempt to deceive?’

Click, went the phone line.