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.
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