Montacute Road

Which, just to be clear, is not the same as Montague Avenue, right?  I mean, I’m getting confused by all these street names and I live round here.  If I thought I knew the area well before we started this, then the bloody a-z is cut into my soul now.

I think I must have found this one.  Mainly because I fell completely for one of the rooms.  Would you believe I wastotally smitten by the hall again?

It’s not my fault.  It’s not like I have some weird fetish about having a place to leave an umbrella and my car keys.  It was pretty, okay?  Original thirties tiles in black and white chequers.  Hardly anywhere has those still.  Nowadays it’s carpets or wooden floorboards which were never meant to be there in the first place.  We insert unoriginal original features to conform to some expected sense of design.

Oh, and it was massive. 

Not the hall per se, but the whole house.  A living room with a gorgeous functioning fireplace, a dining room with an ugly non-functioning fireplace and inexplicably purple walls, a large kitchen, a wonderful south facing tiered garden, slotted in between Ladywell Fields and Blythe Hill - which offers one of the finest and least well known views over the city - and four bedrooms. 

Yeah, four.

‘Half the problem,’ I’d previously, piously, explained to anyone still listening, ‘is the number of people living in homes with more space than they actually need.’

Hear that kitch-klacking sound?  That’s the revolutionary firing squad releasing their safety catches.

It as slightly ramshackle without actually being about to fall down which meant we could afford it.  Well, okay that’s not true.  I thought I could get them to come down to a price we could afford which isn’t quite the same, but you can see where I’m coming from.  They’d been doing the place up and had finished the downstairs – although, I mean, purple, really? – but had yet to start upstairs.  Consequently the rooms were all pretty tatty; their paintjobs were tired and their carpets were tufty.  The attic conversation didn’t look like it had ever been used as a bedroom.  It looked unfinished, stuffed with boxes from which reams of fabric spilled.  Things had been stashed up there to be forgotten about and a dressmaker’s dummy get the view over London disappearing towards Kent all day.

There was one more, slight, hitch:  It was in Catford.

1986:  Jimmy turned up his stereo. It was Anthrax.  A band Mark had described as speed metal, whatever that meant.  Jimmy wasn’t entirely sure he whether liked the squealing and screeching about death and murder and the guitars made his head hurt a little, but his sister loathed them so that was good enough for him.

Gemma had locked herself in the bathroom.  Again.  At fifteen she was two years older than Jimmy and allowed out on her own in evenings, but like on so many other occasions she hadn’t made use of privilege.  She’d been out for about two hours before coming flying through the front door, straight up the stairs and slamming the bathroom door behind her.  Jimmy knew that she’d be sitting with her back against the locked door, snuffling into globules of screwed up pink toilet tissue.  With his own door half open, Jimmy could see his Mum standing outside the bathroom, one palm against the wooden door as though she may be able to transcend through it. 

‘Gem,’ Jimmy mouthed sarcastically, ‘it’s Mum.  Are you all right, love?’  God, he hated his sister’s melodrama.  He turned the music up a notch more.

‘Jimmy!  Will you turn that god-awful music down?’  Jimmy obliged, but not without muttering incoherent insults under his breath which made his Mum lie ‘I heard that’ when she couldn’t have done because it was only half formed.

At least he wasn’t listening to Duran-Duran.  At least it wasn’t boring.

Jimmy might have had more sympathy if it wasn’t the same every Friday night.  The old man off down the pub, then the dog track.  Jimmy grounded, still after two months.  It had only been one cigarette.  Mum settling down to watch some inane rubbish on ITV.  Gemma let out into the night only to come crashing back again in tears over some slight given her by Kelly Masters or because Alastair Dean wouldn’t give the time of day even though they did get off on Tuesday, on every Tuesday, but then Friday wasn’t Tuesday.

Mum would spend twenty minutes trying to coax Gemma out before giving up and going downstairs to watch the ten o’clock news.  Gemma would keep occupying the bathroom no matter how much Jimmy needed to pee.  Sometimes it would get so bad that he had to sneak outside and go in the garden, but his Dad had come home early and caught him that one time, giving him hell over what it’d do to the roses.

Then, at half ten, joy of joy, Dad would tumble through the door full of beer and tales of four legged heroics that had almost come good, but never did.  Not quite. 

And Jimmy was never sure whether it was because she loved Dad the most, was a little scared of him or had merely got bored, but Gemma would emerge from the bathroom to cooing reassurances from the man of the house.

‘If I ever see that Dean boy, I’ll knock him bloody sixways.’

‘No, Dad,’ Gemma would squeak, ‘don’t!’ but you could tell a bit of her really wanted him to.

Jimmy could put up with all this drama so long as it wasn’t the same all the time.  It was like the BBC endlessly showing Dad’s Army or Fawlty Towers.  It seemed like the same few episodes were shown twice a year at Saturday teatime, repeat again and again until they stopped being funny and then, finally, became funny again if only because they were so unrelenting.

If, in the past, I’ve been sceptical about Ladywell, then I’ve been downright rude about Catford.  While it’s probably fair to say that my opinion has been skewed b hours stuck in traffic grinding through the gyratory system smack in the town centre and recently I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Catford Tavern, but I’ve had so many nasty thoughts about it over the years it seemed unlikely that I could actually live in an SE6 postcode without it getting its own back on me.  Having never really wandered around the town centre, my badly informed views were based on what I’d seen out the car window and judging an area on the places selling car spare parts, poundlands and the Argos that graces most places where two or more main roads crash is a bad idea.

Plus there’s a giant plastic cat sitting above the entrance to the shopping arcade so it can’t be all bad. 

It was the same logic with which people berated New Cross and while I’d usually leap to the area’s defence, I also wasn’t planning to live round the back of the bus garage.  Again.  Or at least not unless we got really desperate.

The question was, would anyone know?  The street was only a couple of roads across the SE4-SE6 border.  It was one of the nicer bits of Catford which, for all the faults of its carbon monoxide strangled centre, does have some amazing Victorian and thirties houses at prices much lower than Brockley and this one was on the side that we’d hoped to stay.  Brockley high street, also known as Crofton Park, was a short walk away and green space was still aplenty. 

‘The station,’ my girlfriend pointed out.  ‘Brockley station is miles away.  You’d either go to Honor Oak Park or Crofton Park.’

‘Probably Honor Oak,’ I suggested given the infrequent service at Crofton Park.

‘Or Catford,’ she said. 

She was right.  Anyone not in the know would put our address into their phone and go to the closest station.  They would come out, see the swathes of stationary trucks and buses backing up the hill, the light industry units opposite and wonder what the hell we were doing.

We went away to think about it and do some sums.  We decided that our snobbishness about Catford was both silly and somewhat abhorrent.   What were we thinking?  Two streets up, we wouldn’t have questioned it.  Who cares about a postcode?  The most important thing was the house and whether we liked it?  Did we want to live there or was I just swooning over the hall floor like a love-struck pillock for no reason?

Then we had the conversation.  You know, the one about all the rooms and what we might want to eventually do with them?

On Monday morning the agent rang me, which was unusual.  I asked him what he thought they’d accept, he dropped the price by twenty-five grand.  I made an offer at another twenty-five lower.

They didn’t go for it.

A couple of days later, still playing it nice and cool at this point, still thinking that this wasn’t so hard after all, I rang him back and upped our offer by thirteen grand, trying to meet them in the middle.

‘Yeah,’ he said.  ‘I think that’s a fair price.  I think that’s what its worth.’

Crikey, I thought.  I’m about to buy a four bedroom house. 

I should be so lucky.

This time it took him a couple of days to get back to us.

‘I’ve been round there most of the morning, arguing your case.  I’ve told them it’s a good offer.  The thing is, if it was down to her I think they’d go for it, but he, he wants two grand more.  Not a penny less.’

Two grand.  Two grand over twenty-five years.  Less than five hundred quid now.  It was nothing.  He’ll crack, I thought.

‘By the way,’ I said casually just before I rang off, ‘did you know the house is also on with another agency?’

‘Is it now?’ he said and at the time I didn’t really register the irritation in his voice.

A few days later I rang back again to see whether there had been any sign of weakness from the vendor.  The agent said that they were no longer involved in the sale since they were supposed to have been the sole agent.  He muttered something about considering suing them for breach of contract.    

I know what you’re thinking, I made a right royal bollocks up of that, didn’t I?  I was so sure of myself, so cocky in my skills as a negotiator and I’d managed to completely screw it up.  My girlfriend, bless her, even when things got really hard, when it felt like we were never, ever going to find somewhere didn’t blame me.  At least not out loud.

Still, oops.